but-”
The officer’s eyes darted once toward the building, then back to me. He wasn’t buying it. “Get on your feet, mister.”
“Look, I’m telling you, if I stand up now, he’s going to shoot-”
His attention was fixed solely upon me. “I’m not kidding, buddy!” he demanded. “Get up with your hands behind your head!”
The sirens were much louder now, probably only a block away, racing down Central Avenue toward the courthouse. The officer was waiting for his backup to arrive, and he wasn’t about to give me any slack. There was a dead woman on the sidewalk, and his suspect was giving him a song-and-dance routine. His right forefinger was wrapped around the trigger of his gun. This was a young rookie, still in his twenties and fresh out of the academy; he wanted to be a Good Cop, but I was only too aware of the fact that some members of the force had a bad rep for being trigger-happy under pressure.
As the first police cruiser howled into sight and screeched to a halt in front of the plaza, I took a deep breath. The cavalry had arrived; maybe they had scared off the sniper. “Okay,” I said, “just stay cool. I’m standing up.”
The second cruiser arrived, stopping behind the first one; two cops had already jumped out of the first car and were rushing over to check on Beryl Hinckley. I slowly began to rise out of my squat, but as I did I kept my eyes fixed on the empty windows of the building Ruby Fulcrum had pinpointed.
I had barely raised my head and shoulder above the height of the urn when I glimpsed vague movement in a corner window on the fifth floor: a brief, dull reflection, like sunlight reflecting off something metallic …
“Duck!” I yelled, then threw myself to the ground.
“Don’t … AWWWHHHH!”
A small black hole appeared in the cop’s chest, just below his neckline. He dropped his gun as he grabbed at his collarbone, screaming in agony, then his legs collapsed beneath him and he fell backward to hit the pavement. He was still alive, but the laser beam had cut straight though his body.
Two more cops from the second cruiser, who had been running over to assist him, stopped dead in their tracks. They had seen the whole thing; judging from the expressions on their faces, they couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened. They glanced first at their buddy, then at me, then back at him again.
“I didn’t do a thing!” I yelled as I lay flat on the ground, my arms spread out before me. “I’m just lying here … get him an ambulance!”
The cops unfroze. Instead of rushing me, they hurried to the rookie’s side. He was writhing in pain, his legs thrashing against the pavement. His colleagues kneeled beside him; one of them grabbed his beltphone and flipped it open. “Mobile Charlie-Five, answering call at the courthouse!” he snapped. “Code ten-three, officer down!”
The other two cops ran over to assist them. For the moment, they were entirely concerned with the injured officer. No one was paying attention to me. I rose to my hands and knees, carefully picked Joker up from the concrete and shoved it in my pocket …
And then I jumped to my feet and took off running.
Not away from the scene, though, but straight toward the abandoned building.
18
One thing to be said for knowing that a sniper is trying to kill you: it makes you run faster.
Even as I sprinted across the intersection, I knew that I had less than thirty seconds-if even that-to reach cover before the laser’s batteries recharged. On the other hand, if I could make it to the building itself, then the gunner upstairs wouldn’t be able to shoot me. A clean vertical shot would be nearly impossible from up there, or otherwise he would have fired at Beryl before we had jaywalked across the street.
I heard cops shouting behind me as I made a beeline for the building, demanding that I halt. The thought crossed my mind that one of them might open fire on me, but I wasn’t about to stop and lie down in the middle of the intersection. I was screwed if I did and screwed if I didn’t, and all I could hope for was the notion that a well- trained police officer wouldn’t shoot a running man in the back …
So I kept running.
A laser beam didn’t punch a hole through my head, nor did I heard the crack of a gunshot as I reached the opposite side of the intersection and dashed toward the building’s front doors. Although its nineteenth-century facade was largely intact, official condemnation notices were pasted across the plywood nailed over the windows.
I ducked into the recessed doorway and took a deep breath. I was safe for the moment, but I still had to get inside before the cops followed me. The narrow door, itself covered with plywood, had been secured with a padlock; when I looked closer, though, I saw that the lock’s hasp had been severed as if by a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters, then carefully rehung to make it look still secure.
The door’s pneumatic hinge wheezed as I tugged it open and stepped into the narrow entranceway, cautiously avoiding the shattered glass that lay on the floor of the foyer. The door closed behind me. Faint sunlight penetrated the gloom through cracks in the plywood, making it possible for me to read the dislodged building register resting on its side against the wall: lawyer’s offices for the most part, although the second and fifth floors had been vacant at the time of the quake.
The building was stone quiet.
Groping along the walls with my hands, I made my way farther into the building, passing a battered water fountain, an inactive elevator, and the entrance to what had once been a barber shop, until I reached the end of the hallway and found the door leading to the stairwell.
The door squeaked as I pulled it open; I hesitated for a moment, listening intently to the darkness above me. I still couldn’t hear anything, but that meant nothing. For all I knew, the sniper could be at the top of the stairwell, waiting for my head to come into sight.
For a few moments I considered the safest option but almost immediately discarded that idea. Retreat only meant giving the sniper a chance to try again some other time … but now I had a slim chance of cornering the bastard and ending this game once and for all.
So I entered the stairwell, carefully let the door slide shut, then began to climb the stairs.
Light shining through unboarded windows at each landing guided me as I made my way upward, peering around each corner before I jogged up the next set of risers. Mice and cockroaches fled from my approach; the building smelled of old dust and the stale urine of evicted squatters. On the third-floor landing, I found a small pile of rubble from a collapsed ceiling. I picked a short length of iron rebar out of the mess and hefted it in my hands- remembering the crazy lawyer I had seen at the Muny a couple of nights earlier, I wondered if his firm’s offices had once been located here-then I continued my way upstairs.
No one was waiting for me on the fifth-floor landing.
Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I studied the door leading toward the end of the building from where the shots had originated. At first glance, it seemed undisturbed, until I noticed a straight line of dust and broken plaster leading away from the hinge at a right angle as if recently pushed aside by the bottom of door.
There was a window behind me, looking out over the rear of the building. I peered out and spotted a battered brown Toyota mini-van parked in the back alley, near the bottom of a fire escape. From what I could see, it looked as if the fire escape had a gravity ladder leading to the pavement. If that was the killer’s wheels, then he would probably be using the fire escape to make his getaway from the building.
I should have thought of that earlier. It wouldn’t have been quite as stupid or reckless to wait in the alley until he reached the bottom of the fire escape. No turning back now, though. I was here, and he was somewhere in there, and the time had come to take down the son of a bitch before he killed somebody else.
Gripping the iron bar in my left hand, I tiptoed to the door, grasped its handle, and slowly eased it open.
A short hallway led me past the defunct elevator and the door of the vacant office space; at the opposite end of the corridor was the fire-escape window. The window was raised, and the office door was propped open with a short piece of broken wood.
