The knock on the motel room door, therefore, brought me back with a start, making me drop the pen I was holding and causing my reading glasses to slip off my nose. I glanced up at the TV screen, now filled with two people standing silent and transfixed in what looked like a gloomy cellar, and realized I must have dozed off. The bedside clock read three-ten in the morning.
Still dazed, I climbed off the bed, my back stiff and my butt sore, and walked to the door, discovering I was still wearing my shoes. I also noticed I’d dropped the door key upon entering after dinner.
Shaking my head, I bent down for the key and simultaneously opened the door, expecting to see Paul Spraiger, whose room was next door.
Instead, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark pair of high-heeled cowboy boots-still damp from the snow outside-and heard the distinct and chilling pop of a silencer just inches above my head. As something shattered behind me, I instinctively kept tucked over and charged like a linebacker at the pair of legs before me.
I heard the air go out of the shooter’s lungs as we smashed into the wall across from my door, and felt a halfhearted blow of a gun butt glancing off my shoulder as we slid to the floor.
My life-saving position now did me a disservice, folding me under the other man’s collapsed body, an advantage he used not to fire another shot but to push me aside and scramble to his feet, obviously so surprised at the turn of events that he could only think of running.
But I did not feel so accommodating. Perhaps due to the frustration I’d been wrestling with moments earlier, I lashed out at his ankles as he regained his footing, tripping him up and making him sprawl on his face, his long-barreled gun bouncing away on the rug ahead of him.
The sight of the weapon brought my vulnerability sharply to mind, and I made a flat dive up and over his squirming body in an attempt to get hold of it. But he was younger than I, faster, and more desperate, and he managed to catch the side of my head with his elbow just as I went over him, throwing me off balance and giving him the chance to get back on his feet.
Fortunately, even my last-minute meddling didn’t alter his eagerness to escape. Ignoring the gun, he took off down the long hallway as I untangled myself, picked up the weapon, and gave chase.
So far, not a word had been said.
My room was on the third floor, with the stairs and an elevator at one end of the hall and an interior fire escape at the other. My assailant had chosen the latter, no doubt hoping for the fastest way out, which, considering my chances of catching him, was a smart move-and made me all the angrier I hadn’t yelled for Paul before taking off in pursuit.
The shooter took the stairs in leaping bounds, bouncing off the stairwell walls like a careening bowling ball. Much as I wished I could do the same, however, my older anatomy wouldn’t stand for it. I moved as fast as I could, but he was putting some serious distance between us.
He reached the bottom with a crash and slammed through the door to the parking lot like a bull leaving a chute, smashing the plate-glass window in the process. By the time I reached the same spot, he was halfway across the lot, heading toward a small, rust-splotched sedan.
Which is where his luck took another downward turn.
Apparently, this presumed hit man had pocketed his car keys as he might have on a trip to the supermarket, and now-extracting them from his pocket at a dead run-he dropped them in the snow. He slid to a scrambling stop, dropped to his knees, and flailed around in the slush for a few seconds as I stopped also, grasped the gun in both hands, and tried to draw a bead on his leg to slow him down without killing him. But he was still too far off, I was breathing too hard to be steady, and my opportunity disappeared almost as fast as it had cropped up. With a frustrated punch at thin air, he regained his feet and ran for the embankment overlooking King Street, vaulting the guardrail and vanishing from sight.
I didn’t know what options I had. By all appearances, the car was his and would lead us to him if I gave up the chase. But chances were just as good it had been stolen, or that this guy would end up as dead as the man I’d found in the old jail. I didn’t want to risk losing another piece to our puzzle.
Despite the obvious arguments, therefore, not to mention that I was wearing only a shirt and slacks, I climbed over the guardrail after him.
The bank was steep, covered with deep snow, and stopped right at the edge of the road below. By the time I reached it, I was wet, my hands were numb and nearly useless, and my face and ears were stinging with cold. Ahead of me, across a trickle of predawn traffic, the shooter was cutting across the sidewalk, heading for a dead-end road leading down toward the river. I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was doing.
The side street he’d taken turned out to run between a darkened office building and an abandoned business lot, and ended at a metal barricade, beyond which were some smaller buildings and a few trees. In their midst, his bobbing shape receded, still aiming for the ghostly pale expanse of the river ahead.
I was breathing hard by now, my lungs aching from the frigid air. My feet had become as numb as my hands, making me feel I was running like Frankenstein’s monster, stumbling and lurching in wooden clogs. I began to wonder how much longer I could keep this up.
My quarry’s intentions, however, finally became clear, and their simplicity-for no reason at all-gave me the incentive to continue. He was going to cross the frozen river to the south side of town. There was no reason to think this man wouldn’t outpace me there as he had so far, but the appearance of that huge, pan-flat, almost shimmering expanse as I emerged from the trees inspired me with visions of ice skaters at full tilt, and for some reason I believed, as perhaps did he, that once on its surface, I would move like an arrow in flight.
I didn’t, of course. Surprisingly, the river’s surface wasn’t crusty with frozen snow, as I’d expected, but smooth as a hockey rink, which put me flat on my butt almost as soon as I touched it. Thankfully, the target of this hypothermic exercise wasn’t faring much better. Although he was better dressed than I, his cowboy boots were serving him poorly.
As a result, the distance between us remained roughly the same as we staggered and slid our way toward the river’s midpoint, two small silhouettes caught in the translucence of the city’s night lighting.
Then things began turning in my favor.
Accompanying a small but growing chorus of distant sirens, a twinkling of emergency lights began appearing out of the darkness like otherworldly fireflies being drawn to an open field. Also, announcing himself with a yell in my direction, Paul Spraiger stepped out onto the ice, moving with far more grace and speed than either I or the man we were after.
I stopped and waited for him to catch up.
“You okay?” he asked, panting as he drew abreast.
“Yeah-just cold. How’d you know where I was?”
“I thought a bomb had gone off when you two hit the hallway. The walls shook. But by the time I got out of bed and to the door, all I saw was you heading downstairs. I watched from the window, figured out what was going on, and called for backup.” He held up a cell phone he was holding in his gloved hand. “I’ve been keeping them up to date on this.”
We could see ahead of us how the winking, colored lights had concentrated on the far shore, making the man ahead pause, look back, and begin to consider an alternate plan, his body language making plain his confusion. Behind us on the north shore, additional shadows were stepping onto the ice.
“Won’t be long before the snowmobiles arrive,” Paul muttered, and then spoke into the phone, “He’s stopped heading south. Now he’s going for the bridge.”
True enough, the shooter had cut east down the river’s center toward the Montcalm Bridge and the gorge beyond. “Why’s he doing that?” I asked, beginning an angled course to shorten the distance between us.