The basement exploded in light. Spotlights. Set up on stands and hanging from the ceiling like a TV studio.
And in the center of the lights . . . our killer.
“Hi, Jack.” He was squinting against the glare, hiding behind a kneeling half-naked woman. She had blood running freely down her torso from several dozen cuts. A gun was being pressed under her chin.
My gun.
“Take it easy, Charles.”
“I’ve got him, Jack.” McGlade assumed a shooting stance. “I can blow his head off from here.”
Charles brought his free hand around to the woman’s front and flicked a Zippo lighter. He held it next to her hand. In her trembling fist was a length of rope. I followed the rope to where it divided into six segments, each leading to the base of a large barrel. They were spaced far apart along the walls of the basement.
It wasn’t a rope at all. It was a fuse.
“Hold it, Harry! Everyone fall back! I don’t want anyone within fifty yards!” In my earpiece, I heard the commotion of my men complying.
“Such a good cop, Jack. Such concern for her people.”
“What’s in the barrels, Charles?”
“Gasoline. Enough to take out the whole block.”
“Stand down!” I yelled into my mike. “Clear out the houses on both sides and call the FDP! It’s all wired to burn!”
The word spread quickly. Panic. Evacuation. Herb came over the air, begging me to pull out. I ignored him.
Only McGlade and I remained.
“You can’t get away, Charles. There’s nowhere to go.”
“You’re wrong there. You’re the one who can’t get away. Once I light this, the whole place goes up. You won’t have time to piss your pants.”
“I’m shooting him,” Harry said.
“Both of you drop your guns. Now, or I light it.”
I took a step closer. “It’s over, Charles. Give up. Maybe you can do a Trainter show from your cell, let him interview you live.”
Charles Kork grinned, pure malice, pure evil.
“Good-bye, Jack. I’m sorry we never got to know each other. I guess I’ll just have to look up your mother after you’re dead.”
He lit the fuse, and then dragged Diane backward, retreating to the other side of the basement. Next to the furnace was a back door. Charles yanked his wife through it and disappeared into the night.
But Harry and I had our own problems.
“Uh-oh,” McGlade said.
I dove for the fuse, which was burning at about three inches a second. I grabbed and just missed, watching the fuse separate into six different flames, each one heading for its own full barrel.
Enough gas to burn the whole neighborhood.
I yanked at the nearest fuse, searing my hand but pulling it free of its gasoline tank. It harmlessly burned itself out.
Scrambling on all fours, I hunted down a second flame and pulled that out as well.
“It won’t go out! It won’t go out!” Harry stomped up and down on a lit fuse with both feet. He looked a lot like Daffy Duck throwing a fit.
“Yank it!”
I turned my attention to a barrel several feet away, the lethal flame streaking toward it. I took two quick steps, pain searing through my leg, and I launched myself into the air, ramming into the barrel, pulling out the fuse and watching the last six inches burn away in my hands.
I looked at Harry, who was standing on the far end of the room, tossing two burning fuses aside. His eyes tracked the floor, following the last flame as it snaked its way to the final barrel.
It was less than two feet from its target, and too far away for either of us to get to in time.
I drew my gun and aimed.
“Jesus, Jackie, ricochet!” Harry crouched down and covered his face.
I fired three times at the flickering spark, my .38 slugs bouncing off concrete and turning the basement into a deadly pachinko game. Cement chips peppered my feet. Harry howled with fright. I exhaled slowly and fired once more, my fourth bullet neatly severing the advancing flame from the rest of the fuse.
Stillness. I took a deep breath.
McGlade peeked through his fingers. “Are we dead?”
Herb’s voice in my ear. “Jack, are you okay? Suspect on foot, in the backyard. Has a woman with him.”
“Move in!”
McGlade walked over to the last barrel, examining it. He pulled out the remaining fuse, about the length of a cigarette.
“Nice shooting, Wyatt.”
I limped past him, pushing through the back door. The backyard was cool and dark, and I couldn’t spot any movement. Red and blue lights swirled from a few houses away, washing over the lawn in waves.
“The bomb is defused, Herb, close the perimeter. Perp ran out the back door. He has a hostage. Do you have a visual? Over.”
“Negative, Jack. We were falling back. We’re coming in now.”
A hand on my shoulder. I spun, bringing around my gun.
McGlade.
“Don’t tell me you lost him.”
I walked away before I did something I’d regret, like shoot him. The important thing was finding Charles.
I couldn’t allow him to kill his wife.
In my ear, Benedict and his men swept the block, while I took a walk across the backyard lawn. I gripped the .38 in both hands, holding it at an angle away from my body, ready to point and shoot at anything that grabbed my attention.
“Jackie! I found something!”
McGlade was holding up some kind of hook.
“Nice work, Harry. Now sit on it and spin.”
“It was right on the ground, next to this manhole.”
It took a few seconds to register, and then I hobbled over. McGlade used the hook to pry up the cover, dragging it off to the side. He flashed his key light down into the hole.
“Stinky. Think he’s down there?”
“Jack!” My earpiece buzzed. “We have a man and a woman, four doors down. Team is moving in!”
“Roger that, Herb. McGlade and I . . . Harry!”
Harry disappeared down the hole.
“Dammit! Herb, we found a manhole in the yard, Harry just went down. I’ll contact you again in a minute.”
I got on my knees and peered down into the sewer.
“Harry! Get up here!”
“Sorry, Jack,” he called up. “You did this to me. I have to catch the guy to clear my good name.”
“Goddammit, McGlade, you don’t have a good name! Harry! Harry?”
He yelped once, then didn’t answer.
I reloaded, told Herb my intention, and then went down after him.
Chapter 43
THERE IS NO BOOM.
Charles stops, hunching down in the sewer line, filthy water up to his ankles. He holds his breath and listens.
No explosion. No screaming. Nothing.
What’s going on?
He wraps his hand in Diane’s hair and pulls her along. If the cops aren’t burning, they’ll be coming after him. He has to hurry.
It’s dark as ink, foul, claustrophobic. The narrow pipe forces him to run in a crouch. His wife whimpers, dragging her feet, slowing him down. He jabs her with the knife to get her to move.
“I told you to run!”
After the fourth or fifth jab, she falls down. Continued poking doesn’t make her get back up.
Damn her. Charles hates to end it here, in a sewer where he can’t even see her face. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. He wants to take his time, make it last, feast on a banquet of her agony.
A clang, in the distance. Someone opening the manhole cover.
Jack.
Charles reaches down, slashes at his wife in the darkness. Such a disappointing ending. She deserves so much more.
Then he scurries away from her. He moves by feel, counting his steps. Sight is minimal, but he’s walked the route several times. Before he became a media darling, Charles always kept his kills hidden. The sewer is the perfect h
iding place for corpses—he can bring them here without witnesses, no one notices the smell, and the rats take care of any evidence. Throughout these pipes are the remains of a half-dozen people he’s killed.
After twenty-four paces he stops, feeling for the grating. It’s two feet before him. Taped to it is a flashlight.
He crouches in the concrete tube and flicks on the light, briefly. Finding the clasp, he opens the rusty gate and slips down four feet into the main line.
Now he can walk upright rather than bent over. The sewer main is wide as an alley. Filthy water runs down the center in a putrid, brown stream. Charles doesn’t know how deep it is, and has no desire to find out. On either side of the flow is a ledge, a catwalk that can be treaded upon when the water level is low enough.
His smartest escape route is to follow along the right wall, down to the end of the block, and then turn left and go eight blocks over. He’ll pop up in an alley, right across the street from the public garage where he keeps his second car, and far from the searching pigs overhead.
But he isn’t ready yet. He still has to deal with Jack.
The lieutenant can’t be allowed to live. She found him. She’ll find him again. Charles doesn’t want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, waiting for her to pounce.
It will end here.
The Gingerbread Man checks his bullets and switches off his light.
Noises are coming from the sub main he’d exited moments before.
He hunches down and giggles, ready for the fun to start.
Chapter 44
THE LADDER WAS MADE OF STEEL bars, rusty and slimy. Descending was a complicated ordeal where I had to hop down each step, since my bad leg refused to bend. When I finally reached the bottom, I stepped on something.
“Jesus, Jackie!”
I was on Harry’s leg. He shoved me off and flicked on his key light, pointing it in my face. McGlade was on his ass, in the middle of a large slick of gunk.
No—not gunk.
Blood.
“My God, Harry—”
“I slipped. It’s not my blood.”
My stomach churned. The wife.
I tried to radio Herb to say we were on the right trail, but the radio only gave me static. I played with it for a few seconds, but being underground probably put us out of signal range.
Harry stood up and banged his head on the top of the tube we were in.
“Christ! That’s gonna leave a lump.”
The smell was nauseating, human waste and rotting animal matter. Several rats scurried past, disappearing into the darkness.
I took the key light from Harry. The little beam barely penetrated the darkness, only allowing for a few feet of sight.
“So which way, Lieutenant? This tube goes both ways.”
I focused the light at our feet. The trickle of sludge was moving to our left.
“This way.”
“Lead on, Jackie. You’ve got the body armor.”
I killed the light and we shuffled forward. The muck became ankle-deep after a few yards, and the smell was so foul, I could taste it in my mouth.
I stopped twice to listen. The only sound I heard was my labored breathing, which was amplified in the fetid air and made me sound asthmatic. Walking in a crouch with a bad leg was slow going and painful. I felt down in the darkness and discovered that my pants were soaked with blood yet again. This damn wound would never heal.
But that was the least of my problems.
“I think we went the wrong way,” Harry whispered.
“Shhh.”
“I’m going back. Be a dear and let me borrow your vest.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“You want to get romantic now?”
I strained my ears. There was noise ahead, like a water cascade. We were coming to the end of the tunnel.
How far ahead of us could he be? Assuming he knew these sewers, Charles could be hundreds of yards away by now.
Or he could be just around the corner, waiting in ambush.
“Help . . .”
A woman’s voice, weak and pleading, coming from ahead of us. Diane Kork was still alive.
I moved faster, urgency prodding me on, overriding the pain. The radio was still all static. I also tried my cell phone, but couldn’t get a signal surrounded by all this concrete. We came to her twenty yards later, lying half-naked in the filth, covered with blood and muck.
“Diane. Can you hear me?” I knelt down next to her, my wounded leg stretched out behind me. Her pulse was strong, steady. I eyed her wounds; several ugly slashes across the chest, and a deep cut in her collarbone that missed her throat by a fraction. Her eyelids fluttered, and she focused on me.
“He heard you coming, and ran off.”
“Diane, we’re going to get you out of here.”
She shook her head. “You have to get him.”
“We will. First we’re going to . . .”
“No!” The power in her voice startled me. “Don’t let him get away. You have to go get him. Please.”
I looked at Harry.
“Give her your jacket.”
He shrugged off the blazer, draping it over Diane.
I tucked the sport coat under her arms and chin.
“He won’t get away, Diane. I promise. We need to get you to the hospital. Can you stand?”
She shook her head.
“We’ll have to carry her, Harry.”
“You can’t even walk. How are you supposed to carry someone?”
“I’ll manage.”
No one else dies. Even if we had to drag her to safety an inch at a time.
Harry complied, gently lifting Diane under her armpits. She groaned painfully. I positioned myself on the other side and lifted her knees, my legs trembling under her weight.
It would be tough, but we’d get her out of here.
“Jack!”
The voice came from behind us, loud and unmistakable.
Benedict.
“Herb! We’re over here!”
Thirty seconds later my partner came waddling down the tube, followed by a uniformed officer. His labored breathing and the coat of sweat on his face told me he wasn’t any more comfortable in the sewers than I was.
“Kork is ahead of us,” I called out. “Get Diane out of here, alert the troops. We need to cover all manhole exits for ten square blocks.”
“You’re going after him?”
I nodded.
“With him?” Benedict jerked a thumb at Harry.
McGlade sneered back. “Good to see you too, Tubby.”
“Harry’s going back with you. Place him under arrest for obstruction of—”
“My ass,” McGlade said. Then he took off down the pipe.
Nothing’s ever easy.
“Gotta go, Herb.”
“Be careful, Jack. Backup is coming.”
We exchanged a tense look, and then I went after Harry. A few feet into the blackness, I stopped and listened. The falling water sound was louder, and I could hear the echo of footsteps.
“Dammit, Harry! Wait up!”
My voice sounded small, hollow, as it echoed down the tube.
“I’m a few yards ahead of you.”
When I finally caught up to him, I was sweating as much as Herb had been.
“Welcome back, Jackie. You gonna read me my rights?”
“When this is over, Harry, I swear—”
I felt the bullet at the same time I heard it. It hit me in the stomach, knocking me backward. I sprawled in the filthy water, my head bouncing on cement.
The feeling was unreal, like I’d been gut-punched by a speeding car. I sucked in the foul sewer air, my breath having left me. The pain was so bad, it made me forget my leg.
The tube exploded in a muzzle flash, and thunder erupted in my ears. McGlade was returning fire. Enclosed in the concrete tube, the gun deafened us both.
A long minute passed. McGlade knelt next to me and felt along my body. He pressed
on my diaphragm and I yelped. Then he reached under my vest and felt the skin. I couldn’t sense if there was a wound or not.
Harry released the pressure and a moment later the little flashlight was pointing in my face.
“The vest stopped the bullet.” Or that’s what it sounded like. My ears were still ringing. “Can you move?”
I tried to speak. “Yeah.”
He offered his hand and helped me up. The darkness fractured into pinpoints of light, stars dancing in my vision. I blinked twice and swallowed.
“Kevlar worked pretty good.” McGlade handed me the light and crouched behind me. “You go first.”
I looked down at my gun hand and saw that I still held the .38. Then I moved, one foot in front of the other.
The water sound increased. I sensed the tube ending, opening up into a much bigger area. The sewer main. I listened, peering into the dark.
“You waiting for Christmas?” Harry nudged me. “Move it.”
I flicked on the flashlight, looking for a foothold so I could climb out.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Three shots went into the wall next to me, chips of concrete biting into my face and neck. I jumped, landing on a ledge several feet below, falling partially into the sewage water. My gun skittered off out of sight.
A bright flashlight beam trained on the tube where I’d been seconds ago. It made its way down the wall and hit me in the face. I squinted at the figure behind the light.
The Gingerbread Man grinned, his gun pointing at my head.
“Hello and good-bye, Jack. Looks like the best man won.”
Then a shot rang out from the tube above us.
Harry.
The flashlight fell away from my face, and Charles Kork howled in pain. I felt around for my gun, instead finding the keys. I flicked on the key light and Harry dropped to the ledge next to me.
Charles moaned. I put the light on him. He was bleeding from the shoulder, clutching the wound with his good hand. His gun was gone.
I let out the breath I’d been holding.
The Gingerbread Man offered a lopsided grin. He looked small, petty, like the sewer rats that scampered behind him.
“Well, looks like you got me, Jack.”
“Stand up, put your hands on your head.”
“I can’t get up.”
I took a step closer. My reserves were almost gone, and my entire body ached and smelled like sewage. But I could honestly say I never felt better.
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