What was it? His ears were still ringing from the shots, maybe he was hearing that. He rolled down the window, just an inch, and heard the sound again, over the noise of the wheels. And then he passed the end of the block, and looked down to the right. A group of kids on the sidewalk, with candles.
Carolers.
“Christ,” he said. “Little fuckers oughta be in bed.” And he went on.
SELL-MORE HADN’TSHOWN, and Del had come and gone—he’d be at the hospital, he said. Sherrill had left for the funeral home. Visitation night. Lucas and Sloan said they’d be along.
“You don’t have to come,” Sherrill said.
“Of course we have to,” Lucas said. He patted her on the shoulder. “We’ll be there.”
When she was gone, Sloan said, “Why don’t we pick up a burger and a beer before we go over?”
Lucas nodded: “All right.” He was locking the door when they heard running footsteps. Anderson, white-faced, came around the corner: “It’s Palin,” he blurted.
“What?” Lucas looked at Sloan, then back to Anderson.
“I had Gina down at Dispatch running tapes, to nail down where Palin was when he was on duty. And night before last, he called in a Wisconsin plate. You won’t believe . . .”
“Elmore Darling,” Lucas said, snapping his fingers. “That’s how he found Darling. Took the numbers off the plate when he talked to LaChaise, ran them, went over there and killed Darling.”
“I think so,” Anderson said, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing in his thin neck. “We never would have caught him if we hadn’t run those old tapes.”
“Arne Palin,” Sloan said, shaking his head.
“Let’s take him,” Lucas said.
17
LUCAS MET QUICKLY with Roux and Lester, and Lester got the Emergency Response Unit moving. Palin was at home: his precinct boss called him about emergency overtime. Palin said he’d be happy to work, and was told to stay close to the phone while they figured out a new schedule.
“LaChaise isn’t with him. He couldn’t be that far gone,” Lucas said to Roux and Lester, as they walked out toward the doorway.
“We can’t take the chance, we don’t want anyone else killed. Let the ERU do the entry,” Lester said. “If LaChaise isn’t there, you get in there and see if you can crack Palin in a hurry. Maybe we can get LaChaise’s location before he figures out that we’ve got Palin.”
“Sloan’s here, he can help with the interrogation,” Lucas said. They turned a corner and saw Sloan waiting by the door, talking with Franklin. As they walked up, Stadic came in, stamped snow off his feet.
“You want to come?” Lucas asked Franklin.
“If you need the weight,” Franklin said. He nodded at Stadic, who nodded back. “I’m trying to sneak out to my house and pick up some clothes for my old lady.”
“Do this one thing first,” Lucas said. He turned to Stadic. “How about you? You look kind of fucked up.”
“Yeah, I am,” Stadic said, shaking his head.
“All right,” Lucas said. He stuck a finger in Stadic’s gut. “Get some sleep.”
“But what’s happening?” Stadic asked.
“We think one of our guys is talking to LaChaise,” Lester said grimly.
Stadic’s eyelids fluttered, and he said, “No way.” And then, “Who?”
Lucas, Sloan and Franklin were already pushing through the door into the snow.
“Arne Palin,” Roux said to Stadic, behind them.
“No way,” Stadic said again.
“I gotta think he’s right,” Franklin said as they stepped out into the snow and the door closed. He looked up at the miserable sky, which was so close that he almost felt he could touch it. “I can’t believe it’s Arne Palin.”
STADIC WENT DOWN to his office; nobody home, just a bunch of empty desks. He kept a half-dozen white crosses stashed in a hole at the back of a desk drawer, where they couldn’t be seen even if you emptied out the drawer. He popped one, as an eye-opener, took his phone out of his pocket and started to punch the speed dial, but stopped, frowned, thought about it and turned it off again. Cell phones are radios. He should stay off the air.
Then it occurred to him that LaChaise’s calls on the cell phone could be traced. Shit. If they found the phone, and checked the billing, he’d be screwed. Stadic started to sweat. Christ, he had to get that cell phone. Had to.
He thought for a moment, then picked up a desk phone and dialed LaChaise’s number: as he dialed, the first of the amphetamine hit his bloodstream, and his mind seemed to clear out a bit.
LaChaise answered: “Yeah.”
“I got a guy for you,” Stadic said, without preamble.
“Which one?”
“Franklin. He and Davenport and a couple of other guys just left here, they’re gonna raid a guy . . . nothing to do with you. But I heard Franklin say he had to sneak over to his house after this raid, to pick up some clothes for his wife. She’s over at the hotel.”
“When’s he gonna get there?” LaChaise asked.
“This raid won’t take long,” Stadic said. “They’ll probably hit this house in twenty minutes or so, and Franklin doesn’t live too far away. I’d say, half hour to an hour, depending on what happens with the raid.”
“Anybody watching his house?”
“No.”
“Gimme the address,” LaChaise said.
After he hung up, Stadic worked it through his quickening brain: wait in the snow across the street. If he saw LaChaise and Martin arrive, that was fine. If he didn’t, he’d wait until Franklin showed. Franklin would pull out the other two. And when they moved in on him, to kill him, Stadic could come up from behind, and take them out.
Just as he’d planned it at the other house, but with one less guy to worry about. Had to get that cell phone, though.
Leaving the office, locking the door, he heard voices in the hall, and then Lester came around the corner with Lew Harrin, a homicide guy. He heard Lester say, “There’s Stadic, let’s get him,” and then Lester called, “Hey, Andy.”
Stadic turned as they came up. “Yeah?”
“We got a homicide down on Thirty-third, somebody ran over a guy laying in the street. The uniforms checked it out, say it looks like he was already dead, couple of bullets in the head. Run down there with Lew, see what’s going on.”
“Listen, I’m totally fucked . . .” Stadic began.
“Yeah, I know,” Lester said. “We’re all fried. We can’t put you out front because you don’t have a gun, but you can do this, this is just bullshit interviewing. Anyway, we hear the guy’s a doper. Maybe you’ll know him.”
“Man, my head . . .”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Lester said. “Get your ass down there.”
LA CHAISE AND MARTIN scrambled to get ready for the attack on Franklin. Martin had field-stripped one of the .45s. He walked around finding his boots as he put it back together and reloaded. LaChaise pulled on his parka and said to Sandy, “I’m worried about you. You’d sell us out, just like your old man.”
“C’mon, Dick,” she said. “Don’t scare me.”
“You oughta be scared.”
“I am scared,” she said. “The police are going to kill us.”
“Yeah, probably,” he said, and he grinned at her.
Martin handed LaChaise a blued Colt .45 and a half-dozen magazines. “A little more firepower,” he said. “I wish we had some goddamn heavier stuff. That AR’d be worth its weight in gold.”
LaChaise broke his eyes away from Sandy. “These’ll work,” he said, stuffing them in his parka pocket. He turned back to Sandy. “I thought about taking you, but that won’t work. We’re gonna have to . . .”
“What?” she asked, suddenly sure that this was it: they were going to kill her.
LaChaise grinned at her. “Gonna have to tie you up a little.”
“Dick, c’mon. I’m not going anywhere. I can’t . . .”
“Bill and I have bee
n talking: we think you will.”
She looked at Martin, who nodded. “You will,” he said.
“Down the garage,” LaChaise said.
THEY’DFOUND A dozen padlocks in a kitchen drawer, of the kind Harp used as backup locks on his washing-machine coin boxes. And from the garage, they got a chain. Martin brought an easy chair along, and a stack of magazines.
The lockup was quick, simple and almost foolproof: LaChaise, Sandy thought, probably learned it in prison. One end of the chain went snugly around her waist, and was padlocked in place. The other end went around a support beam in the basement, and was padlocked there. She had just enough slack to sit down.
“You can try to get out,” LaChaise said. “But don’t hurt yourself trying, ’cause it won’t do you no good.”
“Dick, you don’t have to do this,” Sandy said, pleading. “I’d be here.”
LaChaise looked at her hard: “Maybe . . . maybe we can have some fun when I get back.”
“What?”
He said, “C’mon, Bill. We gotta move.”
LUCAS KNEW FIVE minutes after they took Arne Palin that they’d made a mistake.
They’d set up a few blocks away, pulled on the vests, ready for anything. The entry team went to the front door, knocked, and when Palin opened, pushed him back. Another team went through the back door at the same moment, breaking the lock. Palin, sputtering, stuttering, his wife screaming, watched as the team flowed through the house, from bedrooms to basement. Lucas, Sloan and Franklin moved in right behind the entry team. Palin had been patted down and pushed back on the couch with his wife. Palin was sputtering, angry, then dumbfounded.
“Nothing here,” Franklin said. “Can I split?”
“Yeah, take off,” Lucas said. “You coming back to the office?”
“Soon as I get the stuff to my old lady,” Franklin said. He nodded at Palin. “Arne,” he said, and he was gone.
“What the hell?” Palin asked Lucas. “What the hell?”
“Last night you called in a routine make on a Wisconsin pickup that belonged to an Elmore and Sandy Darling. Why’d you do that?”
Palin’s wife looked at him, and Palin’s mouth opened and shut, and then he turned his head, thought for a moment, then looked up at Lucas and said, “I never did that.”
“We got you on tape, Arne.”
“I never,” Palin protested.
“Elmore Darling was shot to death last night and Sandy Darling is running, maybe, with LaChaise and these other nuts. We know you ran their tags . . .”
“You wanna fuckin’ listen to me?” Palin screamed. He started to stand up but Lucas held a hand out toward his chest. He sat down again and shouted, “I didn’t run no Wisconsin plates, and you ain’t got it on tape because I never did it.”
Sloan said, his soft act, “Arne, you might want to get a lawyer . . .”
“I don’t need no fuckin’ lawyer,” Palin shouted, bouncing on the couch. “Bring the fuckin’ tapes in here. Bring the fuckin’ tapes in here.”
Lucas looked at him for a long beat, then at his wife, who was weeping. “All right,” he said. “Why don’t you get your coat on? Let’s go downtown and listen to the tapes, and see if we can figure out what’s going on.”
“I want to come, too,” Palin’s wife said.
Lucas nodded. “Sure, that’d be fine.” He’d been about to tell her to get her coat, as well. He didn’t want anyone left behind, if they were talking to LaChaise.
STADIC LOOKED AT the body of Sell-More. Sell-More’s head was bent against the curb, twisted hard to the right, and his legs had apparently been crushed by the car that hit him. There was no visible blood.
“Shit,” he said to Harrin, the homicide cop. “I just talked to him, a few hours ago. Davenport’s gonna freak out. This is LaChaise’s work. Wonder what the hell’s going on.”
Lucas took the call from Stadic on the way back to the office: Sell-More? Why in the hell would somebody hit Sell-More? Because he was asking questions?
FRANKLIN LIVED IN North Minneapolis, in a single-story rambler in a neighborhood of mixed housing styles and ages. Across the street, a brick four-square looked across at him, while to his left, a white clapboard split-level crowded his driveway. Franklin drove slowly down toward his house, tired, feeling the day. There was a little drifting snow around, from the squalls that had come through during the night.
Maybe he ought to get the snowblower out and blast his driveway clean, before it got too deep, or run over too much by the paper delivery guy. He had an insulated jumpsuit in the front closet, along with some pacs; he could clean it out in ten minutes. But had he gassed up the snowblower?
LA CHAISE AND MARTIN had cruised Franklin’s house, then the side streets.
“If there’s anybody around, they sure gotta be inside,” Martin said. “Can’t see shit out here.”
“I been thinking about it,” LaChaise said. “No point in both of us taking him on. So, you drop me up the block, where I can walk back. Then you find a place to park—you see that streetlight?”
LaChaise pointed at a streetlight on the corner two houses up from Franklin’s.
“Yeah?”
“You park where you can see the light. If you can see it, then you can see his car lights when he shows up. As soon as you see him turn in, you come on down. I’ll take him as soon as he gets out of his car.”
“What if he goes in the garage, stays in the car, drops the door without getting out?”
“Then I’ll go right up next to his car window and fill him up from there,” LaChaise said. “That might even be easier.”
“Wish we had a goddamn AR,” Martin said again.
“The ’dog’ll do, and the forty-five.”
“You’ll freeze out there . . .”
“Not that cold,” LaChaise said. “We’ll wait for an hour. I can stand an hour.”
THEY’D BEEN WAITING twenty minutes when Franklin showed, Martin a block and a half down the street, LaChaise ditched behind a fir tree across the street from the mouth of Franklin’s driveway.
Four cars had passed in that time, and a woman in a parka and snowpants, walking, carrying a plastic grocery bag. She passed within six feet of LaChaise, and never suspected him. As she passed, LaChaise pointed the ’dog at the back of her head and said to himself, “Pop.”
He had six shots in the ’dog. He thought about that for a minute. Martin had given him one of the .45s he’d bought from Dave. Now he took it out of his pocket, racked the slide to load and cock it and flipped the safety up.
WHEN FRANKLIN TURNED onto the street, LaChaise leaned forward, tense. The car was moving slow, and he had a feeling . . . yes. He clicked the safety down on the .45.
The garage door started up, a light on inside, and Franklin took a hard left into the driveway. The door was moving up quickly enough that Franklin could keep rolling into the garage. LaChaise unfolded from behind the fir, stumbled—his legs were cramped, he’d been kneeling too long—recovered, started to run after the car, stumbled again, caught himself and saw the car door swing open. But the stumbles had slowed him down . . .
FRANKLIN WAS A big man, but agile. He swung his feet out of the car and stood up, still thinking about the snowblower, and at that moment saw LaChaise running up the drive, knew who it was and said, “Shit.”
LaChaise saw the big man turn toward him and saw his hand drop, and he flashed on Capslock making the same quick move. He was ready this time, and he pulled up and fired the first shot with the ’dog, into Franklin’s chest from twenty feet, saw Franklin stagger back. He closed, walking, fired again at fifteen feet, then a third, a quick bang-bang-bang and then Franklin’s hand came up and LaChaise jerked off a fourth shot and knew that it had gone wide to his right . . .
And then Franklin’s gun was up and LaChaise saw the muzzle flash and he fired once with the .45 with his off hand; missed, he thought. Franklin fired again and LaChaise thought he felt the bullet zip through his beard and he was f
iring and Franklin fell down but he was still firing and LaChaise turned and ran . . .
Martin was there, skidding to a stop, the door opening. LaChaise piled through the passenger-side door and Martin took off, the back end slewing wildly once, twice, then straightening. LaChaise caught the door and slammed it, and looking back, saw Franklin on the floor of the garage . . .
“Got him,” Martin said.
“I don’t know,” LaChaise said uncertainly. “He was this big motherfucker, and I kept shooting him and he kept bouncing around and he wouldn’t go down . . .”
“You can shoot a guy in the heart, he can be good as dead, but he can go on pulling the trigger thirty seconds or a minute,” Martin said. “That’s what happened to them FBIs down in Miami. Those old boys were good as dead, but they kept on shooting, and they took the FBIs down with them.”
“I don’t know . . .” LaChaise said. He twisted to look back, but Franklin’s place was gone in the night.
WHEN THE FIRST slug hit, Franklin felt like somebody had smacked him in the breastbone with a T-ball bat. Same with the second one, and the third. Then he had his own weapon out, but the fourth shot caught his arm, and stung, as though somebody had hit him with a whip, or a limber stick, and turned him. He thought, Don’t be bad, and he opened fire, knowing that he wasn’t doing any good, his left arm on fire. Then another shot hit him in the chest and he fell down, slipping on the snow that had come off his car. He had no idea how many times he’d fired, or how many times he’d been shot at, but a slug ripped through his leg and he rolled, and now was hurting bad, but he kept his pistol pointing out toward the door, and kept it going . . .
And then it all stopped, and he was in silence. Out in the street, he saw LaChaise hurtle into a waiting car.
He said out loud, “What?” And he remembered, Christ, he probably was out of ammo. He automatically went for the second magazine with his left arm, and a tearing pain ran through his arm and shoulder.