Nathan's Run (1996)

by John Gilstrap

  "How sure do you want me to be?" Todd retorted, exasperation showing through in his own voice. "You left a picture of the kid at our door, and I'm telling you that the kid I saw for about five seconds fifteen hours ago looked like the picture." Patty, Peter and the dog had all joined him at the kitchen table to witness the inquisition.

  Greg took a deep breath and let it out. Clearly, his anxiety was showing, and he was telegraphing the wrong message to his witness. As the investigating officer for this portion of the Bailey case, he faced a difficult dilemma. If he reported to the state police that the Bailey kid had been sighted in Jenkins Township, the whole law enforcement world would descend upon them, perhaps to the exclusion of where the kid actually was:Just as surely as his discovery this afternoon could be a career-maker, a mistake could sentence him to life as a beat cop.

  There had been hundreds of Nathan sightings over the past twenty-four hours, some as far away as California. None of them had panned out. Greg needed some additional proof before he cried wolf. There had to be a way to verify Mr. Briscow's story.

  "Tell me again what he was wearing when you saw him," Greg said, straining inside to sound patient.

  Patience, however-real or pretended-was not Todd's long suit. "I already told you, Officer, that I don't remember. He had shorts, I know that, and some kind of sports team shirt. I don't recall which team."

  According to the reports from Virginia, Nathan Bailey had taken a Chicago Bulls shirt from the Nicholson house.

  "And where was he headed when you last saw him?"

  "When I first caught sight of him, he was coming toward our house, crossing the street."

  "From where?"

  "Like he was coming from the Perlmans' house."

  Not knowing who the Perlmans were or where they lived, that information was less than helpful. "Could he have been coming from St. Sebastian's Church?" Greg asked.

  Todd considered the question for a moment, calculating the map directions in his mind. At length, he nodded. "Yes. If he'd cut through the woods, that's the general way he would have come from."

  Greg clapped his hands together. "I think that's enough to call it an official Nathan sighting," he said with a smile. Turning to the other police officers who had gathered in the front hallway, he said, "Sounds like the real thing, guys. Let's go door-to-door and find him."

  It was always this way in police work. What you're looking for always showed up in the place you'd already searched. Greg thanked the Briscows for their assistance and rose from the kitchen table to assist the others in the search. As he approached the front door, he realized that he hadn't asked the most important question of all.

  "Mr. Briscow?" he said, turning around to face the family again.

  "Yes?"

  "Do you know if any of your neighbors are on vacation this week?"

  Todd winced as though he had a sudden toothache. "Jeeze, Officer, I don't know," he said. "I really don't know that many people in the neighborhood yet. We haven't lived here long enough."

  Greg nodded through his disappointment. He supposed there'd be no shortcuts on this one. "That's all right, sir. Just thought I'd ask. Thanks for your help."

  "Sorry."

  "No problem." He turned again for the door.

  "Wait a minute!" Todd exclaimed before Greg could take a step. Todd had the look of a man who had just discovered something important. "The Grimeses up the street are on vacation," he said. "I just remembered that the kid next door's been picking up their newspapers all week."

  At Greg's request, Todd walked the police officer up the street to the Grimes residence at 4120 Little Rocky Trail. To Greg, the house looked no different from the others in the neighborhood, except he remembered this as the one at which he had been compelled to look through the front window, having seen-no, sensed, really-motion through the sheer curtains.

  In the daylight, it had looked just like all the other empty houses on the street, but now, at night, its darkened windows stood out like an ink stain on a white tablecloth. As he drew his weapon from his holster, Greg told Todd to wait by the curb. Todd did him one better, and volunteered to go back home.

  At this point, procedure mandated that Greg call for backup. A lone-officer search of a structure for a confessed killer was insanity, and even to consider doing it violated every procedure he could think of. Crazier still was the prospect of bringing every cop in the free world to bear on a property that was merely empty. In the world of the police officer, it was far better to be dead than embarrassed. With no serious thought at all, he decided to perform this search on his own. In his worst moments of self-doubt, it had never even occurred to him that he couldn't outshoot a kid. Now he was surprised that the thought gave him such comfort.

  He started where he'd left off last time, shining his flashlight through the front window. In the dim, deflected glow of the light, nothing seemed out of place. Just a darkened living room, not entirely unlike his own. He walked down off the front porch into the side yard. Not sure what he was looking for, exactly, he noted that there were no footprints in the grass, and no broken glass. The air conditioning compressor was running, but that didn't necessarily mean anything, did it?

  The backyard was more of the same. He'd read in the report from the Nicholsons' house that Nathan had gained entry through the back door, but this house had no back door on ground level. Rather, it was a half-level up, where a deck might have been built, but wasn't. A wooden railing in front of the door blocked any direct access anyway.

  The only conceivable means of entry would be through the kitchen windows, which seemed intact, or through one of the tiny grass-level basement windows. As a random thought, he admired the housekeeping skills of the homeowner. At his own home, the basement panes were perpetually mud-spattered, but here, the Grimeses' windows were spotless. One was so clean that it appeared not to be there at all.

  The significance of the thought made Greg's skin crawl. No matter how clean the glass, there should always be a reflection of a flashlight.

  "Well, I'll be damned," Greg mumbled aloud. He assumed a shooter's position on his belly, playing his light around the inside of the basement, backed up by his service revolver, with his finger a half-pull on the trigger. Once he verified that nothing was either moving or alive, he lowered himself through the window, and inside the house.

  The voice of his field training officer from long ago boomed in his mind to call for backup, but he ignored it. He could sense the nearness of his prey, and he was going to finish this one himself. It would be the perfect day: discovering the car, and capturing the kid. He just hoped to God there'd be no shooting. The paperwork on shooting an adult was ridiculous. Greg didn't even want to think about what would be involved with shooting a kid.

  Greg's movements inside the house were spiderlike. His weapon was an extension of his right arm, held stiffly out at ninety degrees, with the base of the grip cradled in his left hand, which also held the mini Maglite, whose powerful light beam was aligned with the muzzle of his pistol, brightly illuminating his field of view. His back was rigidly straight, his knees were bent, and he advanced through the basement and up the stairs like a fencer, his feet never crossing. He was perfectly balanced for a fight.

  The door at the top of the basement stairs was closed but not locked, posing only a moment's delay in his search. If the kid were there, and if he were smart, he'd be waiting on the blind side of the door, and he'd take his shot at the first sign of movement. Aware of this, and being smarter than the average bad guy, Greg paused before proceeding, playing his flashlight around to provide the boy who wasn't there with a false target. Then he charged forward and shoulder-rolled into the kitchen, recovering expertly to jerk his gun and light in a horizontal arc, covering all compass points. There were no visible targets to be shot.

  It was only after a thorough search of the second floor of the house that Greg found a note on the kitchen table signed by Nathan Bailey. The good news was that this was the right hous
e. The bad news was that they had missed the kid. The note apologized for breaking in, and assured the homeowners that he'd done the laundry for them. It went on to say how badly he felt that he had to steal their car, and that, oh, by the way, he now had a gun.

  Greg lifted his portable radio and keyed the mike.

  Chapter 25

  In the dark, New York looked a whole lot like Pennsylvania. For the last five miles, a car had parked itself on Nathan's back bumper and refused to back off. He'd tried slowing down to get the guy to pass him, and he'd tried speeding up in an effort to lose him, but nothing worked; the guy just stayed there, about three feet behind, his bright lights in the rear- and sideview mirrors burning circles into Nathan's retinas. The other driver was playing some sort of game, racing up close, then falling back a ways. The game frightened him.

  After seeing the parade of police cars entering the neighborhood, Nathan had made the decision to avoid the main highways, and to stick instead to the smaller roads. On the map, they looked like they all headed in the same direction. And once he had gotten the hang of the gearshift, he was as comfortable piloting the little Honda around the curves as he was the Beemer.

  Like so many other decisions he'd made these past couple of days, this one seemed to have started out well, and then turned sour. He hadn't realized how much of a sense of security there was in passing gas stations and other occupied places periodically. At 1:30 in the morning, there were no lights anywhere, and no other cars around, which to Nathan meant that there were no sources for assistance when this asshole in his mirror finally did whatever he was planning. One thing was certain, though. He had been smart to take the pistol with him.

  Sheriff's Deputy Chad Steadman's orders were clear. He wasn't to make the stop until backup units were in place. According to the last report from the Pennsylvania boys, Nathan Bailey was armed and dangerous, and driving the Honda that Chad had been following for the last twelve miles. In the wash of his high beams, the driver certainly looked short enough to be a kid. And the job the driver had done on the license plates wouldn't fool anybody.

  To kill the time as he waited for the other two on-duty Pitcairn County patrolmen to form up on him, he decided to play a little catand-mouse, falling back a few car lengths, and then roaring ahead till he nearly hit the Honda's rear bumper. If the kid bolted, he'd have probable cause to pursue on his own. The games seemed to unnerve the kid a little, but other than some erratic swerving, he kept his cool. Steadman wasn't sure how he felt about a kid keeping his cool under pressure. Wouldn't that make him all the more difficult to manage after he was captured?

  Steadman saw headlights cresting the hill behind him at the same instant his radio crackled to life. "Charlie Seven's on location with Baker Fifteen," the speaker barked.

  "Charlie Seven," acknowledged the dispatcher.

  Steadman pulled the microphone out of its dash-mounted clamp and thumbed the transmit button. "Baker Fifteen, Charlie Seven," he said, hailing Jerry Schmidtt, his newly arrived backup.

  "Charlie Seven, bye."

  "Reliability is high that this is our kid," Steadman explained in the practiced monotone of one who had logged many hours of radio time. "He's been driving erratically. May have made me as a cop.

  "You wanna make the stop now?"

  "Negative. Command Six is en route; not sure of his ten-twenty," Steadman cautioned, noting for the tape that recorded all radio traffic that he was ready to do his job even when his boss was nowhere to be found.

  "Command Six, Baker Fifteen." The speaker rattled with the gravelly tones of Sergeant Watts, the watch commander.

  Steadman smiled. Gotcha, he didn't say. "Baker Fifteen?'

  "I'm at Halsey Road and Route One Sixty-Eight," his boss explained. "What's your ten-twenty from that location?"

  Steadman's smile turned into a disappointed frown. Old fart was a lot closer than he'd given credit. "That'd be about a mile and a half, Command Six."

  "All right," Watts decided, "we'll make our stand here. I'll set up a roadblock. Treat this as a felony stop."

  "Baker Fifteen's okay," Steadman acknowledged.

  "Charlie Seven's affirm?'

  Steadman lived for felony stops. It was the closest they ever came in Pitcairn County to being like the police officers on Cops. As they approached the site of the roadblock, Steadman and Schmidtt would hit their lights and sirens and wedge the Honda into a triangle of vehicles from which there would be no escape. From behind the cover of their doors, and armed with shotguns, the three officers would demand that their prisoner get out of his car and sprawl on the ground, from which position he would be taken into custody. If things went well, no one would get hurt. But if the little bastard did anything funny-especially with his hands-he'd be no shit forever dead.

  Nathan's heart dropped when he saw the second set of headlights in his mirror. That was no child molester in the car behind him. That was a cop. As the second car approached from behind, its lights highlighted the red and blue lightbar on the roof.

  Keep cool, boy, Nathan coached himself silently. They haven't stopped you yet. Maybe they don't know. Maybe they're on their way someplace else. He knew the thought was ridiculous, but his brush with suicide had shaken him into a forced optimism. As long as there was hope.. .

  His mind raced for a way out. As long as they were all just driving along together and he was in the front, then everything was okay. But soon they would make a move, and he wanted to be prepared. They had to catch him before they could put him back in a cage. Just be ready for anything.

  He wasn't.

  Up ahead, the woods on either side of him started to give way to darkened homes and businesses. A yellow reflective sign warned him of an approaching intersection with a school crossing, and instructed him to slow down to twenty-five. Under the circumstances, Nathan didn't think that would be a very good idea. His foot got heavier. Whatever they were going to do, he sensed it would happen soon.

  There it was. A roadblock. About a hundred yards ahead, a cop car was crossways in the street, its blue and red lights sweeping the buildings around it. In his rearview mirror, two more sets of lights jumped to life, and he was startled by the electronic yelp of a siren.

  "Oh, shit!" he spat, not even hearing the words as they escaped. For just the slightest instant, he took his foot off the gas, but then he realized that to keep hope alive, he had to keep moving. "Just you and me, God," he said.

  Jamming the gas pedal to the floor, the rubber pad became just a tiny wedge between his sneaker and the thin-napped carpet.

  Steadman couldn't believe what he was seeing. After having to hit his brakes when the kid slowed down, the distance between them grew dramatically. Over the wail of his siren, he could hear the whiny roar of the Honda's engine as it dopplered away from him.

  "Son of a bitch is running!" he shouted into his mike.

  But there was no place to go. Watts's cruiser had completely blocked the roadway, leaving only a foot between his back bumper and the four-inch curb. Nothing could get through that space.

  Steadman thumbed his mike again. "Christ, Sarge, he's gonna ram you!"

  Even as he approached the cop car blocking his path, Nathan didn't know where he was going to go, except that somehow he was going to get past it. The distance closed with frightening speed as the Honda's speedometer passed fifty.

  More by instinct than by conscious thought, with less than a dozen yards to go before impact with the police cruiser, Nathan gallumphed the Honda over the curb, the transmission making a horrendous crashing sound as it dragged itself along the concrete. The car went airborne for just an instant, and then crashed back down onto the grass on all four wheels. He struggled to control the vehicle as it spun on the dew-soaked sod.

  He didn't even see the shotgun before it discharged.

  "Jesus Christ!" Steadman shouted aloud as he saw Watts discharge his riot gun at point-blank range into the Honda. The muzzle flash was three feet long in the darkness. "Fucker's dead no
w," he declared, surprised by the satisfaction in his voice.

  The explosion to his left deafened Nathan instantly, though he shrieked aloud as nine thirty-two-caliber pellets mauled the rear window and post, shredded the passenger seat and headrest, and then went on to blast out the windshield, leaving him a near-opaque spiderweb of shattered glass to see through. It had to be a shotgun, he knew. The dickheads were still trying to kill him!

  He had no time to regain his bearings before he was back out on the flat street, with the roadblock getting smaller behind him. As he watched in the rearview mirror, he saw a muzzle flash like a yellow camera strobe, and just an instant later, the mirror, along with the rest of the windshield, was gone in a white puff of erupting glass. He yelled again and pressed the gas pedal even harder.

  The car did not respond.

  "Oh, God, no! Not now! Please, God, not now!" For the first time since he had seen the cars in the mirror, he was gripped with terror. The Honda was slowing! He tried to downshift, but the gears responded only with a teeth-rattling groan. The gearbox had been destroyed by the impact with the curb.

  As Nathan pleaded for help from the Almighty, the speedometer crossed twenty-five on its way down to zero.

  "FUCK!" he shouted. It was the worst word he knew.

  He jammed the brake and the Honda jolted to a stop in the middle of the road. I'll do it on foot if I have to, he declared silently.

  But Steadman was on him before he could reach for the door handle.

  "Let me see your hands!" an adult voice shrieked from behind him. "Show me your hands or I'll blow your fucking head offl."

  Nathan sat still for a moment, coming to grips with the end of his journey. Somewhere in this mess there was hope, he supposed, but it was awfully well camouflaged. He slowly raised his hands into the air, surrendering not only to the police, but to his own fate.

  His ears still rang from the gunshot, but he could hear the sound of running feet as they approached from behind. Out of nowhere, a gun barrel propelled itself through what was left of his side window and bored painfully into his ear.