"Did you check with Klett and Barker?"
"They haven't seen a soul down here."
Bahr glanced at Jeff sharply. "How about the streets behind? Any chance
of a breakthrough there?"
The man's voice was matter-of-fact. "It's airtight. He couldn't get
through without somebody seeing him." He stepped back to the car and
spoke rapidly into the talker for a moment or two. "Nothing yet."
"Damn. How about Howie and the boys inside the place?"
"Nothing from them either."
Jeff's face darkened. "The Hoffman Center," he said slowly. "He got
into the Center, somehow. He must have."
"He'd have to have gilt-edged medical credentials to get in after
hours. They don't mess around over there. And what would it gain him?"
Jeff peered at Bahr in the darkness. "Maybe he wanted to be thrown to
the Mercy Men. Maybe he's figured that as a last resort, he'll go in
and volunteer, make a stab at the Big Cash."
Bahr stared at the big man in horror. "Look--Conroe may be desperate,
but he hasn't lost his mind. My God, man! He isn't crazy."
"But he's scared."
"Of course he's scared, but--"
"How scared?"
Bahr shrugged angrily. "He'd have to be on his last legs to take a
gamble like that."
"But they'd take him. They wouldn't ask any questions. They'd swallow
him up; _they'd hide him_, whether they knew it or not." Jeff's voice
rose in excitement. "Look. We've hunted him down for years. We've never
rested; we've never quit. He knows that and he knows why. He knows me.
He knows I'm not going to quit until I get him. And he knows I will
get him, sooner or later. I'm cutting too close; I'm undermining his
friends; I'm always moving closer. Everywhere he goes, everything he
does, I'm onto him. And he knows when I do get him, he's going to die.
What does that add up to?"
Bahr blinked in silence. Jeff's face hardened. "Well, I'll tell you
what it adds up to. A man can take just so much. He can slide and twist
and hide and keep moving just so long. Then he finds there aren't any
more hiding places. But there's one last place a man can go to hide--if
he's really at the end of his tether--and that's the Mercy Men. Because
there he could vanish as though he'd never existed."
Ted Bahr carefully lit a smoke. "If that's where he went, we're
through, Jeff. We'll never get him. We don't even need to worry about
trying. Because if he's gone there, he'll never come out again."
"Some of them do."
Bahr grunted. "One in a million, maybe. The odds are so heavy that
there's no sense thinking about it. If Paul Conroe has gone to the
Mercy Men, then he's dead. And that is that."
Jeff returned his weapon to his pocket sharply and walked out to the
car at the curb. "Keep your men where they are," he said to Bahr. "Keep
them there for the rest of the night. If he's found a loophole, I want
to know it. If he's hidden in the buildings, he'll have to come out
sometime. Get some men to search the roofs, and you and I can start on
the alleyways. If he's out there, we'll get him." He straightened his
shoulders and the sullen fire was back in his eyes--an angry, bitter
fire. "And if he's gone into the Center, we'll still get him."
Bahr's eyes were wide. "He'll never come out if he's gone where you
think, Jeff. We could wait weeks or months, even years, and we still
wouldn't know. Even if he did come out, we might never recognize him."
"I'll recognize him," Jeff snarled, looking down into Bahr's face. "I'm
going to kill him. I'm going to know that he's dead, because I'll see
him die. And I'll kill him if I have to follow him into the Center to
do it."