Shoswitz chimed in. “So we put it out over the unicom that we want Branslonovich to make a land line call to headquarters. That will force her back into the truck, to a pay phone, and we can deal with it from there. Settled?” he asked rhetorically, his mind already made up. “Do it,” he instructed the dispatcher. He glanced over and caught Boldt staring at him. “What?” he asked, still at a shouting volume.
“I didn’t say anything,” Boldt objected. But inside he was thinking that Branslonovich was Vice and was more than familiar with field operations, and such a summons would mean only one thing to her: She was being called in. So, he reasoned, the first time she received the message over the unicom she would ignore it and say later that bad reception had interfered with the signal. The second time she might be forced to respond, but at her own speed; she would take her sweet time about coming in. With each successive attempt by dispatch, she would increasingly suspect that the only explanation for these attempts was that she was in a hot zone and because she was a woman officer the male pigs that controlled such operations were recalling her. This, in turn, would keep her in the field all the longer. And the truth was, as far as Boldt could tell, she probably was in the operation’s hot zone, somewhere within a city block of Boldt’s house.
“You’re pissing me off,” Shoswitz declared, glaring at his sergeant.
“Then give me your keys,” he said, standing up from the milk crate and hunching into an uncomfortable stooped crouch. He sensed that at first Shoswitz was reluctant, but the change in expression on the lieutenant’s face revealed his decision to pick his fights carefully. This fight would be lost on his part, no matter how adamant his attempt. He handed Boldt the keys. They both understood that Boldt intended to go after Branslonovich himself. He rarely felt prescient about a situation, but Branslonovich was in danger. Lou Boldt felt certain of it.
Shoswitz directed his anger to the dispatcher. As Boldt slipped out the back of the step van he heard the lieutenant bark, “Try sending it out over the unicom again.”
It was a moonless night, inside-the-stomach dark. An ocean smell permeated the chilly air and brought back images of Alki Point, where Boldt had once stood staring down into the crab-eaten eyes of a decomposing corpse.
A dead body, he thought, hurrying toward Phil’s car. All at once it felt as if he might be too late.
Cole Robbie found the darkness of the trees comforting. A moment earlier he had been ordered to adopt his night-vision goggles, which meant discontinued use of the flashlights. It was a good call on the part of the ERT commander, because it allowed a return to hand signals and silenced the winking flashlights that seemed to shout every time a signal had been sent.
The world was now a green and black place, with few shades of gray. The tree trunks rose like black cornstalks from the forest floor, looking to Robbie like irregularly placed bars to a jail cell. Three dimensions were reduced to two-he felt as if he were walking inside a green and black television set. Inside these goggles, motion blurred; fast motion sometimes vanished completely. It was rumored that the FBI had seriously superior night-vision headgear presently “in testing,” which was a euphemism for proprietary ownership. What the FBI got, others waited for-sometimes for years.
A hand signal from his right. Robbie caught it, returned it, and then passed it along to the officer twenty-five yards to his left. All this occurred with Robbie feeling as if he were on autopilot. He noticed that the line was stretching apart, stretching thin. Pretty soon they would be too far apart for hand signals. He wondered if anyone else had noticed. It was just such sophomoric mistakes that hurt operations. Just the kind of thing that got someone killed.
Up ahead to the north, the park fed into a hillside neighborhood falling toward Green Lake. The occasionally glimpsed light from those houses momentarily blinded the night-vision goggles, burning a bright white hole in the dense green and black. For that reason, no sooner had Robbie donned the night-vision goggles than he shifted them to his forehead and avoided their use. Previous experience with “golf balls”-the ERT name for the blinding flashes and burnouts in the light-sensitive goggles-had educated him to avoid the goggles in the presence of any artificial light. Whether or not any of his other teammates also elected to skip the goggles, he couldn’t be sure. He would still need to use them every four minutes for hand signals, but in the meantime he preferred the uniformity of the darkness.
Immediately a slight glint of yellow light high up in a distant tree caught his attention and provoked him to stop. An airplane light seen through the towering limbs? he wondered. Something wet in the tree, reflecting light from the ground? A person? He quickly tried the goggles but preferred it without them, his peripheral vision expanded. He hadn’t seen exactly where … the sound of an airplane briefly convinced him that it was nothing…. There! Another glint of light, thirty or forty feet up in a tree perhaps fifty yards directly ahead.
He depressed a small button on the device clipped to his belt that allowed him radio transmission within the ERT team. “Operative Three.” He announced himself at a whisper. “Eye contact with possible suspicious object. Five-zero yards. Eleven o’clock. Elevation: four-zero feet. Advise.”
“All stop,” came the commander’s voice through Cole’s earpiece. The line hissed static as the commander checked in with the command van, but Cole knew what was in store for them. A minimum of four operatives would converge on that tree.
With God’s guidance, Cole Robbie thought, this one was over before it had barely begun. They had their man. He stayed where he was, eyes fixed on that elusive spot, hoping beyond hope that what he had just witnessed had nothing whatsoever to do with aviation traffic and everything to do with the suspect they pursued.
As it turned out, because of his disdain for the night-vision device, when the first and only firestorm occurred Cole Robbie was the sole ERT officer not wearing goggles and so not blinded, the only operative able to function, the only operative to see a spinning body burning as clearly as if it were a Christmas tree afire. He was immediately struck by the irony of an arsonist setting himself aflame.
But then, as he began to run toward the animated orange puppet that spun like an unpracticed dancer, he heard it screaming like a woman-worse, in a voice familiar to him. It was, in fact, a woman, a woman consumed by pain and fear. By fire. Worse yet, the voice of a friend. The closer he drew, the more convinced he was that it-however indistinguishable, for it was no longer human-was the voice of Vice officer Connie Branslonovich.
Boldt found the animal control truck parked well up the hill from his house, half a block from Greenwood, two blocks from Woodland Park and the well-discussed anticipated escape route of the arsonist.
He glanced down driveways, around corners of houses, up and down the road, hoping for a glimpse of Branslonovich. He carried a unicom walkie-talkie concealed inside his sport coat, a single wire leading to an earpiece. He hoped like hell to hear Branslonovich or the dispatcher announce that she had reported in. Instead, he heard the order for the thirty-four uniforms to leave the buses and begin closing the net. The operation was in full swing.
The radio channel came ablaze with communication traffic as a small army of uniformed patrol officers was unleashed onto a four-block area.
ERT was somewhere inside the park setting up a back line to net the escaping arsonist. Suddenly the entire effort seemed so futile to Boldt, so absurd. It was based on the assumption that Boldt’s house had been rigged with accelerant, as yet an unproven fact. He reviewed the logic, aware he might need it later to defend the decision to the brass. But the more he examined the thinking, the more he liked it. If the uniforms were presently being deployed, the sirens and the lab truck were only minutes from screeching to a stop in front of Boldt’s house-an act certain to dislodge the waiting arsonist, accepting the theory that the arsonist was indeed watching. Although he could make sense of it in his head, he wasn’t too confident how it would sound to a review board. He had convinced Shoswitz ea
sily enough, but he and Shoswitz had a long history together, a working relationship, and the lieutenant had grudgingly come to trust his sergeant’s decision-making process. It didn’t mean that others would understand it. Not at all.
His current thought process was more clear to him: Thinking like a cop, attempting to retrace Branslonovich’s steps. He stopped and looked around, realizing what a dark night it was. He glanced back at his own house, seeing it differently for the first time-as a target. The arsonist would want a good view, and that seemed most clearly offered from up the hill, which explained the location of the parked animal control truck. Branslonovich had quickly discerned the importance of the elevation of the hill. If the arsonist didn’t care about seeing anything more than the flames, a position in the park would suffice. Boldt chugged up the hill, winded immediately, shoulders hunched, wondering how he had allowed himself to fall into such bad shape and vowing to do something about it. Sometime.
The arsonist would need a lookout, someplace either secretive-inside an empty house, perhaps-or right out in the open but with a convincing excuse to be there: electric lineman, telephone or cable repairman. Boldt quickly glanced up and scanned the area; he didn’t want to spend too much time with his head up, for fear of being seen and giving away his intentions. A pang of dread swept through him. If Branslonovich had gone around scanning the poles and roofs and windows, she might have given herself away. Perhaps, he thought, she was clever enough to have done so while calling out, “Here, kitty. Here, kitty.” Branslonovich had her share of smarts. Or had she, too, been drawn toward the park?
He climbed the hill a little faster. He had a bad feeling about this. He felt like calling out, Here, Branslonovich. Here, Branslonovich. The higher up the hill he climbed, the more houses he passed, the more inviting the park seemed. Just across Greenwood, dark, full of places to hide. Branslonovich might have felt this same thing: Why bother with the houses, or any exposure, when the park offered such sanctuary? Furthermore, went his reasoning, an animal control officer had every excuse to roam a wooded area. Boldt walked faster. Branslonovich was in the park. He knew this as a fact, however unexplainable, just as he knew his house was rigged to burn.
He dodged traffic, cutting across Greenwood, suddenly more hurried. He pushed himself faster and faster.
He entered the park at a run.
He heard her before he saw the sweep of her flashlight breaking through the stand of tree trunks. She was moving through the park, perhaps thirty or more yards ahead of him. Her flashlight was aimed high into the overhead limbs. He couldn’t actually identify her as Branslonovich, not at that distance, but he knew. She was on the arsonist like a bloodhound; Boldt could feel this as well.
“Hey! Are you the dogcatcher?” Boldt shouted, attempting to maintain a modicum of professionalism by maintaining her undercover status. “You looking for a Doberman?” She didn’t seem to hear him, his voice absorbed by the woods. He took a deep breath to shout loudly, but before that same breath escaped his lips, the ground immediately to her right erupted in a billowing column of purple flame. She had tripped a wire, perhaps, or stepped directly on a detonator.
The figure ahead of him ignited instantaneously in a bluish yellow flame, as did a nearby tree trunk. She spun once, arms held out, crying for help, a searing, painful cry. And then she seemed to explode. Yellow-blue pieces disembodied from the spinning creature, arching through the black night air like fireworks. As what was left of the body slumped forward and collapsed, the bark on the tree trunk exploded-sap combusting like fuel-punctuating the quiet night with what sounded like cannon fire. The concussion of the erupting flames lifted Boldt off his feet and deposited him onto his back, ten feet behind where he had been standing. He felt deaf, blinded, and as if his back had been broken in several places. Branslonovich issued one last bone-chilling cry; how this was physically possible escaped Lou Boldt as he lay on a damp bed of decomposing leaves, immobilized by the fall, his ears filled with the haunting wail of the detective’s final moment on earth.
In the distance, sirens.
Lou Boldt managed to get his hand on his weapon, thinking to himself that in all his career he had only fired it on three other occasions. He aimed straight up toward where the stars should have been and let off three consecutive rounds. With any luck at all, someone would hear it and find him, before the whole forest burned, and he along with it.
Cole Robbie saw her spin in a complete circle, an all-consuming plume of blinding light, as pieces of her shot out like sparks from the fireplace, streaming through the air like shooting stars. The cacophony in his earpiece distracted him, for the commander had clearly been wearing his night-vision goggles at the time, and the string of cursing that ensued poured over the airwaves. Robbie heard three live rounds, yanked the earphone from his ear, and broke into a run, thinking, Someone else is out there.
At that same moment he caught a flicker of a shadow to the left of the inferno and tentatively identified it as an object-a human form-moving away from the fire and indirectly toward him, off to his left. The image was there and then gone, the light of the fire so intense, so bright, that one glance induced temporary blindness-like a camera’s flash-and the resulting collage of shifting, slanting shadows turned the landscape into an unrecognizable, eerie tangle of sharp black forms, as if he were suddenly at the bottom of a pile of brush trying to look out.
He had played team sports in high school and junior college, and his resulting instincts moved him to his left in a line calculated to intercept the path of the human form he had spotted. A few strides into it he dropped all conscious thought, electing instead to turn himself over once again to the power and force that guided his life. He ran like the wind, free of his own misgivings, thoughts and calculations. As if to confirm the correctness of this attitude, he picked up sight of the moving form once again, heading right at him. He felt his hand reach down and locate his weapon without any such thought in his head. Then his hand released the stock and found the TASER stun gun instead-a weapon similar in appearance to a large handgun but one that delivered twenty thousand volts of electricity instead of bullets. The TASER had to be fired within fifty feet of the target-twenty to thirty was preferable for accuracy-as two small wires carried the charge to the inductor needles on the projected electrode. Once hit, a subject was knocked unconscious for a period of four to fifteen minutes by the jolt of electricity. He would take him alive; he would bring home a prisoner, not a dead trophy.
There was no sense of time, except that measured by the change in tone and color of the shadows thrown by the fire. The same hand that held the TASER found the small button on his radio transmitter. Robbie said breathlessly, “Position Three. Suspect sighted. Foot pursuit. Identify before weapons fire.” Whatever the real time, it all happened fast. In a mix of moving shadow, shifting light, and the running human form dodging through it toward an imaginary point directly ahead, Cole felt a part of the forest, comfortable and unafraid.
The suspect was closing fast from his right.
Cole planted his feet, skidding to a stop in the sloppy ground, dropped to one knee, leveled the TASER, aimed into the blackness of space directly ahead, and squeezed the firing trigger. He saw the twin shiny wires glimmer in the brightness of the fire as the electrode raced into space. The suspect, at a full run, having not seen Robbie, bumped into and grabbed hold of a low branch, knocking it out of his way and, as luck would have it, absorbing the electrode into the branch which otherwise would have struck him. The suspect appeared completely unaware of Robbie’s presence, never breaking stride. The ERT man dropped the TASER and reached for his weapon as he came to his feet and continued the chase from behind. The sudden appearance of round white holes in the darkness-flashlight beams-alerted him to his change of angle and the reality that he could not fire the handgun, except in warning, since his teammates were now directly ahead. Robbie, a fast runner, initially gained on the suspect as with his right hand he found the dangling earpiece and ret
urned it to his ear. Then, all at once, the suspect was gone. He had ducked behind a tree in hiding, somewhere up ahead. Robbie instinctively dove to the forest floor, anticipating weapons fire. He tripped the radio transmitter and said quietly, “Operative Three. Kill the flashlights. Go to infrared but do not fire. Repeat, do not fire. Copy?”
“Copy, Three,” said the commander. Robbie heard the instructions repeated.
The ERT weapons were equipped with heat-responsive sighting devices that alerted the shooter to a warm body fix. The infrared devices allowed for nighttime “blind” precision targeting, their only drawback being that they could not distinguish between wildlife and human forms, and occasionally a deer or large dog was shot in lieu of a suspect. What Robbie intended, and what the commander had just ordered, was that the sighting devices be swept through the forest in an attempt to locate a warm-blooded body in the hope of identifying the suspect. If Cole Robbie saw any red pinpoints of light strike his person, he would alert the ERT to a “bad hit.” The lights in the forest went dark; the flashlights were turned off in succession. Between Robbie and the dispersed line of operatives some fifty yards away-and closing-the suspect was hiding.
All senses alert, Cole Robbie rose to his knees and then to his feet and began to creep ahead, one quiet footfall at a time. He realized in that instant that he was dominated by his senses, that he had lost his magical connection with the power of being, of guidance, upon which his confidence relied, the source of all good in his life. He didn’t want to be thinking, listening, watching; he felt trapped in himself.
The suspect came from above, completely unexpectedly, falling out of the darkness and onto Robbie painfully and with determination. A pair of hands found Robbie’s head. One firmly gripped his chin; the other pressed tightly against the back of the cop’s neck. Cole Robbie lay on the ground, face first, still reeling from the impact, unable to gather his senses. He knew this grip and what was coming. The intention was to break his neck with a single jerk, a spine-twisting snap, and leave him lying here. Robbie could defeat the move with a simple anticipation of which direction the suspect would choose. But there was no time for such thought. God help me, he thought, and forced his chin left, just as the suspect made an identical move with his hands.
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