THIS WAS probably one of the worst ideas in the long, troubled history of bad ideas. Cooper knew this. But he scaled the gate anyway.
The army had prepared him for these kinds of insane activities. Climbing tall barriers. Hunting prey in the dark. Running until you thought your heart and lungs would burst in your rib cage.
But none of those activities usually took place in a cold urban environment like this one: a freezing, grimy commuter tunnel that plowed under the Schuylkill River.
Yep. A seriously bad idea, for sure.
But Cooper knew he couldn’t turn around and make the loser’s march back to his car on Eighteenth Street. When someone tries to blow your brains out, you don’t just turn the other cheek so he can take another shot. Cooper needed to find this bastard and make him explain.
So into the tunnel he went, pumping his legs as fast as he could.
The terrain was dark and treacherous. He had to avoid the rails and trash and vermin (yeah, he could hear them complain and squeak) while still matching the speed of the shooter, who was barely visible at the far end of the tunnel. Why did he have to be so fast? Why couldn’t they have dispatched a weight-challenged hit man, some dude named Mel or Irv who could be caught easily?
Cooper couldn’t help thinking about what Victor had told him about the Atlantic City hit man, aka Tesla or the Quiet One. The assassin notorious for speed (check) and stealth (check). Is that who Cooper was chasing through this damn tunnel?
On top of all that, Cooper idly wondered (as he ran, ran, ran) how wide the Schuylkill River was, how long this tunnel went on. Did the Quiet One have an end point in mind? Or did he think there was no way Cooper would be stupid enough to pursue him down here?
Sorry, Tesla, Cooper thought. I am that stupid.
The tunnel seemed to go on forever. Cooper wouldn’t have been surprised to see signs for Pittsburgh. But he turned a bend, and the dim glow of the next station appeared in the distance. Thirty-Third Street, right in the heart of the University of Pennsylvania’s campus. Maybe the Quiet One was returning to his dorm in the quad.
The sharp crack of a push bar on a metal gate told Cooper that his quarry was headed to the surface.
Ignore your pounding heart. Ignore your burning lungs. Get up there, Cooper. Go bag yourself a hit man.
When he reached the street, he saw a surprising number of students around. Probably coming home after a long night of post-Eagles-win revelry. Cooper scanned the slowly moving bodies for the one body who looked out of place. Come on, Quiet One, show yourself…
“It’s a cop!” someone cried.
Cooper spun around to find the tipsy student was talking about him.
“You don’t belong here!” the doughy-faced kid in John Lennon glasses shouted. “Get off our campus, pig!”
“Did you see a slender man with a gun run through here?” Cooper asked him and his friends. But they either didn’t hear him or didn’t care to answer. They closed ranks around Cooper, feeling emboldened by the lager or cider or shots in their systems.
“Defund the police!”
“‘I can’t breathe!’”
“Blue lives suck!”
Cooper tried to ignore them as he looked around for any trace of the Quiet One. If the shooter was smart—and clearly he was—he would have slowed down and blended into the crowd. But Cooper would recognize him. Not that he had a description, but he’d spent the past twenty minutes watching the shooter move. He was pretty sure he could identify him by body language.
The students, however, were determined to give him as much grief as possible. They blocked his attempts to look around them and continued shouting slogans at him.
“All cops are bastards!”
“Defund the po-po!”
“I don’t believe this,” Cooper said. “You’ve got a problem with me, but you guys are cool with a professional killer roaming the campus?”
The Quiet One—if indeed that’s who Cooper had been chasing—was nowhere in sight. Cooper had lost him. He holstered his Browning and willed himself to take slow, steady breaths.
A young woman with blue hair practically spat in his face. “When’s the last time you murdered someone, pig?”
“Ask me again in a couple of days,” Cooper replied.