Scent of Evil (24 page)
He never got the words out. There was a metallic scraping sound from the bench as the figure ahead of us made a violent movement, and I suddenly sensed more than saw something spinning toward our heads. I instinctively raised my right arm and began to duck and turn away. A burst of pain whacked my forearm, numbing my hand, and a crescent wrench clanged at my feet.
Ron seemed riveted in place, staring at me doubled over in agony, my arm tucked into the pit of my stomach. “Son of a bitch. Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not fucking okay—damn.”
Crouching, we both recovered quickly and fanned out to either side of where we’d been, but the dark outline at the bench had vanished. I glanced at Ron, his gun out and ready. I’d left mine in its holster, since I still had no sensation in my lower arm and couldn’t shoot worth a damn with my left hand. “See anything?”
He scrutinized the gloom as if concentration alone could give him the vision he lacked. “Cappelli, come on out. We’re from—”
Again, he was cut short as a gunshot rang out and sent both of us flat on the grease-stained ground. No more flying tools, I thought; now we were getting serious. There was the sound of running feet and the clang of a metal door.
“Over there—to the left.”
“Watch it, Ron. He may not be gone.” I was sweating freely now, the pain in my arm superseded by an adrenalin rush that made my heart pound and my pupils dilate.
My vision of the garage now entirely cleared, I could see a line of oil drums running parallel with part of the bench, forming an aisle to a doorway mounted in the left-side wall. I gestured to Klesczewski to circle out to where the drums met the wall, while I made an approach more in line with the aisle, so that by merely poking my head out, I might see all the way to the door. I too now had my gun cradled in my still-tingling right hand.
The aisle was empty. I straightened from the crouch I’d unconsciously assumed. “He’s gone.”
Ron vaulted over the drums and beat me to the door, turning the knob, kicking it open, and tucking himself behind the jamb, all in one fluid movement. We were looking into the same office we’d visited upon our arrival. The gum-chewing secretary was standing between us and the front door, her mouth open at the sight of our weapons.
“Oh, my God.” She backed up several steps, caught her desk with the backs of her thighs, and went tumbling head over heels, vanishing on the far side with a crash and a flash of upturned legs.
I checked the office quickly as Klesczewski ran up to the desk. “We’re cops. Where did that man go?”
The girl, from the floor, pointed toward the front door.
“Was that Cappelli?” I shouted, already moving.
She answered yes, as we made for the exit.
Outside, we saw Cappelli disentangling himself from three strands of barbed wire strung along the top of a low chain-link fence separating E-Z’s yard from the C&S lot. The huge, dark-brown freezer building just beyond loomed like Jonah’s whale, lying ready to swallow our man whole.
I ran across toward the fence, yelling to Ron. “Drive to the far entrance. Radio everyone and get ’em out here… And give them a description.”
I began struggling with the fence, just six-feet tall, trying to keep my hands free of the barbs while scrambling for toeholds in the wire. Ahead, I could see our quarry, now almost at the bottom of the grassy slope between me and C&S’s tarmac apron. Cappelli was of medium height, broad-shouldered, with long black hair and a mustache. He was wearing jeans, work boots, and a bright-red T-shirt with black lettering on the back. I couldn’t see a gun and presumed he’d pocketed it for convenience. I hoped Ron had noticed as much for his description to the troops.
Cursing my own clumsiness, I finally stripped off my jacket, laid it across the top of the fence to absorb the barbs, and half fell into the grass on the far side just as Cappelli vanished around the corner of the distant building. Running downhill, I forgot radio protocol as I unclipped my portable from my belt: “Ron, he’s gone into the freezer. Try to seal off the perimeter gates somehow and then block the connecting tunnel into the main warehouse. Maybe security can help.”
The two C&S buildings are gigantic rectangles when seen from the top, linked by a thin, umbilical-like surface tunnel for forklifts. The long southeastern walls of both buildings house rows of some fifty loading bays each—square holes punched into the wall about four feet off the ground to accommodate the thousands of trucks that back up to them every week. The rest of the thirty-five to forty-foot-tall walls, including the one I was skirting at a dead run, are relatively free of doors or windows, and enclose a dizzying array of gigantic rooms, some two hundred and fifty by three hundred feet, which are interlaced with thirty-five-foot-tall racks. Loaded with boxed produce, they look like solid walls. Both buildings are manned twenty-four hours a day by a total of some six hundred stockpilers and machinery operators, all motivated by an incentive-pay system to keep twenty-one thousand products moving toward retailers over a good part of New England as fast as possible. Where Cappelli had just disappeared, in other words, was like an entire town under one single three-hundred-and-ten thousand-square-foot roof—not a bad place to hide, and a bitch to control.
I skidded around the corner, almost in time to be killed by a fast-moving tractor, and found Cappelli had vanished from sight. It was perfectly possible he had disappeared into one of the cabs or was hiding behind the wheels of one of the many eighteen-wheelers backed up to the building, but my instincts told me otherwise.
I double-stepped up a short flight of concrete stairs to a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” pulled it open, and slipped inside.
The shock left me breathless for a moment. From blazing, white-hot, suffocating daylight, I had stepped into a huge, artificially lit, cold cave. The sudden contrast made me feel I’d been transported forward in time to the gloom of late fall, and the unexpected cool air was like a splash of water in the face.
The room was approximately one hundred feet long, forty feet wide, and another forty feet tall. There were two enormous doorways in the long concrete wall opposite the row of loading doors, both of which were blocked off by overlapping strips of heavy plastic hanging from above. Behind them was the freezer room, almost one hundred thousand square feet of it.
I was in the dock area, where piles of boxed frozen goods were stacked on pallets, either fresh from or ready for the truck bodies that extended like dead-end doorless hallways from the open loading bays. Blinking away the outside brightness, I scanned the large room, looking for Cappelli’s distinctive red shirt.
“Hey. What’s up?”
I whirled around. A man dressed in insulated overalls, gloves, and a wool cap stood slightly behind one of the stacks along the wall, a clipboard in his hands. His eyes widened at the sight of the gun strapped to my belt.
“I’m a cop. Did you see a guy in a red T-shirt run in here?”
“Yeah. He went in there. I thought—”
He pointed toward the plastic-curtained door to the freezer. Just then, a lightning-bright muzzle flash exploded and crashed against the metal walls around us. The bullet tore the clipboard from my guide’s hands just as I threw myself against him and sent us both sprawling behind some boxes.
“Holy shit. What the hell is going on?” His cap had slid over one ear, and he looked like the village drunk propped up against his cardboard shelter.
“I’m going in there. As soon as you think it’s safe, get out and take as many people with you as you can. Don’t waste time doing it and don’t be a hero. Just spread the word and get the hell out. I got troops on the way.”
He nodded dumbly, his eyes wide, as I got to my knees and peered around my barricade. The shadow I’d seen behind the muzzle flash was gone.
Tucked low, I scuttled from pallet to pallet, working a zigzag course toward the freezer door. Finally, with my back against its cold concrete edge, I pulled out my radio. “Ron, you there?”
I released the key button and waited. Some two seconds of static came back at me.
“Ron? Do you copy?”
More static.
“I can’t read you. Maybe it’s the building. I’m about to go into the main freezer room.” As I replaced the radio on my belt clip, I noticed its side had been badly gouged, presumably from my nose dive to the cement floor. That probably accounted for the static; it also meant I was all by myself.
I leaned around the edge of the doorway and peeled back one of the plastic strips, shivering as the blast of cold air hit my sweat-soaked shirt. I was about to slip through the narrow opening when I heard a sudden loud whining bearing down on me. I looked around frantically and then spun back as the plastic strips burst around me, yielding to a fast-moving forklift that missed me by two inches.
“Get the fuck out of the way, you moron. I almost killed you.” The operator stopped abruptly, his eyes like his predecessor’s, glued to my gun.
I gave him the same set of instructions, adding that he should run to the far end of the building as quickly as possible to get the cops.
He did so, abandoning the fully loaded forklift.
I stepped onto the tiny driver’s platform at the back of the machine and studied the controls for a moment. Then, crouching down, I operated the reverse and backed through the curtain as fast as I could.
On the other side was a wide traffic lane, running parallel to the cement wall and at right angles to an endless row of three-story-high stocking racks. I drove fast and straight toward the nearest aisle, using the machine and its speed as cover. It almost wasn’t enough. Another bullet whacked into the control panel, showering my head with shattered plastic. I jumped for the temporary safety of the aisle just before the forklift crashed into one of the racks.
The sudden silence was electrifying. With the forklift stilled, I became aware of the all-encompassing low-toned rumble of the refrigeration compressors, as seemingly permanent and pervasive as the sound of a distant sea.
I picked myself up off the icy floor and began to look for a way west, through the middle of the towering racks and in the direction of the last shot. I was now beginning to feel the cold. My breath hovered before my face. Overhead, ominous icy stalactites reached down from the steel cross-bracing and water-sprinkler pipes high above, reminders of how briefly I could survive in this environment. I began to shiver as I squeezed between two stacked loads on the bottom shelf and wriggled my way into the next aisle.
Aisle by aisle I progressed, slowly, cautiously, and without sound, looking up and to the sides, never knowing where Cappelli might be lurking, not even sure he was still in the freezer. My hands and feet became numb. My shivering developed into an uncontrollable shaking. My jaw muscles began to ache from clamping my chattering teeth together.
I decided to speed things up a bit by running to the far end of one of the aisles and proceeding up the distant traffic lane, thereby sparing myself the additional discomfort of sliding between the frozen boxes.
It was the shortcut Cappelli was waiting for. I rounded the first aisle without mishap or reward, but as I dashed across the open space for the sanctuary of the next line of racks, now almost sure I was alone, I heard the faintest of sounds overhead and looked up just in time to see several boxes come hurtling down on me, the flash of Cappelli’s T-shirt behind them.
I twisted out of the way, tripped, and landed on my back, my revolver going off accidentally. There was a loud metallic crack following the blast, and one of the overhead water pipes blew up. I watched in slow terror as a fountain of freezing water sprang free and came at me, a huge, expanding, life-threatening shower. As I rolled over to catch the brunt of it with my back, I wondered incongruously why Cappelli hadn’t simply shot me. The answer, of course, lay in my hand. He, like I, had no feeling left in his fingers, and no ability to willfully pull the trigger.
The water hit me like icy lava, burning my body and changing my entire focus from pursuit to survival. At first crawling, then staggering to my feet, and finally lurching down the hundred-foot aisle, I made a beeline for the exit, fully aware that any caution now would mean my freezing to death. As I ran, I could feel my clothes stiffening against my skin.
Cappelli must have been in the same situation. About halfway down the aisle, I saw another flash of red before me as he darted across the opening, making for one of the huge curtained doors. He was a good fifty feet ahead and long gone by the time I half fell between the long plastic strips.
I looked around, standing in the open, my hair and eyebrows glistening with ice, my gun hanging useless at the end of an arm without feeling. Several heads were visible peering over the tops of various boxes.
“Where did he go?” I asked in my head, but not in fact. My mouth was numb, and the sounds from it made no sense.
Someone nevertheless pointed to another curtained opening which separated the cold portion of the building from what the workers called “Phase B,” a second hundred-thousand-square-foot addition that was slated to become a freezer, but which for the time being was uncooled.
With none of the caution I’d displayed earlier, I stumbled through the connecting archway into Phase B.
The shock of coming from the cold into the warm was not as brutal as the reverse. My body was so numb, it took a while to adjust, but I was aware of the change and of the salvation it represented. That mere instinct sharpened my senses.
“Where?” I asked the first person I met.
Word had obviously gotten out, however filtered. Here, as in the freezer, the steady whirring of forklifts had been quieted by the crisis Cappelli and I represented, but the sense of threat had suffered in translation, or had been diminished by our weather-beaten appearance. In any case, the workers were just standing around looking baffled.
“What’re you guys doing?” The man I’d addressed was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that said, “Five hundred thousand cows can’t be all wrong—Visit Vermont.”
“Where did the man in the red shirt go?”