‘Jack didn’t say. He just said that maybe what connected all these killings wasn’t a person, but a crime. That maybe everybody who got killed had stumbled on this network thing with the pushers, and had to be eliminated. He said stick with Rivera and watch for anybody on the street with red socks. He said he thought that was the key – red socks.’
‘And did you see anyone in red socks?’ Neilson asked.
‘I saw three guys in red socks,’ Pinsky said. His voice was thinning and his eyes closed in exhaustion. ‘One of them was the guy who told everybody I was a cop.’
‘There he is.’
Dana looked into the rear-view mirror and saw the big man coming out of the house behind the hedge. He was wearing what looked like a cashmere overcoat, and stood about six two in it. His face had once been handsome, perhaps, but now was bloated and pale and sullen.
A woman stood in the doorway, watching him go down the drive toward the car he’d left parked there. She did not wave, and the man did not turn back to wave to her. Neither was smiling.
‘Is that his wife?’ Dana asked.
‘I have no idea,’ Stryker said. ‘This is the most recent address given in the files for him, but I don’t know what his domestic arrangements are. I wish to hell I could search that car – the rifle might be in there.’
‘Jack – what possible motive could Leary have for all this killing?’
‘He doesn’t need a motive that makes sense,’ Stryker said. ‘He’s turned rotten and he’s got nothing to lose. He’s also the kind of smart-ass bastard who thinks he’s invulnerable, that nobody would be smart enough to catch him. But I’m going to catch him, if I have to hang on his tail for the rest of my life.’
‘But you . . .’
Leary had reached his car now, and was searching in his pockets for his keys. The woman had closed the door. The street was deserted, except for some children playing down at the far end of the block. Playing cops and robbers. Stryker glanced at them and smiled. ‘Bang’ they were saying. ‘Bang, you’re dead.’
When the shot came, there was a wild instant when he thought it had come from the children, but then Dana screamed.
‘Oh, God!’
He turned back just in time to see Leary start to slide down the side of his car, half his head blown into a dark spray over the car roof. As he went down, he made a wide, ugly smear on the beautiful white paint of the Mercedes. He hit the ground and sprawled. The smear began to drip down on to him.
Dana was choking and gagging, her hands over her face.
The door of the house opened and the woman who had not waved at Leary stood there, staring out. The hedge obscured her view of Leary’s body, but she had heard the shot and Dana’s scream, and saw through the leaves of the hedge that the Mercedes hadn’t moved.
She looked worried.
Stryker was rigid with disbelief.
Then he heard a noise behind him. A car starting up. He pivoted in the seat and saw a dark sedan pulling out from between cars parked about forty yards behind them. Driving it was a figure in a cap.
‘Jesus – there he is!’ Stryker shouted. ‘Start the car, start the car, start the goddamn car!’
As the sedan pulled past the driver glanced briefly in their direction, then gunned the engine and took off down the street. Dana was still rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat, her hands over her face.
‘STOP THAT! THAT’S HIM – HE’S GETTING AWAY. Stryker screamed at her, slapping her around the face with his good hand until she stopped sobbing and took in what he was saying. ‘LET’S GO, LET’S GO!’ he screamed.
Too stunned to do anything but what she was told, Dana started the car. As they pulled away, the woman in the door had crossed the lawn to the point where she could see Leary’s body.
Her screams blended with the scream of their tyres.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘But I don’t know what to do!’ Dana wailed, as she turned into the road behind the dark sedan.
‘Do what I tell you. Don’t think, don’t hesitate, just do what the hell I tell you to do. You can think about it later,’ Stryker said, leaning forward in his seat to try and read the licence number. But he could see that the plate was smeared with mud. Nothing missed, the bastard.
But Leary was dead.
It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make—
‘Get ready to turn right. He’s going to turn at the next intersection.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He’s moving over – there. Step on it, for Christ’s sake!’
‘The car will turn over if I go any faster!’ Dana screamed.
‘No, it won’t. Don’t even think about what the car will do, dammit, don’t think at all. Just drive. He’s pulling around that car – go for it. Go for it!’
She went for it, and narrowly missed a large truck coming at them as she pulled in ahead of the slower-moving hatchback that had blocked them. ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ she kept saying, but she went on, her hands gripping the wheel so tightly she thought her knuckles would burst right out through her skin. She felt as if she were standing still and the world was coming at her, faster and faster, some kind of arcade game that had gone out of control. She was terrified, and yet Stryker’s voice held her there, locked to the wheel. If she didn’t do what he said, if she let go for even one second, the world would explode. She knew it would.
Stryker’s voice went on and on, giving her instructions, never giving her a moment to think, to breathe, to be herself. She was an extension of him, of his will, she was a machine and he was running it.
‘Okay, we’re coming up to a big intersection now, and I have a feeling the guy is going to go right through. He could turn left into town, or right out of town, but I think he’ll go through toward the freeway. He knows we’re after him – dammit, hang a right, hang a right!’
Dana and the tyres screamed together as she jerked the wheel to the right, riding over the corner curbing and causing a woman with a bag of groceries to jump back, scattering tomatoes. One hit the windscreen and made a big red smear in front of Stryker. It made him feel sick for an instant, and then he leaned forward and switched on the windscreen wipers, activating the wash at the same time.
‘Get closer, get closer, I want some details!’ he shouted at Dana over the scream of the engine. The little rented car was not accustomed to such treatment. Why hadn’t they taken his, he thought frantically, but he knew why. So Leary wouldn’t spot it and report he was being followed and give the licence and then Klotzman would find out that Stryker wasn’t at the nursing home in Philadelphia, after all. But in his car there was a radio. In his car he could have called in, gotten help, headed the dark sedan off, boxed him and turned him and funnelled him into a corner.
In his car they could have got him.
But they were stuck with this one.
The only thing the radio in this one did was play music.
‘Where the hell is he going?’ Stryker shouted, frustrated. His mind was spinning with the shock of seeing Leary go down, when all the time he had been convinced that it was Leary who was the sniper. He couldn’t get his head clear, he couldn’t make sense of it, and there was no time for it now. What was here, and now, like a gift, like a revelation, like God’s finger poking him in the eye, was the sniper, dead ahead. And pulling away.
‘Faster, dammit – put your foot down!’
‘It’s down, it’s down, it’s down!’ Dana screamed back at him. ‘I’m doing the best I can, I can’t even feel the car or the road – it’s like sliding on ice . . .’ Dana had never driven a car like this, never even approached this speed on city streets. The car felt strange, light, uncontrollable – and yet the least touch on the steering wheel brought a sharp, terrifying response. One touch and they could be off the road into a parked car, or a store front, or somebody’s front yard.
/> The route the dark sedan had chosen to take was not a busy one at this hour, but there was enough traffic to make their progress erratic and extremely dangerous.
‘He’s got to be a cop,’ Stryker muttered, still clinging to his theory as if it were a strap to keep him upright. ‘Who else but a cop could drive like that?’
The dark sedan had cut through a narrow gap to put three cars between them. One of them was a van, and obscured their view almost entirely. ‘Pass them, pass them!’ Stryker shouted.
Dana was too terrified to take her eyes off the road, but she didn’t think he could see what she saw. ‘How can I pass, there’s traffic—’
‘Go on the inside – look – there’s no parked cars along here, it’s . . . go on the inside, dammit! DO IT NOW!’
She did it. With a blare of horns – one of them their own – she swerved inside the line of traffic and shot past the two cars and the van. The other drivers, startled, swerved away and then swung back. As she pulled into the line ahead of them she hit the leading car a glancing blow. ‘Keep going, keep going!’ Stryker screamed in her ear.
‘This isn’t a police car!’ Dana screamed back, tears covering her face, spreading in the rush of wind from the open window. ‘I can’t keep this up – I can’t, I can’t!’
‘You have to! There, go in there . . . Shit! He’s turning, he’s turning, he’s . . .’
She saw the dark sedan cutting across a corner gas station, and without hesitation, she went for it. So hysterical was she, so keyed up by Stryker’s screams and orders that she just did it.
And missed.
Their front bumper caught a stand of oilcans displayed by the pumps, and sent it flying toward the plate-glass window of the station. The impact, small as it was, was sufficient to deflect their course, and she sideswiped a car placed for sale with a cardboard sign in the windscreen showing the price.
There was a loud report as their front tyre suddenly blew under the stress of the turn, and the steering wheel was whipped out of Dana’s hands as they spun and then slewed sideways across the remainder of the forecourt and slammed broadside into the white fence that separated the station from the line of houses beyond.
Dana was thrown against the door, and Stryker was thrown against her, their bodies straining against their seatbelts. Stryker’s head narrowly missed the steering wheel, and had the window not been open beside her, Dana would have smashed into it. As it was, neither lost consciousness for more than a second or two.
In the terrible silence that followed the noise of the crash, Stryker reached out and turned off the ignition. Through the crazed windscreen he could see the dark sedan, disappearing around a curve in the highway.
And then it was gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Dana was sobbing.
‘Forget it,’ Stryker said, gruffly. ‘You did pretty well at that – the guy was ready for us, that’s all. Probably had the route planned and everything, just in case.’
‘But—’
‘No, forget it,’ Stryker said, staring out of the taxi window as they drove toward the hospital. He had used his badge far too much at the gas station, talked big about pursuing a thief, impressed the attendant enough not to call the local precinct cops, and had done the rest by phone. Of course the local cops would be there by now, drawn by the noise and the traffic jam and the complaints of drivers they had upset during their chase. They would be going crazy trying to sort it all out. It was only a matter of time before his name and badge number got through to Klotzman. Maybe Klotzman would figure it was just an accident. Maybe. But he’d face that problem when it came up and slapped him in the kisser.
Right now, what concerned him was square one.
And why the hell they were back on it.
The taxi pulled up in front of the hospital. Dana got out, wiping her face with her hands like a child. Stryker paid off the cabbie and they went in.
They sat in the Emergency Room for some time, watching people come and go, before Stryker spotted the intern who had treated him for the gunshot wound. He stood up and waved. The intern stopped short at the sight of him.
‘Somebody put another hole in you?’ he asked.
‘No, but I might have opened up the old one,’ Stryker said. ‘It feels sticky under there. And this lady isn’t feeling so good, either. I think she needs a tranquilliser.’
The intern looked at Dana. ‘You shouldn’t hang around with cops, lady. Look what happens to you.’
‘It was a car accident,’ Dana said. ‘I was driving.’
The intern raised an eyebrow and looked from one to the other and back again. ‘And I thought my life was exciting,’ he said. ‘Come on – we have a special two-for-one sale on today.’
‘Hey! What about me? I’ve been waiting an hour, here,’ shouted a man with one leg stuck out in front of him encased in a dirty walking cast. ‘Somebody is supposed to take this off me.’
The intern glanced over at him and then pointed to a glass-covered case that housed a fire-axe. ‘If you’re in a hurry you can do it yourself,’ he said. ‘Otherwise bleeding takes priority over unveiling.’
‘Crummy hospital!’ the man shouted, as they disappeared through the cheerful flowered curtains. ‘I’ll sue!’
The intern’s voice floated back from the cubicle. ‘Forms for lawsuits are at the desk – we run off a fresh batch every morning.’
Through bullying combined with logic, Neilson had gotten Pinsky moved into the same room as Toscarelli. ‘Look,’ he’d said to the nurses and the doctors and finally the managers. ‘They’re friends, they’re buddies. Ned can keep talking to Tos. You said people should keep talking to him, right? Well, his mom and his sister go home at night, right? So suppose Tos wakes up in the night and nobody notices? You can’t spare nurses to sit around on the off-chance, can you? Of course not. But if Ned were there, talking away . . .’ He’d gone on and on in this vein until, fed up with the sound and sight of him, they’d done as he asked.
Since Pinsky had been unable to get police protection for Tos, this seemed to keep two birds alive with one stone. Not that Ned could do much if somebody tried to bump Tos off.
‘But you could yell,’ Neilson pointed out.
‘Not until tomorrow,’ Pinsky rasped through his bruised lips. ‘No yelling until tomorrow.’
‘Whatever,’ Neilson said. He’d had supper in the hospital cafeteria and was wondering if they could put in a third bed for him. His stomach felt distinctly like it needed immediate and sympathetic treatment. He belched.
‘Oh, very nice,’ Pinsky muttered. ‘What a classy visitor I’ve got here.’
‘You want me to go?’ Neilson asked, irritably.
‘No,’ Pinsky admitted. Toscarelli’s mother and sister and his own wife, Nell, had departed for home. ‘Turn on the lights, will you? I hate it when it gets gloomy.’
Neilson stood up and turned on the lights. In his bed, Tos grimaced and then his face smoothed out again into blankness.
‘Hey – did you see that?’ Neilson said in delight.
‘He did it before,’ Pinsky said. ‘While you were having dinner. They came in to take his pulse and that, and he did the same thing. The nurse said it was a good sign.’
‘Hot damn,’ Neilson said, as pleased as if he had done it himself. ‘Maybe the son of a bitch is in there after all.’ He leaned over the bed. ‘Hey, you guinea bastard, wake up, will you? We got work to do, we got to roll, baby, we got to roll!’
But there was no response.
Neilson went on for a few minutes, but finally gave up in defeat. He returned to Pinsky’s bedside and dropped into the chair. Pinsky eyed him as well as he could through the swelling.
‘You got to keep on at it,’ Pinsky said. ‘I talked to the nurse and she said we should make some tapes or something, stuff he l
ikes, talking, music, all kinds of things. It’s always a familiar sound that gets through to them. Something they’re used to hearing. Maybe we should do a tape of the Squad Room or his favourite restaurant.’ The prospect seemed to exhaust him. ‘I’m gonna talk to him a lot, tomorrow. When it doesn’t hurt so much to breathe.’
‘Good. You do that,’ Neilson agreed, wearily. He had practically dozed off when Stryker and Dana appeared, looking rather the worse for wear.
‘What the hell?’ Stryker said, stopping stock still in the doorway. He had expected only to see Toscarelli. The sight of Pinsky there, too, battered and bandaged, with Neilson slumped in a chair beside him, was a shock. Neilson, jerked awake by the sound of his voice, peered over the white mound of Pinsky’s stomach.
‘Hi,’ he said. Then, seeing Dana, he stood up. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
Stryker told them what was wrong.
Neilson got a chair for Dana and settled her in it. He stood beside her with his hand on her shoulder as Stryker concluded his tale. His face grew more and more stormy as Stryker gave the details of their chase. ‘She’s not trained to do that kind of stuff.’ he said, outraged. ‘You didn’t have any right to make her do that.’
‘I didn’t have any choice,’ Stryker said.
‘And I wasn’t good enough,’ Dana said in an exhausted voice. ‘It should have been you, Harvey. Or Ned.’
‘You did fine,’ Stryker said, for the umpteenth time. ‘I told you, you did all anybody could do.’ He walked over to the bed and gazed down at Pinsky. ‘What happened, Ned?’
‘Aw, I got beat up a little,’ Pinsky said, dismissively.
‘Three broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken arm, a bruised spleen, concussion, and numerous contusions,’ Neilson listed, through clenched teeth. ‘All because of red socks.’
‘Sorry, Ned,’ Stryker said. ‘I seem to be striking out everywhere.’
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