“Laminate flooring,” Mel announced. “I’d call that a pretty high-class floor covering for a dump like this.”
“Especially if you’re renting,” I said.
The front door was standing open to allow for the passage of an extension cord. A portable saw with a pile of damp sawdust next to it stood just outside. We were stepping up to the door when we heard the sound of voices.
“You’ve got no right to come charging in here like this without so much as a by-your-leave,” someone was saying.
“I just came by to talk to you,” Paul Kramer said. “I wanted to go over some phone records with you. I knocked, but you must not have heard-” He stopped. “Wait a minute. What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“There on the floor.”
“Paint,” Bill Winkler answered. “Red paint. One of my guys spilled it earlier this week. I decided covering it over would be easier than cleaning it up.”
“It doesn’t look like paint to me,” Kramer said. “It looks more like blood-a lot of it. I think you’d better come with me, Mr. Winkler. I’d say we have far more to discuss than phone records.”
“Like hell!” Bill Winkler responded. I heard a dull thud-the kind of noise you hear on a football field when one player crashes into another, only I doubted anyone here was wearing protective padding. I looked at Mel. She was already reaching for her phone.
Inside, the sounds of a desperate struggle continued. We both had our backup weapons-lightweight Glocks that were fine up close but would be useless from a distance. That meant for our guns to be useful we had to be inside the building, but neither of us was wearing a vest. Mel’s was probably in her trunk. Mine was at home.
“Go,” she told me in an urgent whisper. “Once you’re inside, you go left. I’ll go right as soon as I’m off the phone.”
I stepped through the door and into the warehouse just as a muffled gunshot ended the struggle. Only half the cavernous room was lit by the feeble glow of hanging fluorescent shop lights. Thankful for the dim lighting, I dodged forward between ranks of mostly empty metal shelving. Finally I was close enough that I could see the outline of a man standing still, breathing heavily, and looking down. I could also see the outline of the gun in his hand.
I caught a flash of movement off to my right as Mel Soames darted through the door and then disappeared behind a tall wooden counter. “Drop it!” she shouted. “We’ve got the place surrounded. Put down your weapon and get down on the floor, facedown.”
Surrounded? I knew she was bluffing. Mel knew she was bluffing. All we could hope was that Bill Winkler had no idea.
But he must have. “Hell, no!” he exclaimed. With that he turned and set off at a dead run for the far side of the building, where only now I could see the outline of another door. He reached it, pulled it open, and then stood behind it, using it for cover as he sprayed the interior of the building with a barrage of automatic gunfire.
For a moment, after the door banged shut, I stood where I was. “Kramer,” I shouted. “It’s Beaumont. Can you hear me? Are you all right?”
His response was more groan than anything else. “Go get him. Don’t let him get away.”
I turned and sprinted toward the door. Mel was there waiting. “Here,” she said, and thrust a set of keys into my hand.
“They’re from his van,” she said. “I saw them and took them when I was making the call. Without your vest, we’ll be better off in vehicles.”
“Right,” I said. And away we went.
CHAPTER 23
As we exited the building, the first of several squad cars came streaming through the gate. Those guys had weapons and vests and they were all a hell of a lot younger than either Mel or me. While the young Turks went sprinting off toward the back of the building, Mel and I hurried back inside, with Mel redialing 911 and calling for medics as we went.
We found Paul Kramer lying faceup on the concrete floor. He looked so pallid in the yellow-tinged glow of the fluorescent lights that at first I was afraid he was already dead, but when we reached him, he was still breathing.
“Thank God!” I exclaimed.
He had been wearing a vest. Unfortunately, a single bullet had sliced through the edge at the bottom of the vest and veered into his ample gut. He was doing his best to maintain some kind of pressure on the bloody wound, but he was losing it and slipping into unconsciousness. I moved his hand aside and put my own in place of his. Kramer was a pain in the ass, but I had never wished him this kind of ill.
“Stay with me, Kramer,” I ordered. “You son of a bitch, you’d better not give up and die on me now. What in blazes were you thinking coming here alone?”
His eyes blinked open briefly and then closed again. “Hurts,” he murmured. “Hurts like hell.”
Mel whipped off her dove-gray blazer and put it under his head. “Stay here,” she told me. “I’ve got a blanket in my trunk.” She took off like a shot.
“I’m sorry…” Kramer began.
“Forget about it,” I said. “Don’t talk. Save your strength. The ambulance will be here soon.”
Mel returned a minute or so later carrying a plaid wool blanket which she unfolded and carefully placed over Kramer’s body. His eyes blinked open again as he felt the weight of the blanket. “Catch him?” he mumbled.
“Not yet,” Mel said. “They’re looking. He evidently had a boat of some kind moored out back. He took off in that. The uniforms have called for more help-a helicopter, a police boat, and a canine unit. Don’t worry. They’ll find him.”
A wailing siren announced the arrival of an aid car and soon a troop of EMTs jogged through the door.
“Over here,” Mel shouted, standing up and waving. “We’re over here.”
Within seconds, the latex-gloved EMTs took over. Now that the crisis was out of my hands, I moved to one side, feeling surprisingly shaky.
“Are you all right?” Mel asked.
I nodded.
“You should probably go wash up,” she said. “You’re covered with blood. The rest room’s right over there.”
She was right. There was lots of blood. I went into the rest room and spent the better part of five minutes letting the soap and water sluice over my hands, but the blood didn’t want to let go. The water in the bowl turned pink time after time. Even when I could no longer see it, I knew it was still there-on my hands and on my clothing. When I finally exited the rest room, Mel was waiting outside. Her dove-gray outfit and white blouse were as bloodstained as mine. Clearly we were a matched pair.
“That’s what you get for wearing good clothes so early in the day,” I told her. “You’re a mess, too.”
“According to my mother, I always was,” she said.
I looked around the interior of the warehouse. The place was crawling with cops, in uniform and out, but the EMTs and Kramer were nowhere in sight.
“Where’d they take him? Harborview?”
Mel nodded. “I told Detective Monroe, the lead investigator, that’s where we’d be going, too. I gave her our cell-phone numbers.”
I remembered Sasha Monroe’s first day in uniform. Now she was a lead investigator. Feeling old as the hills didn’t improve my frame of mind.
“Let’s go then,” Mel said.
As we drove out through the gate, the neighborhood was parked full of patrol cars, but somehow Bill Winkler had given them the slip.
“What the hell was Kramer doing there alone?” I demanded.
Mel laughed. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never done anything stupid?”
“Well…”
“We were pushing him,” she said. “I’m sure he had access to the same phone records we have. The only difference is he went through them, and we haven’t. He wanted to ace us out of solving the case. Once he figured out what was up, he didn’t want to wait around until any of his guys showed up.”
“And besides,” I added, “he’s invincible.”
“Exactly,” Mel agreed.
The two of us were already in the ICU waiting room-the same waiting room I’d occupied the night before-when Kramer’s wife, Sally, and his daughter, Sue Ann, showed up. Sue Ann was fifteen and could have been a dead ringer for Heather Peters, except Sue Ann’s hair was green.