While I ducked into the shadow behind the car, a motion-sensing fixture shot a beam of light down the stairway. Seeing it, I uttered a silent prayer of gratitude. If I had headed for the stairway right then instead of toward Kramer, the light would have flashed a vivid warning to everyone below that someone was coming. Had I been caught in that blinding shaft of light, I would have been a sitting duck.
"Come on, come on," Bill Whitten urged. "Get a move on."
"I'm moving as fast as I can," Grace Highsmith returned crisply. "I'm no spring chicken, you know."
Bad as the situation was, I couldn't help smiling. Faced with the very real possibility of her own death, naturally Grace Highsmith was arguing with her self-appointed executioner, lecturing this man who was most likely a multiple murderer as though he were nothing but an errant schoolboy.
Long seconds passed before she finally came into view, pulling herself along the handrail, her purse dangling from one forearm. Seeing that purse, I couldn't help wishing that the. 32 auto was still concealed in Grace Highsmith's pocketbook rather than languishing in the safety of the Firearms Section of Washington State Patrol. Latty had said her aunt had wanted the gun for protection. If ever that stubborn old woman needed protection, it was now.
I had hoped for an opportunity to get off a clean shot, but there was no chance of that. Bill Whitten was walking directly behind Grace. If he had killed three times already, there was no reason to think he would hesitate to do so again. In fact, what I couldn't understand was why he was bringing Grace along.
"Mr. Whitten," Ron Peters called, rolling into sight around the garage. "Let the woman go."
Everything stopped. No one moved. For several seconds, no one said a word.
Then Bill Whitten grabbed Grace Highsmith and pulled her back against him. I saw the gun then as he pressed it against her head.
"Who are you?" he demanded. "What do you want?"
"I'm a police officer," Ron said, raising his hands in the air. "I'm unarmed. Let her go. Just because your life is falling apart is no reason to go around killing people."
"Shoot him," Grace shrieked. "Don't worry about me. Get him. He's a killer. He tried to frame my niece. He-"
One-handed, Bill Whitten lifted Grace Highsmith off the ground and shook her. "Shut up!" he ordered.
I understood at once what Ron was doing. By keeping Whitten's focus on him, he was hoping to give me an opportunity to fire off a shot. But I was too far away. There was no way I could hit Whitten without running the risk of hitting Grace as well.
"Get out of the way," Whitten said, as the two of them gained street level. "We're going to get in the car, and we're going to drive away. Otherwise, she dies."
"Don't listen to him," Grace said, finding her voice. "I don't matter. This man is evil. Don't let him get away with anything more."
Ron moved his chair back, as if clearing a path for them to come up the stairs and walk past him. Just then, another car came up the street. This one wove around the haphazardly parked cars, momentarily leaving me fully exposed as a Mercedes station wagon loaded to the gills with a mother and several kids made its way past our little tableau.
And at just that moment, when any kind of change in the dynamics of the situation could have been most damaging to a carload of innocent children, Grace Highsmith took decisive action. At first, she seemed to slump over, as though she had fainted. Then, when Whitten looked down at her to see what was happening, she twisted around in his arms and kneed him in the groin.
With a startled gasp, he stumbled and seemed to fall forward, landing on Grace, who had dropped to her hands and knees in front of him. In the flurry of arms and legs, I realized that the gun had been knocked from his hand. At that point, Whitten was unarmed, but again, there was no chance of getting off a clear shot or even any shot at all. Whitten leaned back and reached for the gun while Grace scuttled away from him. Meanwhile, Ron rolled forward with one hand outstretched and reaching to help. He caught Grace by the arm and somehow pulled her clear, dragging her with him by one hand while rolling backward with the other.
By then, Whitten had retrieved the gun. Before he had time enough to raise it or aim, I squeezed off a single shot. The bullet caught him in the left shoulder. It turned him around and sent him tumbling backward down the stairs. As I raced forward, hoping to fire again, Ron dragged Grace to relative safety behind the garage.
"Stop," I yelled. "Stop or I'll shoot!"
Whitten's answer came in the form of a sharp report of gunfire. Suddenly, the light over the stairway was snuffed out, leveling the playing field, momentarily blinding everybody.
Dropping down on all fours, I wiggled up to the edge of the stairway and peered down. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the dark, Whitten had disappeared. When another shot rang out and sent a bullet whizzing over my head, it didn't come from the landing at the bottom of the stairs, from behind the woodpile, or even from the cover of the house. The report came from off to one side of the stairs, from a rocky, brush-covered bank ten feet or so from the shoulder of the road-from much the same area where Paul Kramer lay wounded.
"Get away from me," Bill Whitten ordered. "You shoot me, Detective Beaumont, and this officer friend of yours is a dead man."
Off in the distance, I could hear the sound of sirens. Ron Peters had done his job-both his jobs. Not only had he dragged Grace Highsmith to safety, he had also summoned help-the Kirkland cops. But from the sound of it, our backup patrol cars were just then starting down the ravine.
In a world where vest-piercing bullets can end a life in a heartbeat, Paul Kramer could be dead long before help arrived. In hostage situations, the idea, of course, is somehow to open up the lines of communication, to keep them talking.
"What do you want?" I asked.
Another bullet pinged off the top of the stairway, inches from my face. It wasn't the kind of answer I wanted, but it was, by God, an answer.
Twenty-two
In those few brief moments, personalities disappeared. Kramer stopped being the jackass who had always rubbed me the wrong way. He was a cop in trouble. Like it or not, that gave him a claim on me-the responsibility of trying to save his damned hide.
The next thing I knew, someone was tapping me on the shoulder. I turned around to find Peters lying on the cold ground next to me. Using his powerful arms and dragging his legs, he had belly-crawled up beside me.
"Grace is okay," he whispered.
Armed with his nine-millimeter Glock, Ron gestured for me to move off to the left. The unspoken plan was that while he created yet another diversion, I should try to get the drop on Whitten from some unexpected angle. Nodding, I slipped away, leaving Ron Peters to be our mouthpiece.
"Look, Whitten," he called down the bluff. "You're not going to get away with any of this. Listen to the sirens. More cops are on their way. Give up while you still can, before somebody else gets hurt."
Ron's attempt at communication, like mine, was immediately met by a similar answer-another gunshot. The inevitable conclusion had to be that time for talking to Bill Whitten had ended some time ago.
Meanwhile, I scooted away, back toward the parking ledge with its two parked cars. Staying low, I crept along the shoulder of the road, following the edge of the bank. I tried to keep the noise to a minimum, but each time my feet scraped over a loose piece of gravel, the resulting crackle in my cringing ear sounded almost as loud as a clap of thunder.
Several days into a Pacific Northwest January, the early nighttime chill was cold as blue blazes. The pavement wasn't yet icy, but it would be by morning. With every move, sharp frigid edges of rocks and pieces of gravel bit painfully into my skin. My teeth chattered. The hand that held my gun shook convulsively, as much from cold as from fear. The Beretta in my frozen fingers felt as though it weighed ten pounds.