Sonofabitch! Payne thought.
Sparks sprayed out from the Escalade as it slid down the street and then onto the sidewalk. It struck a tree and a lamppost, causing it to spin. Its rear end then slammed into the heavy stone wall of one of the two-hundred-year-old buildings. The impact compressed and then ripped open the fuel cell. Gasoline flowed out, then erupted in flames.
The white van braked and skidded sideways as it returned to the street. It then managed to make the left turn, passing within feet of the upside-down SUV. Billows of dense black smoke now rose above the thick orange-and-red flames coming from the rear of the vehicle.
Payne had just decided on the closest spot ahead that he could park in order to extricate whoever was in the SUV. But then he saw two blue shirts—Philadelphia police officer, detective, and corporal ranks wore uniforms with blue shirts; higher ranks, including the commissioner, wore ones of white—run out of the park and approach the scene. They passed more people who were fleeing into the park. One of the officers was yelling into the Police Radio microphone clipped to the epaulet of his shirt.
Nearing the intersection, Payne waited until the last second before braking hard and downshifting, then shot through the turn, the all-wheel-drive sports car hugging the street as if it was riding on rails.
He accelerated quickly after the van.
Ahead, more people bolted from the crosswalks and sidewalks as the van approached Eighteenth Street. The van then made a right onto Eighteenth, tires squealing again as its rear end fishtailed.
Oh shit.
Wrong way—that’s a one-way.
Payne scanned the intersection, looking for cross traffic. He could see across the southeast corner of the park clearly. But the building across the street on the right created a blind corner. It was impossible to see what was happening on the far side of it.
A second later, it did not matter—the shrieking roar of tortured metal reverberated off the tall buildings as a Quaker Valley Foods six-wheeled box truck, apparently having dodged a head-on collision with the white van, came sliding up the two-lane street on its side. It then struck a pair of cars that had stopped at the light and wedged between them, completely blocking off Eighteenth to the right.
Payne carefully approached the intersection, looking beyond the truck and two cars, but could see only a half dozen other wrecked cars and boxes of frozen meat scattered along the street.
He smacked the top of the steering wheel with his open palm.
“Damn it!”
He quickly reached for his phone, connected it to the port, and thumbed the EMERGENCY prompt on the keypad.
“Philadelphia nine-one-one,” a woman’s deep, calm voice came over the car’s audio system. “What is your emergency?”
An image of the police 911 dispatch center flashed in his mind.
The grimy room, in the bowels of the Police Administration Building at Eighth and Race streets, was cramped with rows of workstations holding antiquated computers, and stood in sharp contrast to the department’s high-tech Executive Command Center.
That the dispatchers toiled in such conditions, each working an average of three hundred 911 calls over the course of an eight-hour shift, amazed him as much as he was disgusted by the petty interagency infighting at City Hall over the modernizing of the separate police, fire, and non-emergency 311 facilities.
He knew that dispatchers had to very quickly discern which calls were genuine emergencies, and then how to properly respond to them, and which ones were, for example, pranks and worse. While bored middle school–aged kids still called in hoaxes to liven up a slow day in the neighborhood with sirens, dispatchers now also dealt with older, tech-savvy “swatters” calling in bogus hostage or active-shooter threats and giving a rival’s address so that responding police SWAT (special weapons and tactical) teams would kick down the rival’s doors, scaring the living shit out of him—or worse.
And now Payne had no doubt the dispatch center was already lit up with a flood of legitimate calls for help from Rittenhouse Square.
“This is Sergeant Payne,” he said, and gave the unique identifier code that would confirm him as Badge No. 471. He turned left on Eighteenth, and announced, “I’m in a black Porsche in pursuit of the vehicle involved in a shooting at Rittenhouse Square that caused two major wrecks there. Shooter’s vehicle is a white Chevy van with white magnetic signs on its doors that say KEYCOM INSTALLER . . .”
After taking the immediate first right off Eighteenth, which was Locust, he then took the next right and headed down South Seventeenth.
Payne kept the Porsche in second gear, repeatedly pushing the tachometer needle near redline. Its engine roared.
“. . . Did you copy that?” Payne said.
“Sergeant, I can barely hear you.”
Payne raised his voice as he spoke slowly: “I repeat, Rittenhouse Square shooter is in a white Chevy van headed south—the wrong way—on South Eighteenth. I am driving a black Porsche in pursuit—”
“Okay. Got it. Description of the doers? White? Black? Skinny? Medium build? Anything?”
“Negative. Only the vehicle, a white Chevy with significant damage on right side and door signs reading KEYCOM INSTALLER. Also, need Fire Rescue for vehicle fire and multiple collisions at South Rittenhouse Square—”
“Priority 1 call for service already made on the fire and collisions. Stand by.”