Nathan's Run (1996) (32 page)

"Pleasant dreams," Steadman said as he closed the door behind him. "Don't let the bedbugs bite!" He laughed loud and long on that one. As the heavy deadbolt slid into its keeper, the klunk reverberated through the dank cell.

So this is it, Nathan thought. Ended just like it began, in a cage for trying to protect yourself A wave of tears approached from behind his eyes, but he willed them away. You'll have fifty or sixty years to cry. No sense wasting any now.

Jesus, it was cold in there. He carefully grabbed a corner of the wool Army blanket from the cot and shook it open, checking for bugs. There were none. Wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, he sat on the edge of the cot, which promptly collapsed under his eighty-three pounds. One of the wooden legs had been booby-trapped to look whole. The impact with the concrete floor shook his various injuries to life.

This time, he couldn't stop the tears. Dickheads.

Chapter
27

Sergeant Watts finished his report on Nathan's capture at 4:30, Li and slid the papers into an interoffice envelope addressed to Sheriff Murphy, who had leveraged his political connections to talk himself into a fancy corner office with a fireplace up in the County Administration Building.

The more Watts thought about the irony of his luck, the more he grumped about the day ahead. He and his boys had made the collar that the big-city guys couldn't make, but by the time the press arrived to give him credit, he'd be off duty, and the sheriff would hog it all. Shift change was only ninety minutes away. He wondered if there wasn't some way he'd be able to pull double duty, and give himself an opportunity to witness the bedlam that would be descending on their little community very soon.

The sound of the lobby door opening startled him. Visitors were rare at this hour. In this case, it was another cop, wearing a uniform Watts didn't recognize.

"Good morning," Pointer said cheerily. "I understand there was some excitement here last night."

Watts smiled proudly, despite the inexplicable bad feeling he had about this guy. "Yessir, we got the bad guy. How can I help you?"

"My name's Robertson," Pointer lied. "I'm with the Braddock County PD. The Bailey kid's from my beat. Just here to help out, maybe take him back to Virginia after extradition." He glanced around the lobby. "Looks like a pretty slow night."

Something in the way Robertson made the comment made Watts feel defensive. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "It's always exciting to fix a job that somebody else botched up." Why the hell would somebody wear gloves on a night like this? he thought, noticing the visitor's leather-clad hands.

Pointer laughed. "Well, you got me there, pal. Meant no harm, actually. Place just seems empty."

Watts shrugged and looked down at his papers. "Except for me and the kid, it is empty." Even as he said the words, he sensed that he had done a bad thing. Problem was, Watts had worked behind a desk for too long to react quickly enough to his senses.

By the time he saw the stranger's arm swing up to shoulder height, the bullet was already on its way.

What was that?!

Nathan was startled from near-sleep by a strange noise -p h u t-like the sound of a distant air rifle, followed by the loud clatter of falling furniture, and then silence. No one was picking up anything that had fallen. Wasn't that strange?

He couldn't put it all together, yet he knew that anything out of the ordinary in a jail was bad news. Shedding his blanket, Nathan moved to the small window high in the door to see what he could observe. Even straining on tiptoes to get any view at all, his field of vision was limited to the empty cell across the hall.

Something definitely was going on. He could hear odd movement out front, a moaning sound.

Phut.

There it was again! Only this time, it didn't sound so much like an air rifle; it was more resonant thin that. Nathan swore he'd heard that sound before, or something like it, in a movie or on TV.

When it came to him, his blood turned to ice. He had to breathe deeply and rapidly to keep from passing out. This couldn't be happening to him. The nightmare just wouldn't end.

Pointer had snapped the first shot off a little too quickly, sending the round an inch high and a half-inch to the left, squarely into the cop's breastbone. It was a kill-shot, sure enough, but it was a messy one. If he'd taken just an instant more, the Hydra-shock round would have blasted the man's heart into a hundred shreds, bringing instant death and very little mess. As it was, the bullet flattened to the size of a quarter on impact, then tumbled randomly through the cop's chest cavity, turning his thoracic organs to Jell-O. As the cop lay on the floor with his legs intertwined with the swivels of his chair, blood pumped like a garden hose from his chest wound, and pink sputum foamed from his nose and mouth.

Considering himself an artist in his craft, Pointer detested messy work. He cursed himself under his breath as he strode casually to the sputtering man's side. As long as the heart continued to pump, the gore would continue to spread. Pointer's task was to pull the plug.

The look in the dying man's eyes showed more resignation than fear as Pointer's second shot, this one carefully placed at point-blank range, reduced Watts's front teeth to dust and continued on to bore through his soft palate, into his brain stem, where every command to every body system ceased instantly.

The giant keys to the detention cells sat heaped on the desk, in clear view, in front of three security rcamera monitors. Pointer smiled and shook his head.

These hayseeds have no idea what security means, he thought. Glancing around to make sure no one was near, he watched himself on the TV monitor as he leaned over Watts's body and hoisted the keys with a finger, taking care to leave no footprints in the blood.

Another two minutes, and he'd be done.

The sound of approaching footsteps confirmed Nathan's worst fears. His breathing came in quick gulps, like a panting dog's, and he was feeling light-headed. Why are they doing this to me? His mind raced frantically, but there were no answers.

This wasn't Ricky, and it wasn't Uncle Mark. Whoever this guy was, he was no drunk; he was a killer with a silencer on his gun, and he wanted Nathan dead badly enough that he was willing to kill a cop to do it.

What did I do?

There was no time for thought, only for action. He had to be ready for a fight, no matter how unlikely it was that he'd win. He needed a weapon. If only one of the bricks would come free . . .

"Naaathan," a voice sang from the hallway.

It was the most frightening sound Nathan had ever heard. A weapon. There had to be a weapon...

"Nathan Baileeeey! 0lly olly. oxenfree!" Pointer laughed.

Shit! SHIT! Maybe I can lift the bed . . . The bed! The wonderful, broken goddamn bed! Nathan darted two quick steps to the cot and snapped free the broken leg. It wasn't very big, but it was heavy. It just might . . .

A key slipped into the lock in the heavy door. Klunk.

Oh, God!

Nathan dashed silently back to the hinges, using the door's huge wooden panels as a shield. He saw the gun first. It came in quickly and made the turn, as though the intruder knew exactly where he was hiding. Nathan brought the cot leg down with both hands in a giant overhead arc onto the gun. It was the hardest he had ever swung at anything in his life, and it felt every bit as though he had impacted concrete, a shock wave reverberating through his arms and into his shoulders.

The pistol clattered to the concrete, but didn't go off. His first strike having been perfect, he recoiled for a second blow, but checked his swing and gasped audibly when he saw that his attacker was a cop!

What . . .

Pointer sensed the hesitation and saw his opportunity. He lunged at the boy.

Nathan got in a second shot, but it was all arms-no power-glancing off the man's shoulders just enough to unbalance him a bit. Nathan used the momentum for another home run swing to the side of his attacker's knee. Pointer went down with a snort, but never broke eye contact.

"Who are you?!" Nathan shouted.

Pointer didn't answer, but instead reached for the pistol on the floor.

Nathan screamed, "Don't!"

Pointer didn't hesitate for an instant. With the speed of a striking rattlesnake, he snatched the gun into his hand and brought it around, preparing to shoot through the A-frame of his armpit.

Nathan saw it coming and changed from home run hitter to woodsman, coming off his feet as he two-handed the makeshift baton down onto the back of Pointer's head. The "cop" collapsed so thoroughly and quickly that Nathan thought for sure he'd killed him.

He panicked. "Oh, God, I'm sorry!" he cried. "Why'd you do that? You made me do it! Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry!" It was like the JDC all over again. "Goddamn you!" he screamed, his shrill voice echoing through the empty hallway. "Why'd you do that?!"

When Pointer stirred, Nathan nearly cried with delight. He hadn't killed another cop after all! A bigger, infinitely more important question remained, however: Why were so many cops trying to kill him? And why were they killing each other?

He had to get out. Again. He had to run. Again.

What the hell is happening?

The hallway was clear, the doors all open. He considered that it might be a trap, but dismissed the fear as irrelevant. He couldn't stay, so he had to leave. If it was a trap, then they had him. That was that; end of story.

His Reeboks squeaked as they tried to dig into the linoleum floor to propel him up the incline. To his right, he glanced at the bloody heap on floor and hoped silently that it was the asshole who had wracked his balls. Nathan didn't even slow his stride as he plowed into the crash bar and threw open the front door of the police station and dashed out into the waiting night.

His flight from the JDC had been filled with fear and hesitation. Tonight, there was only the need to run, fast and hard.

Somewhere in all that darkness lay his future.

Chapter
28

Jesus Christ!"

The exclamation startled Pointer back to consciousness. His head felt like someone had lit a fire behind his eyes. That fucking kid . . .

"Sarge! Oh my God!" Schmidtt's voice was nearly a sob. He drew his weapon and chambered a round. "Steadman!" he called. "Steadman, are you here?"

Pointer reoriented himself in an instant, and formulated a plan. He couldn't believe that it all had become this complicated. "Steadman!"

The new addition to the evening's cast was an unwelcome intrusion, but Pointer could handle it. Just another bullet, that's all. He needed to draw the new cop into the cell somehow. Easily enough done. Pointer groaned loudly. It took no effort to sound convincing.

Little shit could have had a career ahead of him in the big leagues, he observed, trying to blink away the lingering fuzziness in his vision.

Schmidtt ran the distance to the open cell in seconds, his footsteps stopping just out of sight beside the opening. After what Pointer thought a ridiculously long hesitation, Schmidtt swung into the doorway, crouched into a two-handed shooting position.

His expression said it all. Who the hell are you?

Pointer sat propped up against the far wall, his head lolling against his chest. He moaned again for effect, even as he noted the bulge of the cop's chest protector through his uniform shirt. Head shot it is, Pointer thought.

Schmidtt nervously scanned the room for the perpetrator who had done this to his fellow police officers. If he had even the slightest suspicion of the stranger on the floor, his eyes showed none of it. In fact, he looked entirely relieved to find that whatever danger there had been had passed him by. The tension drained visibly from his shoulders as he straightened and approached his fellow police officer.

The moment Schmidtt holstered his weapon, Pointer brought his to bear. "Looking for me?" he said as he squeezed off a single round.

The bullet entered Schmidtt's head squarely at the crease of his lips, and sent him sprawling backwards into the hallway.

"Brilliant police work," Pointer chided, holding his aim for just a few seconds to make sure there was no movement before holster ing his own weapon.

Such a simple fucking job, and from what anyone would be able to tell, he was no better at it than the slob Bailey had hired to make the hit. Goddamn kid was slippery. And fast. Pointer was surprised by the effort it took to rise to his feet. He never did get a good look at what the kid used for a bat, but he admired the skill and guts it took to use it so well.

Mr. Slater was not going to be happy. Dead cops always brought more scrutiny than they were worth, and now there were two more of them. Questions were going to be asked. Pressure was going to be brought to bear, and Pointer knew enough about his boss's business to know that people sometimes had to be sacrificed to keep the heat off. The more loyal and hard-working the sacrificial lamb, the more the right people were satisfied. That meant Pointer, unless he could turn this all around somehow.

Everyone deserves a second chance, but no one deserves a third.

As he stared at the uniformed body in the corridor, the outline of a plan began to form in his mind. Most people thought that Nathan was a cop killer already. Looking at the physical evidence in the jail, they might just draw the same conclusion again, especially if Pointer stacked the deck some.