He couldn’t help wondering if the bouquet—or “posies” in the words of the nursery rhyme—had been intended for delivery to him, perhaps as a final message to be left on his dead body.
The second oddity was a black metal object, half the size of a carton of cigarettes, on the ground between Gurney and the bouquet. His reaction to that was sudden and physical, yanking the handlebars to the right and twisting the throttle. The bike pivoted sharply, propelling a shower of dirt and pebbles into the darkness and accelerating along the edge of the tarn.
Had he failed to get out of the way as quickly as he did, the explosion that followed would have killed him. As it was, the only negative effect was a painful blast of dirt and small stones against his back.
In response to this attempt on his life, he called out in his best team-leader voice. “All units converge, back slope, Barrow Hill. Remote explosive. No casualties.” The idea was to increase the pressure. Make Panikos get reckless, make mistakes, lose control. Maybe hit a tree, flip into a ditch. The goal was to stop him, one way or another.
The unforgivable thing would be to let him get away.
To let the red BMW race off into the distance and disappear forever.
No. That wasn’t going to happen. No matter what, that wasn’t going to happen again.
He couldn’t let Panikos get too far ahead. At two hundred yards, for example, he might have the space and time he’d need to come to a sudden stop, turn, steady his weapon, and get off a good shot while Gurney was still too far away to have a chance with the Beretta.
With his attention alternating rapidly now between the ATV taillights and the rutted trail, Gurney was neither gaining nor losing ground. But with every passing second on the bike, he could feel his physical motorcycle memory returning. Like skiing after a long layoff, heading down that trail was bringing back his timing and coordination. By the time they emerged onto the paved surface of Beaver Cross, the ATV still about a hundred yards ahead of him, Gurney felt confident enough to open up the throttle all the way.
The ATV seemed unusually fast—apparently built or modified for racing—but the BSA was faster. Within a mile, Gurney had reduced the gap between them to fifty, maybe forty yards—still too far for a pistol shot from a motorcycle. He figured he’d be close enough in another half mile or so.
Perhaps sensing the same possibility from the opposing point of view, Panikos veered off the paved road onto a roughly parallel farm track that ran along the verge of a long cornfield. Gurney did the same, in case the little man decided to head off into the cornfield itself.
Even more rutted than the Barrow Hill trail, the farm track imposed its own speed limit of twenty to thirty miles per hour, taking away the BSA’s open-road advantage and preserving Panikos’s lead—even widening it a bit, since the forks and shocks of his machine were more suited to the surface than Gurney’s.
The track and its adjacent cornfield sloped down to the relatively flatter but still severely uneven terrain of the river valley. At the end of the track, Panikos continued on into the abandoned pasture of what Gurney had been told was once the region’s largest dairy farm. Now a patchwork of large grassy hummocks and muddy rivulets, it gave the ATV a distinct advantage over the BSA, widening Panikos’s lead to the original hundred yards and then some, impelling Gurney to push the BSA at insane speeds through the equivalent of an unlit slalom course. There was a primal simplicity in hot pursuit that anesthetized fear and suppressed any reasonable calculation of risk.
In addition to the red taillights that he was zeroing in on, he began catching glimpses of other lights farther down the valley. Colored lights, white lights, some seemingly fixed in place, some moving. These at first had a disorienting effect on him. Where the hell was he? Bright arrays of lights were as uncommon in Walnut Crossing as meadowlarks in Manhattan. Then, when he saw an arc of orange lights slowly rotating, it came to him.
It was the Ferris wheel at the Summer Mountain Fair.
Panikos was still widening his lead through a wet depression of boggy land that separated the former pasture from the higher and drier square-mile field that was home to the fair and its parking areas. For a few desperate seconds, Gurney thought he’d lost Panikos in the sea of vehicles surrounding the perimeter fence of the fair itself. But then he caught sight of the familiar taillights moving along an outer parking lane in the direction of the exhibitors’ entrance.
By the time he reached that entrance himself, the ATV had already passed through it. Three young women wearing FAIR SECURITY armbands, evidently in charge of controlling that admission point, looked disconcerted. One was on a walkie-talkie, the other on a cell phone. Gurney pulled up next to the third. Straddling the bike, he flashed his NYPD-Retired credentials at her as he spoke. “Did an ATV just run this gate?”
“Damn right! Kid on a camo four-by-four. You after him?”
He hesitated for half a second at the word “kid” before realizing that, seen fleetingly, Panikos would give that exact impression.
“Yes, I am. What was he wearing?”
“Wearing? Jeez … I … maybe some kind of shiny black jacket? Like one of those nylon windbreaker things? I’m not really sure.”
“Okay. Did you see which way he went?”
“Yeah, freakin’ little creep! Right through there.” She pointed at a makeshift alleyway between one of the main tents and a long row of RVs and motor homes.
Gurney passed through the gate, headed into narrow passage, and proceeded to the far end of it, where it connected with one of the fair’s main concourses. The carefree look of the ambling crowd seemed to preclude any recent encounter with a speeding ATV—meaning that Panikos had probably slipped through one of the many spaces between the motor homes and could now be anywhere in the fairgrounds.
Gurney pivoted the BSA and sped back up the alley to the gate area, where he saw that the three young women had now been joined in their consternation by a sour-faced cop—no doubt one of the locals moonlighting in the security detail.
Gray-haired and paunchy, stretching a uniform that might have fit him ten years earlier, he eyed the BSA with a blatant combination of envy and contempt.
“What’s the problem here?”
Gurney showed his ID. “The guy who ran your gate a couple of minutes ago is armed and dangerous. I have reason to believe he shot out a tire on my car.”
The cop was eyeing the ID like it was a North Korean passport. “You carrying?”
“Yes.”
“That card says you’re retired. You got your carry permit on you?”
Gurney flipped quickly to the section of his wallet that displayed the permit. “There’s a time factor here, Officer. The guy on the ATV is a serious—”
The cop cut him off. “Remove that from your wallet and hand it to me.”
Gurney did so, his voice rising. “Listen to me. The guy on the ATV is a fugitive murder suspect. Losing him now would not be a good thing.”
The cop examined the permit. “Slow down … Detective. You’re a long way from the Rotten Apple.” He wrinkled his nose unpleasantly. “This fugitive of yours have a name?”
This was not a can of worms Gurney had planned to open, but now he saw no alternative. “His name is Petros Panikos. He’s a professional killer.”
“He’s a what?”
The three young women assigned to mind the gate were standing in a row behind the cop, wide-eyed.