Somebody shouted and he turned, dizzy, and a cop fired a pistol and a chair splintered behind him.
Then he saw the woman, scrambling, disappearing into a stairwell. He ran that way, and somebody fired another shot at him, but Stadic had lost it.
The woman, he thought. If he could just get the woman. He forgot about the phone: he thought about the small figure disappearing into the stairwell.
There was his problem. The woman.
DAVENPORT APPEARED, LARGE, hair standing out from his head as though somebody had deliberately mussed it, his long black coat dangling down his legs. He was a quarter of the way around the stadium, a pistol in his hand. “Stadic, goddamnit . . .”
But Andy Stadic, too many days with no sleep, one inch from having pulled it off—Stadic was locked into a loop. Find the woman. He jerked the shotgun toward Davenport and pulled the trigger, once, twice, three times, four, and then the gun was empty. Lucas dropped and the shotgun blasts rattled harmlessly off the seats twenty yards away. Not even close. The cops farther up the dome fired three more shots, missing.
Stadic ignored them, dropped the shotgun, drew his pistol, a Glock nine-millimeter, and ran up the stairs, into the stairwell, going after the woman.
And he found blood.
A SMEAR ON the concrete, then a dribble. He’d hit her with his quick shot. He followed the blood around the corner and up. She’d moved to the next tier. Somebody was screaming at him: “Stadic. Stadic . . .”
Not Davenport, one of the other cops.
He was so close.
SANDY WAS HURT. She didn’t know whether she’d been hit with shotgun pellets, or pieces of the plastic chairs, but she was bleeding from the right hip, thigh and calf, and maybe from her back. Her back hurt, anyway, a scratching pain, like a cut.
She emerged on the second level, saw a TV booth to her left. Try to hide. She ran to the booth. The door was locked. She went back down the stairs, thinking she might hide in the seats again—and noticed that the booth window was open. She stood on the back of a seat, and pulled herself in.
Not a broadcast booth, but a camera position. Empty, except for a heavy camera stand. No playoff games this year. She crouched below the window and listened to the cops yelling out in the stadium.
THE THOUGHTS WERE making a little tune in Stadic’s head: get the woman, fuckin’ Davenport; get the woman soon as you can . . .
He ran up the stairs, paused, looked for blood. Heard the cops calling behind him: “Where’d he go? Get out in the goddamn concourse . . . I think he went up.”
More blood. Yes. Going up.
He followed, poked his head out of the stairwell, and a cop at the far end shouted, “There he is. He’s up on top.”
LUCAS RAN UP a stairwell, paused at the top, and peeked. Stadic was in the next well, with a pistol. Lucas poked his head around the corner and yelled, “Andy. Give it up, man.”
“Fuck you, Davenport.” Stadic swiveled and fired.
“You caused this shit.”
Somebody shouted, “He’s gone, he went back down.”
STADIC JUMPED BACK into the stairwell, paused a second, then came back out: and caught him. Lucas, hearing the other cops yelling, had come out of his stairwell and was headed down the aisle toward him. Stadic had his gun up: Lucas’s gun was out to his side, as he balanced himself trying to run down the too-narrow row of seats.
Stadic fired and Davenport flipped over, went down between the chairs.
WHEN SANDY HEARD Lucas shout, she stuck her head up and peeked. Stadic was twenty feet away, Davenport beyond him: she recognized him from TV, the funny shock when you realized that the TV image actually represented a person. Then Stadic fired and Davenport flipped over the chairs, going down.
Sandy looked wildly around the booth, saw the TV stand. The camera mounting-head was fixed to the end of a steel cylinder, which disappeared into a heavy steel base, fixed with two collars held by wing nuts. She loosened the wing nuts and pulled the cylinder out of the base. The cylinder was a chromed-steel pipe four feet long, an inch and a half in diameter. She grabbed it like a baseball bat, hefted it.
STADIC FROZE AFTER firing at Davenport: stunned. He’d just killed a cop, for Christ’s sake. He stood for a second, looking at his pistol. Maybe he could tell them Davenport was the one, that Davenport had set him up.
Glassy-eyed, he turned back to the trail the woman had left. Blood trail . . .
LUCAS’S HEAD CRACKED one of the blue plastic chairs as he went over the side. The bullet had missed—he didn’t have time to think about it, but he was whole, dizzy, disoriented, struggling to get up . . .
THE BLOOD TRAIL ran toward a door on a TV booth, then away from the door and up toward the window.
“ANDY, ANDY . . . ” THE uniformed cops, still half a stadium away, were firing at him. Stadic looked up at the window, climbed on the chair back, pulled himself up. A bullet clipped his coat, another the back of his neck, and he fell.
“Andy . . .”
That was Davenport? He popped up, gun in hand, and saw Lucas again, fired quickly, saw Lucas duck, go down.
He looked up. Christ, the window was right there. Blood on his hand, on his neck, blood on everything, slippery . . .
He went straight up, leaping, caught the window and hauled himself up, heard the cops yelling, “Andy, Andy, Andy,” a regular football cheer, doing the wave for Andy Stadic.
He hauled himself up, hands slippery with blood . . .
Sandy was there, looking down at him.
SANDY HEARD HIM scrabbling at the booth. Saw his hand catch the edge, saw him fall. There were more shots, and then he was up again, bullet-headed, like a gorilla, like King Kong, climbing up the outside of the booth.
Back home, Sandy had always been the one who split wood for the wood stove. She liked doing it, feeling the muscles work.
Now here was this blood-covered man coming to kill her. A man she didn’t know, with a gun, crawling up the wall . . .
She swung the steel cylinder with everything she had: for Elmore, for the times Martin and LaChaise had knocked her down, for the fear during the ledge walk, for all the blood. She swung the pipe like a wood-splitting maul.
STADIC LOOKED UP. Saw it coming. Had just enough time left in the world to let go of the window.
LUCAS WAS ON his knees, his gun coming up, thinking, Vest; he’s wearing a vest . . .
The gunsight tracked up Stadic’s back to his neck, just as Stadic’s head went over the lip of the window, and Sandy loomed in front of him. Lucas snapped the barrel upright, afraid to touch off the shot . . .
He saw the steel cylinder come down.
Heard the crack.
Saw Stadic drop like a rag.
THERE WAS NO sound in the stadium. Everything had stopped: the workmen, the running cops. Lucas. Sandy. Stadic’s body upside-down in the blue chairs.
After a long, long beat, the world started again. “You can come down,” Lucas said to Sandy as the other cops ran toward them. “You’ll be all right now.”
31
SANDY DARLING LAY in the hospital bed, tired, dinged up, but not seriously injured. Her most pressing problem was her left foot, which was cuffed to the bed frame. She could sit up, she could move, but she couldn’t roll over. The simple presence of the cuff gave her the almost uncontrollable urge to roll, and a powerful sense of claustrophobia when she couldn’t.
She’d spoken to a lawyer. He said the Hennepin County District Attorney might come up with a charge, but there wasn’t a case if what she said was true. She was a victim, not a perpetrator.
Sandy had told the truth, generally, with a few critical lies. She hadn’t seen them, she said, until Butters came to get her, to patch up LaChaise. After Butters showed up, she hadn’t been free to leave. She’d tried to get free every way she could.
There remained the problem of LaChaise’s fingerprints and other traces in the Airstream trailer: but nobody but Sandy knew he’d been there—nobody alive—and pr
obably not more than five other people in the world were aware of the Airstream. If they did find the trailer, and bothered to fingerprint it, she could attribute any cooperation to Elmore. Otherwise, when she got out, she’d wait a few days, and then go out to the trailer with cleaning rags and a bucket of detergent.
And she should get out—in a couple of days, with any luck, the lawyer said.
She turned on her side, felt the tug of the cuff and looked out the window. She had a view of a snow-covered rooftop and a hundred yards of anonymous street.
Elmore. Elmore would be the problem, she thought. The guilt she felt about Elmore was deeper, more intractable than she would have believed. He haunted her thoughts, in death, the way he never had in life.
She’d babbled something about it to a doctor. The doctor told her that grief was natural, would stay, but could be borne and would eventually fade.
Maybe, maybe not.
God, if I can only get out . . .
She needed to be outside, working with the horses. This was a pretty time of year, if you liked the north woods, the white fences of the training rings, the dark trees against the snow.
The horses would be out in it now, running over the hillside, the blankets flowing over their backs, gouts of steam snorting from their nostrils.
Sandy Darling shut her eyes and counted horses.
THE PLAINCLOTHES GUYS gathered in homicide, where there really wasn’t enough space, like mourners at a wake, muttering among themselves. Much of the talk was about the Iowa boy and his rifle.
And Stadic, of course.
Stadic dead was better than Stadic alive, everybody agreed on that. But already, the amateur lawyers were talking: he’d never been found guilty in a court of law. What would happen to his benefits? He had an ex-wife and kid, would they get them?
“Andy was a greedy sonofabitch, he was always bitchin’ about not havin’ enough, not makin’ enough,” Loring said. “All the guy ever thought about was money. That’s why his old lady split. But I never thought he’d . . .”
Lester came in and cleared his throat and said, “Listen up, everybody. We’re all done. Unless you’re on the schedule or you’re making a statement, go home. Finish your Christmas shopping. And get the goddamn overtime forms in, and anybody who wants comp time instead of money, come see me, and I will personally kiss you on the ass and shake your hand . . .”
“At the same time?”
A little laughter.
A detective from sex said, “What about Stadic?”
“What about him?” Lester asked.
“I mean . . . we were talking . . . what’s gonna happen?”
Lester said, “Aw, shit, let’s not get into that. We got a long way to go with the county attorney.”
“What about Harp?” asked a drug guy.
“We’re looking for Mr. Harp,” Lester said. “And pay attention here: if anybody except the chief or the mayor talks to the press about Andy Stadic, without checking with us first, well, that’s your First Amendment right, but we will cut your nuts off with a sharpened screwdriver.”
“Hey, are we gonna be on Cops? . . .”
SLOAN AND SHERRILL found Lucas sitting in a waiting room at the University Hospitals, looking at a sheaf of papers in a manila file.
Sherrill stuck her head in and said, “What’s happening, dude?”
Lucas closed the file and said, “Just . . . hanging out.”
Taking that as permission to come in, they dropped into chairs facing him, and Sloan asked, “Have you seen Weather?”
“She should be waking up,” Lucas said. “I’m waiting to go in.”
“Has she said anything to anybody?” Sloan asked.
“Yeah, but she’s disoriented,” Lucas said. “She really seems . . . hurt. I think I really hurt her.”
Sloan shook his head: “You didn’t hurt her. You did what you had to.”
Sherrill, exasperated, said, “C’mon, Sloan, that’s not gonna help.”
“What?”
“Clichés,” Sherrill said. She turned to Lucas. “Maybe you did hurt her. You ought to think about that.”
“Aw, Jesus,” Sloan groaned.
“The problem that’s got me is, it’s my fault,” Lucas said. “I didn’t see Stadic—I should have seen him. If I’d seen Stadic, we would’ve had them all.”
Sloan was irritated: “C’mon, Lucas, how could you have seen Stadic? He saved your life with Butters.”
Lucas waved him off: “You remember when we were getting ready to raid poor old Arne Palin? We were talking at the door, you and me and Franklin? And Lester was there, and Roux? Stadic came in, and Franklin said something like, he wanted to sneak back to his place to pick up some clothes for his wife. An hour later, he was ambushed.”
“Lucas . . .”
“Listen, after he was ambushed, I ran over to the hospital, and I kept thinking, how could they know he was coming? How could they know? They couldn’t just hide outside his house twenty-four hours a day, waiting for him to come along. Why would they? We’d had it on TV that everybody was safe in the hotel . . .”
Lucas pointed a finger at Sloan: “The answer was right there in front of me: Stadic told them. He was the only one who could have.”
Sherrill shook her head. “Seeing that might seem possible when you’re working it out backwards. At the time, nobody would have figured it out.”
“I should have,” Lucas said.
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Sloan said. “Get your head out of your ass.”
“Since I didn’t see it . . . well, I don’t know what else I could’ve done at the hospital,” Lucas said. He spread his hands, looked around the waiting room as though an answer might be written on the walls, then back at Sherrill and Sloan. “I sit here thinking about what I could’ve done, and I can’t think of anything better. Not that that’d given her the best chance of staying alive, with what we knew at the time. Everything we knew said that LaChaise was insane.”
“That’s exactly right,” Sloan said.
“The way I hear it, from what Weather told the docs, she spent the whole time with LaChaise working on him, convincing him he ought to stay alive . . . that she oughta stay alive. And it worked. They were both getting out of it and then boom! He blows up, and she freaks out,” Lucas said.
“That’s got to have some kind of effect on you,” Sherrill said.
“What kind of effect? He was a giant asshole,” Sloan said. “Getting shot was too good for him.”
“That might not be the way she sees it,” Sherrill said.
“Well.” Sloan looked away. “I mean, what’re you supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. He pushed the conversation away. “Have you seen Del?”
“Yeah, he’s gonna hurt for a while,” Sloan said. “He’s not, you know, injured that bad, but he hurts like hell.”
“His wife is pissed,” Sherrill said. “She says we should have had more people up there, besides Del.”
“She’s right,” Lucas said.
“What about Sandy Darling?” Sloan asked Lucas. “I hear she’s talking.”
“Yeah.” Lucas nodded. He’d spent the best part of an hour listening to the interrogation, before leaving Hennepin General for the University Hospitals. “Basically, she was kidnapped.”
“Who killed her old man?”
“She doesn’t know. She said it wasn’t LaChaise or Butters or Martin.”
“Stadic?” asked Sherrill, in a hushed voice.
“I think so,” Lucas said. “He was trying to get rid of everyone. He got the truck tags, somehow, and figured out where they lived. He probably thought they were hiding up there, and went up to take them out. He had to see everybody dead to get free—and they all would’ve been dead if Sandy Darling hadn’t tripped over her goddamn cowboy boots and fallen on her face in the stadium.”
“It’s a hell of a story,” Sloan said. “The question is, how much of it is bullshit?”
&n
bsp; “Maybe some,” Lucas said. “Maybe not, though. There were a couple of things: she said while they attacked the hospital, they chained her to a post in Harp’s garage. There’s a chain around the post, and there’re two padlocks, just like she said, and there’s paint missing from the post and it’s on the chain, as if somebody was trying to pull it free. The chain’s got latents all over it, so we’ll know if she was handling the chain. I think she was. Then she says she tried to climb out a window on Harp’s building, walk down a ledge and go down the fire escape, but that the fire escape was jammed. There are fingerprints on the window, and the fire escape is jammed—it’s actually an illegal latch, but you can’t see it. So that’s right. And walking that ledge in her bare feet, on snow, you’d have to be pretty desperate. And when she called from the dome, she didn’t know it was all over, and she tried to warn me that LaChaise was going after Weather . . .”
“All right, so she walks,” Sloan said. He stood up, yawned, and said, “The big thing is, you gotta take care of yourself.”
“I gotta take care of Weather, is what I gotta do,” Lucas said.
Sloan shook his head: “Nope. Nobody can take care of Weather except Weather. You gotta take care of yourself.”
“Jesus, Sloan,” Sherrill said. She was getting angry. “You know what he means . . .”
Sloan opened his mouth and shut it again: A few years earlier, Lucas had gone through an episode of clinical depression, and since then, Sloan had thought of his friend as somewhat . . . delicate was not quite the right word; dangerously poised, perhaps. He said, “Well . . .” and let it go.
A nurse poked her head in, spotted Lucas and said, “Weather’s up.”
Lucas pushed himself out of the chair and said, “See you guys later,” and hurried down the hall after the nurse.