He wouldn’t take it, yet. Not yet. He moved his eye a bit farther from the scope: he didn’t want the glass to steam up.
“ I DON’T WANT to talk on the phone anymore,” Lucas said. “I want to talk face-to-face. I want to see if Weather’s okay, what you’ve done to her . . .”
“I haven’t done nothin’ yet,” LaChaise growled.
“I’m gonna push open this other door. I won’t have any cover. I’m gonna keep my gun in my hand. You shoot her, you’re a dead man. But come on out here—talk to me.”
Lucas pushed the second door open, and stood in the center of the hall, his gun by his side, the phone still by his face.
“Trick of some kind,” LaChaise called down the hall.
“No. We’re just trying to get everybody out of here alive,” Lucas said. “Your friend Martin would probably tell you to give it up. He went down shooting, but he seemed happy enough to be alive on the way to the hospital.”
“You swear that’s true—man to man,” LaChaise said.
“Yeah, I do,” Lucas said. “Now let me see your face.” After a moment of silence, LaChaise said, “We’ll come out to talk. Your old lady’ll be in front of me and the gun’ll be pointing right at her head. Anybody tries any shit . . .”
“Nobody’s gonna try any shit,” Lucas said.
LaChaise looked at Weather. “He is a tough guy,” LaChaise said. “Let’s go out there. You just stay right ahead of me.”
“Don’t hurt me,” Weather said.
“Let’s see what happens. Maybe this’ll work out.”
She touched him with her fingertips. “You should give yourself a chance. You’re a smart man. Give it a chance.”
Then she stepped in front of him, and felt the cold steel of LaChaise’s gun muzzle touch her scalp just behind her ear. They edged into the hall together, and LaChaise nervously looked behind him—nothing but a blank wall—and then down at Davenport, who loomed large and dark standing in the double doors. He held the gun at his side and LaChaise again thought, “Cowboys.”
If he got out of this—he was thinking that way, now—if he got out of this, it’d be a long time before he played any cowboy games again.
“I’m here by myself,” Davenport said from the doors. “And I’m pleading with you. Weather takes care of little kids . . . that’s what she’s doing. For Christ’s sake, if you gotta shoot somebody, go for me; let her go.”
“You killed my Georgie . . .” But now Georgie was a bargaining chip.
“We didn’t want to. Look, for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot her by accident, huh? Look, here is my gun.”
Weather could feel the muzzle on the bone just behind her ear. But she wasn’t thinking about it. She was listening to Lucas’s tone of voice, and she thought, Oh, no, something’s going on. She opened her mouth to say something, but LaChaise, behind her, said, “This one time, I’m going to take your word for it . . .”
Now there was a pleading tone in LaChaise’s voice, and Weather felt the pressure from the gun muzzle move away from her ear.
THE SNIPER COULD see Weather from the shoulder up, and all of LaChaise’s head, and the muzzle of the pistol. He could hear what LaChaise was saying, but was mentally processing it in the background. Everything else was focused on the muzzle. He saw it start to move, mentally processed the words, going to take your word for it, realized that the muzzle was about to come away from Weather’s head, and then the muzzle lifted out of Weather’s hair and the sniper let out just a tiny puff of breath and squeezed . . .
THE DISTANCE WAS sixty-two feet. In two one-hundredths of a second, the slug exploded from the barrel and through LaChaise’s head, his skull blowing up like a blood-filled pumpkin.
LaChaise never sensed, never knew death was on the way. He was there one instant, moving the muzzle, ready to quit, even thinking about jail life; in the next instant, he was gone, turned off, falling.
WEATHER FELT THE muzzle move, and the next instant, she was on the floor, blind. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear, she was covered with something—she was covered with blood, flesh, brains. She tried to get to her feet but slipped and fell heavily, tried to get up, then Lucas was there, picking her up, and she began to scream . . .
And to push him away.
30
THREE DOCTORS, PHYSICIANS and friends, bent over Weather, trying to talk with her. She was disoriented, physically and psychologically. The explosion of blood, bone and brain had done something to her. The doctors were talking about sedatives.
“Shock,” one of the cops said to Lucas. The doctors had pushed Lucas away—his presence seemed to make her worse. “We’ll get her cleaned up, get her calmed down, then you can see her,” they said.
He went reluctantly, watching from the back of the room. Roux showed up, looked at the body, talked to the kid from Iowa, then came over to see Lucas.
“So it’s done,” she said. “Is Weather all right?”
“She’s shook up,” Lucas said. “She freaked when we shot LaChaise.”
“Well, look at her,” Roux said quietly. “She looks like she was literally in a blood bath. A bath of blood.”
“Yeah, I just . . . I don’t know. I did right, I think.”
Roux nodded: “You did right.” She asked, “Did you talk to Dewey?”
Dewey was the shooter. Lucas looked across the room at the Iowa kid, who had the rifle cradled in his left arm, like a pheasant hunter with a shotgun. He was chatting pleasantly with the team leader. “Never had a chance,” Lucas said. “I need to thank him.”
Roux said, “He scares the shit out of me. He seems to think the whole thing is very interesting. Can’t wait to tell his folks. But he doesn’t seem to feel a thing about actually killing somebody.”
Lucas nodded, shrugged, turned back toward Weather. “Jesus, I hope . . .” He shook his head. “She acts like she hates me.”
THE PHONE IN his pocket rang and Lucas fumbled for it. Roux said, “What about Darling?”
“We’ve got some guys trying to find her over at the dome.” Lucas got the phone out—his own phone. The ringing continued in his pocket. “Uh-oh,” he said, as he dug out the second phone. “This could be bad news.”
He turned the phone on and said, “Yes?”
“This is Johnson, over at U.S. West.”
“What’d you get?”
“The phone was registered to a Sybil Guhl, she’s a real-estate broker in Arden Hills. There were forty-two calls in the last few days, both businesses and private phones . . .”
“Private phones,” Lucas said.
“There were calls to a Daymon Harp residence in Minneapolis,” Johnson said in his fussy corporate voice. “To an Andrew Stadic residence . . .”
“Oh, shit,” Lucas said.
“Beg pardon?”
“How many calls to Stadic?”
“Uh . . . nine. That was the most frequently called personal phone—actually, it’s another cellular.”
“Who else?”
There were other calls, but they could be discounted. Lucas said “Thanks,” hung up and looked at Roux. “Andy Stadic,” he said. “He’s the guy.”
“Damnit.” She brushed her hand across her eyes, as though that would make it go away. “Let’s get a team out to his house.”
“He’s not at his house,” Lucas said, backing away, heading toward the elevators. He looked one last time at Weather, sitting head down on the cart, the doctors crouched around her. He should stay; but he’d go. “He’s leading the hunt for Sandy Darling.”
SANDY HEARD THE knot of cops coming up behind her. She needed to talk to somebody on a phone before she turned herself in. One of the cops—maybe one of those behind her, maybe not—would have a face that matched the photos in her pocket.
If he was behind her, she might not get a chance to talk. When she heard the cops calling back and forth, she thought about running over to the dome, but the street was too wide, too open, and they were too close. She’d been leavin
g tracks, but there’d been no way to avoid that. Now she ran a few feet into the street, through fresh snow, heading toward the dome. As she got into the street, onto snow compacted by traffic, she swerved left.
An old house, with four or five mailboxes mounted next to the door, was only a few dozen feet away, and behind it, a ramshackle garage. All the windows in the house were dark, but somebody had left it not long ago. A set of tire tracks came out of the garage, into the street.
Sandy hurried to the drive, tiptoed up the car track, crouched, looked around, then lifted the garage door. The door rolled up easily. The garage was empty, except for three garbage cans and a pile of worn-out tires stacked on one side. She dropped the door, and in the pitch-blackness, felt her way across to the stack of tires and sat down.
She felt as though she’d been physically beaten, but there was hope now. If she could get to a phone . . .
Through the walls of the garage, as if from a distance, she could hear the cops calling back and forth, and then more sirens. She sat and waited.
STADIC AND TWO uniformed cops crossed the street to the Metrodome. A ramp led up from the street to the concourse level, and they climbed it, spread out in a skirmish line. Four cars were parked in the tiny parking area above the ramp. Footprints led from the ramp area to the doors at the base of the dome. They couldn’t tell if anyone else had walked up the ramp.
“Protect yourself, boys,” Stadic said to the others. “Davenport might be right that she’s helping out, but he don’t know everything. If you come up on her, be ready.”
The uniforms nodded, and as they approached the line of doors, they saw that one was propped open with a plastic wastebasket. “Five’ll get you ten that she came in here,” one of the cops muttered. They eased through the first set of doors, then went through a revolving door onto the circular concourse.
Nobody in sight. The concourse was only dimly lit, but somewhere, somebody was running a machine that sounded like an oversized vacuum. Stadic said, “You guys go that way. Holler if you see anything. She could be anywhere.”
At that instant, one of the cops saw movement over Stadic’s shoulder. He yelled, “Hold it . . . You! Hold it.”
Stadic spun, and saw a figure in the dim light. The figure had stopped in the center of the concourse, and then the other uniform yelled, “Minneapolis police, hold it.” All three of them trotted toward the figure. A man; a janitor.
“What happened?” the man asked. He was holding a hot TV dinner in one hand, a plastic fork in the other.
“Sorry,” the first cop said. He put his pistol away. “You work here?”
“Uh, yeah . . .”
“Did you see a woman come through here? Hiding out?”
“Haven’t seen anybody but the guys down working on the rug,” the man said.
“The rug?”
“Yeah, you know, the Astroturf.”
“All right: we’re looking for a woman. If you see anybody, you let us know. We’ll be walking around the concourse.”
“What’d she do?” the janitor asked.
“She’s that woman with the guys killing the cops,” Stadic said.
“Yeah?” This was something different. “Is she, like . . . armed?”
“We don’t know,” Stadic said. “Don’t take any chances. If you see her or any of your guys see her, get to a phone.” He waved over his shoulder. There were phones all along the concourse. He scribbled a number on a business card. “Call this number. It’ll ring me, right here, and we’ll come running.”
The janitor took the card. “I’ll tell the other guys. We don’t try to take her?”
“No. Don’t go near her,” Stadic said. “We know her sister used to shoot people for sport.”
“I’ll tell you what I can do—I can go up on top and look down,” the janitor said. “We can get up there, see almost everything inside.”
“Good. Give me a call,” Stadic said. To the uniforms he said, “You guys go that way. Check all the stairwells, go up and down, look in the women’s cans. I’ll meet you on the other side.”
“Got it.”
“And I’ll go up on top,” the janitor said.
CARS WENT BY every few minutes, some fast, some slow. Sandy could hear nothing else, except the whisper of the falling snow. Finally she stood up and edged back to the door, lifted it two feet, squatted and looked out. Nobody. She pushed it up another foot, duckwalked out into the snow. She looked at the house, the windows still dark, then across the street at the dome. She could knock on the door of the house, maybe get somebody up, get a phone.
But there had to be a phone right there, across the street. No cars coming.
She ran across the street and up the approach ramp. A number of car and foot tracks went up the ramp. As she followed them, she brushed past a green pole set into the concrete. The pole was a modernistic phone kiosk, with a phone hanging on the other side—dial 911, no charge—but she never saw it.
Instead, she went on to the door, opened it, stepped through into the dead space between the inner and outer doors, then pushed through the revolving door onto the concourse. Nobody in sight, just a bunch of wet foot tracks. But she could hear rock music coming from somewhere. Tom Petty, she thought.
Down the hall she saw a sign: restrooms and phones. She went that way and found a bank of phones. She picked up a phone, listened, got a dial tone, punched in 911. The call was answered instantly.
“This is Sandy Darling . . .”
“Ms. Darling, where are you?”
“I’m at the Metrodome, I’m inside.”
“Okay. We’ll put you through to Chief Davenport. He’s on his way there.”
A moment later they clicked through. “Ms. Darling? This is Lucas Davenport. The policeman working with LaChaise—his name was Andy Stadic?”
“I don’t know,” Sandy said. “They wouldn’t tell me. They said if I turned them in, the cop was paid to come kill me. I’ve got some pictures of him. I took them out of Dick’s pocket.”
“Okay. I’m two minutes away and we’ve . . .”
“Listen, I think Dick is going to the hospital where your wife works. You’ve got to get over there first.”
“Dick LaChaise was killed at the hospital,” Lucas said.
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God . . .” She said it half to herself, but Lucas picked it up.
“I’m just about there and we’ve got more people on the way,” Lucas said. “Stadic is in the dome with you, so you’ve got to stay out of sight.”
“He’s in the dome?” She could hear voices and footsteps.
“Yes.”
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Somebody’s coming.”
“Run,” Lucas said. “Run and hide.”
Sandy dropped the phone and ran across the hall. Two doors and a stairway led down to the first tier of seats: she pulled on a door, not expecting it to open. It did. She went through, down the stairs to the field of blue plastic seats, and turned left. Below her, on the football field, a half-dozen people were doing something to the dark green carpet. Stretching it? She couldn’t tell.
She went down six rows, apparently unseen by the people on the field, slid halfway down the row of seats, and lay on her back. They’d have to look down every single row to see her, and she only had two minutes to go. Two minutes, Davenport had said. She thought she saw movement at the peak of the roof, but when she focused on the spot, there was nothing.
Less than two minutes, she thought.
STADIC’S PHONE RANG.
“This is the building engineer, I talked to you . . .”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“She’s hiding third row down, lower tier, right behind the goalposts.”
He had her. “Which end?”
“South.”
“What the fuck end is that?” Stadic snarled. North, south, he couldn’t tell anything in this place.
“The, uh, hmm, I know: she’s on the opposite
end from where they’re working on the rug.”
Stadic said, “Go on back up there and watch in case she moves,” then turned the phone off and started running. If he could get her. If he could get the phone away from Davenport. Christ, if LaChaise had Davenport’s old lady, they could be there all day. He was still alive, if he could get the girl.
Stadic rounded the end of the concourse and saw people milling around. One of them yelled, “Sandra Darling. Sandra Darling, where are you?”
Who was that? That couldn’t be Davenport . . .
He dodged left, went down the stairs to the first tier. He was halfway around. He went down three rows and started running sideways. He was on the thirty-yard line, the twenty, the ten, but still a way to go.
A uniformed cop came out of one of the staircases, saw him and yelled, “Andy Stadic. Stadic. Stop there, Andy.”
They had him.
No doubt. But he kept going, he was almost to the woman: he could do that, anyway. He could say that he didn’t hear, that he was about to arrest her. He had the .380 in his pocket, if he could drop it, if they found her with the gun . . .
Sandy heard the cops shouting, heard somebody banging toward the seats. She peeked: the man in the photos was a hundred feet away, running right toward her. He knew where she was. She began to crawl down the space between the seats, got to the stairs, scrambled up them, hands and feet churning.
“Sandy Darling, stop,” Stadic screamed. He brought the shotgun up, centered it on the back of her head and jerked the trigger. The shot boomed inside the stadium and he saw her go down. Had she gone down before the shot? Had he hit her?