“Stop where you are and throw your gun out. This is the police.”
I froze. It was Klesczewski.
“Ron?”
“Lieutenant?” In the mirror, several bodies appeared from behind the metal wall supports, all but Klesczewski’s in police uniforms.
“He didn’t get away, did he?” I asked as we met at the hairpin corner.
Klesczewski looked totally frazzled. “No, no. We don’t have him yet, but I’m sure he’s still in the building. Why didn’t you use your radio?”
I patted his shoulder, more grateful than I cared to admit for his company, as we all four jogged back toward the main building. “It’s broken. How many troops do you have now, and where are they positioned?”
“Eight or so, including some of the local security people. I put some of them outside, along sight lines near the perimeter fence, just to make sure he didn’t slip out between us.”
“That’s great.”
“I’m trying to get the building evacuated, but the P.A. system failed, and I only found someone who’d take responsibility a few minutes ago. Half the people are still unaware of what the hell’s going on.”
“Well, I chased him this far. He’s got to be in the main warehouse. Let’s keep the evacuation going, lock the place up, and send in the Special Reaction guys. Should be just a matter of time, as long as he doesn’t squirt out somewhere between now and then.”
We’d arrived at the tunnel’s far end, into a room that totally dwarfed the two I’d been in before, covering almost seven acres of floor space and reaching four stories up. As Ron had mentioned, the bustle of forklifts, “hi-lo’s,” and manual loaders had been only slightly reduced, although I could see several men in white shirts and ties using bullhorns, trying their best to wind things down.
“There aren’t many doors on the northwest side,” Ron continued, “and I think I got them all covered. It’s the loading dock and all these damn bays that have me worried. I never figured it would be that complicated to shut a place down.”
We heard a startled shout and a gunshot from one of the most distant of those bays.
“Oh, shit,” Ron muttered, and began to sprint down the length of the loading dock, cutting right and left around stacks of produce like a football player going for a touchdown.
I paused a moment. A forklift operator clutched his arm as Mark Cappelli bolted through a crack between one of the bay doors toward a truck backing up to the bay. I ran out another door, set on heading him off outside.
Unfortunately, I was still several hundred feet away and had a long line of trucks to get around. I was about fifty feet from where I thought Cappelli had left the warehouse when I heard a loud crash and the roar of a diesel engine in distress.
The noise had been caused by a Freightliner cab-over being driven away from its box without the support legs being dropped. I rounded my last obstacle in time to see the box lying with its nose in the tarmac like some religious penitent. The cab, shuddering and belching black smoke as Cappelli slammed it through its gears to gain speed, was already peeling away. He was headed west, against the prescribed traffic flow, bound for the far corner of the building and the entrance gates leading out to Ferry Road.
A trucker, his mouth half stuffed with a sandwich, was gesticulating near the front of the box. “He stole my cab, for Christ’s sake; that’s my fucking truck.”
I saw Ron standing at the edge of the adjacent loading door. “Where’s your car?”
“Follow me.” He bent down and swung me up onto the dock before leading me through the entrails of the building on a roughly diagonal tack to the building’s dressed-up front door to the west. As we both burst out onto the parking lot, Cappelli’s fire-breathing behemoth screamed around the far corner, heading for the closed front gate.
“Guess we better let ’em know what’s happening,” I said, as we piled into his car, just as the truck blew through the gate with a shriek of complaining metal. Leaving parallel crescents of black burnt rubber on the pavement, Cappelli slewed onto Ferry Road, heading toward the Putney Road traffic light. In a squeal of spinning tires, Ron backed out of his parking space and gave chase, while I began giving orders over the radio.
We had two major problems: We didn’t have enough time to get roadblocks properly organized, and we didn’t know which way Cappelli would take. If he turned right at the light, he could go north up Route 5 to grab the interstate at Putney, or try to vanish along the byways crisscrossing the hills around Dummerston, the next township. If he turned left, which I suspected he would, his choices were downtown Brattleboro, a couple of miles straight ahead, Route 9 East into New Hampshire, or I-91’s Exit Three, both located at the crossroads less than a mile down the road. I told Dispatch to contact the Vermont State Police and the Windham County Sheriff’s Department for anything north of our position, the New Hampshire cops for anything east, and ordered all available units to converge on Exit Three.
Another disadvantage was that most of our patrol units were behind Klesczewski and me, which left precious little to put between the truck and the open road. As Cappelli skidded through the light and drove south, I modified my instructions over the mike.
“This is Oh-three. I want all available units to move onto I-91, north and southbound. Rolling roadblocks.” I hung up the radio. “Ron, you better let at least one of the patrol units by. We aren’t exactly legal here.”
He slowed slightly and waved one of our tailgaters on, but only one; he wasn’t about to concede the chase, despite the rule that high-speed pursuits and roadblocks were only to be performed by recognizable patrol units.
“Why put everybody on the interstate?” he asked. The crossroads were coming up with amazing speed. I noticed both my feet were pressed flat against the floor.
“Gut call. It’s a wide-open road. That’s what I’d do.”
As if I’d willed it, the Freightliner slid into the crowded intersection, sideswiped several cars, and peeled out toward I-91. Another police unit screaming up the Putney Road from downtown almost added to the wreckage, barely missing us and a man who’d leapt from his vehicle to check the damage. I looked over my shoulder as Ron swept around the corner. That put three units behind us and one in front. I wondered what was left to stop Cappelli. I also wondered how much hell I was going to catch for putting this demolition derby into action.
As soon as I saw the truck commit to the first on-ramp, I grabbed the radio again. “All units from Oh-three. The truck’s heading north on the interstate. All units respond accordingly.”
But I shook my head as soon as I’d delivered the message.
Klesczewski saw me. “What?” he half shouted over the noise of the engine and the sirens.
“Why would he head north?”
“Why not?”
It was a legitimate response. Neither choice was rational, nor was the whole premise, for that matter. How Cappelli hoped to escape, driving a Freightliner with a bunch of cops on his tail, was beyond me. But if he was stupid enough to think he could, he was stupid enough to think that heading south toward Massachusetts and beyond held more options than tearing up the pavement for a hundred miles toward Canada.
I grabbed the mike again. “All units from Oh-three. Who’s on the interstate now?”
“Oh-three from One-five. I’m just north of Exit Two right now.”
“Set up a roadblock southbound just below the West River bridge.”
“I thought he was heading north.” The voice was high-pitched with incredulity.