Deadline (22 page)

Colin aimed for the shed and started running faster.

“Where the hell’s he think he’s goin’?” Betts huffed. He had only run about 50 metres, but his face was already puffy and red. “There’s only one way in or outta here!”

Giordino saw where Colin was going and reached down to grab the radio off her belt to advise one of the uniforms to get moving around the park to cut Mitchell off, but the radio wasn’t there. She had left it in the cruiser and had gotten out in such a hurry that it was still sitting on the floor of the passenger side.

Colin reached the shed. The concrete ridge on the left was narrower than he thought, but he was going too fast to stop now. He ran along the top of the ledge, closed his eyes, and threw himself forward into space.

J
anice was frantic.

The day hadn’t started out as a gigantic mess, but that was sure as hell where it was now. She had gotten up, taken a long shower, gotten a coffee and bagel from the place in the plaza down the street, and then settled in with her laptop to try to see if the Knights had left any digital traces of themselves. The next thing she knew, a news alert had flashed up with Colin’s face on it saying that the police wanted to arrest him for the murders.

What on earth had they found at his apartment? It must have been serious if everyone was looking for him all of a sudden. Janice didn’t think Colin had killed anybody, but what did she really know? She had really only known the guy for a few days. Didn’t they always say that about serial killers after they were caught?
He seemed like such a nice, quiet, normal guy…

She had been so panicked that she had actually picked up the phone and tried to call the police to tell them everything she knew about the Knights of the Holy Thorn, but the guy on the other end didn’t seem to take her seriously and told her that Giordino was out and wasn’t expected back for a couple of hours. With a case like this, they probably got a thousand crazy tips an hour, so it wasn’t a surprise that she didn’t exactly get top priority.

She paced the floor of her small living room and tried to figure out what to do next. Colin had said he was coming here. Should she stay and wait? Should she get in the car and drive straight to the police station and tell them everything she knew? Should she go to the newsroom? What?

The doorbell rang.

Janice stopped pacing. Colin had said not to answer the door. Why shouldn’t she open the door all of a sudden? Why was it suddenly so unsafe? Maybe it was Colin. Or maybe it was someone Colin didn’t want her to talk to. Maybe it was the police.

Oh, what the hell.

Janice ran to the door and pulled it open. On the front step was a man in a dark black jacket with a hood covering a fringe of grey hair that made him look like a monk. Despite the fact that he hadn’t been photographed in many years, Janice recognized him immediately.

“Good afternoon, sister,” he said in a gravelly voice. “I have come to show you the pathway of light.”

C
olin cleared the fence by less than an inch, sailed over the sidewalk, and landed on the roof of a minivan idling in the inside lane.

Colin felt the wind squeezed out of him in a whoosh as his momentum carried him forward, off the roof of the van and onto the street, where he landed in a heap. Colin got to his knees, gasping for air, and looked up just in time to see the word “MACK” screech to a stop within two feet of his nose as the driver laid on the horn. He was too full of adrenaline to be aware of whether or not he might have done himself an injury. All he knew was that he somehow wasn’t dead and was no longer in the park.

Colin got up and staggered out from behind the minivan just in time to see Betts reach the maintenance shed. The big detective wasn’t moving quite as fast as Colin had, but appeared to be trying to make up for that with sheer force of will.

All the willpower in the world wasn’t enough to overcome gravity, however, and when Colin saw Betts stumble after bumping his elbow against the side of the shed, he knew the rest of the jump was not going to go well.

Betts made it surprisingly high up into the air, but forgot to pull up his legs. His right foot caught the top of the fence, tripping him up in mid-air. The big detective spun around and landed virtually head-first on the sidewalk, where he crumpled like a sack of potatoes. Blood started streaming out of his ears and nose. Colin couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not. It was entirely possible that Betts was dead. He felt absolutely no urge to run up and see if the detective was still alive. This was, after all, the guy who had just tried to kill him with a shotgun.

One of the uniformed cops was the first to reach the fence, sliding down the steep embankment and almost running straight into the stone wall at the base. He spotted Betts lying prone on the sidewalk and grabbed the walkie-talkie on his shoulder.

“Officer down on Regent next to Grant Park!” he shouted. “Repeat! Officer down! We need paramedics here now!” He spotted Colin standing next to the minivan and pulled his gun, trying to point it through the vertical iron bars of the fence. “Freeze!”

Shit
, Colin thought.
Now they probably think I’m a cop killer. Is it possible for this situation to get any worse?

Colin had no intention of freezing. He turned around and ran across the street as cars honked and swerved to get out of his way. His right knee was sore from where he had whacked it against the roof of the van, but otherwise he felt okay. At least he hadn’t broken anything.

Behind him, the uniformed cop tried to get a clear line of fire and couldn’t. In addition to the fence, there were just too many cars and pedestrians to risk a shot. A middle-aged man with a brown overcoat and hat crouched down cautiously next to Betts.

“I don’t think he’s breathing!” the man said, tilting his hat back for a better look.

“Get back, sir!” the uniform barked. He could see Betts’s sidearm lying in the gutter next to a mailbox, where it had landed after flying out of the detective’s hand on the way down. Fortunately, Mitchell hadn’t seen it. He thought about trying to climb the fence, but it was ten feet straight up and there was nothing to hold on to. “Mitchell’s headed east on Regent! I can’t get to him!”

Colin dodged around a courier van and turned to see Giordino sprinting towards him along the south side of the park on Norfolk. She must have figured out what he was going to try to do and doubled back to the exit to try and cut him off. She was a lot lighter on her feet and was closing in fast. He saw her hesitate and think about stopping to line up a shot, but then she kept going. She wasn’t going to give him another chance to bolt or risk shooting an innocent bystander in the process. She clearly intended to take him down personally.

He could hear sirens converging on him from all directions. It was time to get off the street. He ran across the sidewalk and pulled open the first door he came to, which happened to be a laundromat.

Machines were humming as Colin ran inside. A guy in a black leather jacket with a do rag on his head and an elaborate handlebar moustache was standing at the front window, along with a skinny girl in a dress that looked more like a hospital gown. The two of them had been drawn up there by the commotion on the street and looked curiously at Colin when he burst inside.

“Hey, what’s goin’ on out there, man?” the guy asked. “I swear I heard shots!”

Colin ignored them. He had spotted a door at the back marked “Staff Only”. It was handwritten in pen on a sheet of paper and mounted with a couple of thumb tacks, but it marked another way out and that was all that mattered. Colin ran down the long row of machines, pulling open the doors of some of them as he went. Water and clothing gushed out onto the dirty linoleum floor.

“Hey man!” the moustache guy said, watching his favourite Metallica shirt hit the deck. “What the fuck?!”

Colin grabbed the back door and yanked it open just as Giordino arrived at the front. She noticed the water on the floor, but not soon enough to stop herself from slipping and landing on her back in the warm, soapy water. Her elbow hit the floor, causing her to inadvertently squeeze off a round from the 9 mm she was carrying in her right hand. It ricocheted off a dryer and went through the suspended ceiling, where it severed one of the pipes supplying the sprinkler system. Water immediately began to pour down from around the central bank of overhead fluorescent lights.

This was enough for moustache guy, who threw his arms up over his head and ran out the front door. Most of the laundry was his girlfriend’s anyway. If she wanted it, she could come back and get it herself. The skinny girl in the white dress just stood and watched it all with a vacant expression of disbelief.

Giordino cursed and pulled herself to her feet. Her back and her head were soaked and now more water was pouring down from above. She checked to make sure her gun hadn’t jammed and then moved quickly towards the back, using the machines to help stay upright. There was a drain in the middle of the floor, but it appeared to be plugged because no water was actually draining into it. The mess on the floor was ankle-deep and getting worse by the minute. She was grateful that she hadn’t worn her new leather shoes.

Colin made it through the door and found himself in a dark, narrow hallway that led past an empty manager’s office to a set of stairs. He raced up the stairs and found himself facing a metal emergency door that appeared to be the only way out. A faded red and white warning on the handle advised that the alarm would sound if he pushed it. Colin, however, was way past worrying about that, and shoved the door open without a second thought.

Colin burst outside and ploughed directly into three men standing in the alley behind the building.

The first of the three was Barry Zito, aged 23, a drug dealer with a long and undistinguished record of arrests. He was about Colin’s height, had roughly the same hair colour and was also wearing a black leather jacket, although his was the zip-up kind with elasticized wrists and waist. He liked to do most of his business in the network of alleys off Norfolk Street because there were a lot of options for getting in and out if he got into a jam, either with the cops, a client or a competitor.

The second of the three was Thomas O’Riordan, 48, the owner of Tommy’s Bar & Grill on Carlyle. O’Riordan was there with his head bouncer, Teshaun Brandlebury, 31. O’Riordan was a tiny man with thinning red hair and a lisp that caused many of his clientele to think that he was gay. He was there to buy some uppers for his night staff, as strippers didn’t tend to make quite as many drink sales if they kept falling asleep in their client’s laps. He always brought Teshaun, who was not nicknamed “Black Thor” for no reason, along on these deals just to make sure everything went according to plan.

Which everything was, right up until Colin came out of nowhere and knocked two of them to the ground.

“What the f—” was all Zito got out as the red pills flew out of the bag and scattered on the wet pavement like candy from a piñata.

O’Riordan, meanwhile, just made a dull “ooof!” sound as Colin’s elbow ended up in his solar plexus and he went flying to the ground himself. Zito tried to get out of the way, tripped over his own ankle, and landed on his ass.

Brandlebury was leaning down to intervene when he heard the sirens. It occurred to him at that point that he didn’t particularly enjoy accompanying his boss on these little pharmaceutical runs anymore and now would be as good a time as any to look for another line of work.

G
iordino burst through the back door to find a small, red-haired man with a confused expression on his face sitting in a puddle.

“Where’d he go?” Giordino yelled, looking around wildly.

“That ath-hole!” said the red-haired man. “He juth took off!”

Giordino looked down and noticed red pills scattered on the ground. The man in the puddle, meanwhile, had just noticed that the woman with the sopping hair who had just come through the door was also carrying a gun. Giordino elected to ignore the pills. The red-haired man decided it was a good idea to become as cooperative as possible.

“That way!” he said, pointing down one of the alleys. “I wath cutting through here on the way to work and he attacked me!”

Giordino ran around the man and checked her surroundings. Many of the buildings on Norfolk and Carlyle were heritage buildings, which meant that they had been built before modern considerations like transport trucks and receiving entrances had taken precedence. There were at least eight separate alleys that led out of the centre. Some were dead ends and others came out onto the street. None of them were lit up or wide enough for a car, which made them a popular destination for junkies, hookers, muggers and other members of the downtown glitterati.

She spotted Mitchell running down the alley that the red-haired man had indicated. He was only about 30 meters away. She raised the walkie-talkie she’d grabbed from one of the uniforms when she’d doubled back through the park.

“I’ve got Mitchell!” she said. “He’s in the alley behind the dry cleaners! He’s heading for Wright Street near the cell phone place!”

Giordino stuffed the walkie-talkie back in her pocket and took off after Mitchell at full speed. He wasn’t moving very fast. He appeared to be limping. Must have trashed his ankle when he jumped the fence. Probably took some of the adrenaline wearing off before he noticed.

She jumped over an overturned garbage can and continued to make up ground. Because of the clouds and the rain, it was hard to see much, but she could tell that Mitchell was really labouring now. He was actually holding his leg while he ran and appeared to be in serious pain.

He was almost at the entrance to the alley when the blue and white pulled up with lights and blaring siren to block him in. Mitchell stopped and tried to turn around, which was when she jumped on him from behind.

“You’re under arrest!” she said, pinning him to the ground with her knee while she fished out her handcuffs. She pulled them off her belt and locked Mitchell’s hands behind his back while the two uniforms got out of the cruiser, guns drawn. She made sure Mitchell’s hands were firmly secured and then stood up to flip him over.