Mind prey

CHAPTER 30

A surgeon in a scrub suit was wandering aimlessly outside the emergency room exit, a mask hanging down on his chest, paper operating hat askew. He was smoking a cigarette, head down, shoulders humped against the cool air.

"Did you do the White kid?" Lucas asked as he hustled up the drive to the door.

The surgeon shook his head. "They're still working on him." Inside the door, Lester was talking to two Minneapolis cops, while Roux was facing Bob White, the cop's father, and his mother, whose name Lucas couldn't remember. But he remembered that she liked hats, although this morning she was bareheaded, and holding on to a white handkerchief like it was a lifeline. Lucas walked up, nodded, said, "Bob, Mrs. White… how is he?"

"His head is real bad," White said. "But he's a fighter," Lucas didn't know the son, but had the impression that he was somewhat dull; not a bad kid, though. "Yeah, he is. And this is the best trauma place in the country. He's gonna do good."

Mrs. White pushed the handkerchief into her face and started to shake and her husband turned toward her. Lucas looked at Roux and tilted his head toward the door. She gave him an almost imperceptible nod and lifted a hand at a priest who was talking with a St. Paul cop. The priest broke away and Roux stepped toward him and whispered, "I think Mrs. White could use a hand…"

Lester joined them, and Roux lit up as soon as they were outside. The surgeon was starting a new cigarette and stamped his feet and said, "Cold."

Roux and Lester and Lucas walked to the end of the driveway as Roux puffed on the cigarette and Lucas filled them in on Mail's computer shop. When he finished, he said, "We couldn't put his picture out before, because it might touch him off. Now he knows we're close, and that'll do it-he's gonna kill them. We've got to get that picture on the air, everywhere."

"How do you know he'll kill them?" Roux asked.

"I know. He's had them a long time. The pressure must be terrific. With this chase, he'll have cracked like a big fuckin' egg. And he's smart. He'll know we've got the van, and he'll know that we'll get the computer store, that we'll get his prints, that well identify him as John Mail. He'll figure all that out-or he already has." Lucas nodded toward the hospital. "A cop has a shotgun, and Mail took him on with a club. He's freaking out."

Roux nodded. "All right. We can have the photo out in twenty minutes. He'll make all the morning news shows."

"Ask the TV guys to show the pictures at the beginning of the broadcasts, and to tell everybody to get their friends and come and watch, and show them again a couple of minutes later. As many times as they can. Flatter 'em: tell 'em if TV can't find the guy, Andi Manette's gonna die, and the kids, too. That'll keep them pushing the picture out there."

"How long have we got?"

"No time," Lucas said. "No time at all. If we don't find Manette in the next couple of hours, they're gone."

"Unless he's still in the perimeter," Lester said. "They think he might be, the guys up there."

"Yeah. We've gotta keep the perimeter tight. I'm gonna go over there, see if I can figure the odds that he's inside."

"Is there anything else?" Roux asked. "Any goddamn thing?"

Lucas hesitated, then said, "Two things. The first one is, I'd be willing to bet that wherever he's got them, it's within a few miles of that computer shop. That's where the phone calls were coming from, when we were trying to pinpoint the cellular phone. I think we oughta get everybody with a gun-highway patrol, local cops, everybody-and send them down there. We oughta filter every goddamn road. We don't have to stop everybody, but we ought to slow everything down, look in every backseat, see if we can spot somebody trying to elude the blockade."

"We can do that," Roux said.

Lucas looked at Lester, grinned slightly, and said, "Frank, could you call in? Could you get the picture thing going?"

Lester looked from Lucas to Roux and back, and then said, "What? I don't want to hear this?"

Lucas said, "You really don't."

Lester nodded. "All right," he said. "Back in a minute," and he went inside.

"What?" Roux asked when Lester was gone.

"I might call you later in the morning and suggest that you… I don't know, what?" He looked around, and then said, "… that you come over here and visit White. Spontaneously, without telling anybody exactly where you're going. You won't have to be out of touch long. Maybe half an hour."

She narrowed her eyes. "What're you going to do?"

"Are you willing to perjure yourself and say you didn't know?" Lucas asked. "Because you might want to say that."

Roux's vision seemed to turn inward, although she was gazing at Lucas's face. Then she said, "If it's that way…"

"It's that way, if you want to get them back-and keep your job."

"I'd do any fucking thing to get them back," she said. "But I hope you don't call."

"So do I," Lucas said. "If I do call, it'll mean that everything's gone in the toilet."

Mail picked out a house with lights on in the back. From the alley, he could see an older woman working in what must be the kitchen. He crossed a chain-link fence into the yard, wary of dogs, saw nothing. As he passed the garage, he stopped to look in the window. There was a car inside, a Chevy, he thought, not new, but not too old, either. That would work.

He went on to the house, to the back door, leaned the shotgun against the stoop, took out the pistol, looked around for other eyes, other windows, and knocked on the door.

The woman, curious, came to look. She was sixty or so, he thought, her gray hair pulled back in a bun, her thin face just touched with makeup. She was wearing a jacket over a silky shirt. A saleswoman, maybe, or a secretary. She saw the police hat and the uniform jacket and opened the inner door, pushed out the storm door, and said, "Yes?"

Mail grabbed the handle on the storm door, jerked it open, and before she could make another sound, shoved her as hard as he could, his open hand hitting her in the middle of the chest. She went down, and he was inside, and she said, "What?" She tried to crawl away, slowly, and he straddled her and gripped the back of her neck and asked, "Where are your car keys?"

"Don't hurt me," she whimpered. Mail could hear a television working in the other room and turned his head to look at it. Was somebody else out there?

"Where're the fuckin' car keys?" he asked, keeping his voice down.

"My purse, my purse." She tried to crawl out from under him, her thin hands working on the vinyl floor, and he tightened his grip on her neck.

"Where's your purse?"

"There. On the kitchen table."

He turned his head, saw the purse. "Good."

He stood up to get a better swing, and hammered her on the side of the head with the butt of the shotgun. She went down, hard, groaned, kicked a couple of times, and was still. Mail looked at her for a moment, then made a quick check of the small house, A weatherman with what looked like false teeth was pointing at a satellite loop of the Twin Cities area: "… a lake advisory with these winds, which could kick up into the thirty-mile-per-hour category by this afternoon…"

The bedroom had only one bed, a double, already made up.

A black-and-white photograph of a man in a Korean War Army uniform sat on the nightstand, under a crucifix. Nobody else to worry about.

He started back to the kitchen, and was stopped by his own image peering out of the television.

A woman was saying, "… John Mail, a former inmate at the state hospital. If you know this man, if you have seen him, contact the Minneapolis police at the number on your screen."

Mail was stunned. They knew him. Everything was gone. Everything. But they didn't know where he was. And they didn't say anything about the LaDoux name, they didn't say anything about finding Andi and the kid. And the TV would have that. So he was okay, for a while, anyway. But he had to get out, and get out now.

That fuckin' Davenport. Davenport was the one who'd done this. And it made him angry. That fuckin' Davenport, he wasn't fair. He had too much help.

The woman hadn't moved, and he dumped her purse on the kitchen table: car keys and a billfold. He opened the billfold, found twelve dollars.

"Shit."

He went back to the door, pausing to kick the woman in the side: twelve fuckin' dollars. You can't do anything with twelve fuckin' dollars. Her body moved sideways under the blow, leaving a trail of blood on the vinyl; she was bleeding from her ear.

Mail went on, through the door, picked up the shotgun at the stoop, and walked back to the garage. The side door was locked, and none of the keys fit it. He walked around to the alley side, tried the overhead door. That wouldn't budge, either. He walked back to the side door, used an elbow to put pressure on a window pane in the door, and pushed it in. Then he reached through, unlocked the door, and went inside.

A doorbell button was fixed to a block of wood beside the door. Mail pushed it, and the overhead door started up. He climbed in the car, started it, checked the gas. Damnit. Empty, or close enough. He'd have to risk a stop, or find another car. But there was enough to get him out of the neighborhood, anyway.

After Mail had gone, a neighbor woman looked out the back of her house and said, "That's odd."

"What?" Her husband was eating toast while he read the Wizard of Id in the comics.

"Mary left her garage door up."

"Getting old," her husband said. "I'll get it on the way to work."

"Don't forget," the woman said.

"How can I?" he asked, irritated. "I'm right across the alley."

"You could forget," his wife said. "That's why you've been shaving with soap for what, four days now?"

"Yeah, yeah, well, I'm not supposed to do the shopping for this family."

They argued. They always argued. In the heat of the argument, the woman's odd feeling evaporated-when her husband left, she went to get dressed herself, without waiting to see if he closed Mary's garage door.

The man who found White's body showed Lucas the window. "I saw the guy running, and I went right out front."

"So let's walk through it," Lucas said. He looked at his watch. "You're back here, you walk to the door."

They walked through it, out the front, down to the walk, all the way to the point where the man found White's body.

"Did you hear the cop cars moving out before or after the ambulance got here?" Lucas asked.

"Uh, about the same time. There was sirens everywhere. I remember hearing all the sirens, and then the ambulance got here. There was already four cops here, and they sent everybody running around after the guy."

Sloan walked up as Lucas looked at his watch again. "So it was probably five minutes."

The man said, "It didn't seem like it was that long. The cops, they was here in a couple seconds, it seemed like."

"Listen, thanks a lot," Lucas said. He slapped the man on the shoulder.

"That's fine, I hope I helped."

As they walked away from him, Sloan said, "I go on administrative duty starting with the next shift, until the shooting's okayed."

"Yeah."

"Makes me nervous," Sloan said.

"Don't worry about it," Lucas said. "You got witnesses up to your eyeballs."

"Yeah." Sloan was still unhappy. "What's happening here?"

"I'm not sure," Lucas said. "They probably didn't have the new perimeter up for six or seven minutes. The new perimeter is a half-mile out there. He could have run through it-we haven't found any sign of him, If it was me, I would have run through it."

"Sonofabitch could be in somebody's home," Sloan said, looking at the rows of neat, anonymous little houses. "Laying up."

"Yeah. Or he could be out."

Mail found a cut-rate gas station with no customers and no visible television. He pulled in-the shotgun, the hat and cop jacket in the backseat-and pumped ten dollars' worth of gas into the car. A bored kid sat behind the counter eating a packet of beer nuts, and Mail passed him the old woman's ten-dollar bill. Another customer pulled in as he paid for the gas. Mail walked back out, head averted, got in the car, and left. The other customer filled his tank, walked inside, and said, "That guy who just left-he looked like the guy they've got on TV."

"Don't got no TV. Asshole owner won't let me," the kid said dully. He did the credit card, and the other man said, "Sure looked like him, though," and went off to work, where he talked about it most of the morning.

Mail went on down the block, stopped for a red light, turned on the radio. They were talking about him. "… apparently a long-time mental patient who faked his own death. Police have not yet identified the body found in the river."

Good. A break.

But they could be lying. Davenport could be mousetrapping him.

Another voice said, No big difference. There's no way out anyway. Anger cut through him, and he thought: no way out.

Another voice: sure you can…

He was smart. He could get down to the house, pick up what cash he had, take care of Manette and the kid, make it out to the countryside, knock off some rich farmer, somebody whose death wouldn't be noticed right away. If he could get a car for forty-eight hours, he could drive to the West Coast. And from the West Coast… he could go anywhere.

Anywhere. He smiled, visualized himself driving across the west, red buttes on the horizon, cowboys. Hollywood.

As the light changed to green, Mail saw the free-standing phone booth at the side of an Amoco station. He hesitated, but he wanted to talk. And shit, they knew who he was-they just didn't have the LaDoux name. He pulled into the station, dropped a quarter, and dialed Davenport.

The phone rang and Sloan looked at Lucas, and said, "If it's him, give me the high-sign, and I'll tell the Cap."

Lucas took the phone out, flipped it open. "Davenport."

Mail's voice was dark but controlled. "This was not fair. You had a lot more resources on your side."

"John, we're all done," Lucas said, jabbing a finger at Sloan. Sloan ran off to where the uniform captain was talking by radio with the cars on the perimeter. "Come on in. Give us Manette and the kids, huh?"

"Well, I just can't do that. That'd just be losing all the way around, you know? I mean, if they go away, then you've lost, too. You know? You've really lost, completely, in fact, because that's all you really want."

"John, I'm not worried about winning or losing…"

"I gotta go," Mail said, interrupting. "You've got those assholes tracing this."

"Are you trying to protect your friend? The one who's feeding you information on us?"

There was a moment of silence, then Mail laughed. "My friend? Fuck my friend. Fuck her."

And he hung up.

Lucas ran to the uniform captain's car, and the captain was saying, "Are you sure that's it? All right, I'm on the way."

To Lucas, he said, "It's an Amoco station not five miles from here. We didn't have anybody close. He's out."

Lucas said, "Shit," walked in a circle.

The uniform cop screeched out, leaving them, and Sloan said, "What'd he say?"

"He's gonna kill them."

"Aw, shit."

"But it's gonna take him a while to get there," Lucas said. "Patch through to Dispatch. Call Del, get him in. Get Loring from Intelligence and that rape guy, Franklin. Get him. Get them out of bed, anything you have to do, but tell them to meet me downtown in fifteen minutes. Tell them don't shave, don't clean up, just get there. Fifteen minutes."

"What're you gonna do?"

"You know somebody's feeding information to Mail?"

"I know you think that," Sloan said.

"I'm gonna arrest her," Lucas said.

Sloan's eyebrows went up. "Her? Who is it?"

"I don't know," Lucas said. "Get going."

Sloan, puzzled, hurried away. Lucas went back to the telephone, dialed. When the phone at the other end was picked up, he said, "Time to make your humanitarian visit to White."

"Lucas…" Roux was worried.

"Leave there in fifteen minutes."

"Lucas…"

"I just got a call from Mail. He's out, and he's going home to kill them. So go see White and keep your head down. Better keep it down for an hour."

"You gonna get him?"

"Yeah. I'm gonna get him."