Scent of Evil (25 page)

“Into the tunnel.” He pointed to the far end of the room.

The tunnel was a ten-foot by ten-foot boxed-in metal corridor that connected the freezer building to the main warehouse. It was restricted to forklifts only and designed to allow them free access to both buildings regardless of the weather. Unfortunately, it wasn’t short or straight. Despite the proximity of the buildings, they were on sharply different levels, so, to avoid too harsh an incline, the tunnel had been built as a long, gradually descending V, with a one-hundred-sixty-degree switchback crimping the middle. I ran toward it, feeling more limber with each step, knowing that as soon as I was in its embrace, I’d stick out like a target in a shooting gallery. Again, I tried my radio, and again I got no results.

The first fifteen feet were no problem, since they were a straight shot from the building to the top of the V’s first leg. At the corner, however, things literally and otherwise went downhill. I glanced at the convex mirror mounted in the far corner, but the distortion was too great to distinguish much detail. Cappelli could be tucked alongside one of the hundreds of metal ribs that held the tunnel roof up and not be seen until I stuck my nose out.

I did stick it out, briefly, and saw nothing, just a hundred feet of gray corridor stretching away like a near-bottomless well. I began walking down it, keeping to the middle, ready to move right or left, depending on his angle of fire. I flexed the fingers of my right hand. At least now I could fire back.

But again, he didn’t shoot. As I was about twenty feet shy of the switchback, I thought I saw a movement in the second distant mirror. I moved to the left, progressing from protective rib to protective rib, so tense I thought I could hear my socks rubbing my pants legs. My eyes were glued to the mirror, willing its image to flatten out and enlarge, to tell me more of what lay hidden just a few feet away now. There was another movement, along the wall, tiny and distorted—an arm, holding a revolver.

“Stop where you are and throw your gun out. This is the police.”

I froze. It was Klesczewski.

“Ron?”

“Lieutenant?” In the mirror, several bodies appeared from behind the metal wall supports, all but Klesczewski’s in police uniforms.

“He didn’t get away, did he?” I asked as we met at the hairpin corner.

Klesczewski looked totally frazzled. “No, no. We don’t have him yet, but I’m sure he’s still in the building. Why didn’t you use your radio?”

I patted his shoulder, more grateful than I cared to admit for his company, as we all four jogged back toward the main building. “It’s broken. How many troops do you have now, and where are they positioned?”

“Eight or so, including some of the local security people. I put some of them outside, along sight lines near the perimeter fence, just to make sure he didn’t slip out between us.”

“That’s great.”

“I’m trying to get the building evacuated, but the P.A. system failed, and I only found someone who’d take responsibility a few minutes ago. Half the people are still unaware of what the hell’s going on.”

“Well, I chased him this far. He’s got to be in the main warehouse. Let’s keep the evacuation going, lock the place up, and send in the Special Reaction guys. Should be just a matter of time, as long as he doesn’t squirt out somewhere between now and then.”

We’d arrived at the tunnel’s far end, into a room that totally dwarfed the two I’d been in before, covering almost seven acres of floor space and reaching four stories up. As Ron had mentioned, the bustle of forklifts, “hi-lo’s,” and manual loaders had been only slightly reduced, although I could see several men in white shirts and ties using bullhorns, trying their best to wind things down.

“There aren’t many doors on the northwest side,” Ron continued, “and I think I got them all covered. It’s the loading dock and all these damn bays that have me worried. I never figured it would be that complicated to shut a place down.”

We heard a startled shout and a gunshot from one of the most distant of those bays.

“Oh, shit,” Ron muttered, and began to sprint down the length of the loading dock, cutting right and left around stacks of produce like a football player going for a touchdown.

I paused a moment. A forklift operator clutched his arm as Mark Cappelli bolted through a crack between one of the bay doors toward a truck backing up to the bay. I ran out another door, set on heading him off outside.

Unfortunately, I was still several hundred feet away and had a long line of trucks to get around. I was about fifty feet from where I thought Cappelli had left the warehouse when I heard a loud crash and the roar of a diesel engine in distress.

The noise had been caused by a Freightliner cab-over being driven away from its box without the support legs being dropped. I rounded my last obstacle in time to see the box lying with its nose in the tarmac like some religious penitent. The cab, shuddering and belching black smoke as Cappelli slammed it through its gears to gain speed, was already peeling away. He was headed west, against the prescribed traffic flow, bound for the far corner of the building and the entrance gates leading out to Ferry Road.

A trucker, his mouth half stuffed with a sandwich, was gesticulating near the front of the box. “He stole my cab, for Christ’s sake; that’s my fucking truck.”

I saw Ron standing at the edge of the adjacent loading door. “Where’s your car?”

“Follow me.” He bent down and swung me up onto the dock before leading me through the entrails of the building on a roughly diagonal tack to the building’s dressed-up front door to the west. As we both burst out onto the parking lot, Cappelli’s fire-breathing behemoth screamed around the far corner, heading for the closed front gate.

“Guess we better let ’em know what’s happening,” I said, as we piled into his car, just as the truck blew through the gate with a shriek of complaining metal. Leaving parallel crescents of black burnt rubber on the pavement, Cappelli slewed onto Ferry Road, heading toward the Putney Road traffic light. In a squeal of spinning tires, Ron backed out of his parking space and gave chase, while I began giving orders over the radio.

We had two major problems: We didn’t have enough time to get roadblocks properly organized, and we didn’t know which way Cappelli would take. If he turned right at the light, he could go north up Route 5 to grab the interstate at Putney, or try to vanish along the byways crisscrossing the hills around Dummerston, the next township. If he turned left, which I suspected he would, his choices were downtown Brattleboro, a couple of miles straight ahead, Route 9 East into New Hampshire, or I-91’s Exit Three, both located at the crossroads less than a mile down the road. I told Dispatch to contact the Vermont State Police and the Windham County Sheriff’s Department for anything north of our position, the New Hampshire cops for anything east, and ordered all available units to converge on Exit Three.

Another disadvantage was that most of our patrol units were behind Klesczewski and me, which left precious little to put between the truck and the open road. As Cappelli skidded through the light and drove south, I modified my instructions over the mike.

“This is Oh-three. I want all available units to move onto I-91, north and southbound. Rolling roadblocks.” I hung up the radio. “Ron, you better let at least one of the patrol units by. We aren’t exactly legal here.”

He slowed slightly and waved one of our tailgaters on, but only one; he wasn’t about to concede the chase, despite the rule that high-speed pursuits and roadblocks were only to be performed by recognizable patrol units.

“Why put everybody on the interstate?” he asked. The crossroads were coming up with amazing speed. I noticed both my feet were pressed flat against the floor.

“Gut call. It’s a wide-open road. That’s what I’d do.”

As if I’d willed it, the Freightliner slid into the crowded intersection, sideswiped several cars, and peeled out toward I-91. Another police unit screaming up the Putney Road from downtown almost added to the wreckage, barely missing us and a man who’d leapt from his vehicle to check the damage. I looked over my shoulder as Ron swept around the corner. That put three units behind us and one in front. I wondered what was left to stop Cappelli. I also wondered how much hell I was going to catch for putting this demolition derby into action.

As soon as I saw the truck commit to the first on-ramp, I grabbed the radio again. “All units from Oh-three. The truck’s heading north on the interstate. All units respond accordingly.”

But I shook my head as soon as I’d delivered the message.

Klesczewski saw me. “What?” he half shouted over the noise of the engine and the sirens.

“Why would he head north?”

“Why not?”

It was a legitimate response. Neither choice was rational, nor was the whole premise, for that matter. How Cappelli hoped to escape, driving a Freightliner with a bunch of cops on his tail, was beyond me. But if he was stupid enough to think he could, he was stupid enough to think that heading south toward Massachusetts and beyond held more options than tearing up the pavement for a hundred miles toward Canada.

I grabbed the mike again. “All units from Oh-three. Who’s on the interstate now?”

“Oh-three from One-five. I’m just north of Exit Two right now.”

“Set up a roadblock southbound just below the West River bridge.”

“I thought he was heading north.” The voice was high-pitched with incredulity.

“He is. I think he’ll turn around.”

“Oh-three from One-two. I’m coming onto Exit Two from West Bratt. Want me to join One-five?”

“Ten-four.”

Klesczewski’s face was tight with concentration as he tried to keep out of the ditch rounding the corner of the on-ramp. “You better be right, or we’re going to look like a bunch of assholes.”

I grinned at this rare profanity; in fact, I knew that soon, especially in the eyes of several of our town leaders, we would earn the label regardless of today’s results.

Cappelli’s truck was swerving slightly from side to side, making it impossible for the patrol car behind him to pass. As he drew abreast of the interstate at the top of the ramp, he added to the obstacle course by clipping a Subaru station wagon and causing it to twirl into a series of multiple pirouettes, which made all of us slam on our brakes to avoid joining in. Thus shielded, Cappelli cut into a controlled slide and sliced across the emergency U-turn lane a bare hundred feet away from the ramp. He was going for the southbound route.

The unit immediately behind him missed the U-turn completely, since it had veered to the wrong side of the dizzying Subaru and was hurtling north in the far breakdown lane. Klesczewski was luckier, as were the two units behind us.

“One-two and One-five from Oh-three. He’s headed your way.”

The thousand-foot-long West River bridge, one hundred feet above the water and now just a mile ahead of us, was undergoing repairs. The entire southbound span was closed, and traffic had been rerouted to one half of the northbound span, which was split down the middle by a row of heavy concrete dividers. The speed limit, for good reason, was forty. We were going ninety-five.

The approach to the bridge is a slightly descending slope. Units Twelve and Fifteen, their blue lights twinkling fiercely, were clearly visible on either side of the single southern lane at the far end of the bridge. Real roadblocks, unlike those in the movies, should always allow an exit. They are supposed to show the bad guys that escape is fruitless, not to provide them with cinematic opportunities to create mayhem. At midpoint on the bridge, in the gap that separated the two spans, workmen were operating acetylene torches from a long wooden platform, suspended by cables from the railing above. The flames from their torches looked like minuscule chips of sunlight.

“Ease up a little, Ron, the switch-over is bumpy.”

Klesczewski slowed down. Cappelli did not. His truck hit the thin, ripply asphalt overlay linking the southbound lane to its half of the northbound bridge, bounced once, and began to twist sideways, spewing several small rooster tails of burning rubber.

“Holy Christ, he’s going over.” Klesczewski slammed on the brakes hard, making my seat belt cut across my chest.

The truck hit the bridge sideways, with its rear wheels in the lane, its middle straddling the guardrail, and its cab hanging over the gap between the two spans. I could see the looks of horror on the faces of the workmen on the platform as the Freightliner screamed toward them, riding the guardrail sideways like some huge bizarre toy run amok. Now, added to the black smoke from the burning tires and the diesel exhaust, there was a shower of flaming sparks cascading from where the railing cut the truck undercarriage as it slid.

Slowly, as if tantalizing us, the cab began to peel forward off the chassis, exposing the engine beneath and throwing the whole disastrous mess off balance. For a moment, the truck’s wheels left the pavement and then, with the last of its momentum, it flipped on the guardrail like an acrobat somersaulting on a tightrope. The cab flew high in the air, its driver catapulting through its front window like a champagne cork. The chassis settled back onto the road, a smoking, twisted wreck, while Cappelli and the cab landed with an explosion onto the wooden platform below the bridge. We watched transfixed as the cab, surrounded by debris, spun silently through the hundred feet down into the shallow river. The platform, hanging on by a single cable, swung in a wide arc, and below it, swinging in turn by his leg, which was tangled in the remains of the other cable, was Mark Cappelli. The workers, hooked to their safety harnesses, were glued to the metal undercarriage of the bridge like insects to flypaper.

There was a deathly quiet as Ron and I left the car and stepped out onto the bridge. All traffic had frozen in place, all the topside workers were as still as statues at the railing; the one sound I could hear distinctly for that brief moment was the gurgling of the water far below as it swirled around its newfound obstacle.

I began to run.

IT TOOK AN ENDLESS THIRTY MINUTES
to get Cappelli up onto the bridge, never knowing when the tangled cable around his leg might suddenly unravel. Finally, two members of the Special Reaction Team managed to rappel down to the hapless trucker, hook a harness to him, and have him pulled to safety. When he reached us, he was unconscious but alive, and for the second time in two days, I rode in the ambulance to babysit someone I hoped would wake up to answer my ever-growing questions.