Even with his face turned down, the powerful light cut through the grass, dazzling him. And the light passed on.
He looked up, saw the zigzagging chopper chattering slowly toward the overpass. He got to his feet and began running again.
A cop car, lights flickering, ran through the neighborhood on the other side of the tracks, but a street or two west of him. He was running toward some kind of commercial building with trees around it. He swerved toward it; he could hide in the brush. The cops on the bridge swept him with the searchlight and he went down. A second later, the light came back, swept overhead, picking away at him. When it drifted back toward the tracks, he made it the last few feet to the trees.
And found his way blocked by water.
“No-no,” he said, out loud. He couldn’t catch a break.
He was in a small neighborhood park, with a pond in the middle of it. The light came back, and he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled toward the water. His hands slipped on the grass and a stench reached up to him. What? Whatever he was crawling through was slick; then a small thing moved to his right, and he realized it was a duck. He was crawling through duck shit. The light came back and he dropped into the stuff, then slithered down the bank into the chill water. And heard the shouting behind him.
THE NIGHT GLASSES were useless. They were fine in steady, low light, but the sweeping searchlights were screwing up the sensors, and Haywood put them away.
“That way,” Lucas said. “Up in those containers.”
They ran along the track and were quickly pinned and dazzled by the searchlights from the overpass. Lucas got on the radio, waved the lights off.
“Can’t see a fuckin’ thing,” Haywood said. “I never been on the other end of those lights.”
Lucas stepped into a hole in the line of containers, found a second row of containers with a track between them, all dark as pitch.
“If he’s down there and he’s got a gun, it’d be suicide to go in,” Haywood said.
“Yeah.” Lucas got on the radio, got the chopper. “Can you come back toward the elevator? There’s a double line of containers; we want the light right down the middle.”
The pilot took a minute to get lined up, then hung above them, the downwash from the rotors battering down at them as they walked up the line. A hundred feet from the end, Lucas caught an edge of chrome in a hole in the wall. He shouted “Whoa” into the radio and caught Haywood’s arm, shouted, “There’s the van, there’s the van.”
Haywood went right while Lucas went left, and the chopper moved up, found the hole, and dropped the light on it.
THE COPS WERE walking through the neighborhood, and lights were coming on. Mail could hear their voices, far away, but distinct enough: a woman yelling to a neighbor, “Is it the gas? Is it the gas?”
And the answer, “They’re looking for a crazy guy.”
Mail dog-paddled across the pond to a muddy point, where a weeping willow tree hung over the water. A half-dozen ducks woke and started inquisitively quacking. “Get the fuck…” he hissed and started out of the water. The ducks took off in a rush of wings, quacking.
Christ, if anybody heard that…
He crawled up on the bank, shivering—very cold now—and had started through the trees when he heard the cops coming, marked by a line of bobbing flashlights. He looked around, then back at the water, and reluctantly slipped in, his head below the cutbank under the willow.
The chill water was only about three feet deep but wanted to float him. Groping along the bank, his hand caught a willow root, and he used it to push himself down and stabilize. He turned his face to the bank and pulled the dark jacket over his head.
“Probably breathing through a straw,” a cop said, the voice young and far away.
“Yeah, like you’re talking through your ass,” said another, equally young. “Jesus, there’s goose shit all over the place.”
“Duck shit,” the first voice said. Farm boy. “Goose shit’s bigger; looks like stogies.”
A third voice: “Hey, we got a shit expert.”
“Somebody ought to kick through those bushes…”
“I’ll get it…?”
Mail bowed his head as the footsteps got closer. Then the cop began kicking through the brush overhead. The cop came all the way down to the willow tree: Mail could have reached out of the water and grabbed his leg. But the cop just shined his light out over the water and then headed back for the others, calling, “Nothing here.”
Mail was on the same side of the pond as the cops. When they’d moved on, he dog-paddled across the pond and crawled out, picking up more duck shit. Now he began shivering uncontrollably. Cold; he’d never been this cold. He crawled straight ahead, toward the corner of the commercial building, the rubble on the ground cutting into his hands. He pushed into a clump of brush, where he stopped, and pulled his legs beneath him, trying to control the shivering. His hair hung across his forehead, and he pushed it back with one hand; he smelled like duck shit.
Across the tracks, the helicopter was hovering in one spot, and three cop cars were bumping along the line of containers.
“Found it,” he said out loud. They’d already found the goddamn van. The barking started again: were they tracking him with dogs? Jesus.
More dogs were barking through the neighborhood, aroused by all the cops walking through. He had to move. Had to get out of here. He crawled back through the bushes, finally stood up and looked around. The cops seemed to have set up a perimeter, with more cops sweeping the area inside of it. He’d have to cross it, sooner or later.
He thought: Sewer.
And dismissed it. He didn’t know anything about sewers. If he crawled down a sewer, he’d probably die down there. And the idea of the sewer walls closing in…
He’d always been claustrophobic, one reason he’d never go back to the hospital. The hospital didn’t fuck around with beatings; they knew how to really punish you. His claustrophobia had come out early in his stay, and they’d introduced him to the Quiet Room…
Half-crouching, Mail crossed a driveway and climbed a short fence into the first yard. He crossed the yard, ran behind a house with several lights on, and down a line of bridal-wreath bushes, where he crawled over a wire fence, crossed the next yard, and climbed the fence again. He crossed the next yard, came to another fence, and heard the dog. Large dog, woofing along in the night at the other end of the yard. Take a chance? The dog smelled him at the same time he heard it, turned, and rushed the fence where he was hiding, snarling, slavering for him. Big black-and-tan body, white teeth like a tiger’s. No way.
Mail went back, crawled over a fence, and turned left, looking for another way.
A cop car flashed past, light rack spinning; dogs were barking everywhere, now, a mad chorus of mutts.
This could take a while…
LUCAS CALLED IN the plate number on the van, and the VIN.
Thirty seconds later, on the radio: “Lucas: we’ve got an address down in Eagan.”
28
THE BEDSPRINGS WERE too flexible to make decent weapons. They’d hoped for something like an ice pick, but the springs would not fully uncurl. When pressed against anything resistant, they flexed.
But if they couldn’t get ice picks from the springs, they got two fat, three-inch-long needles, honed on the granite rocks in the fieldstone walls.
Grace stood on the Porta-Potti and began picking at the nail: “Lots better,” she told Andi. “This works great.”
She picked for ten minutes and Andi picked for ten minutes more, then Grace started again. Grace was working on it when it finally came free. She thought it moved under the spring-needle, and grabbed it between a thumb and forefinger. It turned in her fingers, and she held tighter and put weight on it, felt it twist again.
Grace said, breathlessly, “Mom, it’s coming. It’s coming out.” And she pulled it free, like a tooth.
Andi put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”
Grace fro
ze, and they listened. But there were no thumps, no footsteps, and Andi said, “I thought I heard something.”
“I wonder where he is?” Grace looked nervously at the door. Mail had been gone a long time.
“I don’t know. We just need a little more time.” Andi took the nail, sat on the mattress, and began to hone it on a granite pebble. The nail left behind what looked like tiny scratches in the rock, but were actually whisper-thin metal scrapings. “Next time he comes, we have to do it,” she said. “He’ll kill me, soon, if we don’t. And when he kills me, he’ll kill you.”
“Yes.” Grace nodded. She’d thought about it.
Andi stopped honing the nail to look at her daughter. Grace had lost ten pounds. Her hair was stuck together in strings and ropes; the skin of her face was waxy, almost transparent, and her arms trembled when she stood up. Her dress was tattered, soiling, torn. She looked, Andi thought, like an old photograph of a Nazi prison-camp inmate.
“So: we do it.” She went back to scraping the nail, then turned it in her hand. The rust was gone from the tip, and the wedge-shaped nail point was fining down to a needletip.
“What we have to do is figure out a…scenario for attacking him,” she said. Grace was sitting at the end of the mattress, her knees pulled up under her chin. She had a bruise on her forearm. Where’d she gotten that? Mail hadn’t touched her, yet, though the last two times he’d assaulted Andi, he hadn’t bothered to dress before he pushed her back in the cell. He was displaying for Grace. Sooner or later, he’d take her…
She put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”
There was nothing. Grace whispered, “What?”
“I thought I heard him.”
Grace said, “I don’t hear anything.”
They listened for a long time, tense, the fear holding them silent; but nobody came. Finally, Andi went back to honing the nail, the ragged zzzt zzzt zzzt the only sound in the hole.
She had Mail in her mind as she honed it. They’d been in the hole for almost five days. He had attacked her…she didn’t know how many times, but probably twenty. Twenty? Could it be that many?
She thought so.
She honed the nail, thinking, with each stroke, For John Mail. For John Mail…
29
LUCAS AND HAYWOOD went past Lucas’s building at seventy—Sloan still standing in the lot, now in the center of a circle of plainclothes cops; an ambulance had hauled Ricky away—slipped onto Highway 280 and then 1-94, east to I-35E, south through St. Paul, Haywood hanging on the safety belt, three cars trailing, all with lights.
A dispatcher came back. “Eagan’s in. They’re pulling a search warrant right now and they ought to have it by the time you’re there.”
“Patch me through—get them to pull us in there.”
The directions from Eagan burped out over the radio and they crossed the Mississippi like a flock of big-assed birds, jumped off on Yankee Doodle Road, killed the flashers, and headed east.
“That’s them,” Haywood said. He was holding on to the safety belt with one hand and had the other braced on the dashboard. Below them, in a shallow valley, two squad cars and a gray sedan were lined up at the curb. Lucas pulled over next to the sedan and hopped out. A man in a suit hustled around the nose of the car.
“Chief Davenport?
“Danny Carlton. I’m the chief out here.” Carlton was young, with curly red hair and a pink face. “We got your search warrant, but I don’t think you’re gonna be happy.”
“Yeah?”
Carlton pointed down the road, where it rose along the opposite wall of the valley. “The place you’re looking for is right up there. But it’s one of them self-storage places. You know, like two hundred rental garages.”
“Damnit.” Lucas shook his head: this sounded unlikely. “We have to check it, we can’t fuck around.”
THE SELF-STORAGE WAREHOUSE was a complex of long, one-story, concrete-block buildings, the long sides of the buildings each faced with twenty white garage doors. The whole place was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. A small blue gatehouse stood next to the only gate through the fence. An elderly man, pale, worried, met them at the gate. He carried a .38 that looked older than he was.
“No problem,” he said when they gave him the warrant. “Roses, that’d be fifty-seven.”
“Have you seen him?” Lucas asked.
“Hasn’t come through here, not tonight.”
Lucas showed him a copy of the computer-aged Mail photo. “Is that him?”
The guard held it under a light, tipping his head back the better to use his bifocals, stuck out a lip, raised his eyebrows, then handed it back. “That’s him. Got him to a T,” he said.
THE GARAGE DOOR was padlocked, but one of the Eagan cops had a pair of cutters and chopped the hasp. Lucas knocked it away, and with another cop, raised the door.
“Computers,” Haywood said.
He found the light and flipped it on. The room was lined with tables, and the computers were stacked on them, dozens of beige cases and sullen, gray-screen monitors. Under the tables were plastic clothes baskets full of parts—disk drives, modems, sound and color cards, a mouse with its cord wrapped around it, miscellaneous electronic junk.
Nothing human.
A desk and an old cash register sat off to the left. Lucas walked over to the desk, pulled open a drawer. Scrap paper, a single ballpoint. He pulled open another, and found stick-on labels, an indelible pen missing its cap, a dusty yellow legal pad. The middle drawer had another pencil and three X-Men comics in plastic sleeves.
“Tear it apart,” Lucas said to the Minneapolis cops crowding up behind them. “Any piece of paper—anything that might point at the guy. Checks, receipts, credit card numbers, bills, anything.”
The Eagan chief lit a cigarette, looked around, and said, “This is him, huh?”
“Yeah. This is him.”
“I wonder where they are?”
“So do I,” Lucas said.
He stepped outside and tipped his head back, and the Eagan chief thought for a moment that he was sniffing the wind. “I bet they’re close—I bet this is the closest self-storage to his house. Goddamnit. Goddamnit, we’re close.”
The guard had come along out of curiosity, but when not much happened, started tottering back to the gatehouse. Lucas walked after him. “Hey, wait a minute.”
The guard turned. “Huh?”
“You see this guy come and go? You ever see him spend any time here?”
The guard looked slowly left and right, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “He runs a store here on weekends. All kinds of long-haired kids running around.”
“A store?”
The Eagan chief had come up behind him. “It’s illegal, but you see it quite a bit, now,” he said. “Part-time shops, nobody talks to the IRS, no sales tax. They call them flea markets, or garage sales, but you know—they’re not.”
“Does he have any employees? Any regulars?”
The guard touched his lips with his middle and index fingers, thinking, scratched his ass with the other hand, and finally shook his head. “Not that one. The guy in the next, uh, spot, sells lawn mowers ’n’ hedge trimmers and stuff. He might know.”
“Where’s he?”
“I got a list.”
Lucas followed him back to the gate shack, where the guard fumbled under a countertop and finally produced a list of names and telephone numbers.
“What’s under Roses’ name? What number?”
The old man ran a shaky index finger down the list, came to ROSE, and followed it across to a blank space. “Ain’t got one. Supposed to.”
“Gimme the other guy’s name, the lawn mower guy.”
THE COP WASN’T going to leave.
Mail lay behind a bush thirty feet away and watched him. The cop checked his shotgun, then checked it again—playing with it, flipping a shell out, catching it in mid-air, shoving it back in—hummed to himself, spoke into a radio a
couple of times, paced back and forth, and once, looking quickly around first, moved up close to a maple tree and took a leak.
But he wasn’t going anywhere. He idled back and forth, watching the cars come and go at the end of the block, turned the shotgun like a baton. Whistled a snatch of a Paul Simon song…
The cop was at the thinnest spot along the line, a place where the street made an odd little curve before straightening again, as though it had been built around a stump. The curve had the effect of changing the angles, pushing out toward the next set of lawns.
If he could just get across. He thought about using the .45, but if the cop tried to fight him for it, or went for his gun, and he had to shoot—that’d be the end. If he was going to take the cop out, he had to be quick and silent and sure.
Mail pushed himself back, a foot at a time, until he reached the back edge of the house, where he got to his hands and knees. He couldn’t see much, but he could see the dark shape of some kind of yard shed. He scurried over to it, looked around quickly, pulled open the door, and slid inside.
And felt instantly safe with the roof over his head. Nobody could see in, no light would catch him. The shed was full of yard tools and smelled of dead autumn leaves and old premix-gasoline. Groping in the dark, he found a couple of rakes, a hoe, a shovel. He could try the shovel, but it was awkward, and he groped along the floor for something else. He found a short piece of two-by-four, thought about it, decided he liked the shovel better. Moved on, found two snow shovels, a pair of hedge clippers; he touched a gas can, smelled the gas on his fingers; and then, in the corner, a spade handle.
The handle had broken off just above where the blade had been. He hefted it, made a short chopping motion. Okay. This would work.
He didn’t want to go back outside, but he had to. He slipped outside, scrambled back to the corner, and eased down the side of the house to the bush where he’d watched the cop. The cop was still there, hat off, rubbing his head. Then he put the cap back on, said something to his radio, got something back, and whistled the snatch of Paul Simon again.