by Ethan Cross
“Get the car!” he yelled.
He knew he’d never catch Ackerman on foot. But the killer would be forced to follow the ramps down through the structure. Marcus needed to move vertically, not laterally. He looked over the edge of the ramp. The level below showed through the gap in the layered structure, over the top of a three-foot concrete barrier.
He slipped his gun back into its shoulder holster and his feet carried him toward the edge. And then over it. He didn’t have time to consider his actions or hesitate. React, don’t think.
Knees bent, he landed against the roof of a white car on the next level. His gaze swept the area. There was the silver sedan. Ackerman made the turn, spiraling downward.
Marcus grabbed the edge again and swung down.
The roof of another mid-size car awaited. The impact jolted him, but he pulled his Sig Sauer and aimed at Ackerman’s vehicle. The silver sedan fishtailed sideways, almost striking a support pillar as Ackerman guided it around the turn to the next level.
Marcus cursed and shoved his pistol back inside his coat. He was getting closer with every drop, gaining on the killer. But he was almost out of ramp.
He dove toward the edge and swung through the gap.
This time, however, the spot below was empty. There was no car’s roof to break his fall. He dropped a full twelve feet to the concrete. He tried to bend his knees and roll, but he still felt the impact in his bones. His ankle twisted below him. Pain lanced through his leg. He stumbled forward, pulling out the gun.
He would only have one shot at this. He moved into the path of the oncoming sedan and took aim. Ackerman’s head was visible behind the windshield, the fluorescent lights burning overhead illuminating the calm face.
Marcus’s finger found the trigger, and he squeezed. The gun bucked, and the sound of the blast, amplified by the structure’s interior, reverberated throughout it. His finger twitched back repeatedly, unleashing a stream of hot metal toward the front of the sedan.
He could see Ackerman ducking down inside the vehicle as the windshield splintered out in spiderweb cracks. But Marcus didn’t let up.
On a normal day, he carried either a 9mm P226 Platinum Elite or a Diamond Plated P220 chambered for .45 caliber. The .45 had more stopping and takedown power, but it also only held ten rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber while the 9mm held fifteen in the magazine and one in the chamber. Today, he had opted for stopping power, so he counted off ten shots. Then, with the calm precision of a maneuver that had been practiced over and over and while he still had a bullet in the chamber, he ejected the clip and slammed another home. The blasts from the gun didn’t skip a beat.
But the car was still coming. Faster and faster. The distance between them growing to nothing.
He had time to fire three more rounds from the new clip before Ackerman was on top of him.
Waiting until the last second, Marcus dove away from the path of the onrushing vehicle, narrowly avoiding being crushed beneath the tires and the unforgiving weight of the sedan.
While still on the ground, he turned toward Ackerman and fired again, trying to hit the tires. But the sedan careened forward and smashed through the gate to the garage, reaching the public streets of the city.
Yelling a primal scream, Marcus was back on his feet. His ankle protested with every step, but he ignored the pain as he sprinted after Ackerman, onto the street and down Roosevelt Road.
30
Vasques shoved Andrew away from the driver’s door of the big black SUV. “I’m driving,” she said.
He didn’t argue, and it was a good thing. This day had been a roller coaster, and she wasn’t in the mood to discuss this with a committee. Being humiliated, psychoanalyzed, and nearly run down had a funny way of putting her in a pissed-off mood. But this time she knew exactly what she was going to do about it, even if she still had no clue as to what had just happened or who had tried to kill her.
She slammed the Yukon into reverse and jammed down the accelerator even before Andrew had closed his door. The Yukon barreled down the ramp, bottoming out and spitting sparks as she took the turns at breakneck speed. She tossed a cell phone into the back seat at Andrew as she pulled out onto Roosevelt Road.
“Speed dial 3. Tell them we’re in pursuit of a suspect wanted for the attempted murder of a federal agent and get us some backup.”
As he fumbled for the phone and dialed, Andrew said, “I’ll just tell them we’re in pursuit of Francis Ackerman. They’ll send the National Guard.”
“Ackerman? How do you know that?”
The killer topped the most-wanted lists, and his exploits had grown to be the stuff of legend, especially after his escape from a burning hospital in Colorado Springs. Somehow, he had managed to stay under the radar and evade capture since then. Many within the law-enforcement community believed that the only explanation was that he had fled the country.
“It’s a long story for another time,” Allen said from the passenger seat. Then he pointed at the road ahead of them. “There’s Marcus!”
Agent Williams sprinted down the road ahead of them, hugging the center line and barely managing to avoid being hit. She screeched to a halt beside him. “Get in!”
Williams hopped into the back seat and pointed down Roosevelt Road. His words were punctuated by gasps of air. “He just turned ahead. We’re going to lose him.”
“The hell we are,” Vasques said under her breath. This was her town, and Ackerman had just made a major mistake. The killer had turned down Wood Street. Unfortunately for him, a crew was filming a scene for some movie at a statue in front of the University of Illinois Medical Center located on the corner of Wood and Taylor. They were going to close the streets and block traffic for the whole afternoon.
She jerked the wheel and turned onto Damen Avenue. The tires squealed in protest, and the big top-heavy SUV listed to the side. An angry commuter in the opposite lane pounded his horn as he slammed on the brakes to avoid crashing into them.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Williams said. She ignored him and continued north down Damen until she whipped the vehicle right onto Taylor.
Ackerman was trapped. He had nowhere to go but straight into their path.
Vasques slammed down the accelerator again and held the wheel in a vise grip. “Take a look,” she said. The silver car that had nearly run her over was heading straight for them. The car swerved around a red S-10 pickup truck and then nothing separated them but a couple of football fields of gray pavement.
“What are you doing?” Williams said again from the back.
Once more she didn’t answer, kept accelerating. This wasn’t the first time she had played chicken.
“You can’t.”
The street was a narrow two-lane patch of road bordered by parked cars. Both of their vehicles hugged the center, straddling the yellow lines. Ackerman was in a mid-size Dodge sedan. Vasques was driving a full-size extended SUV. She was twice his size. He would swerve or stop the vehicle and try to escape on foot. He had to. Anything else would be suicide.
“He won’t swerve!” Williams bellowed.
As Vasques watched the smaller sedan from the raised vantage point inside the cab of the Yukon, she knew Williams was right. In fact, Ackerman too was accelerating.
31
Realizing that she had made the grave mistake of playing chicken with a deranged psychopath, Vasques jerked the wheel to the side. But Ackerman still clung to the center of the road, and there wasn’t enough space for both of them. He was only a hundred feet ahead and closing.
She waited until the last second and then slammed on her brakes and jerked the wheel hard, smashing into a little Chevy parked along the street. Then Ackerman was on top of her. Sparks shot from both sides of the Yukon as Ackerman slid along their left side and the Chevy slammed against their right.
The killer didn’t even slow down as he continued east down Taylor Street. Vasques tried to keep her vehicle under control and pull away from the
collision, but the dual impacts had thrown her into a tailspin. The Yukon swung in a circle down the center of the road and crashed into a light pole directly in front of a squat brick building marked with three crosses and the words Children of Peace School. Luckily, the students were on Christmas break.
Her head shot away from the headrest and struck the windshield. She tasted blood, and her ears rang like someone had jammed an alarm clock inside her skull. She pressed her hands against her forehead and tried to get her bearings. Something wet and warm trickled down her forearm. She heard someone asking if she was okay, but the voice sounded distant.
After a few long seconds, her vision cleared, and she dropped the lever on the steering console into reverse, pulling away from the pole. Ackerman was still only a few beats ahead of them. They still had a chance.
Vasques scanned Taylor Avenue, but the silver Dodge sedan was gone. Ackerman must have taken the next turn, and he wouldn’t have headed back toward the FBI building, so he must have turned north down Damen Avenue. She slammed the pedal to the floor and took the next turn right. Damen was a four-lane road divided by a four-foot concrete median and bordered by tall black lamp-posts ornately designed to look like something from nineteenth-century England. Several vehicles dotted the road ahead, but no silver Dodge. Along the left side of the road, on the corner, she caught sight of a group of people at a black covered bus stop gesturing east down Polk Street. Reasoning that the people were most likely commenting about a car that had just skidded by at high speed, she took the turn onto Polk. The pale green and tan campus of John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital loomed off to her left. They were entering the heart of Chicago’s medical district.
Farther down Polk, she caught sight of Ackerman weaving in and out of traffic. From the back seat, Williams said, “There he is!”
Vasques thought she heard sirens heading their way, but they needed to maintain visual contact. A siren of her own would have helped. The traffic was extra thick on Polk, and she nearly collided with a red mini-van as she swerved into oncoming traffic to pass a slow-moving car. But then she got stuck behind a FedEx delivery truck as oncoming traffic and parked cars boxed her in on each side. The truck also blocked her view of the sedan. The intersections of Wolcott and Wood flew past, but before reaching Paulina she saw Ackerman’s vehicle parked along the right side of the road in front of a long row of multicolored newspaper dispensers. The driver’s door hung open. The raised platform for the Pink Line of CTA Rapid Transit sat only a few feet away.
The Yukon skidded to a stop. “He must be trying to get away on the train,” Vasques said as she leaped from the SUV and sprinted toward the glass front of the station’s entrance.
At her back, Brubaker called after her. “Vasques, wait! He wouldn’t have taken the train. We could just call ahead and have officers waiting for him at the next station.”
She hesitated in front of the station doors and glanced toward Paulina Street. A man wearing a blue stocking cap and a Chicago Bears jacket was securing a bright green ten-speed bike to a rack in front of the transit station. “Hey, you!” The man glanced up. “Did you see a guy get out of that car?”
The Bears fan nodded and pointed north. “Yeah, he went that way.”
32
Allen Brubaker felt like his lungs were being crushed in a vise. The air was cold and thin, and he wasn’t in nearly as good shape as he had once been. Still, he urged his legs to pump along with the others, who were at least twenty-five years his junior. The sound of their feet slapping the sidewalk and his own shallow breathing were the only noises he could hear. They sprinted north in the direction the man with the bike had pointed and were rewarded with a glimpse of Ackerman ducking into a large building up the street.
Allen’s eyes weren’t as good as they used to be, either, but he was fairly certain that he saw Ackerman clutching his left shoulder. Apparently, one of Marcus’s rounds had struck home, but it also hadn’t been enough to slow the killer down too much.
As they drew closer, Allen’s gaze traveled up the strange-looking building that Ackerman had entered. From his vantage point, it was the color of light sand with one central section touching the ground while the first levels of two adjoining wings were exposed and supported by square pillars. It reminded him vaguely of some sort of space station. A dark gray awning jutting out over the entrance bore the words Johnston R. Bowman Health Center.
They pushed inside and glanced around the small lobby. A dark-skinned security guard with a gray Fu Manchu mustache sat behind an information desk. Vasques flashed her ID and said, “Did you see a guy in a dark coat come through here holding his shoulder?”
“Yeah, I told him the emergency entrance is all the way on the other side of the hospital, but he didn’t listen. He just jumped in the elevator.”
“Are there any other exits?”
“There’s a walkway that connects to the Academic Center on three.”
All stares fixed on the lights above the elevator. They indicated it had stopped on the third floor. “Dammit,” Vasques said. “The Rush University Campus is a maze. If he makes it into the Academic Center we might lose him.”
“Plus it’s full of people,” Andrew added.
“Okay,” Marcus said as he moved toward the exit. “Vasques and I will try to cut him off from the Academic building before he makes it across the walkway. Andrew, you and Allen take the elevator up after him and come at him from behind. We’ll try to box him in.”
Vasques followed Marcus out, and as she did, she raised her cell phone to her ear. Allen overhead her calling in reinforcements as she rushed from the building. The ding of the elevator sounded at his back, and the doors slid open.
Andrew stepped inside and stopped them closing with his palm. “Come on, Allen.”
Allen took a step toward the elevator but then hesitated. Something didn’t seem right. Off in the far corner was the door to the fire stairs. Maybe Ackerman was trying to double back on them? “I’m going to take the stairs and make sure that he doesn’t try to sneak past us that way.”
Nodding, Andrew slid his hand away from the doors’ sensor, and they slid shut. Allen moved off toward the emergency door and pushed inside. The metal stairs climbed skyward, and he bounded up them two at a time.
By the time he hit the door to the second floor, his lungs were burning, and a wave of dizziness swept over him. He gasped in large gulps of air but pushed forward. In the recent months of his retirement, Allen had often looked back fondly on his time with the Shepherd Organization. The thrill of the hunt. The knowledge that he was making a difference. Saving lives. Being a tool for justice and righteousness. The human mind had a funny way of romanticizing the past, and as he ascended the stairs, he realized that all too well. Now he recalled what it was truly like to be a Shepherd. It was adrenaline-filled, for sure, but it also meant fear. In fact, he now remembered that, in most cases, it was actually ninety-five percent terror and only five percent exhilaration.
As Allen fought for air, he wondered why in the hell he had volunteered to take the stairs.
But then, finally, he crested the last flight and came to the third-floor landing. As he reached out for the door handle, it seemed to twist on its own and swing toward him. The progression of time seemed to slow down and speed up simultaneously.
His hand flew to the Beretta holstered beneath his left arm.
Ackerman’s face appeared in the doorway.
Allen gripped the weapon and pulled it free.
Before he could bring his gun to bear on the killer, Ackerman rushed forward and slammed against him, his hand clamping onto Allen’s right wrist. Ackerman forced Allen back against the white railing. Allen swung his left fist into Ackerman’s side, but the killer smashed his forehead into the bridge of his opponent’s nose.
Allen felt something crack, and his vision blurred. A disorienting and nauseating deluge of pain thundered through his skull.
Then his whole world dropped out from beneath him, and he
tumbled backward over the railing.
Day Four – December 18 Afternoon
33
The waiting area at the Rush University Medical Center had both a modern and a retro feel. Marcus sat on a strange curvy couch that snaked across one entire wall of the room. It was brightly colored with red, yellow, orange, and brown stripes. Windows overlooking the city filled the entire wall at his back, letting sunlight invade the space. The whole place seemed too cheery for his tastes. The walls were bright yellow. Chairs were mint green. He wondered whatever had happened to hospital white. The only aspect of the room that matched his mood was the carpet checkered with shades of gray.
He pressed his palms against his temples, trying to push back the pounding in his skull. Andrew paced back and forth in front of a business center in the middle of the room. The door opened and the sounds of the hospital slipped inside. They both looked quickly toward the entrance, expecting a doctor with news of Allen’s condition. But it wasn’t the doctor; it was Vasques.
She walked over and sat next to Marcus on the technicolor couch. Her right hand held a tray filled with cups of coffee. Andrew took one with a nod of thanks.
As Marcus reached for a cup, he said, “Ackerman?”
She sighed. “They think he stole an ambulance and slipped through the perimeter. He’s gone, but we have an APB out. We’ll find him.”
Marcus shook his head. “No, you won’t. He’s lived most of his life on the run, learning every trick. He’s a chameleon when he wants to be.”
Vasques swallowed hard. “I’m sorry about Agent Brubaker. I know that I had only just met him, but he seemed like a wonderful man. Were you two close?”
“We are close,” Marcus snapped.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …”
He waved his hand dismissively. “It’s fine. You didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just on edge. I’ve only known Allen for a little over a year. He actually helped recruit me into our organization, and then he took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. My parents were killed when I was little, but in a lot of ways, Allen reminds me of my father. Dad was a detective with the NYPD. That’s where I started out, too. Anyway, when I was learning from Allen, it was almost like I had a little piece of my dad back. He’s a good friend.”