“He’s coming here?” Disbelieving, Sara was out of her chair without thinking. This madness had to be cut short, and now.
“Sit down!” he roared in her face, springing up, the M-16 ready to rip her in half with its deadly Teflon loads. In an instant his face had turned vulpine, wolfish. Before Sara now was an unstable and heavily armed man who had not twitched an eyelid at rape, at incest, at murder, at the thought of the death of his best friend.
Sara sat back down as though yanked, the blood draining away from her complexion, her knees watery and quaking. She was going to die, and she was trapped in her favorite chair with no clothes on.
Lucas simmered for a couple of beats, nearly panting, reining his control. “Just sit. We sit and we wait for this cycle to finish itself. And don’t worry, Sara. You’re doing your job in the best way. You’re helping me to eliminate those nightmares for good.”
As he spoke they heard the first sirens, distantly.
30
The Charger encountered the patrol roadblock just as the rain turned nasty again. Two growlers were nosed into a V formation with about three feet between their grilles. Two men in yellow rain slickers reluctantly got out to do their duty, as they had for every car on this road for the past hour. Datafax copies of Gabriel Stannard, Horus, and Lucas Ellington were clipped to the visor in each car.
Stannard geared down, cutting speed to fifty. “Poor fuckers,” he mumbled. The battle light had settled into his eyes. “Get the Auto Mag.”
Cannibal Rex dug through the black duffel and brought up the blued automatic .44.
“When I do my trick, cripple those.” His manner indicated the police cars; his eyes could just as easily have been saying “Kill them.” Cannibal grinned and worked the action to chamber the first slug.
The officers in their frisbee-brimmed, Glad-bagged hats had split to approach the Charger from both sides as Stannard slowed. Their reaction time when he shifted into first and stamped down was good. The car’s fat radials ate wet pavement, and the cops backtracked several paces. Stannard stood on the brake and cranked the doughnut steering wheel sharply.
The Charger was a pre-oil-shortage extravagance, a gas gobbler big on size and performance. The trunk must have been weighted with cinder blocks, because the mags barely squeaked whenever Stannard laid on the petrol. Old Clyde Kellander had hot-rodded his car well.
The car spun sideways. The cops were uncertain. It could be a loss of control on the wet road.
The tail of the Charger swung like a hammer and demolished the right front fender of one cruiser, folding the metal and jamming it through the tire, which burst with a gunshot noise and flattened. The cops dived for the embankments on either side of the road. Next they would be clawing for their service revolvers.
Cannibal Rex leaned out the window on Horus’ side and put a huge Magnum slug into the engine block of the second cruiser, right through the hood. Only the monster Magnum was capable of penetrating all that heavy, metal.
The cops ducked for cover, squirming around in the slimy mud of the embankment as Stannard put the car in motion. The Charger charged, slewing around the leftmost cruiser and tearing twin traction ruts out of the shoulder. Bilge spewed skyward and came down in a brown rain. Stannard saw one of the patrolmen’s eyes go as big as tea saucers when he concluded that the Charger was trying to flatten him. He dove facedown into the pool from which he had just risen.
Another spin of the doughnut, hard over, and the Charger fishtailed back onto the road with a dragster screech of tires and instantly generated distance, farting thousands of highway stripes. Before the hypos could run for their radios, it was slot-car size in the dim, rainy distance on the road to Dos Piedras.
Quiet approval settled over Horus’ face. He enjoyed violence that solved problems without loss of life. His right hand was firm on the door handle, to maintain equilibrium through all the thrashing around. “You do know where we are going,” he said, “don’t you?”
“I think I bought my grandmother a house up here,” said Stannard, his forward view unconcerned with obstacles. The Charger’s needle crawled back toward the century mark. “There’s a street, Claremont, that runs parallel to Center Avenue on the other side of a hill. Claremont is backed into the hillside. The house we want is about two-thirds of the way up Claremont.” Joshua Knopf’s directions had been very specific. “He’s holed up in there. By the time those cops back there call us in, we’ll be there. The rain’ll slow ’em down. There’s a goat path that dumps into Claremont from the far side. I think we can get away with using that. Hope it’s not flooded.”
Four blocks shy of the right turn that would put them on Center Avenue, a county sheriff’s vehicle ass-slid into the rearview mirror, lights and siren popping on in an all-out, berserk maniac code three, making tracks behind the Charger like a puma running a rabbit to ground.
“Shit.” Stannard was actually amazed their luck had carried them this far. His hands tensed on the doughnut wheel, and the Charger charged again, a bull seeing red.
Miles behind, in the trailer office of the Oildale airstrip, George 0. Kellander finally got around to phoning his son Clyde. With the conspiratorial glee of a twelve-year-old, he told Clyde that his news was man-to-man stuff and not for the ears of his mom, who would not understand anyway.
“You remember that gashog Charger with no muffler?”
Clyde’s teenaged sigh said, Why shouldn’t I remember my own fucking car? But he was still living at home, at least until next summer, and in the Kellander household the fathers still used three-inch belts. “You place the ad, finally?”
“Better.” George had Stannard’s hundred-dollar bills lined up, two bills high, eight bills across, sixteen hundred bucks’ worth of good news right next to the fingerprinty center-spread of Stacey Butterick. “We don’t need no ad. I just sold it to some hippie queer from Los An-gee-lees for a thousand bucks. Split it with you, fifty-fifty.”
Clyde whistled through his teeth. His mother was in the front room dozing through a movie on CBS and probably could not overhear, but he whispered anyway. “You want me to come pick you up? You ain’t got no wheels there.” He wished he’d had the opportunity to strip some of the frills from the Charger’s powerhouse before his dad had sold it. But five hundred bucks was more than twice what he expected his cut to be, and delays often made for no-sales.
“Come on in about ten o’clock. I got paperwork.”
Clyde knew that this meant his dad was most likely going to spend the next hour warming a toilet seat. “I’ll bring the Camaro,” he said.
“Good.” George hung up.
George Kellander had not lied to Stannard about his truck being in the shop. What he had neglected to mention in his quaint rural way was that he and Clyde owned five other functional automobiles between them, including a refurbished 1968 Mustang with a police chaser engine and a classic 1967 Camaro with Naugahyde buckets and fuzzy dice.
Clyde wondered whether he’d left half a lid of stale marijuana in the Charger and decided it did not matter. He was already spending his five hundred bucks in his mind, wondering how in hell his father had really wrangled a grand for the Charger.
They burned intersections and red lights like a seven-year-old gobbling potato chips, and when Stannard’s cold blue eyes checked the mirror again, he had to look hard to make sure he was not seeing a double image. A second sheriff’s car had sprung into view, bobbing in and out behind the first one. They’d been whistled up by the highway patrol. Stannard was willing to bet cash that the call-in had neglected to mention how he had turned two chase cars into scrap steel back on Route 5. Two more junkers wouldn’t change the course of history. He put his foot down. The acceleration mashed Horus and Cannibal Rex into their seats.
The cop cars hung on about a block back and would have gained had they not slowed and swerved twice for other cars and once for a pedestrian in the rain. Stannard didn’t bother.
The turnoff on DeLacy had to be sacrifice
d. Stannard kept his contingency plan foremost in his mind as he burned up Fifth Street and hung a gliding, smoking skid turn past the One Stop convenience mart on northbound Weaver Avenue. The One Stop clerk, a college student named Abel Langtry, gawked at the car chase as it hurricaned past in the rain. His only customer, a ten-year-old named Dennis Chambers who had tarried late to fill the store’s Slime Wars videogame with quarters, took the opportunity to pocket three Milky Ways free and clear.
It could be said that religion was the buffer between Olive Grove, where the stores were, and Dos Piedras, where the residences were. Weaver Avenue featured five houses of worship. Their differences were cosmetic. The last church on Weaver Avenue was the imposing Grace Methodist, which was backed into a scenic, rolling hilltop. Grace Methodist Church was Gabriel Stannard’s contingency plan. He’d seen it once and known immediately what might be done with its layout.
The church was at the end of the street. From there, one turned right onto Center Avenue to get over the hill and onto Claremont, or left, which led to a winding, tree-lined drive of five minutes that emptied back onto Highway 5. When Stannard caught Weaver Avenue, the chase cars would assume he was headed back for the highway. Other units were already enroute to Claremont. If he was foolish enough to hang a right, he’d find cops waiting to scoop him up.
The pilot of the lead chaser was alone and busy calling in his hot pursuit when he was forced to drop his mike and match the speed turn Stannard had made onto Weaver Avenue from Fifth. The two sheriffs in the second car, as well as One Stop clerk Abel Langtry and ace shoplifter Dennis Chambers, all watched as the lead car angled into the rain-slicked, double-wide street, slid wide, and started spinning. It plowed into a row of three cars parked slantwise in front of the post office and mangled all of them. Fiberglas and chrome shrapnel sprayed into the street. The first car was goosed up onto the sidewalk. The police crash bumper banged a mailbox loose from its bolting; it fell onto its wide-mouthed face with a loud ashcan noise and lay there like a dead robot, bent feet sticking out. The car settled creakingly onto its left rims as the driver tried vainly to focus his vision on the passenger door and crawl out of it. A pair of late-night postal customers, checking their boxes, peeked timidly out to see how their cars had been customized.
Several blocks away, the convoy of police vehicles from Vista View Park piled through the intersection of Fifth and DeLacy, bearing down on Center Avenue and, beyond it, Claremont Street. Everybody’s target.
Watching the deputy ahead of him botch it caused the pilot of the second chase car to think hard about his repertoire of aggressive driving techniques. He nearly clipped the ass of the wrecked cruiser as Weaver Avenue tried to spin his car, too. It almost ended ugly, right there. Nearly and almost, he thought as he began to hydroplane, only counted in mortar attacks. He corrected deftly, then put his pedal down on the straightaway just as Stannard had. Churches blurred past.
Stannard saw in the mirror that he had dropped a cop. Only a single chaser was sniffing his tailpipes. Then Weaver Avenue suddenly ran out for everybody.
The Charger scorched up the inclined parking verge of Grace Methodist and hit the front walk at one hundred miles an hour. When the pavement quit, the wheels left the ground and the car spent a scary half second in flight over a row of concrete planters. Stannard cut loose a throat-rawing war whoop as Clyde Kellander’s pet Charger went airborne, and everybody aboard clamped on for dear life. A planter clipped by one of the rear wheels exploded. The highballing half ton of Detroit steel crashed down and chewed turf, destroying a decomposed fence and spitting white pickets rearward. Sod and mud fanned out in the car’s wake as traction was wrenchingly reestablished. The headlights played over the oncoming row of graveyard markers, throwing jittering shadows.
Two sets of sheriff’s eyes bugged as the stone wall of Grace Methodist grew in their windshield to monster size. Darkness descended inside the car, leaving only the eyes, dull white with fear. The end was right on top of them.
The driver of the number-two car chickened and mashed the brake down hard enough to spring a tendon in his ankle. No fucking way he was Steve McQueen. He had a goddamned family and a wife and Sears payments to live for.
Smoke blurted from the wheel wells, and the cruiser slid to a halt, its nose kissing the stone steps leading to the cemetery gate with a hollow bump. Both cops inside could hear the Charger’s engine racheting, growing distant. They listened to the hiss of their own radio and the clicking noise of their flashbar lights. Tinka-tinkatinka-tink. The woop-woop siren had malfunctioned, cutting itself off about the time they rounded the corner. In the mirrors they could see their fellow officer’s car belching up steam clouds into the moist air, leaking its vital fluids all over the pavement. Crashed autos only blew up in the movies.
The two sheriffs looked at each other. Simultaneously, both said, “Son of a bitch.”
“This damned street’s as empty as a collection plate,” said K. C. Dew to his deputy, Chris Carpenter.
Carpenter curbed their cruiser at 7764 North Claremont. The vacant slot they filled had been provided by the departure of Joshua Knopf, private investigator.
K. C. disliked city cops trespassing on his preserve and resented the suggestion that he and Carpenter were to do nothing more here than await the arrival of some bigshot from the L.A.P.D.’s collection of SWAT lunatics who wanted to land his goddamned helicopter right in Vista View Park. His men had been ordered out on roadblock duty. Everybody complied. It wasn’t the shitwork that K. C. bristled at so much. It was the suggestion that psycho killers were some kind of urban specialty.
Out here in the sticks, he knew, there were crazies, too. But they were quiet crazies—the senile, the juvenile. Rarely did you pull a one-hundred-proof whacko. Out here, they didn’t dress like the village idiot or drop clues like they had holes in both pockets. Out here, a quiet madness waited, and to K. C. that threat was more frightening than the more concrete disposal problem presented by a loon in a tower with a rifle.
He remembered Mrs. Kalish. Her husband, Jack, had gone to Southeast Asia and come back in a MA bag. She had hung herself in 1972, leaving an incoherent note about the coming UFO invasion. The Vietcong were aliens. She had been thirty years old.
He remembered Buddy Simonsen. That one still hurt. After a decade and a half of tipping hats and picking up checks for coffee and danish and pie, Buddy simply forgot who and where he was and hadn’t remembered since.
A silent street, a quiet house like this one, could be signs of serious trouble. They might have to deal with a dead body today. K. C. was convinced there was something wrong with a community like Olive Grove/Dos Piedras, so friendly and countrified, where the dead could go unnoticed for so long. Chris Carpenter had been a deputy for nine months, the same amount of time it took to make a baby. Like a baby, Chris had done a lot of hard growing in nine months. He’d dealt with his first dead body his second day on the force. He’d blanched but not puked. He’d dealt with it. It had been an easy one, thank god. Mrs. Keeley had been found in her bathroom, dead for ten days until a neighbor noticed the smell. She had been ninety-one, also a widow, who still took evening constitutionals and cooked her own food. Her homemade preserves were locally famous. Old people often died in the bathroom, K. C. knew.
K. C. and Joel Carpenter—Chris’ old man—had gone to high school together. They still took fishing trips twice a year. K. C. fought regularly not to be overprotective, over-proud, of Chris.
“So what are we supposed to do?” Chris said. Rain hissed down all around them and speckled the windshield.
K. C. rubbed his florid face. “I guess we stroll up to the front door and knock in the name of the law.” His casualness did not appear forced. He kept his thoughts to himself. He had spent a good slice of his sheriff’s career amortizing the horrendous discoveries he often made at times like this; the starved, forgotten dead people he’d tripped over, the domestic scenes out of Peyton Place by way of de Sade’s Justine. His duty wa
s keeping the peace.
He opened the door and hefted one massy leg out. The wing lights popped on, red and white, and the door buzzed with a cheap smoke-alarm sound.
Chris turned up his coat collar and grabbed his plastic-bagged hat. Claremont’s single streetlamp tossed down a long thin shadow from his football-toned frame. As the rain ebbed and then descended with renewed vigor, they could hear frogs chittering in the distance. The street was oiled and gleaming. Their Wellington boots made soft sounds on the pavement.
“Car’s in the driveway,” Chris said. “Datsun. It’s hers.” They took no notice of Burt Kroeger’s Eldorado, parked curbside two cars up.
“Anybody asks, you and I are investigating an anonymous call regarding a suspicious disturbance.” K. C. knew he was circumventing the desires of the police in Los Angeles by poking around. But he’d damn himself for sitting and waiting.
Both men were three paces from the car when a single gunshot ripped through the fabric of the rainy night, to silence the frogs. The cruiser’s right mouse-ear blinker disintegrated in a spray of red plastic chunks, and the bullet zinged off the roof.
K. C. hit the deck with amazing speed. “Chris!”
Carpenter dived headfirst over the hood of the car and rolled. Hearts racing, they huddled up behind the far side of the front fender, sneaking glances at the house through the cruiser’s windows. Chris jacked open the door to grab the radio.
There was an absolute lack of practical cover. Past a recently laid strip of sidewalk, lawns sloped up to houses. It was wide open, punctuated only by standing lamps at the sidewalk level and flagstone or concrete walks winding up to each residence. Decorative foliage was mostly tucked against the houses.
It was no popgun that had taken out their blinker. K. C. wondered if the shooter had a good scope, or excellent aim, or both. It had definitely been a warning shot.
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