car and driven out of town. They were here.
Then she heard a different set of shots—one, two, three, four in rapid succession. That had to be the F.B.I. man returning fire. There was an irregular volley of shots from below, then silence. They weren’t shooting at her. They were shooting at him.
The pause lasted a long time. Maybe after all of that noise they had decided they had to leave. She slowly raised her body against the chimney, then craned her neck to search for the F.B.I. agent. She picked out a shape that must be his on the next roof, crouched and looking away from her along the row of rooftops they both had crossed.
She kept her eyes turned in that direction. She knew she should be spending this time searching for a way down, but she couldn’t. She saw movement. The F.B.I. agent fired twice, then ducked down. Muzzle flashes erupted far down the line. Jane pulled out Vaughn’s pistol and waited. She thought she saw the shadow of a man appear on the farthest roof and tried to aim, but lost it in the shape of another building. Then another bobbed up from the ladder. She tried to lead them as they crouched and ran, but it was too late. They flopped down on their bellies so she couldn’t see them.
The F.B.I. man fired two times at their prone figures. Then there was a click as though he had removed the magazine from his pistol. The two men heard it too, or sensed it. They popped up and fired eight or ten times while he slid his next magazine into place.
One of the two men made a run and jumped to the second roof. Just as he came down, the F.B.I. man fired once. But the other man had been waiting for it, and he fired wildly in the F.B.I. man’s direction to keep his head down. He used the pause to make his run and jump to join his companion on the second roof.
When the F.B.I. agent rose to fire at him, he got off only one shot before the man’s companion fired a rapid salvo to make him drop down again.
Jane watched anxiously as the two men used the same strategy to reach the third roof. Each time the F.B.I. agent tried to raise his head to aim at the one who was vulnerable, the other one would lay down a barrage of fire that forced him to go down again. Jane had led them both into a terrible place. Jane was already trapped on a roof with a steep slope, and she could not hold a view of the two men long enough to fire. All she could tell in the darkness was that they were moving closer and closer, and the F.B.I. agent had gone as far as he could without being trapped beside her.
He had fired probably ten times and then he had needed to reload. Why wasn’t he carrying a government- issue Beretta 92 with a police-only fifteen-round magazine? He had been walking around town alone, in a jacket and tie. He had been looking for a doctor’s wife, not conducting a raid on Brian Vaughn’s house, or getting into a firefight. He was probably using something smaller that he could carry without attracting attention, with a single- stack ten-round magazine like the ones they sold in every gun store. It was very unlikely that he was carrying more than one extra magazine.
Jane saw him beginning to crawl toward the edge of the roof closest to the two face-changers, and her heart skipped, then beat harder. It was much worse than she had guessed. He had not been reloading his pistol. He had been checking the magazine to see if he had another shot left: ten in the magazine, one in the chamber. He was out. As she watched him, she found that she could feel his thoughts again, and she felt despair. He was moving to the spot where he believed the first man would leap to his roof, so he could jump the man, disable him, and take his gun. It was a desperate, hopeless plan.
Jane watched as the first man began his run. They must have sensed what had happened too. They knew he was out of ammunition, just as she did. The man ran harder. He was going to jump.
Jane stood up and screamed, “Hey! Over here!” The man hesitated, slipped, and barely stopped himself from toppling over the edge. His friend dashed to his side and grabbed his arm to steady him, and they both ducked down.
The F.B.I. man turned, sprang to his feet, and ran across the fourth roof toward the last gap. He launched himself into the air, landed on his side, and rolled to his belly, as Jane had. He slid a few feet downward, then stopped just as the two men realized what he had done and fired.
He had landed high enough on the sloped roof so that they couldn’t achieve the proper angle. Their shots cracked over his head into the sky.
From the peak of the roof, Jane called down, “Stay on your belly and come up at an angle, toward the chimney. It’s higher than their roof, so they can’t quite see you.”
“I’ll try,” said the agent. He didn’t sound very optimistic.
“Don’t pretend to be nervous,” said Jane. “You’re Superman.”
She could hear the agent give a little huff of air that might have been a chuckle. “What’s to stop them from doing the same thing?”
She said, “I’m leaving a little present for you on the upper side of the chimney. That should help.” Then she moved along the crest of the house, away from him.
When she reached the edge, she lay on her belly, grasped the shingles again, and let herself slide, hand below hand, down the slope of the roof. At the very end, she turned and looked down to be sure that she had seen clearly from above. A thin black cable stretched from the telephone pole across the alley to the corner of the house.
She reached down and tugged on the wire. It was looped once around a metal hook screwed into the clapboard, then stapled once to the wooden trim, and finally it disappeared into a hole drilled into the house. It seemed to be a cable-television hookup. Her eyes followed the wire across the alley to the telephone pole, but she could not tell how it was connected on the other end. As she grasped the wire and slowly eased her weight off the roof, she tried to convince herself that it would hold her. She reached out farther on the wire with her right hand, and her body swung and bounced a little. The swing helped bring her left hand up to the wire for the next grasp. She began to move out over the alley, swinging from hand to hand.
She heard a sound behind her, then felt the cable jerk and begin to sag. The loop had tightened, and the metal hook was threatening to pop out of the clapboard. She moved her hands faster, trying to keep her body from swinging.
Jane dropped four or five feet as extra cable began paying out of the drill-hole in the house. She heard a loud crash, and something like broken glass from inside the house, and then a thud against the wall. Jane knew what it was. The coaxial cable had been screwed into the back of a television set, and her weight had pulled the television set off whatever it had been sitting on. The set was caught against the wall, and the only thing that could be holding the cable to it was that little metal connection.
Jane began moving toward the telephone pole again. In her imagination she could see the television set jammed against the wall, and she remembered that the backs of all the television sets she had ever seen were just brittle plastic. Maybe the metal connection would come right out, but with its base, it would be too big to go through the hole.
She was dangling over a spot just past the center of the alley when the cable gave way. She fell straight down a few feet, but then the connection at the pole caught and her fall became a swing. She loosened her grip on the thin cable to go lower, but the telephone pole seemed to be coming toward her at an incredible speed. She held her feet up in front of her to cushion the impact, but then she twisted in the air. Her shoulder glanced off the pole and she lost her grip. She hit the ground hard, rolled, and lay on the gravel, dazed.
Jane had to get up and move. Her shoulder and side hurt, and there was a dull pain in her left ankle. She tested her weight on it and found she could walk. She took a few steps, then a few more, heading toward the end of the alley.
She stared up at the rooftops, but could not see any of the three men. She began to trot, and she could tell that she would be able to run after all. She stopped, turned, and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey!” she shouted. “Doesn’t anybody want to say good night to a lady?” She pivoted and began to run.
She passed between two of the posts at the end of the alley and into the municipal parking lot, then dodged to the left to run along the only line of cars left there this late at night.
She reached the end and prepared to turn right to head for the cross street that would take her under the freeway, and then saw the pay telephone on the corner. She told herself it was too soon to stop. She should get far enough ahead to be sure they wouldn’t convert a glimpse into a clear shot. How could she possibly be more exposed to their view than she would be standing under a street lamp at the first intersection? She took a step toward the telephone. There were plenty of telephones farther away. She had seen lots of them along the
