Ron pressed the button to roll down the windows. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“What if they doan listen?”
“Make them!” Peters barked. “You’ve got to.”
Moments later I heard the first echoing slaps of Knuckles’s retreating Reeboks, then Peters continued two-wheeling us up that gut-wrenching circular ramp.
My heart sank. Every single day, cops make life-or-death judgments based on appearances alone, on how the people they’re dealing with look, act, and sound. Ezra Russell looked fine. He wasn’t wearing gang-type clothing, but he still sounded like a street tough. There was nothing in the way he spoke that announced he had changed his ways and matriculated at an institution of higher learning as a respectable college student. I worried about what kind of call the port police would make with all our lives hanging in the balance.
“What if he’s right?” I asked. “What if they don’t believe him?”
“That’s a risk we’ll have to take, isn’t it?” Peters returned. “Hold on. You get out here. It looks to me as though he’s on his way up to the top floor.”
“But…” I objected.
“No buts. This is seven, the end of the line. Come up either the stairs or the elevator. As far as he’s concerned, I’ll be a sitting duck. I’m counting on you to see to it that isn’t the case.”
Peters paused barely long enough for me to clamber out of the car. Luckily I landed on my feet. The next thing I knew, I, too, was racing through the almost deserted parking garage. The place was full of cars, but empty of people. Evidently Saturday isn’t a primo flying day.
Never before had I noticed how unbearably long those aisles were. They must have stretched forever while behind me I heard the squeal of tires as Peters rounded the last curve that would take him onto the eighth level of the parking garage, the top and unroofed level.
I ducked my head and ran that much faster, dreading with every step the reverberation of a gunshot echoing off concrete that would mean the end of Ron Peters.
Overhead I heard a terrible crash followed by the scraping of metal on concrete. There was no way to tell what had happened. The sound seemed to come from behind me, from what was now the far side of the garage. By then there was no point in running all the way back to the ramps and making my way up from there. I was already far closer to the elevators and stairwells.
Between stairs and elevator, there was no contest. I knew from bitter firsthand experience that a stairwell can be as bad as a blind alley, a trap, or a box canyon. But at least a stairway exit door wouldn’t ring a bell and point an arrow announcing my arrival.
I dashed through the door marked STAIRS. On the first landing I paused for a moment to hear if anyone was headed either down from above me or up from below, but there were no echoing footsteps. The place was empty. Relieved, I pounded up the remaining set of steep concrete stairs, covering three steps at a time. By then, my breath was coming in short, sharp gasps, there was a splitting pain in my side, and one ankle was giving me trouble.
Damn! I still expected my body to respond like it had twenty years ago, but it didn’t. Couldn’t. Even if I didn’t want to accept the idea that middle age was setting in with a vengeance, my body knew it. I had to wait outside the heavy metal door to catch my breath before I dared open it and go on.
Without my consciously being aware of it, the 9 mm automatic appeared in my hand. Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open a crack.
Level 8 in the Sea-Tac Airport Parking Garage-the uncovered, rooftop portion-is the floor of last resort when it comes to parking cars. Usually it’s relatively open. Not so that particular day, and not because cars were parked on it either. Instead, the whole place had become a construction material staging area for the massive expansion of the parking garage. The place was strewn with stacks of lumber and iron rods, rolls of metal mesh fencing, piles of sheet metal, and several parked forklifts.
Where I expected a clear line of vision from the stairs to the ramps, instead the view across the floor was totally obscured. Over the noise of a departing jet, I could hear nothing. The only way to find out what was happening with Peters was to leave the relative safety of the stairwell.
I stepped out onto the concrete rooftop. At that exact instant, Curtis Bell’s Beretta came hurtling past my line of vision. Heading toward the exit ramp and busy dodging among the piles of construction material, I don’t think he even saw me. Raising the 9 mm, I assumed the proper shooting stance, hoping to squeeze off a shot at him before he disappeared down the ramp, but then I saw Peters.
Nosing his car straight through a stack of fencing, he sent huge rolls of the stuff spinning off in all directions. But the maneuver had accomplished its desired effect, creating a shortcut that took him to the top of the exit ramp and cut off Curtis Bell’s only remaining avenue of escape. With a sickening crunch the speeding Beretta plowed into the Reliant’s rider’s side. The grinding, sheet metal-devouring crash that followed made me grateful that I wasn’t sitting there in Peters’s car on the rider’s side. If I had been, I would have been holding the front end of the Beretta’s V-6 engine.
Instead of moving forward toward the melee, I stood as if frozen, still holding my weapon. There was no way for me to pull the trigger. If I had, Ron Peters would have been directly in my line of fire.
The dust settled slowly. At first glance I didn’t see either Ron Peters or Curtis Bell. Then, just when I’d almost convinced myself that they were both either dead or too badly injured to move, the clamshell top on the wheelchair carrier shot up and with a whir Peters’s wheelchair lowered down beside the car. So Ron was all right. He was getting out, moving himself expertly from car to chair.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I started forward, but then I saw movement in the Beretta as well. Curtis Bell, his head bloodied, crawled out through the rider’s side window. There was no need to shout a warning-they saw each other at precisely the same moment.
Midafternoon sun had finally managed to burn through the cloud cover. I saw the reflected glint of sunlight on metal and knew without a doubt that Curtis Bell had a gun in his hand.
My main problem was one of distance. Physics and reality to the contrary, it seemed as though the eighth floor aisles must have been far longer than those on the seventh, longer at least by half. I tried to shout a warning across the intervening space, but the sound was swallowed up in the roar of a departing jet. My only hope-Ron Peters’s only hope-was that I close the distance between us. Knowing I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting there in time, I ducked my head, said a silent prayer, and ran.
It was like running in slow motion or in water or sloughing through deep sand. The vast distance that separated us didn’t seem to get any smaller. Partway there, I could see that Ron Peters and Curtis Bell were speaking earnestly back and forth across the hood of Ron’s car, but I wasn’t close enough to hear their voices. I wondered if they were negotiating about which one would end up having to give up and let the other one go.
With less than a quarter of the distance to go, a blaring alarm began sounding from somewhere inside the terminal itself. Thank God, I thought with relief. Knuckles had done it. He had somehow sounded the alarm and airport security was coming to help, but before that could happen, Curtis Bell swung around and saw me.
He saw me and pulled the trigger all in the same movement. He didn’t pause, didn’t have to think about it. He aimed and fired, hoping to gun me down without even the slightest pretense of hesitation. A long way from any cover, I hit the ground and skidded along the rough concrete surface just as the first bullet whizzed by overhead.
Curtis Bell was carrying the same kind of automatic I was. There should have been a whole barrage of bullets, but there wasn’t. Not exactly. There was a second shot-I heard it-but it didn’t hit anywhere near me.