Bellows Falls (33 page)

He shifted slightly to sketch a second plan. “Next floor is the creamery proper. Wide-open, high ceilings, lots of windows, none of them facing where the fireworks’ll be. The best viewing areas,” he added a rectangle to the north of the square he’d just drawn, “are in three big rooms separated from the main floor by three doors. That’s also where people are on the roof. Those rooms only have ten-foot ceilings, so from the outside, that whole part of the building’s kind of stepped-down from the rest. Access to the roof is by fire escape on the north wall. The third floor is more like a mezzanine or catwalk. It’s where the executive offices used to be, right over the factory floor, high against the ceiling. The corridor feeding the offices is only equipped with a railing, so from below, it’s like the bridge of a ship, overlooking the deck. All the offices are on the side facing the river, away from the show.”

I glanced at Jonathon. “That must be where we’re headed.”

Searches like this are always tense. No matter how many people you have keeping you company, the feeling is always one of total isolation. You become convinced that behind every door, lurking in every shadow, is the guy with the gun who’s about to take you out. For a moment only, all three of us gazed at the enormous building before us, no doubt sharing those very thoughts.

“Okay,” I finally murmured. “Let’s get it over with.”

Jon and I entered first, walking virtually back-to-back, a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other, and our radios muted by earpieces. We walked slowly and quietly, pausing occasionally to listen and get our bearings. Greg’s directions had been schematically accurate, but they hadn’t prepared us for the mood of the place. Dark, cool, and crowded with industrial paraphernalia, to us it became a lethal house of horrors.

It was with considerable relief that we reached the stairs, gave our position on the radio, and headed up.

The next floor was in stark contrast to the threatening muddle of shadows below. As described, it was an enormous room, high-ceilinged, lined with ten-foot-tall windows, cluttered with old, dust-covered equipment clustered into regularly spaced workstations. Bundles of pipes and conduits shot up from each of these to the ceiling and spread out to all four corners like huge metal straws, crushed over against the inside cover of a too-small box. Bathed in the remnants of the departed day, and tinged by the glow of the town all around, the room looked like an abandoned movie set of some abstract, industrialist nightmare.

I immediately noticed the far wall with the three doors, behind which, even from where we stood, we could hear people talking and laughing, gathered together in excited anticipation.

Jon looked at me and pointed at the doors quizzically. I shook my head and indicated the gallery tucked up against the ceiling and running the length of one wall—the executive aerie Greg had likened to a ship’s bridge.

Jon nodded and followed me silently up the metal staircase attached to the far end.

Flashlights now off, we paused at the top landing, taking in the catwalk ahead, a railing on one side, offices on the other. Aside from the muffled sounds from below, we couldn’t hear a thing. The dull light seeping through the huge windows across the chasm made me feel I was in a tunnel instead of twenty feet in the air, and gave the whole setting a claustrophobic feeling.

We crept to the first office and found the door open. Normally, I would have had a long-handled mirror to safely check the room from around the corner. But circumstances were far from normal. Harking back to the old days, I stuck my head out into the doorway and instantly withdrew it, listening and waiting for any response. There was none. I repeated the gesture—more slowly this time—with similar results and finally did it again with my flashlight on. The room was bare—and empty.

Throughout this exercise, Jonathon stood back slightly, prepared for attack from either direction.

Room by room, we progressed in this stealthy manner, sometimes switching roles, but finding nothing until we reached our first closed door, three-quarters of the way down.

My back against the wall, I tried the doorknob gently. The door soundlessly loosened against the jamb. Switching on my light, I nodded to Jon opposite, who followed my example and prepared to enter low and fast. On a soundless count of three, I threw open the door. Jon barreled past me and rolled to the right, I half fell in after him and cut to the left. The halos from our lights dashed around the small room, desperately searching for a body in motion.

They found one who would move no longer. Confident the room was otherwise empty, Jonathon stepped back into the doorway to stand guard.

“That her?” he asked over his shoulder.

I was surprised he didn’t know and then realized they’d never met. “Yeah. Jan Bouch.”

She was lying sprawled on the floor, her torso propped against the wall under the window. Her eyes were half open, seemingly lost in a daydream, her face, so tense in life, was slack and hopeless in death. As I approached her, there was a sudden, frightening explosion from outside, and the room filled with violent, shimmering color. I glanced out the window and saw blazing streamers falling from the sky like stars, plunging toward the ghostly froth of the river below. The colors played dimly on Jan’s skin and hair as I turned my light away.

“Her son said she’d come here to watch the fireworks.”

Jonathon took a quick look in my direction. “What’s her status?” he asked, not having heard me.

I felt for a carotid. Her skin was soft and warm, but in memory only. “She’s dead.”

Jon updated the others.

I played the light on her again. She was disheveled, her lips cut and swollen, one eye puffy. I saw a small hole in the front of her blouse and unbuttoned it enough to confirm the dark puncture in the skin beneath. There was no blood.

I thought back to all I’d learned about this couple, and all the warning signs I’d heeded but could do nothing about.

Latour’s voice came over my earpiece. “Joe, do you advise changing tactics, now that she’s dead?”

“Hang on a sec,” I answered him. “Let’s finish checking this top section. She hasn’t been dead long, so if he is in the building, I don’t want to rush him. We still have a potential hostage situation here.”

Jon and I searched the rest of the gallery, room by room, the earlier quiet now replaced with raucous cracks, bangs, and strung-out screams from high overhead. The darkened, haunted corners flickered with garish rainbow colors.

When we returned to the top of the stairs, I radioed, “Top floor clear. Heading down.”

Extending beneath us, the vast plant floor glimmered eerily in the dying colors, each one of which brought muted outbursts of appreciation from behind the doors at the room’s north end, where the trespassers could see the fireworks we were missing.

“Emile?” I continued, “how many can you give us up here? We’re on the main floor.”

There was a pause. “How ’bout five?”

“That’s good. He probably made it out, but I want to corral the spectators before we call it quits.”

We descended the staircase and met Emily, another Bellows Falls officer, two state troopers, and, to my surprise, Emile himself.

I gave him a smile. “Couldn’t stay out of the action, huh?”

He looked slightly embarrassed. “Greg runs things better than I can anyway,” he muttered. “Besides, I won’t be able to do this too much longer.”

I glanced over his shoulder and saw Emily roll her eyes, forever unforgiving.

“Here’s the layout,” I said. “This room looks empty, but we haven’t checked around each of the workstations. There are seven of us, so let’s break into teams of two, and work in a row, walking from here to the far wall. That,” and I played my light on the distant doors, “is where our trespassers are enjoying the show.”

We set out like grouse hunters in a twilight landscape, our movements punctuated by the jittery beams from our lights. We proceeded quietly, the sound of our progress supplanted by the noise outside. The cavernous room around us shifted alternately from one garish color to another.

At the far end, I turned to Emily and Latour. “Is there any difference between one room and the next in terms of size or layout?” They both shook their heads. “Then we might as well use whichever one has the most people to hold them all.”

Using the same three teams, we entered the separate rooms without fanfare or noise, slipping inside like latecomers to a movie, our flashlights extinguished.

In my room, the center one, I could see the outline of almost ten people standing before a wide bank of multi-paned windows, gesturing and calling out excitedly with each new explosion. Occasionally, several of them would lift an arm and suck on what appeared to be a beer can.

I spoke quietly into my radio. “This is Joe. I’ve got close to ten.”

“Five for me,” answered Emily.

“I only got three,” said a voice I didn’t recognize.

Latour came on. “Round them up and bring them to where Joe is, then. Tell ’em they’re not in any trouble—just that we want ’em where we can find ’em.”

I opened my door and motioned the two groups to enter. Aside from a few startled looks, no one seemed to care much about the sudden appearance of so many cops, and merely moved to the window to resume their enjoyment. We all gathered together near the door to consider our next move.

Still uneasy, however, I kept watching the spectators, the lifelike warmth of Jan Bouch’s skin lingering on my fingertips—as palpable as a scent of Norm’s proximity.

It was then, barely registering the muted conversation around me, that I focused on one particular silhouette. Yielding to instinct over good sense, I took aim with my flashlight and hit the switch.

Bouch’s reaction was instantaneous. For a split second, I saw his pale face half turned toward us before it vanished like a ghost. In that same instant, I saw a familiar glimmer in his hand.

“
Gun
,” I shouted, and pushed at the others to scatter them.

But there was no redeeming a bad situation. Having overlooked the obvious possibility that Norm, finding his escape blocked, had hidden among the spectators, I’d exposed us all to lethal danger.

The room exploded in a terrifying travesty of the fireworks outside, slashing flashlight beams and wild shouting replacing rockets and starbursts. In the kaleidoscopic result, I saw people either diving for cover, or frozen in place with their hands up, all to an orchestra of, “
Police
—nobody move.”

In its midst, I saw Emily Doyle, half crouched, her gun and flashlight held in a classic shooter’s stance, scanning the room for a target.

But the target, largely concealed, had already found her. Momentarily revealed in a red flash from outside, protruding from behind a large piece of equipment by the window, was a hand holding a gun. Norm was taking a careful bead on one of the thorns in his side.

I shouted a warning, to no avail in all that noise, and simultaneously saw Emile Latour break from the tattered darkness, hitting Emily like a car broadsiding a small pet. Just as their bodies commingled, they were caught in the fiery muzzle-flash of Norm’s gun. I clearly heard Latour let out a surprised grunt of pain before they both vanished into the gloom that clung to the floor like fog.

In the split second in which this all took place, I aimed and fired quickly three times in Norm’s direction. There was a second shout of pain, the sound of a gun skittering across the floor, and a sudden stunned silence in the room, now sharp with the smell of cordite.

“Norm Bouch,” I shouted, “this is the police. Surrender immediately.”

The response was a shattering of glass and the blur of a balled-up human shadow hurtling through the window.

I dropped my flashlight and reached for the radio at my belt. “All units. Suspect’s left the building through a window—north wall. Shots have been fired. Possible officer down.”

I ran, stumbling over scattered bodies still squirming for safety, and leaned out the jagged hole, half expecting to see Norm Bouch sprawling face down on the ground. Instead, I found a fire escape attached to the building’s side.

I climbed gingerly out the window, hearing footsteps clanging on the metal steps below. Latour had said there were people on the roof, but I’d been so focused on finding Jan, and then Norm, that I’d not only forgotten about them but that Davis had specified the presence of the fire escape. My frustrated rage found new strength at my own continuing stupidity.

I began shouting again into the radio. “Suspect’s heading down the north fire escape. Close off the bottom. He may still be armed.”

The way down led to a small platform ten feet off the ground, from which a metal ladder had been lowered the rest of the way. As I began my own descent, I could feel the fire escape quivering under Bouch’s weight. I also saw that there were no officers below waiting for him. Human to a fault, they’d bolted from their posts to render aid when I’d announced the downing of one of their own.

I almost fell to the platform below, again calling for help on the radio, and reached it just as Bouch hit the ground. He stumbled once and took off hobbling toward the rear of the nearby crowd. As I swung my leg over the ladder’s top rung, I glimpsed the immensity of the scene before me, captured like an infrared photograph in the burst of a crimson rocket. There were thousands of people extending like an oil slick from within twenty yards of the creamery to the distant riverbank—a clotted mass of heads and shoulders as densely packed as commuters at a suburban train station. From the moment Bouch hit its outermost fringe, he became indistinguishable from his surroundings.

Of my two remaining hopes, one was that I could track him by the disturbance he’d leave in his wake, as I might a car driving through a corn field. The other was evidenced by the blood I found on every rung of the ladder. Norm Bouch was badly wounded, if only in the hand, so even if he got away this time, either the blood loss or the need for care would eventually force him to where we might find him.

My adrenaline, however, drove me to make the first option a reality. As soon as my feet touched the ground, I bolted for where I’d seen him disappear, telling the others the direction I was taking, and recommending that all exits from the Island be blocked immediately. Through my earpiece, I heard the tactical machinery switching gears; Greg Davis also thoughtfully let me know that Latour had received only a superficial wound. Emily Doyle, whose unprotected head had been in Norm’s sights, would be hard put to proclaim her chief’s uselessness in the future.