But as I began going from door to door, my discomfort grew.
I was pulling open the third door along the hallway when I heard a distant thump, dull enough to be barely noticeable. I stood stock-still, waiting for something more. Then I tried the radio. “Audrey? You okay?”
The dead silence sent me running.
I found her struggling to get to her feet in the hallway beyond the fire door. “You all right?”
She pushed me away, already staggering toward the distant staircase. “Son of a bitch jumped me. Went up.”
I grabbed her arm to steady her, noticing a smear of blood and a large swelling by her temple, along with a look of determined rage. It never occurred to me to try to get her to sit down. I did, however, update everyone by radio.
The stairs led straight up to stage level, dark, grandiose, and reverberating with music. After the bright, bland corridors below, the contrast was disorienting. Stepping onto the stage itself, I saw people with flashlights running down the aisles from the front of the theater and heard, for the first time, the orchestra begin to falter.
A sonorous crash indicated why. Springing from beneath the scaffold-like risers on which the rearmost musicians were seated, Lenny Markham made a dash for the opposite side of the stage, using the middle tier of the orchestra as a shortcut. Like a football player with the crowd cheering him on, he pushed and shoved his way along, scattering bodies and instruments to an accompaniment of shouts and curses, with Audrey and me in close pursuit.
But Lenny had the advantage. Following in his destructive wake proved slow going, and by the time we reached the other side, he’d disappeared into the wings.
By now, people were converging from every corner. Audrey ignored them all. With her knowledge of the building’s details and her passion to nail the man who’d made her look bad, she steamrolled her way past everybody and disappeared through a door in the far wall. The most I could do was ride shotgun.
We descended another set of stairs to a hallway like the one we’d just left-well lit, empty, and utterly quiet. “You sure he came down here?” I asked. “He didn’t have a choice,” she answered, checking the first door. It led to a large, dark, ghostly room with two oversized furnaces squatting in its middle like prehistoric monsters. We walked around them, sweeping the corners with my small light.
I was headed back out when Audrey stopped me. “Hang on. There’s one other place.”
She stepped up to a door I hadn’t noticed, about three feet tall, mounted flush to the building’s exterior wall. “It’s the old coal bin,” she explained. “Used to feed the furnaces before they converted to oil.”
She crouched and grabbed the door’s handle. At that moment, it flew back and smacked her in the forehead, sending her spreadeagled to the floor. I glanced at her quickly as I stepped past and saw her weakly reach for her head. I huddled by the side of the door and pushed it wide open with my foot, gun in hand. “Lenny, this is the police. Come out with your hands up.”
I heard a frantic scrambling, as from a huge rodent struggling to run up a gravel hill. Gun and penlight held as a unit, I swung around the corner to look inside.
What confronted me was a room so vast and dark, and so filled with cloying dust, it virtually swallowed what little glimmer my small light could put out. I could barely discern, as if through a fog, a slight, pale, distant blur, at which I shouted, “Stop,” to predictable results.
I stepped inside the room, aiming to give chase.
It was then the meaning of the strange noise I’d heard became clear. My ankles disappeared into a crunchy quicksand of loose coal, throwing me off balance and pitching me forward. The bin, long abandoned, still housed a half load of fuel, probably dating back decades, and it was through this that I had to pursue the pale figure up ahead, stumbling, slipping, and choking on a cloud undisturbed for years.
Halfway across the bin, a sudden flash of light made me instinctively leap to one side. The acrid, dust-choked tomb was abruptly filled with diffused sunshine, sparkling off millions of dark airborne particles like a perverse parody of a religious revelation. I squinted at its source and briefly saw the haloed outline of Lenny Markham as he scrambled into the light and escaped to freedom.
My headache returning with a vengeance, I slowly reholstered my gun.
Chapter 19
Tim Giordi looked at us with open contempt. It was an hour after Lenny Markham had made good his escape from the Flynn Theatre, during which time Giordi had pieced together the string of poor decisions that had aided Lenny’s escape. My sole comfort was that in that same period of time, I’d been able to take a shower and an aspirin and beg a change of clothes.
Filling Giordi’s office were Audrey McGowen, a bandage around her head, Duncan Fasca, Jonathon Michael, and myself.
“I won’t go into details now,” Giordi began. “I still have more to investigate, and more apologies to make to a lot of pissed-off people. I did want it known, however, that this is not being considered a minor lapse of protocol. What happened out there was human, but it was not forgivable. You turned the routine stakeout of a nonviolent suspect into a circus by ignoring the precise procedures created to avoid just such an escalation. You people are goddamn lucky Lenny Markham wasn’t armed or didn’t choose to use his weapon. And you, Joe,” he added, pointing at me, “it’s a miracle you’re not dead.”
“For which I’d like Duncan officially commended,” I said. “Nothing would have altered that part of this fiasco. Neither one of us had any reason to think Lenny would turn violent. I know things could’ve been done better later on, but I’d like his quick thinking reflected on the record.”
Giordi sighed softly. “So noted. You did all right, Duncan. Which,” and here he stared at Audrey, “is more than I can say for others.”
Audrey didn’t react, so I opened my mouth to fend for her, too.
Giordi stopped me with an upheld hand. “I know, I know. Officer McGowen is a monument of rectitude, decisiveness, and honor. And I am keeping in mind her obvious perseverance. But we all know there was a major screw-up here, and I am not going to let a bunch of smokescreen testimonials disguise that fact. From what I’ve gathered so far, nobody’s job is threatened, but this will be dealt with in such a fashion that you’ll never pull a similar stunt again. Is that clear?”
He wasn’t looking for an answer, so we all filed out without comment. In the hallway, Duncan Fasca, whom I’d written off earlier as a throwback to the hardheaded cops of yore, shook my hand. “Thanks.”
“It was the truth. You saved my butt.”
He shook his head. “I was scared shitless.”
Audrey was looking at the ground. “I’m sorry I let you down.”
I started to say something soothing, but Duncan surprised me again. “You did what you thought was right, and we all went along with it. You’re not alone on this, even if they single you out-don’t worry about that. There’s not one of them that hasn’t screwed up one time or another in their career, and they’re the head guys. This’ll pass. What pisses me off is that Lenny’s not getting nailed for it.”
“You have any idea where he is?” I asked.
Fasca shrugged without comment.
Jonathon, having weathered the storm without a scratch, suggested, “Maybe we could go over his files again-check his habits.”
We headed toward the detective bureau and Fasca’s desk. “Why do you think he ran for it?” I asked no one in particular.
“You told him his life was being threatened,” Duncan said.
“I said Bouch was threatening it,” I corrected.
“But you didn’t say how or why,” Jonathon joined in, having been briefed on the conversation earlier.
“Implying he already knew,” I said.