He snapped his head back around—and began to run.
Adrenaline poured into my bloodstream as Conklin, Jacobi, and I dodged shoppers, followed Bergin at a run, out through the southeast exit of the mall into the morning rush on Market Street.
Bergin had to be fleeing for a reason.
Was there a warrant out for his arrest?
Or was he running from us because he’d murdered three girls?
I had another blinding moment as I tried to see through the cars whizzing by on the street, screen the pedestrians through my mind, pick a man in white shirtsleeves out of the bustling crowd.
My heart hammered as I finally saw him thirty yards ahead, loping across Market against the light, taking a right onto Powell.
“There!” I yelled out to Jacobi and Conklin. I fixed my eyes on Bergin, who was cutting a path through the shrieking crowd ahead of us.
The sidewalks flanking Powell were an obstacle course of pedestrians, street vendors, passengers lined up for the trolley.
I was already feeling the takedown as a reality, anticipating the rush of throwing Bergin to the ground—but Bergin knocked aside a man selling pottery on the sidewalk, mugs and bowls smashing as Bergin took to the street.
That’s where he picked up speed, his long strides eating up the asphalt, expanding the distance between us.
The gangly man whose pottery stall had been overturned joined the chase, as did a group of brainless, cheering kids who’d been loitering around the newsstand.
I held up my badge, turned my fury on them all.
“Get out of the street. You could get shot!”
Jacobi was wheezing and hacking behind me. The uphill run was too much for him, and he dropped back, limping from the gunshot wounds he’d taken last May.
I shouted, “Warren, send mobile units to Union Square.”
Up ahead, Conklin backpedaled in a circle. That’s when I knew we’d lost Bergin.
I swept the doorways of dozens of shops with my eyes. If Bergin had ducked into one of the small hotels or restaurants, or, God forbid, shot underground into the BART station, he was gone.
A blur grabbed my attention—Bergin running alongside the trolley up ahead, using it as a barrier between us.
“Conklin!”
“I see him, Lou.”
Rich Conklin’s stride was a good match for Bergin’s, and he was really fit. As Conklin crossed Powell behind the trolley, I heard him yelling to pedestrians, “Outta my way. Get back.”
He couldn’t close the gap.
I was close enough to see Conklin hook the trolley’s grab rail with his left hand, step onto the rear step, and ride for twenty feet before executing a first-class flying tackle onto Bergin’s back, pulling the big man down.
Bergin fell to the sidewalk, grunting as the air went out of his lungs.
I was heaving, my legs wobbling with fatigue. I didn’t think my heart could beat any faster, but I was right there. I had my Glock in both hands, pointed at Bergin’s head.
“Stay down, you son of a bitch,” I gasped. “Stay down and keep your hands in front of you. Don’t move a finger.”
Chapter 87
PANTING, I CALLED IN our location as Conklin cuffed Louie Bergin’s hands behind his back.
Bergin’s palms and the right side of his face were scraped and bloody from the fall.