Doug saw it too-- a glint of light beyond squirming Eric. It was a small mirror on a long pole, extending across the mouth of the tunnel.
Jem opened up on it, cracking the mirror, the pole clattering to the stone floor. The echo of his fire was tremendous inside the tunnel, Doug going half-deaf, wincing, backing off and drawing his Beretta. Jem sprayed another volley at the mouth, then turned, firing mad bursts behind him as he ran back toward Doug.
The tunnel filled with fireballs. Fiercely bright but nonlethal Starflash rounds ricocheted off the walls, a disorienting salvo. Jem outran these sparkling bees toward Doug as Doug opened up, blasting cover fire at nothing but flashlight beams. He choked the trigger too tight, the Beretta coughing and jumping in his hand, the sound like firecrackers in a drum. Then Jem ducked past him and together they folded around the corner.
Jem broke off his empty magazine and reloaded, howling curses.
"What the fuck!" said Gloansy, panicked, edging away from the guards.
"We got dimed!" said Jem, leaning out, spraying the tunnel with fire, then leaning back again, the Tec smoking. "Fucking
dimed
! "Mother
fucks
!"
Three gunshots cracked from a different direction, Gloansy shrieking and twisting, hit, falling forward to the stone floor.
Doug ducked, looking around wildly, then grabbed Gloansy's ankle and dragged him to the side of the can by the rear right tire. All five hostages were squirming and yelling and covering their heads. It hadn't come from them. Gloansy had been hit from behind, and Doug peered out behind the can, back toward the Suburban. No one he could see.
Gloansy sat up swearing, reaching for his lower back. His vest had saved him, but it still hurt like hell.
Then more cracks over their heads. Jem opened up against the hull of the can, wasting rounds, the ricochets pelting the floor near Doug. Doug howled at Jem, but at least now he knew where the shots were coming from.
The can driver. From the safety of the armored interior, she was potting them through the gun ports. Doug and Gloansy were safe where they were-- crouched against its hull-- yet pinned down.
Doug looked under the can and saw Dez's legs on the other side. Doug yelled but couldn't get his attention, so he ripped off his radio and threw it beneath the truck, hitting Dez's shoe.
"The door!" Doug yelled to him. "Open the door!"
Dez crawled to the front of the can and jumped up to punch the red plunger button, the bay door starting to rise.
"What the fuck!" yelled Jem from where he was trapped at the near mouth of the tunnel.
But Doug was right: the driver was panicking, and as soon as she saw the door go up, she jumped into the front seat and powered forward, scraping the side of the can against the brick doorframe, lurching over the curb and out onto Van Ness.
Doug stood in the now empty bay and hit the button, shutting the door. He pulled the guard's gun from his pocket and went next to Jem, sticking his arm around the corner of the tunnel and firing, the .32 going crack-crack-crack.
"We bail!" Doug yelled over the reports. "Now!"
"No fucking way!" said Jem. "The ride is loaded and ready to go!"
"Leave it!" Doug said, over the racket of return fire. "Bail out!"
Gloansy was on his feet again, hunched over but moving. He drew on the tunnel and fired into it blindly, then tugged down his bandanna, exposing his face. "I'm driving!"
"No!" said Doug.
But Gloansy was already hobbling to the Suburban, his tunnel fire keeping Doug from giving chase. Gloansy was hurt, he was flipping out, he wanted the presumed safety of a mobile cage of glass and metal. "Meet you at the switch!" he yelled.
Dez was closer to the Suburban, wavering, torn between staying behind or taking off with Gloansy.
"Fuck!"
he said, watching Gloansy slam the trunk door shut. Then Dez hustled back to Doug.
With a rebel yell, Jem curled out into the mouth of the tunnel and filled the passageway with fire and noise.
* * *
CLOSER, OVER THE RAIN and the sound of his own slapping footsteps, Frawley heard gunfire. He saw flashes inside Gate D and heard echoed yelling.
Then someone out on the street near him cried, "Here they come!"
He ran with Dino and the others to the corner of Van Ness. A silver armored truck came scraping out of the block-long brick wall, yellow beacon twirling, surging down the street toward them through the rain. Two sergeants who should have known better rushed to the sidewalk and wasted bullets against the can's grille and windshield.
Frawley worried about the gun ports. He tried to make out the driver but the wipers weren't going, and all he could see through the rain was a blur of frizzy hair-- maybe a bad disguise. Whoever it was, the driver was running scared.
Dino yelled at the rest of them to get away as the truck wheeled past doing thirty. It turned hard right and went into a heavy skid on the wet road, the driver righting the wheels and briefly regaining control, then overcorrecting, the truck veering toward the sidewalk across from the ballpark, ramming the parked police camper head-on.
The blow was tremendous, the loudest, ugliest thing Frawley had ever heard, the camper buckling and grinding on its rims, all four tires exploding, tearing up the asphalt and taking out a hydrant before stopping some forty feet away. Cops tumbled out of the open end of the wrecked camper, falling hurt to the wet pavement and trying to crawl away from the fountain the hydrant made in the rain.
Dino and the rest of the lawmen ran to the truck, the crash bringing two tac cops charging back out of Gate D to investigate. The silver truck was unhurt, the driver grinding gears, still trying to flee. Dino warned the men back from the gun ports.
Approaching sirens drew Frawley the other way, back out onto Van Ness-- just as a second vehicle, a big black Suburban, jumped from the park.
It started away in the opposite direction, but the screaming patrol cars forced it to reconsider, cutting its wheels into a controlled skid that ended with the truck facing Frawley's end of the street, then starting toward him.
Frawley couldn't see the driver at that distance. All he knew was that he had someone fleeing a shooting. He stepped left onto the curb, working the pump action and aiming low for the tires--
Blam!
-- missing the first shot, kicking sparks off the asphalt, pumping again and leading the truck this time--
Blam!
-- striking the right front tire, pumping again--
Blam!
-- bursting the rear. The tires shredded and peeled back off the rims, and there was a spray of wet sparks in the road as the driver fought the steering wheel, losing control on the turn going the other way, jumping the curb and plowing into a Thunderbird parked at the corner.
Frawley ran wide around the rear of the Suburban, assuming all four of them were inside the tinted windows. A two-man tac team advanced with MP5 submachine guns off their shoulders, and Frawley backed away, letting them do their work.
* * *
THEY HEARD THE CRUISERS wheel past after Gloansy in the Suburban. Shotgun blasts in the rain. The sickening glass punch of the crash.
"They got him," said Dez, hands on top of his head. "Oh, fucking shit, they got Gloansy."
Jem wheeled and screamed, sending more angry spray down the tunnel.
"Who the fuck dimed us?"
he bellowed.
"I'll fucking kill them!"
Doug swallowed hard, going after the two uniformed guards and pulling them to their feet, powering them back near the tunnel.
Jem was reloading again, gripping his weapon in anguish. "Gloansy, you fucking shithead..."
Dez's bandanna eyes showed dull shock, his gun hanging in his hand. Doug woke him up by thrusting the guards at him and making him hold them at gunpoint.
Doug ran down the length of the cave, hitting plungers and opening the other four doors, then running back.
One empty duffel bag remained on the floor by the pushcart, and Jem was kneeling over it, stuffing it with cash, the Tec dangling from his shoulder rig.
"What are you doing?" said Doug. Jem kept on loading. "The fuck are you doing? Leave it! Come on!"
When Doug went to grab him, Jem raised up the Tec.
It was the guilty way in which Doug backed off. Jem sensed it, standing, tasting it the way a shark tastes blood, realizing, bright-eyed.
"This is you," he said. "You fucking did this. Did you fucking do this?"
Dez shouted from behind, "Fucking
come on, assholes!
"
Jem stared in white-eyed astonishment. He kept the gun on Doug as he knelt and zipped the bag shut, then pulled the bandanna down off his bewildered face. "Why, kid?"
Dez didn't know where to point his gun, at the guards or at Jem. "Tell him you didn't, Duggy!"
More sirens now, Jem's face going grim. He hefted the bag at his side, eyes and gun never leaving Doug as he backed up the incline to the open bay door, pausing there before the rain.
Doug awaited Jem's bullet.
The Tec came down and Jem tucked it into his raincoat, dead-faced, then ducked his head and started out with his black bag into the rain.
* * *
THE DRIVER OF THE Suburban, whoever he was, was at the very least unconscious. The spotter could see his shoulders rising and falling through the windshield, but his head remained down on the bloodied steering wheel. It was a potential medical emergency, but the spotter could not get a clear view of the backseat or of the cargo trunk. The status of the other three-- their very presence-- remained unknown.
A cordon of cops surrounded the crash site-- the smaller of the two wrecks on Yawkey-- one of them with a bullhorn, trying to coax out the occupants.
Frawley was down on his haunches behind a patrol car angled across the intersection, holding his shotgun across his knees. The boots next to him belonged to an ear-wired tac cop standing with his submachine gun braced atop the rain-popping roof of the car, trained on the Suburban. Frawley was coasting on adrenaline, not even feeling the rain. Fucking Special Agent Steve McQueen.
I just shot out a car's tires in the street.
He looked around for Dino. He had to tell this to someone.
More sirens coming, flashing blues arriving from everywhere. Frawley liked the cavalry's sound. But then he remembered the two cruisers that had scared off the Suburban. Those early patrol cars-- who had called them?
There'll be nothing on the radio,
Dino had said.
They're on a scrambled freq.
Frawley got up and started looking for Dino for real, finding him under a borrowed umbrella at the corner fence, talking to a police captain. Frawley stepped in between them, interrupting, jacked up on hormones though barely aware of it. "Where'd the patrol cars come from?"
The captain looked at the letters
FBI
on Frawley's chest. "Well," he said under the umbrella patter, "when a daddy patrol car and a mommy patrol car love each other very, very much..."
Dino rested a stop hand against the captain's chest. "This is my guy, Cap. Frawley, bank squad. Good cop."
The captain looked back at Frawley, nodding a grudging apology. "We got a 911. Radio distress call from inside the armored."
Frawley turned and looked at the silver Provident truck near the camper wreck, now empty-- a distress call going out inside his mind.
"Dean," he said, and Dino registered it, completed the thought.
This crew never left things like that to chance. They went
around
alarms.
"Trip it on purpose?" reasoned Dino. "But why?"
Frawley stepped back to take in the car wrecks on Yawkey, the multitude of cops in orange coats attending. He turned and looked up Van Ness, seeing more orange coats. "They wanted police here."
He noticed one cop crossing the street carrying a loose black bag-- walking away from the ballpark, moving too calmly.
* * *
DOUG STOOD WATCHING JEM go. Another arriving cruiser squealed past, and then Dez was yelling at him. Doug turned to find Dez still holding his gun on the guards. Flashlights and footsteps in the tunnel.
Doug pulled his Beretta and extracted the magazine. Only two rounds left. He pocketed that clip and pulled a full mag from his belt, reseating it, chambering a round. He took a guard from Dez and hustled them all down to the last door, the one farthest away from the tunnel, at the end of Van Ness.
Doug put his guard facedown onto the floor there, then holstered his gun and untied his bandanna from around his face. The guard was begging for his life, certain he was about to be executed, until Doug's bandanna across his mouth gagged his pleas.
Dez did the same, then stood, still wiping at his eyes, trying to blink his contacts right. "Can we do this?" he said.
