Tucked low, I scuttled from pallet to pallet, working a zigzag course toward the freezer door. Finally, with my back against its cold concrete edge, I pulled out my radio. “Ron, you there?”
I released the key button and waited. Some two seconds of static came back at me.
“Ron? Do you copy?”
More static.
“I can’t read you. Maybe it’s the building. I’m about to go into the main freezer room.” As I replaced the radio on my belt clip, I noticed its side had been badly gouged, presumably from my nose dive to the cement floor. That probably accounted for the static; it also meant I was all by myself.
I leaned around the edge of the doorway and peeled back one of the plastic strips, shivering as the blast of cold air hit my sweat-soaked shirt. I was about to slip through the narrow opening when I heard a sudden loud whining bearing down on me. I looked around frantically and then spun back as the plastic strips burst around me, yielding to a fast-moving forklift that missed me by two inches.
“Get the fuck out of the way, you moron. I almost killed you.” The operator stopped abruptly, his eyes like his predecessor’s, glued to my gun.
I gave him the same set of instructions, adding that he should run to the far end of the building as quickly as possible to get the cops.
He did so, abandoning the fully loaded forklift.
I stepped onto the tiny driver’s platform at the back of the machine and studied the controls for a moment. Then, crouching down, I operated the reverse and backed through the curtain as fast as I could.
On the other side was a wide traffic lane, running parallel to the cement wall and at right angles to an endless row of three-story-high stocking racks. I drove fast and straight toward the nearest aisle, using the machine and its speed as cover. It almost wasn’t enough. Another bullet whacked into the control panel, showering my head with shattered plastic. I jumped for the temporary safety of the aisle just before the forklift crashed into one of the racks.
The sudden silence was electrifying. With the forklift stilled, I became aware of the all-encompassing low-toned rumble of the refrigeration compressors, as seemingly permanent and pervasive as the sound of a distant sea.
I picked myself up off the icy floor and began to look for a way west, through the middle of the towering racks and in the direction of the last shot. I was now beginning to feel the cold. My breath hovered before my face. Overhead, ominous icy stalactites reached down from the steel cross-bracing and water-sprinkler pipes high above, reminders of how briefly I could survive in this environment. I began to shiver as I squeezed between two stacked loads on the bottom shelf and wriggled my way into the next aisle.
Aisle by aisle I progressed, slowly, cautiously, and without sound, looking up and to the sides, never knowing where Cappelli might be lurking, not even sure he was still in the freezer. My hands and feet became numb. My shivering developed into an uncontrollable shaking. My jaw muscles began to ache from clamping my chattering teeth together.
I decided to speed things up a bit by running to the far end of one of the aisles and proceeding up the distant traffic lane, thereby sparing myself the additional discomfort of sliding between the frozen boxes.
It was the shortcut Cappelli was waiting for. I rounded the first aisle without mishap or reward, but as I dashed across the open space for the sanctuary of the next line of racks, now almost sure I was alone, I heard the faintest of sounds overhead and looked up just in time to see several boxes come hurtling down on me, the flash of Cappelli’s T-shirt behind them.
I twisted out of the way, tripped, and landed on my back, my revolver going off accidentally. There was a loud metallic crack following the blast, and one of the overhead water pipes blew up. I watched in slow terror as a fountain of freezing water sprang free and came at me, a huge, expanding, life-threatening shower. As I rolled over to catch the brunt of it with my back, I wondered incongruously why Cappelli hadn’t simply shot me. The answer, of course, lay in my hand. He, like I, had no feeling left in his fingers, and no ability to willfully pull the trigger.
The water hit me like icy lava, burning my body and changing my entire focus from pursuit to survival. At first crawling, then staggering to my feet, and finally lurching down the hundred-foot aisle, I made a beeline for the exit, fully aware that any caution now would mean my freezing to death. As I ran, I could feel my clothes stiffening against my skin.
Cappelli must have been in the same situation. About halfway down the aisle, I saw another flash of red before me as he darted across the opening, making for one of the huge curtained doors. He was a good fifty feet ahead and long gone by the time I half fell between the long plastic strips.
I looked around, standing in the open, my hair and eyebrows glistening with ice, my gun hanging useless at the end of an arm without feeling. Several heads were visible peering over the tops of various boxes.
“Where did he go?” I asked in my head, but not in fact. My mouth was numb, and the sounds from it made no sense.
Someone nevertheless pointed to another curtained opening which separated the cold portion of the building from what the workers called “Phase B,” a second hundred-thousand-square-foot addition that was slated to become a freezer, but which for the time being was uncooled.
With none of the caution I’d displayed earlier, I stumbled through the connecting archway into Phase B.
The shock of coming from the cold into the warm was not as brutal as the reverse. My body was so numb, it took a while to adjust, but I was aware of the change and of the salvation it represented. That mere instinct sharpened my senses.
“Where?” I asked the first person I met.
Word had obviously gotten out, however filtered. Here, as in the freezer, the steady whirring of forklifts had been quieted by the crisis Cappelli and I represented, but the sense of threat had suffered in translation, or had been diminished by our weather-beaten appearance. In any case, the workers were just standing around looking baffled.
“What’re you guys doing?” The man I’d addressed was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that said, “Five hundred thousand cows can’t be all wrong-Visit Vermont.”
“Where did the man in the red shirt go?”
“Into the tunnel.” He pointed to the far end of the room.
The tunnel was a ten-foot by ten-foot boxed-in metal corridor that connected the freezer building to the main warehouse. It was restricted to forklifts only and designed to allow them free access to both buildings regardless of the weather. Unfortunately, it wasn’t short or straight. Despite the proximity of the buildings, they were on sharply different levels, so, to avoid too harsh an incline, the tunnel had been built as a long, gradually descending V, with a one-hundred-sixty-degree switchback crimping the middle. I ran toward it, feeling more limber with each step, knowing that as soon as I was in its embrace, I’d stick out like a target in a shooting gallery. Again, I tried my radio, and again I got no results.
The first fifteen feet were no problem, since they were a straight shot from the building to the top of the V’s first leg. At the corner, however, things literally and otherwise went downhill. I glanced at the convex mirror mounted in the far corner, but the distortion was too great to distinguish much detail. Cappelli could be tucked alongside one of the hundreds of metal ribs that held the tunnel roof up and not be seen until I stuck my nose out.
I did stick it out, briefly, and saw nothing, just a hundred feet of gray corridor stretching away like a near-bottomless well. I began walking down it, keeping to the middle, ready to move right or left, depending on his angle of fire. I flexed the fingers of my right hand. At least now I could fire back.
But again, he didn’t shoot. As I was about twenty feet shy of the switchback, I thought I saw a movement in the second distant mirror. I moved to the left, progressing from protective rib to protective rib, so tense I thought I could hear my socks rubbing my pants legs. My eyes were glued to the mirror, willing its image to flatten out and enlarge, to tell me more of what lay hidden just a few feet away now. There was another movement, along the wall, tiny and distorted-an arm, holding a revolver.