Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  Adrenaline percolated through Grove as he crouched there, trying to appear only interested in the weather-beaten gravel. He was still clutching that ridiculous umbrella and that water-blurred bulletin, and for several agonizing moments he couldn’t make his brain work, couldn’t gather his thoughts, couldn’t move. He knew he couldn’t get to his gun without alarming Ackerman (and everybody else, for that matter). And he knew he couldn’t signal Zorn without spooking the perp.

  All at once, he willed himself into a kind of hyper-attenuated hyperalertness that he first learned on the training course when he was at the FBI academy. Back in those days they would send young guys like Grove into this vast fake city hewn from immense particleboard building facades, plywood cutouts, and spring-loaded cardboard criminals, and they would run the poor newbies through the gauntlet, making them jump at shadows with their little .38 starter pistols—bang! bang! you’re dead! Much to the section trainers’ delight, Grove turned out to be almost preternaturally adept at fake-killing fake targets. But now, a million light-years away from the academy, engulfed by the stench of the real world, Grove found he had to struggle to achieve that same cobra calm.

  Crouching in that horrible blood-scented mud, getting drenched by the filthy rain, a calliope of noise swirling around him, he bit down hard, so hard he nearly cracked his teeth. He felt the unwavering reptilian gaze of the tall man in the hood on the side of his face like a heat lamp. And he felt his joints tighten with fight-or-flight panic. The son of a bitch hasn’t figured out what’s going on, Grove’s inner monologist marveled, he doesn’t know you ID’d him, he hasn’t figured out he’s been made!

  Another volley of lightning erupted, turning the scene into a silver photographic negative.

  Grove knew at once that he had an opportunity here. If he could continue the ruse—the Academy Award–worthy performance of An Investigator Examining Pavement—he might be able to get his hand inside his coat, and get it around the grip of the .357 Tracker, without giving himself away. If he could utilize the element of surprise, he might be able to pull down on Ackerman quickly and decisively enough to prevent any further violence or mishaps. Of course, this theory was all predicated on the belief that Ackerman had a few brain cells of sanity left in his beleaguered skull. Unfortunately, Grove had no way to gauge the extent of Ackerman’s sickness. Right now, all that Grove had was a huge, gangly perp with a touch of catatonia, and a face shrouded in the shadows of an oversized hood, standing stone-still on the edge of Grove’s peripheral vision.

  An idea occurred to Grove, a way to get to his gun without alarming the killer, and over the space of a mere second or two, the profiler plotted out his actions: He would do it in three steps. One, he would reach down to his outer pocket with his free hand and dig out his small spiral notebook. Nothing out of the ordinary there; nothing that any investigator wouldn’t do a million times in a day. Then, two, he would pretend to search for a pen that he didn’t have, patting all his pockets and frowning and generally playing the part to the hilt. And finally, three, he would reach into his coat, unsnap the Tracker’s holster, and draw the gun out as he was rising and dropping the umbrella and aiming a bead on Ackerman in one fluid motion.

  The object of all this physical business was not to give Ackerman any chance whatsoever to react. In other words, to make it nearly impossible to respond. The keys to success were speed and resolve. Which was why Grove started taking deep, steady breaths. Like a golf swing, gun work is all about relaxation and breathing.

  Ackerman had yet to move.

  Grove began the three-step journey to his gun, becoming hyperaware of the crowd around him. Very few of the bystanders were talking, or if they were, it was impossible to hear their voices above the noise of the rain. Somewhere on the other side of the parking lot, a detective called out for assistance, and a pair of morgue attendants hurried across the lot with a collapsible gurney under their arms.

  Ackerman kept staring at Grove.

  Grove pulled the little beige spiral notebook from his pocket.

  So far, so good. Ackerman had not moved. Grove laid the notebook on the ground, then pretended to search for his pen. He made a big deal out of it—like a stage actor playing to the back row—patting his right breast pocket, then his left, frowning, patting his trouser pocket, then finally reaching into the inside of his coat. His heart was beating so rapidly, he could feel the pulse on the inside of his arm as he frantically worried open the holster. His mouth was dry. His neck palpitated with excess adrenaline. He heard the muffled snap of the safety strap.

  He had his hand—moist and hot with nerves—around the grip of the gun when he heard an unexpected cry ring out across the street.

  And that was when everything started going to hell.

  “Everybody down! Everybody down! FBI! Don’t you dare move, Ackerman, you son of a bitch! FBI!”

  Terry Zorn hurled across the street with his big black steel Desert Eagle raised and ready, colliding with an elderly duck hunter, sending the old man sprawling to the pavement. The crowd lurched and jerked like a herd of sheep spooked at the commotion, many of them complying instinctively, splashing down into the puddles. Moving in an awkward, tumbling, sideways gait, Zorn held his gun up with both hands in the “weaver” position—the best posture from which to shoot—as he roared toward the hooded suspect.

  The tall man in the hood hardly had time to turn, which he did instinctively now, as people careened to the gravel around him.

  Roaring toward the suspect, closing the distance to thirty-five yards, then thirty, then twenty-five, Zorn forgot the field procedure that had been drummed into him back in the academy a couple of decades ago. Something had snapped in Zorn’s brain a few seconds earlier when he had just happened to glance up from the damp bulletin and look back at the motel, and he had just happened to see the hooded figure at the precise moment a bolt of lightning had just happened to illuminate the landscape enough to light up the inside of that hood, and there he was, the motherfucker from the bulletin, standing right there, his gaunt face creased with a cadaverous smile, and it was that grin, or grimace, or whatever the hell it was, that lit the fuse inside Zorn and made him drop his umbrella and draw his weapon and sent him charging through the rain full of hellfire and fury, and now he was maybe twenty yards away from the subject with a bead dropped directly on the black hole inside that hood.

  Then all sorts of things happened all at once and very quickly.

  There was an audible collective gasp, loud enough to be heard across the street, as the front row of onlookers seemed to duck down in unison like a sloppy chorus line, umbrellas tumbling away on gusts of rain. Some of the investigators across the lot instantly crouched down, hands involuntarily reaching for weapons, while others appeared in doorways, already armed and rigid and instinctively standing in tripod positions. Zorn couldn’t see Grove but heard a shrill silent warning alarm ringing in his ears as he approached the suspect, the sudden danger registering in Zorn’s innards before his brain had a chance to send the news to his legs.

  Ackerman had grabbed the closest bystander—the portly woman with the field glasses—and was quietly holding something long and sharp to her neck.

  Sudden hesitation threw off Zorn’s stride, and the Texan slipped on an oily patch ten yards away from the suspect. His legs flew out from under him and he fell directly onto his ass, banging into a cowering duck hunter, the impact hard enough to knock the air out of Zorn’s lungs. Amazingly, the barrel of that big black automatic never wavered from its trajectory toward Ackerman’s hooded face—even as Zorn sat shuddering in pain near the flapping yellow tape.

  By that point another weapon had been drawn and trained on the killer.

  Ulysses Grove stood in firing position about fifteen yards away, his face taut and dripping, his gaze seared and fixed on Ackerman and the hostage. In that brief instant, Zorn’s brain seethed with panic and regret and shame—the realization almost instantaneous as he sat there like an idiot, like
a rookie, like a goddamned trainee on the wet shoulder, his spine screaming with pain. He had forced them into a standoff. He had violated about a dozen principles of good tactical work, and now they were faced with a hostage situation because of him, and all these thoughts crossed Zorn’s mind in a millisecond and then blew apart like leaves in a hurricane—

  —because Ackerman had started moving.

  Had the killer hesitated another few seconds, the other law enforcement people might have had a chance to get into position for a decent head shot, but there were many aspects working against the cops and feds that day.

  The rain—which had obscured everything with a film of Vaseline—proved to be the least of their troubles. First and foremost was the crowd. The gawkers had scattered in all directions at the first sign of gunplay, making it impossible for an average shooter to pinpoint the bad guy. Too many frantic bodies were lumbering this way and that in the deluge, their umbrellas tossing and tumbling on the winds, skittering willy-nilly across the gravel and the road and even the roof of the motel.

  Lightning only worsened the effect with its intermittent, raging punctuation of silver tungsten supernovas, retarding movement down to time-lapse, Nickelodeon slow motion—which is exactly what it was doing at the precise moment Grove aimed his revolver at Ackerman (who was roughly ten feet away) and hollered in an even, booming, stentorian voice over the rain, the call of a lion tamer scolding an errant animal: “Let her go, Ackerman, there’s no way out, so don’t make it worse! Let her go!”

  Ackerman frantically yet steadily kept backing toward the yellow tape that fluttered on the west edge of the property, dragging the field-glasses lady like a hunting trophy, ignoring her wriggling and mewling, shooting regular glances over his shoulder as though he were an automaton triangulating the distance between Grove and the other armed authorities and the empty forest beyond the property line. It looked as though the killer held a short spear or hunting arrow to the woman’s jugular, the slender tail wagging in the rain.

  Another violent flicker of lightning lit up the world, and Grove had to squint in order to maintain the killing bead on Ackerman’s hood. He could see Zorn back on his feet and in the weaver position just off his right shoulder, and he could sense time slipping away as the other shooters behind him coalesced as quickly as possible on the periphery, the sounds of bolts clanging, rounds injecting into chambers with dull thunks, shuffling footsteps, and a swelling din of frenzied voices. But it was all gelling too slowly because Ackerman was already halfway to the fringe of scrub along the western edge of the gravel lot.

  “Don’t do it, Ackerman! Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it!”

  Grove’s finger, moist with flop-sweat, curled around the trigger, and in the space of a single second he saw the worst-case scenario open up before him like a sinister pop-up book revealing its garish inevitibility in his midbrain: the edge of the gravel lot simply ending, without border or garden trim or edging, merely melting into a leprous hill of ironweed and litter now shrouded in gloom and shadow, providing a perfect escape route into the dense wall of birch that loomed just beyond the motel’s property line.

  Before Grove had a chance to do anything about the situation, several things happened almost simultaneously in the flashbulb strobe of lightning.

  The killer made the tactical error of glancing over his shoulder at the woods long enough for one of the peripheral shooters to squeeze off a shot at his hood. Grove was in the process of firing a warning shot when he heard the blast, and it must have been a large-caliber bore because the report was immense, a teeth-jarring boom that rivaled the thunder. It slapped and echoed off the distant hills. The trees above the killer were perforated in a cloud of mist, and Grove’s gun suddenly discharged as though touched off by sympathetic vibrations, sending a round into the air in a plume of silver light, and everybody dove to the wet ground, and the killer lurched toward the dark forest, doing something jerky and decisive to the lady.

  Grove was on the ground all of a sudden and could barely see the woman with the field glasses collapsing, folding into the dirt ten yards away, her neck breached and gushing blood as black as india ink in the deceptive light of the storm. She convulsed once and then stiffened in shock and imminent death, her hand still gripping those pathetic field glasses as her carotid leaked all over the mire. Ackerman was a blur on the side of the hill behind the victim as scores of firearms—maybe hundreds, it sounded like hundreds—suddenly began discharging from all points across the parking lot.

  The light and noise lit up the storm. Grove ducked down and covered his head. Zorn dropped to the ground not more than ten feet off Grove’s flank. Out of the corner of his eye Grove saw the battlefield firelight—countless yellow lumens popping like phosphorous in the dark. The birch trees boiled. Contact sparks traced across the adjacent woods. The sound had a magnificent ugliness to Grove’s ears—nothing like the cowboys-and-Indians fireworks-crackle of the movies. This sound was a dirty, metallic pummeling sound.

  Ackerman had vanished.

  The gunfire ceased.

  “We need medical attention over here. Somebody get a doc over here, now, now!” Grove bellowed at the top of his voice, but he could hardly hear it in his own ears, they were ringing so badly. He managed to rise to his feet and lumber over to the field-glasses lady, who was soaked in her own blood, twitching in the mucky puddles of the parkway, her gray face contorted with agony, her eyes pinned open.

  Grove dropped his gun and pressed his hand down on the woman’s neck to stanch the bleeding, and he felt the fluttering, wounded-bird pulse of the woman’s heartbeat, and knew, he knew, the lady was gone, she had only moments left. Thrusting his bare fingers down into her blood-clogged throat, Grove cleared her airway and began a futile attempt at CPR as movement and voices swirled all around him. Terry Zorn flashed by Grove, vaulting across the parkway and hurtling into the woods after Ackerman. “Zorn, goddamnit, wait!” Grove howled through the rain. “I told you, we’re not tactical!”

  The next few seconds were critical for Grove. He looked down at the portly woman’s blood-spattered face and saw her mouth moving, eyes blinking, no sound coming out of her other than a faint clicking noise in the base of her throat, and Grove’s midsection seized up with a poisonous cocktail of rage and misery, because he was looking into that dying woman’s eyes, and he saw only pathos there, he saw only the hardscrabble life of a working-class mother with too much eye shadow caking her aging lashes, and now somebody in a white jacket was yanking Grove off the woman, and Grove tumbled backward onto the edge of the gravel, rolling onto his side and clawing for his gun.

  Terry Zorn’s cowboy hat lay on the ground a few inches away, dented by a muddy footprint, and for some reason the sight of that hat lying there did something to Grove, and he rose up and started lurching toward the forest, the revolver hot in his hand now. He could barely hear the frantic voices of the other investigators converging on him.

  Grove ignored all the warning cries and plunged headlong into the woods.

  Zorn kept his automatic pointed out in front of him like the prow of a ship cutting through a storm as he charged up that narrow mud path between thickets of spruce and ferns, the rainy darkness enclosing him. He could barely see the bleary shadow of the killer—sense was a better word—about twenty yards or so ahead of him, fleeing into the wooded hills, something bouncing around inside the back of that jacket.

  Voices pierced the storm. Zorn ignored them, gripping the gun tightly in both of his wet hands, the classic cradle-hold they teach you the first day on the range. He leaped over a deadfall and nearly stumbled, but somehow he kept his balance. His bald head was cold and crawling with adrenaline. His eyes stung. But he kept churning forward through the thickening foliage, his faltering gaze riveted to that ghostly outline of the killer moving through the undergrowth ahead of him.

  The path ended, and the forest seemed to close down around Zorn like a black corridor. Rain sluiced down through endless column
s of cedar, birch, and hemlock. Lightning flickered, the birch, bark momentarily gleaming in Zorn’s peripheral vision like bleached bones.

  Ackerman was getting away. Zorn could see the silhouette receding into the deeper growth in the distance, and the Texan tried to quicken his pace, but it wasn’t easy now. He was cobbling over rain-slimy rocks and rot-wood, squeezing between bottlenecks of branches, moving deeper and deeper into the uncharted darkness of unincorporated Clark County, the steely tendrils bull-whipping at him as he passed.

  One shot. That’s all he needed. One clean shot and he could drop this sick son of a bitch and save the taxpayers the expense of further investigative hours and legal fees and appeals. And he kept thinking this as he tore through the woods, careful not to slip on the greasy exposed roots or partially buried granite facets. He had two extra nine-round magazines jiggling around in his raincoat pocket, which meant he had a total of twenty-seven rounds—including the clip already seated in the Desert Eagle—which should be more than enough firepower to get the job done. He would go for a head shot. The takedown would settle all accounts, obliterating Zorn’s earlier mistake. Tom Geisel would be proud. So would Zorn’s VFW daddy back in Tennessee. Even Grove would have to admit that Terry Zorn was a force to be reckoned with.

  He kept thinking about all this for quite a while, putting almost a mile behind him, before he began to slow down. He walked a few more paces before stopping.

  He was now alone.

  The realization slammed through his gut as he stood in a shadowy little clearing shrouded by a low canopy of spruce and a wall of wild undergrowth so thick it looked as though someone had stitched it out of vines and branches. Zorn’s heart started thumping. He was drenched. His jacket felt as though it were pasted to his back, his feet swimming in his boots. He could no longer hear Grove. Nor could he hear the voices of the other cops and ATF guys. The only sounds now were the distant, dieseling belch of thunder and the incessant rain snapping against the tamarack leaves.