“I talked to him this morning,” he said through a cracking voice. He cleared his throat. “He can only speculate, but it’s his opinion that Three-Seven is lying low to let the heat settle. After that, he may choose to move on or continue killing.”
“I agree,” Williams replied and nodded. “I was hoping he was badly injured and was healing up, but Lincoln’s report on the garage scene killed that. Not a drop of Elliot’s blood was found and the time between Kirby’s murder and the attack on the Warlocks was determined to be a few hours.”
“Yeah,” Frank whispered.
This was Marcus’s cue that the man no longer wanted to speak of it, at least for the time being.
Frank and Marcus met the hearse and took their places alongside the toffee colored casket and grasped the brass handles. Among the six men, they maneuvered it onto the stand at the graveside and lined up behind it.
The priest spoke his piece, as did the mayor and the superintendent. Soon after, it was time for the six of them to fold the flag as the bagpipers and drummers erupted into a rendering of “Going Home”, a known preference of Kirby McLain’s. The McLain family had long since departed from the face of the Earth in one way or another. It was Frank himself that presented the flag to Superintendent Dehner. They saluted one another and Campanelli returned to the line.
His eyes wandered about the crowd and, to his surprise, he found Tamara, dressed in a dark gray pantsuit. He wanted to ask her what she was doing there, as she never attended these funerals. She was crying quietly and dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. The sight of her in such a state, together with the pipes and drums, brought tears to well in his eyes. Frank shut the lenses down, pitching him into darkness where he stood.
They remained off until the end of the ceremony. He found Tamara in the crowd.
“You did wonderfully, Frank,” she said and hugged him tightly.
No words came to his mind, so he simply hugged her back.
***
After Kirby McLain was properly buried, Campanelli dropped Williams home, and drove to his own apartment in silence. He returned his dress uniform to the closet and dressed for a regular day at work in a black suit. Even though it was after noon, he was sure to at least be available in case a call came in from someone having spotted Elliot Three-Seven. Additionally, he may have Sentinel business to attend to, though he doubted it. His underlings were handling the department fine without him.
Frank stared at himself in the mirror for a time as he fumbled with the tie. He could not help but notice the lines near his eyes and forehead. His guard had been down and the worry was plain in his face. He decided he would have to be conscious about his expressions, at least in front of Tam.
He came out of the bathroom, fresh and ready. He was restless and did not know, for the moment, what to do with himself.
“You okay?” Billingsley asked. She had not yet changed out of her pantsuit.
“Yeah.”
She nodded and they looked to one another for a long moment. “I’m heading out to see the Yardleys today.”
“Who?”
“The couple I’m buying the restaurant from. We’re signing the papers today.”
Annoyed at himself, he slapped his palm onto the kitchen counter. “Sorry, I forgot.”
Tamara smiled and walked up to him. She planted a kiss on his cheek and mouth. “It’s more than okay, Frank.”
He thought about it and recalled that the diner was only about a block south and one west of Kirby McLain’s apartment. A vision of Elliot Three-Seven ripping into the small restaurant and killing the Yardleys and Tamara Billingsley both angered and frightened him.
“When are you going?” he asked.
“Right now.”
“I better escort you. You’ll still need to take your car. I could be called while you’re in there.”
Her face brightened. “Oooo…my own police escort? Wonderful.”
Both of them went to their cars. Tam drove her old German roadster and Frank followed in his cruiser. Along the way and while he waited outside, he monitored the CPD computer’s blotter. There was nothing unusual about the day. Traffic stops, burglaries, a mugging, and a stolen car were all quite routine. He smirked over the stolen car, wondering who would bother, considering the amount of junk just lying around. The perpetrator must have been in some need. He wondered if it could have been the FROG.
Campanelli checked on his partner’s status and noted that he had reported in at SWAT HQ on Fillmore Street, several blocks west of his position.
Frank sat back in his seat and watched the restaurant, the pedestrians, and the traffic along Michigan Avenue. His thoughts wandered to the sad events of that morning. There was no way to halt it, despite what good was going on inside the restaurant that would soon belong to Tamara. He was happy for her, but the issue of the psychopathic FROG and the murder trail he was leaving behind weighed heavily.
He lazily watched a group of cars accelerate from the light at Cermak Road. Among them was a vehicle that was much louder than the others and it gathered his attention. Campanelli thought the driver’s window down and watched as three cars and a motorcycle rolled by him. Upon the motorcycle, a dark-skinned male with a mass of greasy black hair eyed him back and gave him a crooked smile.
Frank blinked and quickly magnified his vision, focusing on the rider’s face. The man’s eyes were bright yellow, indicating the presence of bio-electronics. The mass of cars along with the motorcycle rolled on by. Campanelli looked up the model of motorbike and found that it was a rare, American-built cycle with an Italian engine called a Torpedo V-4. It had taken its name from an early twentieth-century machine, but resembled it not at all beyond having a four-cylinder engine. Its age was approximately seventy years old.
He watched the bike recede in his side view mirror. A couple of factors set off his detective’s instincts. The rider was wearing a dirty black overcoat, and Dr. Ruger had stated that FROGs were capable of changing their skin pigmentation.
Frank doubted his luck, but started the cruiser’s motor, slipped it into gear, and made a U-turn. He caught up to the small group of vehicles, so he could see the motorcyclist through the windows of the automobile ahead of him.
At the intersection of Michigan and Cullerton, the biker turned right. Cullerton was a two lane road, quite a bit narrower than Michigan and more residential. Frank turned the corner and followed, keeping roughly a dozen car lengths between himself and the loud machine. The rider seemed calm and was keeping his speed within the posted limits.
The traffic lights were with them, allowing Frank to stay back while he studied the back of the bike. The frame had been designed to be versatile, comfortable over long distances, but built with the legendarily powerful four-cylinder. It resembled café racers of the late twentieth century, only it possessed a larger frame. The black leather saddle bags seemed out of place, but they had been installed solidly. They did not shift when the bike hit bumps. The rear tire was wide and sparsely treaded, making it a high performance tire with a great amount of contact with the pavement.
Cullerton ended when it intersected with Calumet Avenue and featured a posted stop sign. The biker braked and began looking both ways. Campanelli stopped behind him, leaving more than a car length.
The biker revved his motor loudly, sending out puffy white exhaust. He made eye contact with Frank in his left side mirror and turned back over his left shoulder.
In a pair of heartbeats, the rider’s skin changed color to a light pink. He winked at Frank as he gunned the engine with the front brake still engaged. The rear wheel spun in place while the tire shrieked shrilly and created white smoke.
“Son of a bitch!” Frank shouted in his car. His hand flashed to his gun, but he had no chance to pull it as Elliot Three-Seven let go of the brake. In a shot, he turned it to the left and accelerated away.
Frank mashed the pedal on his cruiser. The twin turbochargers howled and made the four tires spin, matching the smoke
the motorbike had left behind on the corner. He thought the command for his cruiser to go to Condition Three, pursuit mode.
“Dispatch! I have suspect, Elliot Three-Seven sighted!” he called out. “I am in pursuit! He’s on a Torpedo V-4 model motorcycle!”
“Five-one-six-two, roger,” the dispatcher replied a scant second later.
She chatted on, alerting back up units, as Frank negotiated the gentle left curve in Calumet Avenue, where he knew from experience, the curvature increased as the road bent westward. He watched as Elliot leaned hard, nearly scraping his knee along the street. Campanelli found himself hoping for an oncoming truck, but he was left disappointed.
Once the street straightened out, Elliot opened up the throttle and put distance between himself and Frank’s car. The street name changed to Eighteenth Avenue after this turn, the very street Frank and Tam lived on.
Campanelli floored the accelerator in an effort to catch up, and his cruiser responded, flying through the gears as it approached and passed one hundred KPH. The distance between himself and Elliot was held in check for a pair of heartbeats.
The motorcycle braked for traffic crossing its path at the intersection of Indiana Avenue. Both tires of the bike smoked and left black streaks along the pavement.
Frank hit the brakes hard as well, throwing his body forward into the restraints. His widened eyes watched as Elliot weaved around cars that had come to a panic stop upon his sudden appearance. These vehicles were without guidance computers and not under Campanelli’s patrol car’s influence, so the drivers had no warning.
Three-Seven accelerated hard once he was through and Frank did the same. Unexpectedly, the FROG hit the brakes again and guided the bike to the right side of the street, but the seasoned policeman was not fooled. He knew this was an attempt to make a left turn at high speed and as wide as possible, so he did the same.
Elliot pressed the motorcycle hard through the turn and bounded up a slight incline as it entered an alley behind a row of apartment buildings. He accelerated so hard, the rear tire slipped, making the FROG ease off the gas.
Frank confidently followed and pushed his car to catch up, which it was able to do in a hurry. The two vehicles raced southward down the alley only a few meters apart. Unlike the well-maintained roadway they had just left behind, the alley was rough and only patched with asphalt, which had been sloppily applied and left lumpy.
Elliot pushed his bike hard and weaved around the bumps as much as he could, but the bike still struck one, lifting it into the air for a scant second, filling Frank with hope that the FROG would fall. Compensating quickly by shifting his weight and briefly laying off the accelerator, he did not. The tires reacquired contact with the rough alleyway and continued on, only giving up another meter of distance to the pursuing police car.
Campanelli began to grin as he was close enough to his target that he could no longer see the bottom of the bike’s rear tire. He also knew that the alley dumped out onto Cullerton again and terminated into an empty lot of decimated concrete and rubble that the motorcycle could not traverse.
Elliot shifted to the left side of the alley, apparently preparing for a right turn. Frank discovered quickly that this was only partly correct. He was forced to slam on his brakes and twitch the yoke to the left to avoid a parked pickup truck. Three-Seven made a high-speed right onto Cullerton, causing another motorist to swerve out of the way. The antique vehicle crashed into a pair of parked cars.
Campanelli made the turn after Elliot and continued the chase, calling in the mishap. He shot through the green light at Michigan Avenue, and Frank could see that they were both driving into traffic. As his cruiser’s computer came within contact of most of the vehicles, they decelerated and moved out of the way. Only an old unmarked delivery truck remained in Frank’s way as he gained on Elliot’s bike.
The two of them came up on the truck as it was passing through the intersection with Wabash. Campanelli’s police siren finally caught the attention of the truck driver, so he slowed and moved out of the way.
As they approached State Street, Frank was alerted to the presence of additional units moving to intercept. Reluctantly, he let off the gas and covered the brake pedal with his other foot.
Elliot, unaware of the upcoming hazard, was surprised to see a marked CPD cruiser enter the intersection from the north and come to a screeching halt directly in front of him. To Frank’s amazement, the FROG put the bike in a skid, using the rear brake only. The rear wheel kicked out to the right, slowing the bike and allowing the rider to steer around the front end of the police car. Once straightened out, the powerful motorcycle put distance between himself and Frank once again.
Campanelli guided his car around the squad car and mashed the gas pedal.
Additional units were waiting ahead, where Cullerton met with Archer Avenue. The three squad cars lay in wait for him, sprawled across the odd intersection and blocking any northbound option.
Elliot shifted his weight hard to his left, again dropping the knee nearly to the pavement, continuing in a tight left turn and bleeding as little speed as possible until the motorcycle wound up on Clark Street, heading south.
Frank followed, but had to put his cruiser sideways to make the high-speed turn without striking civilian cars. He straightened out and kept Elliot in sight, chasing after him with two marked cruisers following behind them.
They were quickly approaching Cermak Road, another place that would make Elliot choose a direction, when Frank’s car lost power. Everything on the dashboard went dark and the pedals and steering yoke all lost function. At well over eighty KPH, Campanelli’s cruiser approached the T intersection.
For a moment, all Frank could hear was the Torpedo’s four-cylinder, the sirens of the police cars behind him, the wind against his cruiser, and the whirring of rubber against pavement.
He gripped the useless yoke in one hand and yanked the parking brake lever with the other. His rear tires locked up, diminishing much of the car’s speed as it entered the intersection. The dead car struck the curb on the far end and was launched up an embankment, where it met with a wooden fence and a pair of trees with a loud crunching, shrieking of metal, and the explosions from the airbags.
Campanelli was vaguely aware of this just before the world went white, then dark.
***
Frank’s unconsciousness was neither complete nor long-lasting. He clearly remembered what had happened and his CAPS-Link device had not powered down, so he knew he had not been out long. He blinked, but could not clear his vision of the white. He lifted a hand to rub his eyes, but encountered something else on the way. Ah, airbags.
He took a deep breath and realized the he felt some pain in his back and limbs, but it was tolerable. He moved the center airbag from his face and looked through the windshield. He saw nothing but spider-webbed glass, trees, and blue sky.
A knock at the window startled him.
“Yes?” He could think of nothing else to say.
“You okay in dere?” someone asked from the other side of the door.
“Think so,” he replied and tried the door. It opened. On the other side was a uniformed officer. “Where’d that biker go?” Frank unbuckled the belt and cautiously got out of the car.
“They’re still chasin’ ‘im,” the slightly overweight patrolman answered. “Looks like anudder squad crashed a little further on.”
“Interesting,” Campanelli commented as he stretched and checked himself for injury. Other than having the wind knocked out of him and his bell rung, he was sure there were no serious injuries. He gazed around and noted the gapers’ block that his crash had caused.
Frank looked his car over. The front end had collapsed around the two trees it had collided with. The hot metal ticked and the destroyed radiator was letting its coolant free in white vapor. He tried, but could not connect to the vehicle’s computer.
“Hey, Detective,” the uniformed officer interrupted, “you sure you’re okay?”
/> “Yes, but I’m out of contact,” Campanelli explained. He looked over at the officer’s vehicle and noted that it was a K-9 unit not involved with the pursuit. “Call a backup unit over here to come get me, please.”
“Yer da boss,” the officer, whose name was Willems, answered and moved quickly to his truck and jumped inside.
Frank reached inside the ruined car and retrieved his hat. He walked around the back of it and up along the other side to see if anything looked better over there. It did not. In fact, Campanelli decided that it looked far worse. The right front wheel was jammed upward into the depths of the fender, and that entire corner was bent upward.
“I got a wrecker and a squad on the way, sir,” Willems called from the truck.
“Thank you,” Frank replied and put his fedora on. The car wreck seemed to have temporarily shaken the urgency from him, but as he thought it over, his anticipation returned. Elliot Three-Seven was extremely dangerous and he had been so close to having him.
“So, what happened?” the officer asked from his side.
“Not sure,” Frank shrugged. “Everything just went out. The engine, steering, dash, lights, everything just…out.”
“Dat sounds just like what they’re sayin’ happened to da car that was just behind you, only a few blocks from here.”
“Are the officers okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” Willems confirmed. “Your wreck here seems worse.”
Frank reached out with his implant and connected to the CPD server. He accessed the radio reports regarding the chase and found that Elliot had led the pursuing officers around McCormick Place and onto Lake Shore Drive. He was now headed northbound with a trail of three cruisers on his tail.
“He’s not trying to escape,” Frank whispered.
“What’s dat, sir?”
“Elliot. Our serial killer. He’s not attempting to leave the city, even with all of us on him,” Campanelli said with conviction. “He’s toying with us.”
Campanelli: Siege of the Nighthunter Page 18