Wolf Hour

51 Message, October 2016

Jill Patterson felt the warm tears running down her cheeks and lost the sensation as they ran onto the tape. They were cold by the time they ran back onto the skin and down over her chin. She wanted to close her eyes, shut out all this, but forced herself to keep them open, forced herself to look at Simon and Siri, who stared at her from above small, taped mouths, as though she, their mother, was the only person in all the world who could save them. And hadn’t she really always been the only one?

Mike Lunde’s voice beside her was calm, almost like someone talking in his sleep.

‘I’m sorry you had to see that man get shot, Mrs Patterson, I would have preferred things to be different. But as your husband preaches, it is the right of every citizen to protect his house and property against intruders. And there is actually a Closed sign on the door.’

Like someone breaking the surface for a breath of air, Jill closed her eyes. Momentarily.

‘Siri and Simon...’ Mike Lunde began, and Jill at once opened her eyes wide again, seeking to catch her children’s eyes, as though she thought they would be doomed if they so much as looked at him. But she had lost them, their gazes were already on the taxidermist.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he continued. ‘This will soon be over. I promise, cross my heart and hope to die.’

Jill tried to blink away the tears as Mike Lunde drew his forefinger twice, slowly, across his throat.

Bob was two blocks away now but had to stop when the traffic lights in front of him turned red. He swore. He knew that, at this particular junction, there was always a long wait for the green. A car with zebra stripes pulled up alongside and he heard the sirens at the same time. He lowered his window. The sounds were coming from several cars and they seemed to be getting closer. Bob turned on the radio and tuned in to the local news channel.

‘...at the opening of the NRA conference at the US Bank Stadium. At this moment in time we have no information as to why Mayor Patterson has cancelled his appearance, but our information is that he was at the stadium. And I’m hearing right now that the mayor and his party have just left the stadium with a police escort and sirens going. We do not know what if anything has happened to the mayor. All we know is...’

Bob felt his phone vibrate. He pulled it up. It was Kay.

‘Hey, what the hell is going on?’

‘Mike Lunde,’ said Kay. ‘He has the mayor’s wife and children with him in the store. He shot one of the bodyguards. I’m on my way there now.’

Bob glanced up at the red light, looked left and then right and saw a trailer approaching. He hoped the Volvo was having one of its better days and caught a glimpse of the staring man in the zebra-striped car as he put his foot down hard on the gas pedal.

Bob turned down the street where Town Taxidermy was located at the same moment as an ambulance entered at the other end, sirens blaring. He leaned out of the window and saw two police cars outside the store. They had stopped in the middle of the road, blue lights flashing. Bob drove the Volvo up onto the sidewalk, jumped out and ran past the crowd of onlookers toward the store and ducked under the crime scene tape. Four police officers and a man in a dark suit were taking cover behind the cars. Two had service rifles aimed in the direction of the store, two had service pistols.

‘Get out of here!’ yelled one of the officers, a sturdy man, his face flushed as he waved his arms at Bob.

‘MPD, Homicide Unit!’ Bob yelled back and ducked down behind the police car. He held up his expired ID card, showing it to the guy with the flushed face and the one in the suit, who had to be FBI. ‘Detective Bob Oz. What’s happening?’

‘He’s in there with the hostages,’ said the officer. ‘No sign of life.’

‘What are you doing here, Detective?’ the FBI guy interrupted.

‘I know Mike Lunde. Who are you?’

‘Gerard Zimmer, JTTF.’

Bob nodded at the SUV that stood with both front doors open. ‘Where’s your partner, Zimmer?’

‘On his way to the hospital. Or the morgue, hard to say. Bullet caught him above his vest.’

‘OK. So what’s happening now?’

‘We’re waiting for SWAT. They’re on their way from the stadium. Should be here in about—’ Zimmer checked his watch — ‘four minutes.’

‘Four minutes,’ Bob repeated. He stood up and started unbuttoning his cashmere coat.

‘What are you doing?’ the police officer shouted. ‘Get down! Zimmer says the guy in there has an M24!’

‘I know,’ said Bob. ‘And I know four minutes is a long time and that having SWAT here guarantees nothing.’ He folded his coat and laid it on the hood of the car.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Zimmer.

‘To talk to Mike.’

‘Our orders—’

‘—are your orders, they aren’t mine,’ said Bob.

‘So who gave you yours?’ Zimmer was standing now and blocking Bob’s way.

‘You can shoot me if those are your orders, Zimmer.’

Bob walked round Zimmer and crossed the street, coatless. His shirt was wet with sweat, ice-cold on the shady side, warm on the sunny side. Behind him someone shouted. But it was too late now. He just had to hope that they wouldn’t shoot him.

He walked to the store doorway and stopped. ‘Mike!’ he shouted. ‘It’s Bob. I’m coming in.’

Bob waited. No answer. He pushed open the door.

The bell jangled as he walked in. Four people sat in a circle around something. A dog. The Labrador retriever Mike Lunde had finally managed to get the right eyes for. Mike was holding a rifle pointed at him, but strangely enough Bob felt no fear.

‘Bob,’ said Mike. ‘You’re a little early. We said one thirty.’

‘Sorry about that. OK if I come in a little closer?’

‘Are you carrying?’

‘Not since Frankie died.’

Mike lowered the rifle. Bob took two steps toward the rearing black bear, picked up the stool in front of it, placed it in the circle and sat down.

‘Turned out well,’ he said with a nod to the dog.

‘Thank you.’

Bob took in the circle. Met the red, pleading eyes of the two children and the woman. He recognised her, she was the woman who had come in to talk about the eyes with Mike. Bob nodded to them, trying to convey to them that this would turn out OK, they weren’t about to die. He doubted he’d succeeded. He looked back at Mike again.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘How do you think?’

Bob shrugged. ‘Like me. Angry. Aggressive. That’s the way we get when we don’t take our antidepressants. But you’re better at hiding it than I am.’

‘Maybe.’

Bob folded his hands. ‘What is it you want, Mike?’

‘Hm. You guessed your way this far, you should be able to work out the answer to that one too.’

Bob nodded. ‘Revenge for your family. Finish that masterpiece you talk about all the time, the one you had me believing was the dog. But then all these staged murders, and this mysterious figure that kept disappearing. Tomás Gomez. Actually you told me everything I needed to know to flush you out, but I couldn’t put it together. Did you want me to stop you?’

‘No,’ said Mike. ‘But maybe I wanted you to understand me. Afterward, at least. That’s what every artist hopes for, right?’ He gave a cautious smile.

‘The thirst for revenge isn’t so hard to understand, Mike.’

‘But there’s more than that. There’s a message.’

Bob saw something moving on the chest of Mike Lunde’s white shirt. A red dot. SWAT had arrived.

‘But if there’s a message, surely you don’t have to kill innocent people.’

‘Gomez, Dante and Karlstad were not innocent people, Mike. Nor was the Milkman, or Die Man either. And Hector I shot only in the shoulder, I hope.’

‘I don’t know anything about any Milkman and Die Man, I’m thinking about these people in here.’

‘In here?’ For a moment Mike seemed not to understand. Then he started to laugh. Looked over at Mrs Patterson and the children as though he expected them to laugh along with him. ‘You surely didn’t think I would kill women and children that have nothing to do with this. I’ve explained to them. That the only reason they are here is to show that they could have been killed. By a depressed, free citizen with access to weapons, the Second Amendment and the District of Columbia versus Heller.’

Bob leaned over sideways, across SWAT’s line of fire. The red dot on Lunde’s chest vanished.

‘But now that you’ve made your point, shouldn’t you let them go?’

Mike shrugged. ‘It was all such a long time ago. Thirty years. Give or take a few minutes.’

‘The children are so afraid, Mike. Experiences like this leave their mark. And I’ll work just as well as your hostage.’

Mike looked at Bob in silence. Then he bent forward and picked something up from under his chair. It was the scalpel Bob had seen him using in his work.

‘Cut them loose.’

Bob took the scalpel from him, stood up and carefully continued to cover the line of fire between the display window and Mike Lunde as he cut the tape binding Mrs Patterson and the children. He indicated to the mother that she could pull the duct tape off their mouths, but either she didn’t understand or for some reason didn’t want to understand. Bob nodded toward the street, and she took her children by the hand and hurried them to the door.

‘Don’t forget Quentin,’ said Mike.

Both children at once broke away from their mother and ran back to the dog, lifting it, one at each end, and carrying it over to where their mother stood, holding the door open. She gave Bob a look that he interpreted as gratitude before she followed the children out. The store bell jangled merrily as the door slid shut behind them.

‘How long have we got?’ asked Mike. The rifle was now between his knees with the butt on the floor and his hands around the barrel, which was pointing up toward the ceiling.

‘Before they storm in? Fifteen minutes maybe.’

‘That’s plenty of time. Shall I make some coffee?’

‘I think it’s best that you sit right where you are. They’ve got snipers out there just waiting to get a sighting on you.’

‘Aha.’ Mike’s smile was sad and resigned. But not just that. There was something else. Hope, thought Bob. Like at a parting you know is final, at the same time as you sense something new and unknown lies ahead of you. Bob felt a little bit the same way.

‘So you want to tell me what happened?’ asked Bob. ‘Had you been planning this long?’

Mike Lunde shook his head slowly. ‘Tomás Gomez just happened to come in here one day. Just like you did. Said his cat was dead and Mrs White had recommended me. It was thirty years since the last time I saw him, he looked very different. But you know, it’s in the eyes. I never forgot those eyes. The eyes of the guy who killed my little girl in that parking lot. Who stood over me and was about to kill me too. We got a real good look at each other before he heard the police car coming and ran off. And even so, Gomez didn’t recognise me when he came into the store.’

‘They called him Lobo, he was a killing machine, you were just another number to him. Did you kill him straight away?’

‘No. I had several conversations with him. I went to his home and ate with him.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I took him to a studio up in Cedar Creek where I kept his stuffed cat. He was pleased with the job I’d done. I gave him coffee. With Rohypnol in it. When he woke up he was tied to a chair.’

‘I know, we found him. Why didn’t you kill him immediately?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘I think you had to act out those fantasies of revenge you’ve been living with these past thirty years. You tortured him.’

‘Yes.’

‘And did it meet your expectations?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I got sick, I had to throw up.’

‘Even though you’ve spent your whole life cutting up animals?’

‘It was the first time I had ever inflicted pain on a living creature. The worst thing was that Tomás regretted it. Talking together here in the store he never said in so many words exactly what he’d done, only that he’d caused untold harm to others, that he didn’t deserve to live. His gang life was behind him, he said, he worked casual jobs, but he still had nightmares every night. In that respect it might have been a harder punishment to let him go on living. Lonely, but haunted. But the torture at least gave me the name and address of the person he had bought the Uzi from, Marco Dante. I learned where his boss Die Man hung out. And that the detective I had trusted took bribes to keep any suspicion from leading to Tomás and Die Man and their gang. And I got his face. And the skin of his hands. When he was dead I took his clothes and the keys to his apartment.’

‘The rest of his body you freeze-dried.’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

‘So Tomás Gomez bought the Uzi he killed your daughter with from Dante?’

‘That is correct.’

‘And after you shot Dante, you left enough clues and witnesses who saw you disguised as Gomez to make sure he would be the suspect.’

‘Yes.’

Bob glanced at his watch. ‘Tell me about Cody Karlstad.’