He never got the words out. There was a metallic scraping sound from the bench as the figure ahead of us made a violent movement, and I suddenly sensed more than saw something spinning toward our heads. I instinctively raised my right arm and began to duck and turn away. A burst of pain whacked my forearm, numbing my hand, and a crescent wrench clanged at my feet.
Ron seemed riveted in place, staring at me doubled over in agony, my arm tucked into the pit of my stomach. “Son of a bitch. Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not fucking okay-damn.”
Crouching, we both recovered quickly and fanned out to either side of where we’d been, but the dark outline at the bench had vanished. I glanced at Ron, his gun out and ready. I’d left mine in its holster, since I still had no sensation in my lower arm and couldn’t shoot worth a damn with my left hand. “See anything?”
He scrutinized the gloom as if concentration alone could give him the vision he lacked. “Cappelli, come on out. We’re from-”
Again, he was cut short as a gunshot rang out and sent both of us flat on the grease-stained ground. No more flying tools, I thought; now we were getting serious. There was the sound of running feet and the clang of a metal door.
“Over there-to the left.”
“Watch it, Ron. He may not be gone.” I was sweating freely now, the pain in my arm superseded by an adrenalin rush that made my heart pound and my pupils dilate.
My vision of the garage now entirely cleared, I could see a line of oil drums running parallel with part of the bench, forming an aisle to a doorway mounted in the left-side wall. I gestured to Klesczewski to circle out to where the drums met the wall, while I made an approach more in line with the aisle, so that by merely poking my head out, I might see all the way to the door. I too now had my gun cradled in my still-tingling right hand.
The aisle was empty. I straightened from the crouch I’d unconsciously assumed. “He’s gone.”
Ron vaulted over the drums and beat me to the door, turning the knob, kicking it open, and tucking himself behind the jamb, all in one fluid movement. We were looking into the same office we’d visited upon our arrival. The gum-chewing secretary was standing between us and the front door, her mouth open at the sight of our weapons.
“Oh, my God.” She backed up several steps, caught her desk with the backs of her thighs, and went tumbling head over heels, vanishing on the far side with a crash and a flash of upturned legs.
I checked the office quickly as Klesczewski ran up to the desk. “We’re cops. Where did that man go?”
The girl, from the floor, pointed toward the front door.
“Was that Cappelli?” I shouted, already moving.
She answered yes, as we made for the exit.
Outside, we saw Cappelli disentangling himself from three strands of barbed wire strung along the top of a low chain-link fence separating E-Z’s yard from the C amp;S lot. The huge, dark-brown freezer building just beyond loomed like Jonah’s whale, lying ready to swallow our man whole.
I ran across toward the fence, yelling to Ron. “Drive to the far entrance. Radio everyone and get ’em out here… And give them a description.”
I began struggling with the fence, just six-feet tall, trying to keep my hands free of the barbs while scrambling for toeholds in the wire. Ahead, I could see our quarry, now almost at the bottom of the grassy slope between me and C amp;S’s tarmac apron. Cappelli was of medium height, broad-shouldered, with long black hair and a mustache. He was wearing jeans, work boots, and a bright-red T-shirt with black lettering on the back. I couldn’t see a gun and presumed he’d pocketed it for convenience. I hoped Ron had noticed as much for his description to the troops.
Cursing my own clumsiness, I finally stripped off my jacket, laid it across the top of the fence to absorb the barbs, and half fell into the grass on the far side just as Cappelli vanished around the corner of the distant building. Running downhill, I forgot radio protocol as I unclipped my portable from my belt: “Ron, he’s gone into the freezer. Try to seal off the perimeter gates somehow and then block the connecting tunnel into the main warehouse. Maybe security can help.”
The two C amp;S buildings are gigantic rectangles when seen from the top, linked by a thin, umbilical-like surface tunnel for forklifts. The long southeastern walls of both buildings house rows of some fifty loading bays each-square holes punched into the wall about four feet off the ground to accommodate the thousands of trucks that back up to them every week. The rest of the thirty-five to forty-foot-tall walls, including the one I was skirting at a dead run, are relatively free of doors or windows, and enclose a dizzying array of gigantic rooms, some two hundred and fifty by three hundred feet, which are interlaced with thirty-five-foot-tall racks. Loaded with boxed produce, they look like solid walls. Both buildings are manned twenty-four hours a day by a total of some six hundred stockpilers and machinery operators, all motivated by an incentive-pay system to keep twenty-one thousand products moving toward retailers over a good part of New England as fast as possible. Where Cappelli had just disappeared, in other words, was like an entire town under one single three-hundred-and-ten thousand-square-foot roof-not a bad place to hide, and a bitch to control.
I skidded around the corner, almost in time to be killed by a fast-moving tractor, and found Cappelli had vanished from sight. It was perfectly possible he had disappeared into one of the cabs or was hiding behind the wheels of one of the many eighteen-wheelers backed up to the building, but my instincts told me otherwise.
I double-stepped up a short flight of concrete stairs to a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” pulled it open, and slipped inside.
The shock left me breathless for a moment. From blazing, white-hot, suffocating daylight, I had stepped into a huge, artificially lit, cold cave. The sudden contrast made me feel I’d been transported forward in time to the gloom of late fall, and the unexpected cool air was like a splash of water in the face.
The room was approximately one hundred feet long, forty feet wide, and another forty feet tall. There were two enormous doorways in the long concrete wall opposite the row of loading doors, both of which were blocked off by overlapping strips of heavy plastic hanging from above. Behind them was the freezer room, almost one hundred thousand square feet of it.
I was in the dock area, where piles of boxed frozen goods were stacked on pallets, either fresh from or ready for the truck bodies that extended like dead-end doorless hallways from the open loading bays. Blinking away the outside brightness, I scanned the large room, looking for Cappelli’s distinctive red shirt.
“Hey. What’s up?”
I whirled around. A man dressed in insulated overalls, gloves, and a wool cap stood slightly behind one of the stacks along the wall, a clipboard in his hands. His eyes widened at the sight of the gun strapped to my belt.
“I’m a cop. Did you see a guy in a red T-shirt run in here?”
“Yeah. He went in there. I thought-”
He pointed toward the plastic-curtained door to the freezer. Just then, a lightning-bright muzzle flash exploded and crashed against the metal walls around us. The bullet tore the clipboard from my guide’s hands just as I threw myself against him and sent us both sprawling behind some boxes.
“Holy shit. What the hell is going on?” His cap had slid over one ear, and he looked like the village drunk propped up against his cardboard shelter.
“I’m going in there. As soon as you think it’s safe, get out and take as many people with you as you can. Don’t waste time doing it and don’t be a hero. Just spread the word and get the hell out. I got troops on the way.”
He nodded dumbly, his eyes wide, as I got to my knees and peered around my barricade. The shadow I’d seen behind the muzzle flash was gone.