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I RACED THROUGH the fire doors and into the stairway. My footsteps echoed loudly in the more dimly lit, dusty, concrete chamber as I leapt down half of the first flight of stairs.
Turning, I took several more steps, then, hand on the railing, vaulted from the midway point of the flight I was on to the midway point of the flight below. Every second flight had an open access to the lower flight.
I was at least ten flights down when I heard the hurried footsteps of my pursuers entering somewhere above, likely back up on the sixty-second floor.
“He’s heading down,” a gruff voice said above.
Another voice, softer, higher pitched, spoke – likely into a radio. “Hal and I are pursuing him down staircase C. Get over to that exit on the lobby level and start heading up for the intercept.”
In the time that I heard these words, I was able to descend another four floors and was just passing the forty-fourth floor.
Hearing the security guard mention the express elevator, I tried to remember if I’d seen Mr. Hyperhidrosis getting into one of the express elevators or one of the regular ones. The two express elevators, as I remembered from my ascent, serviced the concourse, the lobby and the fortieth through seventieth floors. The other two elevators, as I recall, went to every single floor in the building.
Mr. Hyperhidrosis hadn’t taken the same elevator I’d ascended on, which had been an express, and which had taken less than a minute. But had he taken one of the “all stops” elevators? If so, that meant it would take him perhaps as long as three minutes to get to the bottom.
It was a bit after 1:40, perhaps a bit too early for midafternoon breaks, but perhaps not too early for smokers needing to sneak outside for a quick smoke. I was hoping for a lot of those – because for every floor the elevator stopped on, it bought me precious seconds.
I launched myself down another half dozen floors, trying to imagine where the stinky elevator car might be; I allowed myself to become amused at the poor idiots who got onto that elevator car with my overly sweaty friend. Knowing full well that my sense of smell was one hundred times more sensitive than the average persons, I still pitied anyone who got in that close proximity with him, particularly in such a confined space. Short of someone with a bad head cold or infected sinus, it was likely unbearable to be that close to him for more than a minute.
I recalled the slight garlicky tinge to his sweat and marveled at how, despite how awful a person’s garlic breath could be, how much worse smelling that garlic coming out of a person’s pores was.
It was difficult to contain another series of shudders, even as I continued to launch myself down another half dozen flights in as many seconds.
As I ran, another flash from the night before hit me.
Screeching brakes. A car door opening and closing from somewhere behind. In front, a canine beast, filled with anger, with blood fury, running.
I pursued.
Through the damp dark alleyway, a human voice calling, shouting something indistinct somewhere behind me. A warning, a shout of anger was all I had time to interpret in it.
Ahead of me was all I cared about.
The other wolf was getting away. And quickly.
I pressed forward.
Then I felt the piercing pain in my hind leg a split second before I heard the echoing blast of the gunshot.
I tripped, rolled, bounced off the alley wall.
This was the clearest, longest flashback yet.
Too bad I was flying down the stairs at a breakneck speed and couldn’t really spend much time considering it.
Nearing the twentieth floor – I could tell by the numerals painted in bright red on the wall beside the fire doors leading back into the proper office area – I figured it had been at least a minute and a half since I’d started my descent.
My pursuers were still both in the stairway, evidenced by the sound of their shoes on the concrete stairs and their labored breathing. I thought, for a moment, about the guard who they’d radioed to start heading up this stairwell to intercept me, and wondered why another guard hadn’t been sent up from below to a lower floor to intercept me sooner.
But then again, I was just a run-of-the-mill intruder. Building security was likely just going through the motions of assuring confidence in the building’s clients. I mean, it’s not as if I’d been walking around the 62nd floor waving a machine gun at people and firing random shots.
No, I was a somewhat harmless intruder.
On the flip side, they likely weren’t going to just give up pursuing me. After all, they never knew when a harmless intruder was going to turn out to be a deranged killer, or a terrorist, or something. And I doubt that any one of these “polyester police” would want to be the one that decided to call off the chase, particularly if I turned out to be an actual threat.
After all, these were the strongest “cover your own ass” times we’d ever known.
Sure enough, after descending another half dozen floors, I heard a set of fire doors below slamming and the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairs.
I kept moving as fast as I could for the moment, trying to figure out what I was going to do.
While I could easily put the guy out of commission, I wasn’t interested in hurting any of them, particularly for just doing their jobs.
The other thing, of course, was that he likely carried a gun, and might have it drawn.
And as skilled as I have become at hand-to-hand combat, and as strong as my constitution has become, I’m not one to knowingly walk straight into a situation where I might have a gun pulled on me and risk getting shot.
I didn’t think I’d ever actually had a gun pointed at me – unless, of course, I counted the blurry incident from the night before that ended with a bullet lodged in my leg. And I certainly wasn’t looking forward to having a similar experience in human form.
As I approached the twelfth floor, I stopped and just listened. The two pursuers above were now quite a ways behind. Not moving nearly as fast as I, there were likely at least twenty stories up. The guard below, not as tired since his chase had just begun, was moving pretty quickly by the sounds of things. If I had to guess by the approaching intensity of his echoes, he was perhaps half a dozen flights below me.
I waited a few seconds, seeing if any of them said anything to one another on their radios about not hearing me running any longer. They said nothing, just continued to huff and puff as they ran. The sweat-and-cologne odor from the guard approaching from below finally drifted up to me.
It was time to slip out of the stairwell.
I carefully opened the fire doors to the twelfth floor, peeked into the vacant hallway, then slipped out and gently closed the door behind me, ensuring it closed with the gentlest of clicks. From this side, the latch closed softly, but I didn’t know what it sounded like on the stairwell side.
My pursuers were likely huffing and wheezing so loudly that they couldn’t even hear their own footfalls. But you never knew.
Walking as quickly as I could without looking like a fugitive, I headed to the stairway at the other end of the empty narrow hall and went inside.
Now in a stairwell devoid of my pursuers and my interceptor, I resumed the combination run-leap-land technique that I’d gotten quite good at. Hey, who needs to wait for an elevator anymore when you’ve perfected a routine like this?
I was down the last dozen floors without incident.
As I came out through the fire doors and out into the lobby at a quick walk, the fresh scent of Mr. Hyperhidrosis was still strong in the lobby – despite the mingling scents of several dozen people. His pungent odor spoke clearly to me.
He’d already been through. But, hopefully, only a few moments earlier.
I followed his scent out the lobby doors in time to see him sliding his sweaty bulk into the back seat of a Cadillac that was double parked on the street in front of the building.
“Not again,” I muttered, seeing him close the car door. This would be the second time today these gangsters had gotten away from me in a car. As good as I was at following a scent, it was virtually impossible to track someone in a moving vehicle. I mean, if Mr. Hyperhidrosis had gotten onto a motorcycle I’d at least have a chance of following. But he was getting into a closed vehicle.
I had time to lunge at the vehicle.
With the back car door open, I detected the scent of gun oil, not from the gun I knew Mr. Hyperhidrosis was carrying, but from at least one other gun inside the car. The scent of one of the other men from the alley was also in the car. And the scent of a third person, this one a smoker.
So, launch myself at a car filled with armed gangsters? I wasn’t the smartest person in Manhattan, but I wasn’t stupid enough to attempt that.
Perhaps ten feet from the idling Cadillac, I was determined that I was going to do my best to track this vehicle on foot. If there was a smoker inside, perhaps he would crack one of the windows open and I’d at least have a chance of tracking the car as it moved across the city.
As I was moving closer to the car and considering my options, Mr. Hyperhidrosis glanced out the window and stared right at me through the tinted glass as the car started to inch away.
He muttered a single word that I couldn’t distinguish to his colleagues, and the vehicle screeched to a stop.
Mr. Hyperhidrosis opened the door back, training his gun on me and said. “Get in.”