Shit. Who’s kidding who?
He knows what the hell I want…
Payne reached the door and kicked it open. The door swung open onto the sidewalk on Tioga. The Shriners Children’s Hospital was across the street. He looked left and saw people running away, clearly in fear. He started to look around the leading edge of the open door when he heard two shots being fired-and the unmistakable sound of bullets impacting metal.
Payne dropped to his knees.
A glance up the door revealed two exit holes, the thin sheet metal with two ragged holes roughly resembling a king’s crown.
“You sonofabitch!” Payne said.
He quickly stuck his head around the edge of the door and back again.
His split-second view had shown him the man running down the middle of the street, holding his right hand up as he fed the pistol a fresh magazine of ammunition.
Payne popped to his feet and gave chase, running along the sidewalk to use the cars parked at the curb for cover and concealment.
The man cut the corner at Germantown Avenue and started running up it. Payne started to cross Tioga to follow, but the loud horn of a taxicab he hadn’t seen coming forced him back on the sidewalk. He checked again for any traffic, then bolted up Germantown Avenue.
Payne kept looking for an opportunity to shoot. But there were people on the sidewalks and vehicles beyond the running Hispanic male, all of them in what would be the field of fire.
As the man approached the intersection of Germantown and Venango, the traffic light changed. The vehicles started moving east and west, effectively blocking the male’s path. At the corner, he made a right onto Venango, and Payne, looking over his shoulder, crossed over Germantown Avenue to follow.
Two blocks later, at Camac Street, the man again got caught by the changing of the traffic light. This time he cut down an alleyway behind the row houses there.
Payne, breathing heavily, turned down the alley. But when he got there, he saw that the only row houses there were the ones facing acing Venango Street. Behind them, the alleyway opened up for more than half a block. The other row houses had been torn down, leaving a huge vacant area.
And the man was running right down the middle of it, wide open.
Payne could hear the sirens of squad cars in the direction of the burn center. But he had no way of directing them to his location.
Payne once more shouted, “Stop! Police!”
Surprising him, the man did stop-only to turn and fire off two shots.
The shots struck the pavement near Payne. He dropped to one knee and, trying not to let his heaving chest botch his aim, squeezed off one round, then a second one.
The second shot found the Hispanic male. He went down, rolling as he hit the ground, holding his left thigh with his left hand.
Payne stood and started toward him cautiously, shouting, “Drop the goddamn weapon! Now, goddammit!”
From where he lay, the Hispanic male rolled and fired another round at Payne, causing Payne to seek cover behind a tree. Then the man popped up and took off, running with a bit of a limp.
“Sonofabitch!” Payne muttered to himself. “The fucker just won’t quit.”
Up ahead, Payne saw that vehicles were again stopped at a traffic light, this time at Old York Street. And the light was about to cycle from red to green.
Good! I can close the gap again.
But then Payne watched in surprise as, just before the lights changed, the man ran up to the first car in line. It was an older silver Chevrolet Caprice sedan-The Whale Car, Payne thought, for whatever reason remembering its nickname. The man grabbed the handle to the driver’s door, flung it open before the driver-a fat middle-aged black male-even knew that anyone was there, put the muzzle of the pistol to the driver’s left cheek, and started shouting at him.
Payne could not hear what he was saying, but it was obvious what was happening. And the fat driver clearly understood he was being carjacked. He was frantically rushing to undo his seat belt.
Payne ran with what energy he had left.
The Hispanic male grabbed the fat driver by the shirt collar and yanked him to the street. The Chevy Caprice, having been in gear, started to roll on its own, and the man then ran alongside and jumped in, hitting the accelerator. There was a squeal of tires and then the driver’s door slammed shut.
Payne ran over to the man on the ground, who appeared dazed as he tried to sit up.
“Are you okay?” Payne said.
“Don’t shoot me!” the terrified black man said.
Payne shook his head. “It’s okay. I’m police.”
He then looked down Tioga and saw the tail of the Caprice disappear in the distance. He shook his head.
His mind wandered back to the Platoon Leader’s Program at Marine Base, Quantico.
What’d that wise guy crack in the tactical course at Quantico? “When in doubt, empty the fucking magazine!”
[FOUR] Executive Command Center The Roundhouse Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 11:30 A.M.
“Okay,” Police Commissioner Ralph Mariani said to First Deputy Police Commissioner Denny Coughlin. “Who wants to get me up to speed on where we stand? The mayor is screaming bloody murder, if you will pardon the phrase.”
Coughlin made a motion with his hand, effectively passing the request on to Deputy Commissioner Howard Walker, the two-star Chief of Science amp; Technology. Walker had not been Denny Coughlin’s first choice to work directly under him, but Mariani had said he’d had his reasons for installing him in the job.
Walker was a very tall and slender black man of fifty. He had a cleanly shaven head, a long thin nose, and wore tiny round Ben Franklin glasses. He spoke with a soft intelligent voice like that of a cleric, with a somewhat pious air about him. His domain of Science amp; Technology included the Forensic Sciences, Communications, and Information Systems Divisions-the latter two, of course, with oversight of the Executive Command Center.
The ECC was the nerve center of the Philadelphia Police Department Headquarters. It was situated between the offices of the police commissioner and the first deputy police commissioner, in an area that had once been another office and a large conference room, the wall between them now torn down.
Also present in the ECC were Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, commanding officer of the Detective Bureau; Captain Henry Quaire, Chief of the Homicide Unit; Homicide Lieutenant Jason Washington; and Corporal Kerry Rapier, an impossibly small white man with soft features who looked far younger than his twenty-five years. All wore coats and ties, except Rapier, who was in his police uniform, a pair of silver-outlined blue chevrons on each sleeve.
The cost of the ECC had been paid in large part with federal dollars. It had been built just before the City of Philadelphia hosted the Democratic National Convention. The politicians coming from Washington, D.C., fearing a terrorist attack with so many of them being present in one place at once, wanted proper protection in the City of Brotherly Love. And they were more than happy to let taxpayers from Boise, Idaho, to Tupelo, Mississippi, help pay for the best technology that Philadelphia could acquire.
The room was carpeted in a charcoal-colored industrial carpet, in the center of which were two T-shaped, dark gray, Formica-topped conference tables. Each table seated twenty-six and had accommodations for that many notebook computers beside a small forest of black stalk microphones and the multiline telephone consoles. Gray leather office chairs on casters ringed the table, and forty black armless leather chairs along two walls formed somewhat of a long couch.
On the ten-foot-tall walls opposite the line of armless chairs were banks of sixty-inch high-definition LCD flat-screen TVs, frameless and mounted edge to edge. One bank of nine created a single giant image. Two other banks of nine TVs had different images on each, or eighteen different picture feeds.