Mind prey

CHAPTER 29

Lucas and Hay wood went past Lucas's building at seventy-Sloan still standing in the lot, now in the center of a circle of plain-clothes cops; an ambulance had hauled Ricky away-slipped onto Highway 280 and then I-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 lawnmowers 'n' hedgetrimmers 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 counter top 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 lawnmower 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 set 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.

Like he had the song on his mind, Mail thought.

The cop turned, looking away from Mail, drifted toward the maple tree where he'd taken the leak. Mail tensed, and when the cop's head was behind the tree, stood up and padded toward the tree, slowly at first, but more quickly as the cop came out from behind it, his back still turned.

The cop heard him coming, though.

When Mail was ten feet away, he flinched and turned his head, his mouth open. But even a slow man can cross ten feet in a small fraction of a second, and Mail hit him with the spade handle, the steel grip burying itself in the cop's forehead with a wet crunch.

The cop dropped, his shotgun flying out to the side and clattering down the sidewalk. Mail dropped the spade handle, caught the cop under the armpits, and dragged him back between the houses. In a few seconds, he'd pulled off the cop's jacket, hat, and gunbelt. His own dark jeans would do well enough for uniform pants. The gunbelt was heavy and awkward, and he struggled to get it on.

The cop said a word, and Mail looked down at him, prodded him with a foot. The cop's head rolled to the other side, limp, loose.

"Die, motherfucker," Mail said. And he walked away, out to the sidewalk, pulling on the hat. It was too small, and perched on top of his head. But it would do. He picked up the shotgun, crossed the street, walked between a dark house and a lit one, and started running again.

A man in the dark house, standing in the kitchen drinking coffee, saw him pass. Watched him go across the fence; couldn't see the police uniform, only the movement of the running man. He walked quickly back through his house, to tell the cop out front. But the cop out front was missing.

Huh. The man, cold in his undershirt, went out on his stoop, picked up the newspaper. In the very thin predawn light, he could see what looked like a shotgun lying on the sidewalk… and something else, further down the walk. Where was the cop?

The man looked around, then hurried across the street. What he thought was a shotgun turned out to be a spade handle. He turned, shaking his head, to go back to his house. Then he noticed the other object again. He stepped toward it, picked it up. A police radio.

And the cop on the grass groaned, and the man in the t-shirt said, "What? Who is that?"

They'd found a thick wad of computer printout, and Lucas and Haywood were taking it apart a page at a time, looking for anything. They heard the running footsteps before they saw anyone coming and looked up. The Eagan chief spun in the door, grabbing the edge of the doorframe to stop himself.

"Lucas, you better call in. They got a big problem up there."

Lucas said, "Keep reading," to Haywood and started back toward the car. "What happened?"

"I think your guy killed a cop. And he might have gotten through your perimeter."

"Sonofabitch."

As they hurried back to the car, Lucas said, "Have your guys talked to MacElroy yet?" MacElroy ran the lawnmower shop.

"Talking to him now."

Lucas got the radio, called in. The dispatcher said the cop was still alive. "It's Larry White, Bob White's kid. He's really messed up, the guy hit him with a pipe or something. They're taking him to Ramsey."

"Jesus. What about Mail? Is he gone?"

"Maybe not. A guy who lives down there called us on 911 within a couple of minutes of White getting hit. They backed the perimeter off, making the house the middle of it. He should still be inside."

"All right. I'm coming back up there. Call Roux and Lester, tell them we need to talk."

"They're headed over to Ramsey. Both of them, along with Clemmons." Clemmons ran the Uniform Division.

"Are they on the air?"

"Yeah."

"Tell them to wait for me."

Mail made it through the new perimeter, but not by much. Once outside the original lines, he stayed out of sight for two blocks, then simply ran down a long dark alley, stumbling now and then as he raced over the uneven ground. He'd been running for a minute or perhaps a minute and a half, when he heard the sirens screaming behind him. Christ, they'd found the cop. He ran faster.

Another minute, and a cop car flashed down a cross street in front of him but continued past the alley. Mail slowed just a bit. He was breathing hard now, still carrying the shotgun, the hat perched on his head.

At the end of the alley, he edged cautiously out toward the street. The cop car was a block away, dropping off two foot patrolmen. They were crouched over the car window, intent on what the man inside was saying, or the radio. Mail took a breath, took two quick steps across that put him behind a car, then another behind a maple tree. The cops were still talking. Mail took another breath and walked quickly across the street to a maple on the other side.

And waited-but the cops had missed him.

Watching them, trying to keep the tree between himself and the mouth of the alley, he walked backwards until he was into the alley, then turned and broke into a run. A dog barked at him, and Mail ran faster, and the dog barked a few more times. But there were still dogs barking everywhere. Nobody came after him.

Mail stayed in the alley until it ended, then walked down a block to another alley, and ran down that. The sirens were getting fainter, and he could no longer see lights. But he could see houses against the sky. Dawn was getting close-and the traffic would be picking up.

He would be more visible, now, and there'd be more people around.

He needed wheels.