Triple Crown (35 page)

I pushed the lift button but the doors didn’t open. The bloody thing was down the bottom and I didn’t have the time to wait for it.

I’d be dead before it arrived.

I dived through a door marked ‘Emergency Exit Only’.

This
was
an emergency.

I bounded down the stairs, but they didn’t go all the way to ground level, rather they exited through double doors into one of the restaurants in the closed-off section of the grandstand.
It was deserted.

The restaurant exit was at the far end of the room and I could already hear footsteps on the stairs behind me. So I went through the door into the kitchen only to be confronted with a mass of
stainless steel – half a dozen rows of chef workstations with long preparation worktops interspaced with gas hobs and ovens below and extraction hoods and open storage shelves above. Even the
ceiling was lined with stainless steel.

But there were no chefs. No kitchen staff at all. And no obvious route to an exit.

Damn it.

I was leaving a trail of blood droplets, a dead giveaway to my whereabouts, so I grabbed an apron that was lying on a work surface and wrapped it round my hand. Maybe it wouldn’t stop the
bleeding, but it should prevent the blood from dripping onto the floor, at least for a while.

I had a quick look at my upper arm. The bullet had missed the bone, slicing through the flesh about three inches above my elbow. It was very painful but, thankfully, I was still able to use
it.

I looked around for a knife. This was a kitchen, right? There had to be knives, but all I could find was a small vegetable knife with a blade about three inches in length. I’d have much
preferred a nice heavy meat cleaver, but three inches was better than nothing. At least it was sharp.

I saw the door begin to move so I ducked down beneath one of the worktops, many of which had stainless-steel cupboards beneath.

‘He’s in here,’ Steffi said. ‘There’s a blood trail.’

‘How could you have missed him?’ Bob said, breathing heavily.

‘I didn’t miss him,’ Steffi said, clearly pained. ‘Do you think he bled spontaneously? Of course I hit him.’

‘But you didn’t stop him though, did you? You let him get out.’ Bob was clearly in no mood to be kind to his lover. ‘I told you to guard the goddamn door. If you’d
done what you were told, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

My eyes were down at floor level and I could see their feet under the cupboards, over by the door. I watched as Bob’s moved. He started walking slowly down the first line of workstations.
I crawled the other way.

For some reason, it reminded me of the children hiding from the Velociraptors in the
Jurassic Park
movie.

Who would be the T. rex that would come to my aid? No one. The racing was all over for the day, and everyone had gone home.

If Bob and Steffi had worked together as a team they would have caught me easily. But, they didn’t.

‘You stay by the door,’ Bob said sternly to Steffi. ‘And don’t move this time.’

‘All right.’ She sounded cross. ‘But there must be another way out of here. The door to the restaurant can’t be the only one. How do the staff get in and out?’

That was a good question, I thought. Could I find it?

There followed a game of cat and mouse, where I was definitely the mouse, scampering around on all fours.

Bob moved up and down the lines of chef workstations, slowly advancing across the room. I did the same on my hands and knees, always keeping at least one line ahead of him. But I was running out
of space – and of time.

Whenever I crawled round one end or the other of the workstations, I looked for the exit. Get it wrong and I’d be finished. There would be no prizes for trying to escape into a dead
end.

I took a big gamble and doubled back. Instead of crawling down the last line, I turned the other way and went back where Bob had just been. It was another dangerous strategy as it put me between
the lovers, hence there was definitely now one of them between me and any exit. But the alternative was no more attractive – guessing where to go and ending up with a bullet in the head if I
were wrong.

‘Where the hell is he?’ Bob said, sounding so close that it was as if he was standing on top of me.

‘He must have gone out another exit. He certainly didn’t come past here.’ There was something of a sarcastic edge to Steffi’s voice, as if she was still somewhat miffed
by Bob’s earlier comments.

‘You wait here,’ Bob instructed. ‘I’ll go check.’

I heard Bob walk away, his shoes making a slight squeak on the scrubbed tile floor with each step. He soon returned.

‘The only other exit door is locked from the inside,’ he said. ‘He must still be in here.’

Bugger, I thought. This isn’t going well.

Where could I hide?

Nowhere.

Most of the worktops had cupboards beneath, which were all shut with sliding doors, and there was no way I could open one without Bob or Steffi hearing. But, at a few places, there was just a
single shelf about six inches from the floor that stretched right through from one side of the worktop to the other. Most of them were covered in pots and pans, and there was no chance of moving
those silently either.

However, on my crawling travels I remember spotting one empty shelf. It was where I had seen Bob not just from the ankles down but everything below his knees.

‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ Bob said.

‘But we need that extra money if you’re going to divorce Angie and marry me,’ Steffi said. ‘She’ll take you for everything she can.’

Good old Angie, I thought. I wished she’d take him right now.

‘I need to talk to you about that,’ Bob said.

‘About what?’ Steffi demanded.

‘Not now. We’ll talk later. Let’s find him first.’

‘Not changing your mind are you?’ Steffi was getting quite agitated.

‘No, of course not,’ Bob replied, but his tone suggested the completely opposite answer. He very clearly had changed his mind. ‘Come on. Let’s find him.’

‘What if he’s managed to escape?’ Steffi said, panic audibly rising in her voice. ‘Then we’re done for. You heard what he said about the death penalty.’

‘Shut up,’ Bob replied sharply. ‘He can’t have. He must be here. In one of these cupboards.’

I heard him slide open one of the cupboard doors.

‘But what if he has escaped?’ Steffi’s voice had risen so that it was little more than a squeak. She was now in full panic-attack mode.

‘Shut up, woman,’ Bob said angrily. ‘And help me find him.’

Perhaps he thought it was better for her to be occupied than standing by the door dissolving into jelly. But it was more bad news for me. With two of them looking, they were bound to find me
now.

‘I think we should go,’ Steffi said suddenly. She hadn’t moved. I could still see her feet over by the door.

‘What do you mean, go?’

‘Go. Leave. Get out of here before the cops arrive.’ All her earlier bravado about wasting me seemed to have evaporated. My talk of electrocution and Bob’s change of heart over
a divorce had clearly unnerved her.

Bob was far more relaxed. ‘If the cops were coming they’d have been here by now. He was lying about that, and about everything else.’

‘I still think we should leave, now,’ Steffi said determinedly.

Go on, Steffi, convince him.

‘No way,’ Bob said. ‘We finish this.’ I heard him slide open another cupboard door.

‘But I don’t want to get arrested for murder,’ Steffi said.

‘You won’t,’ Bob said. ‘He was lying, I tell you. We find him and kill him. And then we get out of here.’

All the while they had been talking, I had been crawling until I found the empty shelf.

Silently, I eased myself onto it so I was lying with my back to the metal, with my knees drawn up. Maybe Steffi would pass the end of the workstation and not see me. I would then be behind her
again, and closer to the door into the restaurant.

My plan almost worked.

As I had hoped, she walked right past the end without spotting me.

Now all I had to do was roll off the shelf in the direction she had come from. Then I’d be behind her. Easy.

But it was at that point when things started to go badly wrong.

In
Jurassic Park
, it was a falling soup ladle that gave away the children’s position to the Velociraptors. In my case it was a large metal saucepan lid.

It had been standing vertically on its edge on the far side of the large saucepan to which it belonged. I only touched the pan fractionally with my foot as I manoeuvred myself back onto the
floor but it was enough to upset the equilibrium.

I watched in horror as the lid rolled gently off the shelf away from me and clattered to the floor, going round and round like a coin dropped onto a granite top, only ten times louder.

‘Get him,’ shouted Bob.

I stood up and ran.

A bullet zinged off the extractor hood next to my ear causing me to duck involuntarily. I reached the end of the line to find Steffi, but she was facing away from me and towards where the noise
of the lid had come from.

I grabbed her from behind, holding her tight to me with my left arm and placing the vegetable knife up against her windpipe with my right hand.

‘Drop it,’ I shouted into her ear.

She wriggled and squirmed so I cut her neck. Only a little cut but enough to draw blood. She gasped and went very still, dropping her gun with a clatter to the floor. I used my foot to slide it
backwards but I had no chance of bending down to get it because Bob was standing right in front of us, about ten feet away.

‘Drop your gun,’ I shouted at him, ‘or I’ll slit her throat.’

He did nothing of the sort. Instead he took two steps closer and pointed the barrel straight at me, lining up his right eye with the sights.

Steffi was shorter than me by a couple of inches so I ducked my head down behind hers so as not to give him a clear target to shoot at.

‘I said drop your gun,’ I repeated. ‘I will cut her if you don’t.’

A strange look came over his face, almost one of indifference to the plight of his mistress. Was he thinking only of his own skin, or had he decided there was another way out of his matrimonial
predicament?

He took another step forward and shot Steffi from no more than three feet away in the chest.

The force of the impact threw us both backwards off our feet, Steffi landing heavily on top of me.

My first instinct was that I had also been shot but my mind and body were still operating normally.

For some reason I remembered what Bob himself had said to me on that very first day in the FACSA offices in Arlington.
Expanding bullets are less likely to pass right through suspects and
into innocent bystanders behind them.

How right he was.

But I feared that my relief was likely to be short-lived. I would be next.

I realised that I had landed on Steffi’s gun. It was sticking into my back. I grabbed it and dived behind the next line of workstations. Now things were a little more even.

But why had he shot Steffi? It didn’t make any sense.

And there was little doubt in my mind that she was dead. She hadn’t been wearing her FACSA bulletproof vest and her chest had been ripped apart by the expanding bullet.

She lay there on the tile floor in front of me, a pool of bright-red blood spreading out beneath her, with non-seeing eyes still wide open as if in surprise.

I crouched behind the workstation, gun at the ready, watching for the moment that Bob appeared.

He didn’t.

Where was he?

I lowered my head down to the floor and looked under the cupboards. All I could see was his ankles and feet. He was standing just the other side of the worktop.

He was a professional marksman, regularly practised, and I had only fired a gun once since I’d left the army, many years before. However, one never forgets how to aim and pull a
trigger.

I reached under the cupboard with my arms fully extended, holding the Glock 22C as still as I could. The end of the silencer was only twenty-four inches or so from Bob’s feet. Surely I
couldn’t miss from here.

I closed my left eye, looked along the sights with my right, and squeezed the trigger as smoothly as I could manage.

The gun leaped in my hand with the recoil as the round went off. It all seemed a bit surreal without an accompanying deafening bang, the only sound being the mechanic clanging as the gun’s
mechanism automatically ejected the empty cartridge and reloaded. However, the scream from Bob was amply loud enough to make up for it.

I hadn’t missed. The bullet appeared to have caught him square on the right ankle bone and its subsequent expansion had almost torn his foot clean off.

I didn’t go to his aid. He still had his gun and I was in no doubt that he’d use it.

Instead, I ran for the door to the restaurant before he too worked out he could also shoot me at floor level.

Logic told me that Bob couldn’t have run after me with only one functioning foot but, nevertheless, I sprinted across the deserted restaurant, through the empty cavernous betting hall
beyond, and down the stairway towards the grandstand exits.

Indeed, I didn’t stop running until I reached a lone uniformed guard at the security desk in the main lobby.

‘Call the cops,’ I shouted at him. ‘There’s been a murder.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And the cops are already here investigating it.’

I stared at him. He knows? How does he know?

‘So where are they then?’

‘With the body,’ the guard said somewhat matter-of-factly.

‘Whose body?’

It was his turn to stare at me, as if I was the idiot.

‘The groom who was murdered. Over in the barns.’

Did you deal with the groom?
Steffi had asked.

All done,
Bob had replied.

‘No,’ I said to the security guard, finally understanding. ‘There’s been another murder. Here in the grandstand. In one of the kitchens. Call the cops again.’

Everything considered, it turned out to be quite a busy night for the Nassau County Police Department. Almost their total on-duty manpower ended up at Belmont Park for one
reason or another.