Dance for the Dead (44 page)

The two men stepped down from
the Pathfinder and walked to Jane’s car. Barraclough took off
his glove to gauge the warmth of the hood of the car, then winked at
Farrell happily. Then he studied the footprints leading from the
driver’s door. They led around the big building. Barraclough
paused at the corner to draw his pistol, then quickly stepped beyond
it.

He could see that the footprints
led along the side of the building. He bent low to walk beside them,
staying near the wall and keeping his head below the level of the
windows. There were banks of thousands of little panes of glass along
the side of the building, many of them broken and all of them opaque
from at least thirty years of grime. The footprints led to a place
where two of the panes had been hammered in and the frame had gone
with them. “She must have heard us coming and gone in.”

Barraclough looked ahead of him,
but he could not see where the building ended. He stepped outward
away from it to get a better view, then lifted the night scope to his
eye, but he still could not see the end. The brick wall seemed to go
on forever.

Farrell saw it too. “It’s
a big place. How do you want to work it?”

Barraclough peered cautiously
through the broken window with the night scope, then pushed the
switch to infrared. There was nothing nearby that gave off body heat.
“We’ll have to go in after her ourselves. We can’t
leave the cars unguarded, and if she can lose those two on an empty
road, there’s no telling what she’d do to them inside the
dark building.” He slipped the flashlight into one pocket, the
wrist restraints into the other where he could reach them quickly.
“When you see her, train your laser sight on her right away.
She’s not stupid; if she sees that bright red dot settle on her
chest she’ll forget about trying to outrun the bullet.”
He hoisted himself to the row of bricks that formed a sill below the
missing windows, then squeezed himself inside.

When Farrell joined him inside
the building, Barraclough drew his pistol again and turned on his
night scope. They were in a huge, empty, unheated brick enclosure
with a bare concrete floor, a fifty-foot ceiling, and a slight glow
of stars above where panes of glass were missing. Barraclough turned
his scope to the floor where Jane had entered. A few wet, snowy
partial footprints led toward the other end of the cavernous room.

Barraclough walked beside the
footprints, under an arch that was big enough for a truck to pass
through, and beyond it into another high, empty room. To the right
were a set of barn doors that must once have opened onto a loading
dock.

They stalked through room after
room. At each doorway they would pause, slip through the entrance
low, and crouch a few yards apart around the corner. Barraclough
would flick on his night scope, rapidly scan the space ahead for the
shape of a woman, and only then venture to cross the open concrete
floor. When they reached the end of the long building, they found a
door open with snow just beginning to drift inside.

The footprints led to the door
of another building. There was a half-rotted sheet of plywood on the
ground that had once covered the empty upper panel of the door.
Barraclough’s heart was beating with excitement. They always
made some mistake, and she had just made hers. She had gambled that
she could drive into the enormous ruin of a factory, wait ten
minutes, and then drive back up the river. Now she was alone on foot
on a cold, snowy night. She was trying to hide in a complex that had
been so thoroughly gutted that there wasn’t anything to hide
behind. She was running from two old cops who had been trapping
fleeing suspects in dark buildings for half their lives. He would be
able to see her in the scope as clearly as if she were in daylight,
and she would be blind. Even the physical discomfort Barraclough felt
as he entered the next building made him more eager. The air was
frigid. The brick walls offered shelter from the bitter wind, but
there was a chill trapped in the big spaces, and the icy concrete
seemed to send a shock up his shins at each step. The cold would be
much harder on her because she was alone and afraid. At some point
she was going to come to a door she couldn’t open, and he would
have her. It was possible he would have to keep her alive for a month
or two while she gave him what she owed him. She was a hunter’s
dream: a woman who had made at least ten years of fugitives vanish.
There must be dozens by now, most of them still hiding wherever she
had put them. And what kind of person had enough money to pay for
that kind of service? Drug dealers, money launderers, second-toughest
gangsters, big-time embezzlers. She had taken Mary Perkins away from
him, but she might easily have ten more like her. He grinned as he
walked through the darkened building; no doubt about it, she was the
girl of his dreams.

Farrell stopped at the next
doorway and turned to him, but didn’t say anything.

“What is it?”
Barraclough whispered eagerly. “Did you hear something?”

“No,” Farrell
whispered apologetically. “But we’ve been at this for
over an hour.”

Barraclough glanced at his
watch. It was true.

Farrell said, “I think it
might help if we brought the two boys into this. We might want to
have at least one of them waiting for her at the other end.”

Barraclough clenched his teeth
to stifle his annoyance. He didn’t want to wait for people to
move into position – he wanted to finish this himself now –
but Farrell was right. She had already led them too far to have any
hope of getting back to her car. She was heading for the far end of
the factory. “Give me the radio.”

He took the radio and pressed
the talk button. “Unit Two, this is Unit One.” He
listened to the faint crackle of static. He put the speaker against
his ear but could detect no voice. “Come in, Unit Two.”
He looked at Farrell, letting a little of his impatience show.

Farrell said quickly, “It’s
got to be the buildings.

There’s a hell of a lot of
brick and steel between them and us. Let me try it outside.”

Farrell trotted to the next
loading dock, slipped the bolt, and pushed the big wooden door aside
so he could stand out in the open air. “Unit Two, this is Unit
One. Come in.” He listened to the static. “Unit Two, come
in.” In spite of the temperature, he felt a wave of heat begin
at the back of his neck and wash down his spine. He knew his two
trainees were probably in the car listening to a radio they had
turned off by mistake. He walked back into the building and shook his
head. “Nothing.”

Barraclough’s voice was
quiet and cold. “Go back for them. I’ll be up ahead
somewhere.”

Farrell handed Barraclough the
radio, then set off to retrace his steps through the factory. After
four steps, he broke into a run.

As he heard Farrell’s
steps receding behind him, Barraclough started into the next big room
and turned on his night-vision scope. This building was different
from the last. The big row of square enclosures built into the side
wall must have been furnaces. The cement of the floor had holes at
the edges of big rectangles where heavy machines had once been
anchored, and overhead were networks of steel beams that must have
held chain hoists, and brackets for vanished devices he could only
imagine now. This place must have seemed like hell once, he thought –
deafening noise, unbearable heat from the open-hearth furnaces,
molten slag running into big buckets. He stepped close to the row of
furnaces and shone his flashlight into each one as he passed it. He
moved through room after room, seeing few relics, only traces that
were less comprehensible than the stones of some ancient city dug out
of the ground.

After half an hour the radio in
Barraclough’s coat pocket squawked and startled him. Farrell’s
voice said, “Unit One, this is Unit Two.”

Barraclough crouched against the
wall so the noise would not make him vulnerable and kept his eyes
ahead of him on the portal to the next room. He pushed the button and
said quietly, “Go ahead.”

“I’m at the car,”
said Farrell. “The reason they didn’t answer is that
they’re dead.”

“How?”

“It looks like they left
the motor running to keep warm. There’s a hose running from
their own exhaust pipe right back into the cab through the taillight.
Looks like she cut the hose from under the Pathfinder.”

Barraclough tried to sort out
the implications. “Are all the cars still there? Hers too?”

“Yeah,” said
Farrell. “I don’t know how she got all the way back here
past us, but – ”

Barraclough gripped the talk
button and shouted, “Then get out! She’s still there!”

But Farrell had not released his
button. Barraclough heard a swish of fabric as though Farrell were
making a sudden movement, maybe whirling to see something. Whatever
he saw made him voice an involuntary “Uh!”

Barraclough heard the report of
the weapon over the radio. He had time to press his transmitter
button and say “Farrell?” before the delayed
reverberation reached his ears through the air. The sound was fainter
this time, but without the speaker distortion he could tell it was
the elongated blast of a shotgun.

Barraclough had already begun to
put the radio into his pocket before he remembered there was nobody
left to talk to. He hurled it into the darkness toward the corner of
the big empty room. He was standing in a dark, icy labyrinth three
thousand miles from home. The three men he had brought here with him
were corpses. But the biggest change was what was standing between
him and the cars. He didn’t even know her real name, but he had
thought he knew what she would do: she would run, and he would catch
her.

He flicked on his flashlight and
slowly began to walk away from the sound of the shotgun, his mind
working feverishly. Where had the shotgun come from? She had not
taken a shotgun off the body of either of the dead trainees, so she
must have brought it with her. If she had, then she had known he was
coming. This was not what he had expected at all.

Maybe she had not made a mistake
and turned her car into the first place along the road that was big
enough to hide it. It almost seemed as though she had been in this
factory before. As Barraclough traced the logic backward, he began to
feel more uneasy.

She had been shuffling credit
cards and names for ten or twelve years. Why would she suddenly
forget how it was done and take the chance of using accounts he might
know about all the way to her own doorstep? Because that house in La
Salle wasn’t her own doorstep. He had not traced her to her
hometown and right up to her house. She probably lived a thousand
miles from here. He had followed her into an ambush – a killing
ground.

Barraclough decided to run. The
beam of his flashlight bobbed up and down wildly, making shadows that
crouched in his path, then sprung upward to loom fifty feet tall. He
had to remind himself over and over that there couldn’t be
anyone in front of him. What he had to worry about was behind him.

Was running the best thing to
do? It was taking him farther away from the cars. But running made
use of the only facts he could be sure of. He had heard the shotgun
go off within a few feet of Farrell, so he knew where she was…
no, he knew where she had been for the instant when she had pulled
the trigger. His attempt to state it accurately invited doubts to
creep into his mind, but he fought them off. She was half a mile
behind him, he was sure. She had the shotgun in her hands, and she
was walking through the dark line of empty rooms after him.

As he thought about her, a
picture formed in his mind, and in the picture she was not walking.
She had the shotgun in both hands across her chest, and she was
running, taking long, loping strides. He increased his pace. The
clapping of his boots echoed in the cavernous spaces and the rasp of
his breath grew louder and louder. As he ran, he tried not to think
about the shotgun. A double-aught load was twelve pellets, each the
size of a .38 round. From across one of these big rooms they would
hit in a pattern about twenty inches wide.

Barraclough calmed himself. All
he had to do was keep her half a mile behind him and get out of this
horrible place. As though a wish had been granted, his flashlight
swept up and down the gray wooden surface of a door in the wall ahead
of him. He dashed to it and tried the knob, but it spun in his hand
without moving the catch. He pulled on it, but the door would not
budge. He stepped back and ran his flashlight along the doorjamb. He
could see a few puckered places in the wood where big nails had been
driven in. He swept the flashlight’s beam around him. The
windows in this room were all twenty feet above him. When had that
changed? Maybe the windows had been that way for the past half hour.
He began to run back the way he had come. The windows in the next
room were the same, and the room after that. But at the portal
between the next two rooms he saw the doors of another loading dock.

Barraclough hurried to the
doors, set his spotter scope on the floor, stuck the flashlight in
his pocket, slipped the bolt, and tried to slide the door open. He
strained against it, but it only wobbled a little on its track. He
tried to remember: wasn’t this what Farrell had done to open
one of these doors? He turned on his flashlight again and ran it
around the edges of the door until he spotted another bolt that went
into the floor. He lifted it and pushed the door. When it slid open,
he tried to feel happy, but the relief only reminded him how
frightened he had been only seconds ago.

He stepped out onto the loading
dock and jumped down into the snow. He felt a wrenching pain as his
ankle turned under him and he fell across something hard and cold. He
cursed himself. He had jumped onto railroad tracks. How could he have
forgotten the railroad tracks? The loading docks didn’t have
flat paved surfaces for trucks; they were for loading steel onto
freight cars.