Escape Clause

24

After Flowers left, Peck popped a couple of Xanax and sat on his couch and tried to think it over, although the drug fogged him up for a while-enough that he later realized that he’d lost some time. He came back when the doorbell rang. Thinking it might be Flowers again and feeling simultaneously angry and chemically mellow, a confusing combination, he went to the front door and yanked it open.

An attractive thirtysomething woman was standing there, a smile on her face. He didn’t immediately pick up the microphone in her hand or the cameraman standing off at an angle. What he felt first was the heat coming through the screen door; it was like opening an oven.

The woman said something and he frowned and asked, “What?”

She repeated herself: “Dr. Peck, we’ve heard from a number of law enforcement officials that you are suspected of being involved in the theft of the tigers from the Minnesota Zoo.”

As she said that, a light came on to his left, blinding him, and he realized that he was talking to a reporter.

“That’s ridiculous! Who are you? If you make this ridiculous charge public in any way, you’d better have a very good lawyer because I will sue you for every dime you have…”

He went on for a while and then slammed the door.

–

Outside the house, Daisy Jones said to her cameraman, “That’s about it; there ain’t gonna be no more.”

“Sounded pretty fucked up, man. That was drugs talking,” said the cameraman, who’d know.

They got back in their van and started away from Peck’s house, and a block and a half down the street, she noticed a familiar Crown Vic parked at the curb.

“Pull over next to that car,” she told the cameraman, who was driving.

The cameraman pulled over next to the apparently empty Crown Vic, and Jones hopped out and walked around the back of the van and knocked on the driver’s-side window. Jenkins had slumped over onto the passenger seat, trying to hide, but now he sat up and rolled down the window and Jones said, “You can’t do surveillance from a Crown Vic, Jenkins. You need a Camry or something.”

“Don’t fit in a Camry,” Jenkins said. “You get anything hot from Peck?”

“Yeah. A hot threat to sue us.”

“You going with it?”

“Well, he didn’t exactly deny taking the tigers; he said the charge is ridiculous and threatened to sue,” Jones said. “So-yeah, we’ll probably go with it. You and Virgie are using me to break him out, right?”

“We wouldn’t do that, honeybun,” Jenkins said.

“You call me ‘honeybun’ again, I’m going to jerk your tongue out of your mouth,” Jones said.

“Honeybun, honeybun,” Jenkins said. “You are a honeybun, Daisy. Anyway, why don’t you go away so I can go back to being alert?”

“Right. America needs more lerts,” Jones said. She looked down the street toward Peck’s house and said, “If we put it on the air that he’s under surveillance… could make him more nervous.”

“Yeah, but it’d embarrass me with my boss,” Jenkins said.

“Tough. I’ll let my editor make the call on that one. Anyway, give me a ring the next time you’re gonna beat up somebody. If it bleeds, it leads.”

“I’ll do that, if you don’t say that thing about Peck being under surveillance,” Jenkins said. “Now go away.”

–

When the TV reporter left, Peck staggered into the bathroom and took down the tube of Xanax and looked into it. There were only seven little blue pills left and in one clear corner of his brain he thought, “My God, there were sixteen pills in here yesterday.”

He put the tube in his pocket and tried to remember what he’d said to the TV reporter, but none of it was too clear. He went back to his reading chair and turned on the television, which was showing some horseshit cop show.

Another blank space went by, maybe an hour, and he came back when he saw his own face on the television, standing behind his own screen door. He sounded guilty in his own ears, and a little nuts, too: “I’ll put some sue on your shirt…”

“What?”

The woman said he was under surveillance. Really? He went to the front door and stepped out on the porch and looked both ways up and down the street. There were a few cars around, but he didn’t see anybody lurking. The clear spot in his brain, which had grown a bit larger, said to him, “You won’t see them, dummy. They’re hiding.”

He went back inside and sat in his reading chair. The weather report had come up on whatever TV channel he was on, and the weatherman, who looked like he’d been waxed, said it was hot outside. How hot was it? So hot that the hookers outside the Target Center were sucking on snow cones…

What? The weatherman hadn’t really said that…

–

Jenkins and Virgil were talking and Virgil, who’d seen the news broadcast after refusing to give a comment to Jones, said, “I don’t know-he sounded like a chipmunk. I think he’s been pounding his own medication or something. Then she went and said he was under surveillance. Thank you very much.”

“Well, he was watching Jones, because right about the time the news came on, he came out on the porch and looked both ways. We got him on edge, that’s for sure. I was thinking, maybe we ought to call Shrake and put him out behind the house, in case he tries to sneak out and make a run for it.”

Virgil thought for a second, then said, “Let’s keep Shrake in bed. I may need him tomorrow.”

–

Peck slowly got sober. He was being watched. That fuckin’ Flowers. Who did he think he was, anyway?

Good question: Who was he?

Peck got his laptop and typed in “Virgil Flowers BCA.”

He still hit a few mental blank spots, when he found himself waking up without ever being aware that he had gone to sleep-or had gone somewhere, since he didn’t think his eyes had closed-but over the next couple of hours, he gathered information about Flowers, who turned out to be a fairly dangerous man. Peck even remembered some of Flowers’s cases, like the one with the Vietnamese spies and the one with the methamphetamine war out on the prairie with the maniac preacher.

Most interesting were two stories in the Mankato Free Press. One had come from the day before, reporting that a woman identified as a “close friend” of BCA Agent Virgil Flowers had been beaten up at a convenience store, according to Mankato police.

A BCA investigator named Catrin Mattsson had been sent to Mankato to determine whether there was any connection between the assault and Flowers’s law enforcement activity. Flowers, Mattsson, and the victim, identified as Florence Nobles, a businesswoman who ran an architectural salvage operation, all refused to comment to the newspaper.

The other article, back a couple of years, reported that an unknown person had firebombed Flowers’s garage. The fire was extinguished, with significant damage to the garage, but the piece mentioned that Flowers had managed to save his fishing boat, which had been parked inside. The really interesting thing about that article was that it listed Flowers’s address.

Peck closed the laptop and closed his eyes at the same time, and sank back in his chair. Thought about it-mostly thought about it, there were still a few blank spaces in his internal time sequencing. He turned the computer back on, went to Google, typed in “How to make a Molotov cocktail.”

The instructions he found were clear and simple, and he further reviewed the possibilities on YouTube. He shut the computer and thought some more. Ten minutes later, he was on his feet, a much larger clear place in his mind now; large enough that he considered taking another Xanax, but didn’t.

Instead, he dug around in his kitchen drawers and found the two lamp-switch modules he used when he was out of town, which turned his lights off and on. He got a lamp from the living room, connected the lamp to the timer, and plugged it into an outlet in his main bathroom, next to his bedroom.

The other one he connected to a second lamp in the living room, and set it to turn the lamp off at two o’clock in the morning. The bathroom lamp would come on a minute later, and five minutes after that, turn off. From the outside, it would look like he quit working at two o’clock, had gone into the bathroom, spent a few minutes there, and then had gone to bed.

–

That done, he went into his bedroom and pulled on a dark blue shirt and black Levi’s, black socks, and black Nikes. He found the ski mask he’d made Zhang Xiaomin pull down over his face the first time they went to the barn. He hesitated, then went to his bedroom closet, dug out the box at the bottom of it, lifted out a photobook, and below that, found the.38-caliber revolver that had belonged to his grandfather, and the half box of cartridges that went with the gun.

He loaded the gun carefully and put it in his sock. The gun pulled the sock down; that wasn’t going to work. He remembered some knee-high compression socks that he’d bought for airline flights, and those worked fine and held the gun snugly to his calf.

There was still enough Xanax in his system to keep him calm about all of this, but he could feel a puddle of fear gathering in his stomach, ready to burst out. He pushed it down and went to the back door and sat and looked out the window. Do it, he thought, or not.

He did it.

When he saw neither movement nor light to his left or right, or in the house behind his, he slipped out the back door, into some bridal wreath bushes along the neighbors’ property line, and sat and watched and listened again. Nothing. Moving carefully, he crossed behind his house, snuck across the alley, then between the two houses that backed up to his.

Emerging on the street on the other side, he set off for downtown St. Paul. Three miles, more or less, should take him forty-five minutes, if he moved right along.

–

And he moved right along, the gun seriously chafing at his calf; he was hot, but nearly invisible in the dark of night. Not invisible enough, though: he got mugged as he was walking down Selby Avenue, past Boyd Park, when a man stepped out of the trees and said, “Give me your fuckin’ wallet.”

The guy didn’t look like a TV mugger: he was blond, well fed, was wearing a Town & Country Club golf shirt, tan pants with pleats, and tasseled loafers without socks. He crowded up on Peck, who tried to shrink away and cried out, “Don’t hurt me,” and the man said, “Give me your fuckin’ wallet,” and Peck fell on his butt and rolled on his side and said, “Don’t hurt me,” and the robber said, “Listen, man, give me your fuckin’ wallet or I’ll cut your nose off,” and in the shifty illumination of a streetlight, flashed what to Peck looked like a screwdriver.

Peck had pulled up his jeans leg and he cried out, “All right, all right, don’t hurt me.”

The man looked around nervously and said, “Keep your voice down, shithead, gimme the fuckin’ wallet. You got a watch. Is that a watch? Gimme the fuckin’ watch and the wallet.”

Peck pulled the gun out of his sock, but kept it behind his leg. “Can I ask you one question?”

“Give me the fuckin’-”

“Why’d you bring a fuckin’ screwdriver to a gunfight?”

A few seconds of confused silence, then: “Whut?”

Peck pointed the pistol at the man’s heart and said, “Back off.”

The man said, “Listen, dude…”

Peck eased himself to his feet, kept the gun pointed at the man who was backing away, nervously watching the hole at the end of the gun’s muzzle, which was shaking badly, and the man said, “Dude, I just wanted to get something to eat.”

“I’ll give you something,” Peck said. “Gonna give you three steps. You know that song? I’m gonna give you three steps and then I’m gonna shoot you in the fuckin’ kidneys. You better run…”

The man turned to run and Peck said, “No, no. Not that way-the other way.”

The man turned and ran the direction Peck had just come from. When he was ten steps gone, Peck ran toward downtown. A block along, he stopped to look back, saw he wasn’t being chased, and put the gun back in his sock. Now he really was hot, his shirt and socks soaked with sweat.

Ten minutes later, he was at the parking garage where he’d ditched Hamlet Simonian’s car. He walked down a flight of stairs, which stank of years of damp and urine, and went to the car and pulled open the door. The keys were still jammed into the crack of the seat, and he got inside and closed his eyes.

Good so far.