The trip downriver to Alexandria took about twenty minutes, and the Hillbilly spent most of those twenty minutes sitting in the darkness of the cab’s backseat, studying the folder full of information that Splet had given him. The file included newspaper clippings about Ulysses Grove, still-frames from news footage tapes, printouts of background material on the profiler from the Internet, and the most important piece of the puzzle: a photocopy of a Rolodex file card with an address scrawled in ballpoint. 2215 Cottage Creek Drive, Alexandria, Virginia, 23445.
Splet claimed that he got the address from the WJID producer who interviewed Grove.
It was nearly 2:00 A.M. when the cab finally crossed over the border of the subdivision known as West Knoll. The Hillbilly asked to be dropped off a quarter of a mile east of Grove’s home, near a lonely, deserted bus stop. The cabbie—a nondescript man in a Redskins cap—pulled over, took the fare, and left without saying a word.
On his way across the sleeping streets of West Knoll, the Hillbilly strode along calmly, casually, whistling a tune as if he belonged there. He was a returning soldier, a beloved son, a second-shift worker, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. He was everyman. He heard voices in his head telling him to suck the eyeballs from the skulls of the dead. He heard other voices telling him he was weak, dirty, and pathetic. He blocked it all out of his mind.
He was almost there.
The first landmark loomed up ahead: a tiny red reflector poking out of the cattails and saw grass. Then came the mailbox, materializing in the moonlight like a ghost: a simple aluminum box with a little red flag mounted on an iron post. No name, just the address. 2215 Cottage Creek Drive. The Hillbilly walked past the mailbox, past the driveway, then past the property…until he reached the gully on the west edge of the property.
The Hillbilly paused and glanced over his shoulder. The street lay in shadows. Nobody in sight. Houses shut down for the night, windows dark. The Hillbilly turned and carefully slipped into the darkness behind the foliage.
A footpath sloped steeply down into a dry creek bed that was choked with wild undergrowth and weeds. In the absolute darkness it was difficult to make out anything but a jungle of limbs. The ground was strewn with stones and corrugated with roots. The Hillbilly moved cautiously through the dark, squeezing his way between branches with the duffel bag over his shoulder, catching on thorns and snagging limbs along the way. In time he reached a clearing near a little moraine of land that jutted off the northeastern corner of Grove’s property.
A pause here.
He gently set the duffel bag down on the spongy ground. The zipper came open slowly, silently. A small penlight came out, and he clicked it on and put it in his mouth. He dug deeper into the bag. The massive .45 caliber Army automatic appeared like a shiny gray slug in the tiny circle of light. He took the gun out and screwed on the homemade suppressor, a ten-inch-long contraption that looked like a tin can painted black. A black coat hanger served as a shoulder brace.
Something caught his attention to his left, a shiny thread in the corner of his eye.
He looked down and saw the trip wire. It wove through the milkweed about eight inches above ground level, barely visible in the darkness, but shimmering like corn silk in the beam of the penlight. How old was it? Had Grove installed the security measure years ago?
Or had he done it recently?
The Hillbilly was sweating now, shaking, dizzy all of a sudden. He quickly rooted the other weapons out of the duffel bag: the bowie knives, the switchblade, the .38 Police Special. He shoved the smaller gun behind his belt. The knives went in his socks, in his sleeves. Two extra magazines of hollow-points were slipped into his back pockets. Time to put this nosy fed’s hair on the wall.
Creeping sideways, staying low, moving through the foliage at a parallel angle along the edge of the property, the Hillbilly paid close attention to the trip wires until he reached another clearing off the northwest corner of the yard. Now he paused and girded himself. He jerked the hammer on the .45, tightened his grip, and took a deep breath.
Showtime.
He slipped out of the woods, then hopped over the Cyclone fence with a single bound. His weapons rattled and his knees popped, but he kept going. The grass was slick, and he nearly slipped as he made his way toward the house. It was maybe fifty yards away, now thirty, now twenty.
Now fifteen feet.
He dove to the ground near the foundation, the odor of something doughy and sweet filling his senses. A light burned behind the sliding glass doors off the patio. Muffled music played behind one of the walls. A wave of hate swelled inside the Hillbilly as he lay there on the cold ground, breathing manure and oily grass.
He crawled toward the sliding doors, belly pressed against the ground. He reached the doors and peered over the top of the steps.
Inside sat an old black woman in a rocking chair. The room was cozy, a fire burning. The woman held a baby, and it looked as though she were humming to it. Maybe singing a lullaby, the old filthy whore.
The Hillbilly tasted sulfur on his tongue. He wanted to vaporize this old mammy and her little mongrel baby. He rose to a crouch and raised the gigantic barrel of the silencer until it rested against the glass. The liquid-tip loads would cut through the glass like butter, and the retooled mechanism would send a burst of eight rounds into the home in less than three seconds.
He held his breath and started to squeeze off a shot when all at once—inside the house the old woman jumped out of her chair.
And the baby fell to the floor.
And a black handgun appeared in the old lady’s hands, the cocking mechanism chucking loudly.
It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that the Hillbilly had no time to react, had no time to fire, had no time to retreat; he merely flinched backward as though splashed with cold water, and whirled instinctively, blinking and reeling at the harsh light flaring in his eyes from the backyard, and the noises, voices, and loud clanging of bullet chambers coming from all directions, and the bizarre image now lingering like a sun dot on the Hillbilly’s mind screen: the baby bounced!
The baby just fell to the floor—
—and it bounced!
“Stand down, goddamnit! Hold your fire!”
Grove came around the southwest corner of the house with his .44 Bulldog clenched in both hands, his Kevlar Second-Chance vest bunching around his neck, dragging on his lungs. He had been sitting in Geisel’s control van, fidgeting restlessly the whole night. Now his heart pumped and his boots slid on the wet grass as he lined up the intruder in his sights, his brain blazing with contrary flashes of thought: Bag this mother!—Goddamn idiots were supposed to wait till he gained entrance!—What went wrong?
The first shot rang out—a great watery boom—sending Grove to the ground as though he were sliding into home plate. The muzzle flash came from the backyard, from one of the SWAT guys from the Alexandria PD, a silver pop that lit up the sky and sang in the high tension wires.
Glass exploded.
The sliding doors went away, and the intruder rolled across the patio in a hailstorm of diamonds, unaffected, still clutching that contraption in his hand, that stupid goddamn redneck repeating gun. Less than fifteen feet away, in the shadows of the lawn, Grove struggled to his feet and started waving off the troops, screaming at the top of his lungs: “Hold your fire! Get back, goddamnit! Stand down! Stand down!”
The second volley came from the intruder himself as he rose to a kneeling position in front of the jagged broken patio doors and aimed at the figure inside.
Five quick thumps of air—fffhht-fffhht-fffhht-fffhht-fffhht—burst out of that homemade gun, trailing silver rosettes of fire.
Grove cried out from the lawn but it did no good. The large-caliber blasts tore through the family room and also through Special Agent Harvey Moshman with the relentless buzz of locusts. Agent Moshman—who was a veteran with Quantico Tactical, and was skinny enough to pass as an old lady—now jitterbugged in a cloud of red mist just insid
e the gaping doors, as the hollow-points tore through his fake dress and his African beads above his vest and sent the back of his head spraying across Maura’s Hepplewhite oak cabinet.
Outside, on the periphery of the lawn, heavily armed figures began converging on the house.
Panicking, acting mostly on instinct, Grove managed to climb back to his feet in that split second of silence and raise his Bulldog before the barrage started. But Grove didn’t fire at the intruder. He didn’t fire at anyone. He pointed the barrel skyward, and he squeezed off the contents of the cylinder: the Bulldog barked fire—five enormous BLATS!—into the black heavens like Roman candles.
Then Grove hurled himself to the ground, careening down the wet slope.
Almost simultaneously the intruder spun around with a .38 in his hand and was firing in Grove’s general direction as Grove covered his head as he slid against a hickory trunk. Bullets chewed through the air above him. A ricochet punched the dirt near his face and sprayed his eyes, but nothing hit him, and he ducked around behind the back of the tree.
Now the air lit up with high-caliber suppression fire from the trees, from the bushes, from the second-floor windows, from the shadows to the west of the property. The sound was tremendous and horrible—an earsplitting fireworks display—and the corresponding blasts strafed the edge of the patio in a continuous string of firecracker explosions, sending puffs of brick dust into the night air.
But through it all, blinking away the tears of adrenaline and the schmootz in his eyes, Grove could see the intruder slipping away across the lawn, scurrying toward the shadows of the woods like a rat fleeing a sinking ship. Good! That was exactly what Grove wanted. He had one chance. One chance. And it all depended on this redneck getting away.
In the distance the hit man vanished into the shadows of wild grass and foliage.
Meanwhile the black-clad figures started after the gunman. One of them—a younger officer with a jarhead haircut and steroid-marinated muscles—charged toward the woods, raising his M1 to his eye line.
Grove leapt across the patio with his Bulldog gripped in both hands. “Back off! Back off! Back off!”
The jarhead hesitated near the edge of the woods, nearly losing his balance on the wet grass. He spun around and gazed thunderstruck back at Grove, while a dozen or so other Tactical officers fanned across the lawn, either crouching down in firing positions or reloading their speed cartridges. Grove madly waved them all back as he hurried toward the woods.
“He’s mine! He’s mine!”
Grove plunged into the darkness of the forest with his Bulldog sticking out in front of him like the shaky prow of a ship. He could hear frantic breathing and churning footsteps up ahead, a shadow retreating into the blackness. The hit man had gained maybe a hundred-yard lead, but Grove had advantages: he was in terrific shape for a man his age, his cholesterol down, his weight a consistent 175 pounds; plus he had been trained by Bureau specialists back in the Academy in the art of tracking someone.
But most importantly he knew shortcuts.
SEVENTEEN
West Knoll, Virginia, is laid out in the style of a great medieval embattlement. Cross Creek, a narrow tributary of the Potomac, curls around three sides of the community like a moat. A swath of dense woods lines the inner banks of this waterway not unlike an impenetrable bastion. Inside these woods, the fortresses rise in all their glory—split-levels, ranch homes, Victorians, and massive Empire-style mansions whiskered in bougainvillea and ivy. Grove knew the southern edge of this kingdom well. He took his early morning runs around there sometimes, and he and Maura had looked at a house down there a year ago. Along the southernmost edge, the woods abut a tree-lined boulevard called Pilson Avenue, a sleepy cobblestone road that channels slow-moving traffic and tourists in horse carts toward Interstate 95 to the west.
At night the mercury vapor lamps blaze down on this lonely thoroughfare like votive candles in a silent chapel.
Grove reached the Pilson end of the woods—a mere thirty feet from the road’s pea-gravel shoulder—then paused inside the hickories, breathing hard, his pistol still clutched in both hands. His sweatpants were grass-stained and torn where he fell, his leg skinned and bleeding underneath. His Kevlar vest weighed a ton. His heart hammered. He could barely see the road through the foliage, which stretched into the distance to the west.
Pilson was deserted, litter skidding along the night wind like tumbleweeds. It was so quiet Grove could hear the buzz of sodium lamps…and the faint sound of sirens coming from the east, probably heading toward the shootout at 2215 Cottage Creek Drive. He squinted to see down the street. The assailant was now just a shadowy figure a block away, limping hurriedly along. Grove reached down into his pocket and found a small flat device about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
“Mobile One, this is Grove.” He murmured very softly into the walkie. “You copy?”
“Copy that,” a voice crackled.
“Shit.” He turned the volume down. “Listen…stay back at least a couple of miles. I don’t want him to hear even an echo of a chopper.”
“Yeah, copy. We got you on the GPS, we’ll wait for your signal.”
Grove clicked the radio off, shoved it back into his pocket, then pushed his way through the webbing of branches.
The humid breeze hit him in the face as he emerged from the woods. The air smelled of the Potomac, fishy and piquant. He took a deep breath and crept silently westward along the gravel shoulder, staying low, keeping his gun down but ready. A block and a half away, the shooter had turned a corner and was now heading south on Wabash Drive.
A row of dark storefronts loomed, lining the intersection of Pilson and Wabash. Grove slipped behind a dry cleaner’s, then hurried silently down an alley, past festering garbage and drifts of moldering trash. He thumbed the hammer back on the Bulldog as he approached Wabash.
The first shot rang out as he was emerging from the mouth of the alley.
Grove lurched behind a mailbox as the blast ricocheted off the cement with a dull crack, missing his right leg by mere inches. His ears rang. Shit! The assailant had already made him, and now it was a horse race. Grove peered around the edge of the mailbox and saw the shooter hobbling away, heading toward a row of low-slung warehouses.
“Shit!”
For one frantic instant Grove stayed there, crouched behind that mailbox, frozen with indecision. He could try for a head shot but what good would that do? DNA might identify this guy but it was unlikely such information would lead to the Ripper. A nonfatal wound might yield better results—they could sweat the information out of the bastard. But even that was doubtful. The best option was surveillance.
Grove sprang to his feet, then sprinted after the son of a bitch.
At the end of the block the assailant darted between two canning plants.
Grove raced after him. He reached the canneries in seconds flat, hurling around the corner of one building, and then into the dark gap between the two edifices. Leading with his gun, Grove ran with such hell-bent fury down that narrow passageway crowded with Dumpsters and pallets that he nearly cracked his teeth. He tasted the rusty tang of blood where he’d bitten his tongue. He gasped for breath.
Fifty yards ahead of him, the gunman vaulted over a rusted chain-link fence and vanished.
They had just crossed into a transitional area bordering the two main commercial districts of downtown Alexandria. Urban renewal and 1960s social programs had made feeble attempts to beautify the area, but the last few decades had taken their toll, and now the play lots and parks were riddled with decay. Behind the canneries lay a vast, littered abandoned baseball field. Grove landed on the other side of the fence and immediately noticed a lone vapor light shining down near the chain-link backstop, and it was directly at this pool of light that he aimed his .44.
The assailant was waiting for him.
Gunfire erupted like heat lightning.
Grove flung himself to the ground while simultaneously squeezing off a
n entire cylinder of rounds. The air boiled. Large-caliber blasts popped and thumped in the earth, as Grove rolled out of the line of fire. His .44 roared, the muzzle flashing brilliant florets, each concussive blast further deafening his ears with the impact of dynamite in his skull. Somehow Grove managed to roll behind the cover of a discarded oil drum near the right-field wall.
The barrage lifted.
The Bulldog clicked and clicked and clicked in Grove’s hand, as he instinctively kept squeezing the trigger long after the cylinder had run dry. He was out of breath, and deaf, and he had to huddle there behind that oil drum for a moment just to get the air back into his lungs.
Another moment passed. Grove peered around the edge of the barrel.
The assailant had vanished.
“Shit—shit!”
Grove sprang back to his feet, fumbling with the speed-loader as he hurried toward the empty pool of light behind the backstop. The air seemed frozen with echoes and latent violence. Grove finally got the bullets into the cylinder, snapping the .44 closed and tossing the empty loader. He reached the backstop and stayed low, coming around the left side, gun raised, hammer thumbed back.
The shooter was gone.
The stillness mocked Grove as he turned around and around, 360 degrees, searching for a receding shadow, pointing the gun at the empty night air. He became very still. He listened, and he heard something trailing off in the middle distant: frenzied footsteps.
Somebody running away.
Grove launched in to a dead run, charging after those fading footsteps.
The neighborhood to the immediate north was dense with gentrified condos and boutiques and artificial playgrounds for yuppie children with too much time on their sticky little hands. At night, the district rolled up its sidewalks. Most businesses closed at 6:00. Bars shut down by midnight. By 3:00 A.M. the place was a dark labyrinth of deserted storefronts and empty sidewalks.
At the intersection of Hamlin and Orchid, where the high-rise developments towered over manicured parkways of boxwood and lilies, and the quaint wrought-iron street lamps threw pools of yellow light on the cobblestones, Grove paused, his rasping lungs heaving for breath. He realized he couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore. It was over. He had lost the intruder—the only sure chance he had of finding the Mississippi Ripper.
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