by Allan Folsom
Surprise, panic, fear, and total chaos reigned inside the passenger cars the entire length of the train. Luggage, purses, cell phones, laptops rocketed forward in an unleashed hurricane of airborne debris backed by a cacophony of screams and screeching steel. People were thrown against seat backs and headrests. Others, caught standing up, catapulted forward onto the aisle floors. Still others held on with all they had, braced against the monstrous forward pull of the half-mile-long train as the Southwest Chief slid and slid and slid. And then finally, mercifully, it stopped, and for the briefest moment everything was still.
Inside car 39002 the stillness was broken by a single voice. Donlan’s. “Open the door.” He was looking at Raymond.
Staggered by the turn of events, Raymond stepped around the conductor and went to the doorway and tugged on the emergency release. There was a hydraulic whine and the steps settled to the ground. He looked out. The train had stopped in a wide expanse of railroad yards at least a half mile from the station and in what looked like a large industrial area. Raymond could feel the thud of his heart. My God, it was easy. Donlan would flee; the police would go after him. All he would have to do then was retrieve his valise and walk away. This time he did grin, broadly and to himself, then quickly stepped back, expecting Donlan to rush past him to freedom. Instead, the gunman let go of Vivian Woods’s hair and grabbed his.
“I think you should come with me, Ray.”
“What?” Raymond cried out in disbelief.
Then he felt the cold jab of Donlan’s Colt under his ear. He was horrified. God had promised deliverance, now Donlan was taking it away. He tried to pull free, but Donlan was stronger than he looked, and he wrestled him back.
Donlan spoke abruptly. “Don’t do that, Ray.”
He turned toward the conductor.
“You fuck,” he said quietly.
The conductor’s eyes went wide. A horrific chill enveloped him. He started to turn, to run. It was no good. Booming gunshots deafened everyone in the car as the Colt bucked twice in Donlan’s hand. The conductor’s body jumped in the air, then fell out of sight. Again Raymond tried to pull out of Donlan’s grip, but it didn’t work and he was dragged backward down the steps and onto the gravel beside the train. A split second later Donlan had him up and was half-dragging, half-shoving him across the tracks toward a distant fence.
13
8:44 A.M.
Barron leapt from the car door and hit the ground rolling. When he came up Halliday was past him and running toward a point where Donlan was shoving his hostage over a chain-link fence at the edge of the rail yards. Barron took off, running not after Halliday but back along the tracks beside the train. He saw Halliday looking back at him.
“You want to chase him unarmed, go ahead!” Barron was sprinting, searching the roadbed in front of him, looking for their guns. It was nearly a quarter of a mile before he saw the first Beretta glinting in the sunlight. Then he saw the other two, twenty-odd feet apart on the gravel beside the tracks.
He scooped up one, then the other, then the last and cut back across the tracks at a diagonal, halving the distance to the fence Donlan had gone over. Halliday was to his left, just ahead of him, running full out. Catching up, Barron tossed him one of the guns. Seconds later he was at the fence and vaulting it with one hand. Halliday did the same behind him.
The land fell away quickly on the far side, and both men stopped. At the bottom of the hill two major streets crossed at a traffic signal.
“There he is!” Barron yelled, and they saw Donlan and his hostage run up to the passenger side of a white Toyota stopped at the light. Colt in hand, Donlan ripped open the driver’s door and dragged a woman into the street. Then he looked at the hostage and said something. Immediately the hostage glanced back at the police, then ran to the passenger side, getting in just as Donlan was putting the car in gear. There was a sharp squeal of tires and the Toyota rocketed off across the intersection.
“You see that?” Barron yelled.
“They together?”
“Sure as hell looks like it!”
UNION STATION. 8:48 A.M.
“On our way, Marty!” McClatchy barked into his radio at Valparaiso.
Spinning dirt and gravel, Girl Scouts forgotten, McClatchy and his detectives raced the two unmarked Fords out of the secluded construction area across from track 12.
McClatchy drove the first car with Polchak beside him. Lee was alone in the second car, banging into the street right up McClatchy’s tailpipe. A heartbeat later the two black-and-white backup units roared out behind them.
8:49 A.M.
Barron and Halliday stood in the middle of the street waving gold detective shields, trying to flag down any passing vehicle they could. It was no good. Cars shot by left and right. They kept it up. It still didn’t work. People honked horns, yelled at them to get out of the way. Finally there was a wild screech of brakes and a green Dodge pickup truck slid to a stop beside Halliday.
Gold shield held high, Halliday yanked open the pickup’s door, shouting at its teenage driver that this was a police emergency and they needed his truck.
Seconds later the kid was in the street and Halliday was sliding under the steering wheel into the passenger seat and yelling at Barron, “You’re the kid here, you drive!”
In an instant Barron was in, slamming the door and shoving the Dodge into gear. Rubber screaming, he leaned on the horn and fishtailed through a red light, accelerating off in the same direction as Donlan’s white Toyota.
8:51 A.M.
Two-way radio in hand, his feet slipping on the crushed stone lining the roadbed between tracks, Valparaiso ran full out across the rail yards toward the distant street. Two hundred feet behind him L.A. City Fire Department and LAPD rescue units banged over the same crushed rock, racing toward the stopped Southwest Chief.
“Roosevelt, pick up Marty.”
Lee heard Red McClatchy’s order stab over his radio above a scream of sirens and quickly chose the fastest route to the railroad yards, starting with a left turn at the intersection ahead. As he sped into the turning lane, he saw in front of him the McClatchy /Polchak car accelerating, taking a skidding right turn at the intersection and racing away, the red and yellow emergency lights in its rear window flashing violently. A half second later the two black-and-white units shot past in hot pursuit. It was all Code Three. Red light and siren.
8:52 A.M.
Lee caught sight of Valparaiso running toward a low fence twenty yards in front of him. Immediately his size-fourteen right-foot Florsheim pumped the brakes, bringing the Ford to a sliding stop just as Valparaiso vaulted the fence and ran toward him.
“Go!” Valparaiso yelled, climbing in. Lee’s foot hit the accelerator even before Valparaiso closed the door, and the Ford shot forward with a shriek of burning rubber.
14
8:53 A.M.
Raymond looked at Donlan. The Colt automatic in his lap, the intensity and audacity with which he drove, cutting in and out of traffic, running traffic lights, turning abruptly down one street then up another, all with one eye on the road in front of them and the other on the rearview mirror—it was like being in some kind of action movie. Only this was no movie. This was as real as it got.
Raymond swung his eyes from Donlan and looked back to the road. They were traveling fast. Donlan was armed and obviously had no problem killing at the slightest provocation. Moreover, he was as observant as Raymond. Clearly he had picked up on the police on the train and they were the reason for his constant trips to the lavatory. It was his nerves, nothing else, as he tried to decide what to do. But his alertness and will-to-action meant that trying to make a move against him here and now would be foolhardy. That meant he had to let Donlan know exactly what he was going to do before he did it.
“I’m going to reach in my pocket and take out my wallet and cell phone.”
“Why?” Donlan touched the Colt in his lap but kept his eyes on the road.
“Because I ha
ve a fake driver’s license and credit cards and if the police get us I don’t want them found. Nor do I want them getting my cell phone and tracing the numbers back.”
“Why? What are you up to?”
“I’m in this country illegally.”
“You a terrorist?”
“No. It’s personal.”
“Do what you gotta do.”
Donlan took a sharp right turn. Raymond held on as the Toyota righted, then slid out his wallet and took out the cash he had remaining, five one-hundred-dollar bills. Folding them in half, he put them in his pocket, opened the window, and tossed the wallet out. Five seconds later Raymond threw out his cell phone and watched it smash into a jillion pieces against a curbstone. It was a gamble, he knew, and a big one, especially if he got away, because he would need credit cards and identification and a cell phone. But getting away from the armed and psychotic Donlan without the help of the police was unlikely, at least any time soon. And if the police got Raymond, they would question him. In questioning him they would have examined his IDs carefully, and if they’d run them, which they would have, they would’ve found out that his driver’s license was fake and the credit cards, while real, had been issued by banks where he had used the license as identification, making them fraudulent as well.
For that reason, particularly in light of America’s ongoing domestic security concerns, if they had his cell phone there was every chance they would do exactly what he had told Donlan, trace the calls he’d made on it. And while he had used third-party numbers and transfer stations outside the country to forward his calls, there was a possibility, however remote, that they would discover he had been in touch with Jacques Bertrand in Zurich and the Baroness, who was waiting for him in London. That they might uncover one or both was something he could not allow to happen, especially not now with their European timetable locked in and counting down.
What the police found on the train he could do nothing about. Eventually they would sift through the piles of scattered luggage and find his valise with a change of clothes, the Ruger, the two extra eleven-round clips of ammunition, the plane ticket to London, his U.S. passport, the sparse notes he kept in a thin, checkbook-sized daily calendar, and the three identically numbered safe deposit keys tucked into a small plastic Ziploc bag. He now regretted having brought the Ruger with him. The ticket was simply what it was. His notes would most likely mean nothing, and the safe deposit keys were equally nonrevealing, as he had angrily found out, because they had been stamped only with their Belgian manufacturer’s corporate logo and safe deposit box number, 8989. The previous owners of the keys, the people he had killed in San Francisco, Mexico City, and Chicago, had had no idea where the safe deposit box itself was located. Of that he was certain, because he had inflicted enough physical pain on each victim to make any single human being reveal anything. So, he might have retrieved the keys, but he knew no more about them now than he had at the beginning—that the safe deposit box itself was in a bank in a city somewhere in France. But in what bank and in what city, he still had no idea. That information was vital, and without it the keys were useless. Getting it before he left for London had increased the necessity of his journey to Los Angeles a thousandfold, but that, of course, was something the police would not know.
What they would be left with, then, was his passport, and since he had successfully used it to get in and out of the country they would assume it was legitimate. The problem would come if they ran a check on the magnetic strip on the back. If they were astute enough to put things together, they would find he had been in both San Francisco and Mexico City on the days of the murders there and that he had come back into the United States via Dallas from Mexico City the day before the killings in Chicago. But that was assuming they had any information at all on those crimes, which was doubtful because the murders had been so regionally disparate and so recent. Moreover, sorting through all the chaos of luggage and personal effects that had spilled when the conductor had pulled the emergency brake on the train would take time, and that was what he was trying to buy now by getting rid of anything damning. If they did capture Donlan, Raymond could simply say all of his papers had been left on the train and hope they would take him at his word as a terrified hostage and let him go before they found the valise.
8:57 A.M.
“Green pickup,” Donlan said abruptly, his eyes locked on the rearview mirror.
Raymond turned and looked behind them. A green Dodge pickup truck was about a half mile back and moving up fast.
“There!” Barron yelled. Leaning on the horn, he mashed down on the accelerator. Passing a Buick on the inside, he cut sharply in front of it, then moved into the passing lane.
Halliday raised his radio. “Red—”
“Here, Jimmy.” McClatchy’s voice came back distinctly.
“We have him in sight. We’re east on Cesar Chavez, just passing North Lorena.”
Two blocks ahead the Toyota careened left across traffic lanes. Just missing a city bus, it accelerated off and down a side street.
“Hang on.” Barron swerved around a Volkswagen Beetle, then cut across oncoming traffic and took the same left Donlan had.
Halliday lifted the radio. “We’re left on Ditm—Look out!”
The Toyota was coming right at them. They could see Donlan at the wheel, his left hand outside the driver’s window, the Colt in it. Barron jerked the wheel sharply and the truck veered right.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Both detectives ducked away as the Dodge’s windshield exploded in front of them and the truck swerved onto the sidewalk. It went up on two wheels, then slammed back down. Barron downshifted quickly, pulled a tight U-turn, and screamed off after the Toyota.
“We’ve taken live fire. We’re okay. Back west on Chavez,” Halliday spat into the radio. “Where the hell are you guys?”
“I see him!” Barron screamed. Ahead Donlan pulled around a delivery van, cut hard in front of it, and turned down another street.
“Right turn on Ezra!” Halliday yelled into the radio.
In the distance they heard sirens. Ahead they saw the Toyota slow, start right again, then suddenly turn left and race off.
“That’s a dead end,” Barron shouted.
“Yes it is.”
Barron slowed just in time to see Donlan take the only way out he had. Smashing through a wooden gate, he drove directly into a closed parking structure.
“Got him!” Barron yelled exuberantly.
15
9:08 A.M.
Barron brought the windshieldless Dodge to a stop outside the parking structure’s entrance, blocking it. A second later four black-and-white units arrived almost on top of each other. Uniformed cops jumped out, weapons up, starting toward the Dodge.
“Barron, Halliday, Five-Two!” Barron yelled, his gold shield shoved out the driver’s window. “Cordon off the area. Seal any other exits.”
“In process.” McClatchy’s voice came over Halliday’s radio.
Barron glanced in the mirror. Red’s blue Ford was right behind him. Red was at the wheel, Polchak beside him. Then the Lee/Valparaiso car rolled in behind Red’s and stopped. All around more black-and-white units were pulling in.
“Go in.” Red’s voice came over the radio. “Stop at the first ramp. We’ll follow.”
Barron eased the pickup forward and into the empty garage, passing a sign at the entrance that read CLOSED MARCH–APRIL FOR STRUCTURAL RETROFITTING.
Halliday clicked on the radio. “Red, this is a retrofit. We got workers in here?”
“Stay put. We’ll find out.”
Barron stopped. The darkened structure in front of them looked like an empty concrete tomb. Scores of vacant parking spaces were illuminated here and there by fluorescent lights and broken up at measured distances by concrete support columns.
A minute passed, then another. Then Red’s voice came back over the radio. “There’s some kind of job action, nobody’s been here for a couple of wee
ks. Move on in. But use extreme caution.”
Halliday looked at Barron and nodded. Barron’s foot touched the accelerator and the Dodge inched forward, both men’s eyes scanning the area for the Toyota or a sign of men on foot.
Behind them came the McClatchy/Polchak car and then the Lee/Valparaiso car. Then abruptly and from above came the thundering roar of a police helicopter, its heavy rotor blades cutting the air as it hovered, its pilot acting as their eyes from above.
Barron turned a corner, reached the base of the first up-ramp, and stopped.
“Gentlemen.” Red’s voice came over Halliday’s radio. “The outside area is cordoned off. No sign of the suspects.” There was a pause and then Red finished. “Gentlemen, we have the go.”
Barron looked at Halliday, puzzled. “What does that mean, ‘we have the go’?”
Halliday hesitated.
“What’s he talking about?”
“Means we don’t sit and wait for SWAT. The show is ours.”
Inside the unmarked Ford, McClatchy slipped his radio into his jacket and reached for the door handle. Then he saw Polchak looking at him.
“You gonna tell him?” Polchak asked.
“Barron?”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody ever told us.” McClatchy’s reply was matter-of-fact, almost cold. He opened the car door.