Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead

by Perry, Thomas

  Jane turned off the Thruway at Route 5 where it became Fuhrmann Boulevard and hugged the shoreline into the city of Lackawanna. Ahead of Farrell and Barraclough on their right loomed an enormous complex of old brick factory buildings behind a high chain-link fence. “What’s that?” asked Barraclough.

  “The map calls it the Gateway Metroport Industrial Center. It used to be one of the biggest steel mills in the world. I was here a couple of times in the early sixties, before it closed down. You couldn’t breathe unless there was a strong west wind. It goes on like this for four or five miles.” He stared through the high fence. “Looks like they’re renting a couple of nooks and crannies of it to a few half-assed businesses now.”

  The radio crackled. “Unit One, this is Unit Two.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We can’t see her anymore.”

  Barraclough’s head snapped to the right to stare at Farrell in intense concentration. “She must have made them.”

  Farrell spoke into the radio. “Is there any chance she just outran you?”

  “No. We think she must have turned off on one of those little streets on the left.”

  “Then turn down the next one and circle – ”

  Barraclough snatched the radio out of Farrell’s hand. “Negative. Cancel that. She didn’t turn left, she turned right, or we would have seen her go across three lanes ourselves. Go back to where you saw her and look for railroad tracks.”

  Farrell held on as Barraclough swung the Pathfinder around on the icy street. What had Barraclough seen? They had been bumping over old railroad tracks for a long time. “You’re thinking there’s a way into the factory? But all the tracks lead smack into the fence.”

  “There has to be a line that goes in,” said Barraclough. “They might have closed down the spurs that went to different parts of the plant, but to ship coal and ore in and steel out, there must be a regular railroad right-of-way. That doesn’t go away just because something beside it stops making money. And they don’t put a gate across it.”

  More than a mile back, Barraclough found the tracks. There was a functional-looking railroad-crossing light at a little rise just beyond a curve in the road. The big brick buildings on both sides of the boulevard would have obscured the view of her car just long enough for her to turn off her lights and coast up the tracks.

  Barraclough turned the utility vehicle onto the railroad ties to straddle the tracks and slowly bumped along them. The tracks went only fifty yards into the dark shadow of the mill before they passed through a gap in the fence. “Here it is,” said Barraclough. “She lives around here, remember? She’s probably driven by here in daylight a hundred times.” He wrenched the steering wheel to lurch off the tracks into the freight yard of the factory and waited until the black Dodge caught up.

  Barraclough had already found her trail. The snow was clear and unmarked except for two deep parallel lines from a set of tires that ran deeper into the old steel mill. Barraclough trained his headlights on the tire tracks and sped up. He drove past a few small buildings in the complex that had new signs and recent paint on the doors, but as he went farther, immense brick buildings with dark windows loomed on both sides like the ruins of an abandoned city. He judged he had driven nearly a mile before he saw her car.

  It was parked in the shadows on the lake side of a brick building, away from the distant lights of Fuhrmann Boulevard. Barraclough pulled to a stop when he was still a hundred feet away from it and let the Dodge pull up beside him. He said into the radio, “Watch the car and the doors of the building. We’ll call when we need you.” He handed the radio to Farrell and accepted the gear Farrell handed back: pistol, night-spotting scope, flashlight, nylon wrist restraints.

  The two men stepped down from the Pathfinder and walked to Jane’s car. Barraclough took off his glove to gauge the warmth of the hood of the car, then winked at Farrell happily. Then he studied the footprints leading from the driver’s door. They led around the big building. Barraclough paused at the corner to draw his pistol, then quickly stepped beyond it.

  He could see that the footprints led along the side of the building. He bent low to walk beside them, staying near the wall and keeping his head below the level of the windows. There were banks of thousands of little panes of glass along the side of the building, many of them broken and all of them opaque from at least thirty years of grime. The footprints led to a place where two of the panes had been hammered in and the frame had gone with them. “She must have heard us coming and gone in.”

  Barraclough looked ahead of him, but he could not see where the building ended. He stepped outward away from it to get a better view, then lifted the night scope to his eye, but he still could not see the end. The brick wall seemed to go on forever.

  Farrell saw it too. “It’s a big place. How do you want to work it?”

  Barraclough peered cautiously through the broken window with the night scope, then pushed the switch to infrared. There was nothing nearby that gave off body heat. “We’ll have to go in after her ourselves. We can’t leave the cars unguarded, and if she can lose those two on an empty road, there’s no telling what she’d do to them inside the dark building.” He slipped the flashlight into one pocket, the wrist restraints into the other where he could reach them quickly. “When you see her, train your laser sight on her right away. She’s not stupid; if she sees that bright red dot settle on her chest she’ll forget about trying to outrun the bullet.” He hoisted himself to the row of bricks that formed a sill below the missing windows, then squeezed himself inside.

  When Farrell joined him inside the building, Barraclough drew his pistol again and turned on his night scope. They were in a huge, empty, unheated brick enclosure with a bare concrete floor, a fifty-foot ceiling, and a slight glow of stars above where panes of glass were missing. Barraclough turned his scope to the floor where Jane had entered. A few wet, snowy partial footprints led toward the other end of the cavernous room.

  Barraclough walked beside the footprints, under an arch that was big enough for a truck to pass through, and beyond it into another high, empty room. To the right were a set of barn doors that must once have opened onto a loading dock.

  They stalked through room after room. At each doorway they would pause, slip through the entrance low, and crouch a few yards apart around the corner. Barraclough would flick on his night scope, rapidly scan the space ahead for the shape of a woman, and only then venture to cross the open concrete floor. When they reached the end of the long building, they found a door open with snow just beginning to drift inside.

  The footprints led to the door of another building. There was a half-rotted sheet of plywood on the ground that had once covered the empty upper panel of the door. Barraclough’s heart was beating with excitement. They always made some mistake, and she had just made hers. She had gambled that she could drive into the enormous ruin of a factory, wait ten minutes, and then drive back up the river. Now she was alone on foot on a cold, snowy night. She was trying to hide in a complex that had been so thoroughly gutted that there wasn’t anything to hide behind. She was running from two old cops who had been trapping fleeing suspects in dark buildings for half their lives. He would be able to see her in the scope as clearly as if she were in daylight, and she would be blind. Even the physical discomfort Barraclough felt as he entered the next building made him more eager. The air was frigid. The brick walls offered shelter from the bitter wind, but there was a chill trapped in the big spaces, and the icy concrete seemed to send a shock up his shins at each step. The cold would be much harder on her because she was alone and afraid. At some point she was going to come to a door she couldn’t open, and he would have her. It was possible he would have to keep her alive for a month or two while she gave him what she owed him. She was a hunter’s dream: a woman who had made at least ten years of fugitives vanish. There must be dozens by now, most of them still hiding wherever she had put them. And what kind of person had enough money to pay for that kind o
f service? Drug dealers, money launderers, second-toughest gangsters, big-time embezzlers. She had taken Mary Perkins away from him, but she might easily have ten more like her. He grinned as he walked through the darkened building; no doubt about it, she was the girl of his dreams.

  Farrell stopped at the next doorway and turned to him, but didn’t say anything.

  “What is it?” Barraclough whispered eagerly. “Did you hear something?”

  “No,” Farrell whispered apologetically. “But we’ve been at this for over an hour.”

  Barraclough glanced at his watch. It was true.

  Farrell said, “I think it might help if we brought the two boys into this. We might want to have at least one of them waiting for her at the other end.”

  Barraclough clenched his teeth to stifle his annoyance. He didn’t want to wait for people to move into position – he wanted to finish this himself now – but Farrell was right. She had already led them too far to have any hope of getting back to her car. She was heading for the far end of the factory. “Give me the radio.”

  He took the radio and pressed the talk button. “Unit Two, this is Unit One.” He listened to the faint crackle of static. He put the speaker against his ear but could detect no voice. “Come in, Unit Two.” He looked at Farrell, letting a little of his impatience show.

  Farrell said quickly, “It’s got to be the buildings.

  There’s a hell of a lot of brick and steel between them and us. Let me try it outside.”

  Farrell trotted to the next loading dock, slipped the bolt, and pushed the big wooden door aside so he could stand out in the open air. “Unit Two, this is Unit One. Come in.” He listened to the static. “Unit Two, come in.” In spite of the temperature, he felt a wave of heat begin at the back of his neck and wash down his spine. He knew his two trainees were probably in the car listening to a radio they had turned off by mistake. He walked back into the building and shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Barraclough’s voice was quiet and cold. “Go back for them. I’ll be up ahead somewhere.”

  Farrell handed Barraclough the radio, then set off to retrace his steps through the factory. After four steps, he broke into a run.

  As he heard Farrell’s steps receding behind him, Barraclough started into the next big room and turned on his night-vision scope. This building was different from the last. The big row of square enclosures built into the side wall must have been furnaces. The cement of the floor had holes at the edges of big rectangles where heavy machines had once been anchored, and overhead were networks of steel beams that must have held chain hoists, and brackets for vanished devices he could only imagine now. This place must have seemed like hell once, he thought – deafening noise, unbearable heat from the open-hearth furnaces, molten slag running into big buckets. He stepped close to the row of furnaces and shone his flashlight into each one as he passed it. He moved through room after room, seeing few relics, only traces that were less comprehensible than the stones of some ancient city dug out of the ground.

  After half an hour the radio in Barraclough’s coat pocket squawked and startled him. Farrell’s voice said, “Unit One, this is Unit Two.”

  Barraclough crouched against the wall so the noise would not make him vulnerable and kept his eyes ahead of him on the portal to the next room. He pushed the button and said quietly, “Go ahead.”

  “I’m at the car,” said Farrell. “The reason they didn’t answer is that they’re dead.”

  “How?”

  “It looks like they left the motor running to keep warm. There’s a hose running from their own exhaust pipe right back into the cab through the taillight. Looks like she cut the hose from under the Pathfinder.”

  Barraclough tried to sort out the implications. “Are all the cars still there? Hers too?”

  “Yeah,” said Farrell. “I don’t know how she got all the way back here past us, but – ”

  Barraclough gripped the talk button and shouted, “Then get out! She’s still there!”

  But Farrell had not released his button. Barraclough heard a swish of fabric as though Farrell were making a sudden movement, maybe whirling to see something. Whatever he saw made him voice an involuntary “Uh!”

  Barraclough heard the report of the weapon over the radio. He had time to press his transmitter button and say “Farrell?” before the delayed reverberation reached his ears through the air. The sound was fainter this time, but without the speaker distortion he could tell it was the elongated blast of a shotgun.

  Barraclough had already begun to put the radio into his pocket before he remembered there was nobody left to talk to. He hurled it into the darkness toward the corner of the big empty room. He was standing in a dark, icy labyrinth three thousand miles from home. The three men he had brought here with him were corpses. But the biggest change was what was standing between him and the cars. He didn’t even know her real name, but he had thought he knew what she would do: she would run, and he would catch her.

  He flicked on his flashlight and slowly began to walk away from the sound of the shotgun, his mind working feverishly. Where had the shotgun come from? She had not taken a shotgun off the body of either of the dead trainees, so she must have brought it with her. If she had, then she had known he was coming. This was not what he had expected at all.

  Maybe she had not made a mistake and turned her car into the first place along the road that was big enough to hide it. It almost seemed as though she had been in this factory before. As Barraclough traced the logic backward, he began to feel more uneasy.

  She had been shuffling credit cards and names for ten or twelve years. Why would she suddenly forget how it was done and take the chance of using accounts he might know about all the way to her own doorstep? Because that house in La Salle wasn’t her own doorstep. He had not traced her to her hometown and right up to her house. She probably lived a thousand miles from here. He had followed her into an ambush – a killing ground.

  Barraclough decided to run. The beam of his flashlight bobbed up and down wildly, making shadows that crouched in his path, then sprung upward to loom fifty feet tall. He had to remind himself over and over that there couldn’t be anyone in front of him. What he had to worry about was behind him.

  Was running the best thing to do? It was taking him farther away from the cars. But running made use of the only facts he could be sure of. He had heard the shotgun go off within a few feet of Farrell, so he knew where she was… no, he knew where she had been for the instant when she had pulled the trigger. His attempt to state it accurately invited doubts to creep into his mind, but he fought them off. She was half a mile behind him, he was sure. She had the shotgun in her hands, and she was walking through the dark line of empty rooms after him.

  As he thought about her, a picture formed in his mind, and in the picture she was not walking. She had the shotgun in both hands across her chest, and she was running, taking long, loping strides. He increased his pace. The clapping of his boots echoed in the cavernous spaces and the rasp of his breath grew louder and louder. As he ran, he tried not to think about the shotgun. A double-aught load was twelve pellets, each the size of a .38 round. From across one of these big rooms they would hit in a pattern about twenty inches wide.

  Barraclough calmed himself. All he had to do was keep her half a mile behind him and get out of this horrible place. As though a wish had been granted, his flashlight swept up and down the gray wooden surface of a door in the wall ahead of him. He dashed to it and tried the knob, but it spun in his hand without moving the catch. He pulled on it, but the door would not budge. He stepped back and ran his flashlight along the doorjamb. He could see a few puckered places in the wood where big nails had been driven in. He swept the flashlight’s beam around him. The windows in this room were all twenty feet above him. When had that changed? Maybe the windows had been that way for the past half hour. He began to run back the way he had come. The windows in the next room were the same, and the room after that. But at t
he portal between the next two rooms he saw the doors of another loading dock.

  Barraclough hurried to the doors, set his spotter scope on the floor, stuck the flashlight in his pocket, slipped the bolt, and tried to slide the door open. He strained against it, but it only wobbled a little on its track. He tried to remember: wasn’t this what Farrell had done to open one of these doors? He turned on his flashlight again and ran it around the edges of the door until he spotted another bolt that went into the floor. He lifted it and pushed the door. When it slid open, he tried to feel happy, but the relief only reminded him how frightened he had been only seconds ago.

  He stepped out onto the loading dock and jumped down into the snow. He felt a wrenching pain as his ankle turned under him and he fell across something hard and cold. He cursed himself. He had jumped onto railroad tracks. How could he have forgotten the railroad tracks? The loading docks didn’t have flat paved surfaces for trucks; they were for loading steel onto freight cars.

  Barraclough sat up and tentatively shifted some weight onto his ankle. It hurt, but he could tell it wasn’t broken. He was grateful, glad to be alive. He wasn’t going to be trapped; he could still make it. He slipped the pistol into his belt and walked to the left, toward the edge of the factory, the tall fence, and the street beyond. Then he saw Jane’s car parked near the side of the next building. For an instant he struggled to fathom how he could have come out of the huge building right where he had started, but then understanding settled on him. She had not been running through the building at all. She had driven along the outside to wait for him here.

  Barraclough hobbled toward the fence, gasping terror into his chest with each freezing breath. He threw himself against the high fence, clung to the links with both hands, and stepped up. He stretched his arm to clutch higher links, then tried to feel for a footing he could maintain with his injured ankle.