Dead Man Running

by Steve Hamilton

  I felt Larkin pulling me away from him, then he and the bartender both pushing me outside. The man trailed behind and stood in the doorway, an easy place to be brave with two other men between him and me.

  “That’s right,” he said, “why don’t you boys go back where you came from!”

  I pushed the two men away from me and went to my car.

  “Alex, wait.”

  He grabbed me from behind, just as I was opening my car door. I spun around to face him, and as I did I caught sight of the man still standing in the doorway, looking like he’d just won some sort of victory.

  That’s when it came to me.

  The arrow.

  I know what it means.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS FIVE IN THE MORNING when Larkin found me outside the motel, putting my bag in the backseat of my car.

  “Going somewhere?”

  “First rule of tracking a fugitive,” I said. “They always go home.”

  “Livermore lives in Phoenix,” Larkin said, his arms folded against his chest.

  “Before that.”

  “California.”

  “No,” I said. “Home.”

  “That arrow was pointing northeast . . .”

  “Columbus, Ohio.”

  I closed the door and stood there, waiting for him to try to stop me.

  “You can’t go there,” he said. “I told you, I have orders to—”

  “I slipped out when you weren’t looking. Nothing you could have done.”

  He looked at me. “Why would I let you do that?”

  “Because you know I’m right. And because you’re not an asshole.”

  “I’ll call Columbus,” he said. “We’ll watch for him.”

  “I thought all your agents will be in San Francisco.”

  “I’ll make this happen, Alex. Someone will be watching his house.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll be there, too.”

  He stopped me before I could get into the car.

  “Here’s where I either put you in handcuffs,” he said, “or risk my whole career and let you go after him.”

  “Once again,” I told him, “it’s time to make your choice.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, I hit the roadblock they’d set up on I-40. I waited in the line, wondering how busy it would get once the sun came up. Finally, I pulled up to the trooper standing there with a shotgun and waited for him to take a quick look inside my car. I was a male, around the right age, and traveling alone, so he checked my license. Then I was on my way again.

  Livermore can beat that, I said to myself. I know it.

  I passed through Springfield, Missouri, and then a long stretch through the middle of the state as the sun went down on another short February day. More hours of driving, after so many hours already spent chasing Livermore. There was nothing but the open road now, and exit signs leading to small towns I’d never heard of. I knew Livermore might be almost as exhausted as I was at that point, and I didn’t think he’d try to make it all the way to Columbus. I tried to imagine him coming down this very same road, deciding where to stop for the night. I couldn’t see him taking one of these exits yet. My gut told me he’d go all the way to St. Louis before stopping.

  When I got to the city, I got off the expressway and drove down the dark empty streets, finally ending up over by Union Station, just on the edge of downtown. When I was finally out of the car, stretching my legs, the air was cold enough for me to see my own breath.

  Larkin pulled in right behind me. I hadn’t seen him in hours.

  “What did your boss say?”

  “He’s not happy. I’m still on your trail. I won’t go back until I find you.”

  “Tell him you lost me. You don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m here,” he said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  We checked in to our hotel, came back downstairs, and walked down Market Street. We didn’t see anyone else, aside from a few homeless people stirring in a little park across the street. It was one of those cities that brought people downtown to work during the day, and then sent them home at night, leaving nothing but dark buildings and a single lamppost burning on every corner.

  I kept looking around me, like I expected to see him.

  We found the one sign of life down the street, a restaurant that probably relied on the hotel for all of its business. Larkin set up his laptop on a table and checked in with the office. I sat there and thought about how far I was from home. How I should have been sitting by the fire at the Glasgow Inn, having some of Jackie’s beef stew.

  “Amarillo developed some more information,” he said. “Found out that Irene Murphy sent a text to a friend just before leaving the store last night. She was disturbed by an encounter she had with a customer.”

  “Livermore.”

  He nodded. “That picture he left in the safe, looks like he had it printed there. We can’t see any other reason why he would have chosen her. Wrong place, wrong time.”

  There wasn’t much else to say. I shook my head and looked up at the three big HD screens over the bar, each tuned to a different sport that nobody in the place seemed to be watching. Until the one screen in the middle broke into some kind of news report and suddenly Livermore’s face was looking down at me.

  The sound was off, but the caption read MANHUNT CONTINUES FOR SUSPECTED SERIAL KILLER.

  Larkin and I both looked up at the mug shot, at the face of the man as he seemed to look back at us, with that half smile.

  “He could walk in here right now,” Larkin said. “Think anyone would recognize him?”

  “That video he sent me,” I said. “I didn’t see his face, but I’m sure I’d know him in a second, no matter what he’s done to himself.”

  Larkin nodded. There was nothing else to say. We finished eating, paid our tabs, and left.

  “You got a family?” I said as we started walking back to the hotel. I kept looking around me, still expecting to see Livermore right behind us.

  “Not yet. Just got engaged. You?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why the Bureau?” I asked him, not bothering with the follow-up: Why would you want to be hated by so many other cops? I’d worked with plenty of agents back when I was a cop in Detroit, and I knew what my fellow officers thought of them. I remembered one informant who got killed because a feeb made him go back into a drug house to get a refund on some drugs that turned out to be fake. The feeb didn’t want to go back and tell his boss the money was gone. It was something that had happened in another time, in another city. But I knew it was still true. You become a feeb, you set yourself apart.

  “It was always hockey or the FBI,” he said with a shrug. “Ever since I was a kid.”

  The former train station loomed high above us as we kept walking. It was something from another era, a full city block of ornate architecture, limestone with a red roof, and dominated by the clock tower at one corner. The streets seemed even emptier now. The homeless men in the park were either gone or wrapped up tight against the cold, huddled around small fires.

  I said good night to him. When I was back in my room, I looked through the scrapbook pages again. I took the gun from my bag and set it on the bedside table. I imagined Livermore sleeping in another hotel room, maybe in the same city.

  Or maybe he wasn’t sleeping at all.

  I opened up the window. The night air came into the room, mixed with the faint smell of smoke from the homeless men’s fires still burning across the street.

  I hadn’t slept in so long. The smoke stayed with me as I finally drifted off, turning into a raging fire that burned inside my head as the woman trapped inside the flames kept calling my name.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WHEN A MAN tries to get into your
head, he leaves the door to his own open.

  The thought lingered in Livermore’s mind as he sat in the line leading up to the roadblock, using the opportunity to watch the progress made by a little orange blip on his laptop.

  You think you know where I’m going, he thought. You might even try to guess where I will spend the night.

  The best part of that is, the absolute genius of that idea . . . is that wherever you guess . . .

  You will be right.

  When he pulled up to the officer with the shotgun, Livermore couldn’t help but flash back to the canyon, taking a similar weapon off that Arizona cop and using it to shoot that agent. The feel of it in his hands, the lethal power capable of not just killing but destroying. Of deconstructing. He’d only fired small arms before that, but how many hours had passed since the canyon and he could still feel the almost sensual tingling of that shotgun’s recoil in his fingers. He put the thought out of his mind as he rolled down his window.

  I’m an airplane pilot, he told himself, from Wayzata, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis. I fly 727s exclusively. This is my brother-in-law’s car, which is why it has Arizona plates. He’s letting me use it to drive up to the Grand Canyon. My wife is not with me because we’re currently separated, but I have every hope that we’ll be back together someday soon.

  It was all necessary, every detail of his story. He needed to become that other person completely, even if it was just for one minute.

  “License, please,” the officer said as he gave the whole vehicle a quick scan.

  “What’s going on?” Livermore said.

  “Looking for a fugitive.” He was studying the license, looking back and forth between Livermore and the photo.

  Livermore waited.

  “Minnesota,” the officer said. “Long way from home.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a good trip back,” he said, handing Livermore the license.

  “Thank you. I hope you catch your man.”

  Livermore pulled away from the roadblock, speeding up smoothly as he hit the open road ahead of him. He tucked the license back in his shirt pocket.

  He’d used Minnesota’s non-enhanced license template, one of the last few that didn’t comply with the new federal standards. Editing the image, adding the barcode and the encoded magnetic strip, printing it on Teslin synthetic paper, then laminating it. Twenty dollars and maybe two hours of his time. All well spent.

  He settled in for the long drive across Oklahoma and Missouri. When he got close to St. Louis, he found a hardware store that was still open and bought his supplies. He checked his laptop again. The orange GPS dot was just ahead of him. He watched as it left the expressway and made a few turns downtown. Then it stopped.

  Livermore started moving again. When he pulled up on Market, he saw two men walking down the dark street. From behind, it looked like Alex and the young agent.

  Let him come along for the ride, he thought. It’s all the same to me now.

  He watched them go into a bar at the end of the block, then waited until they came back out, maybe forty-five minutes later. He watched them go back to the hotel, and then started counting down in his head as soon as they walked through the front door.

  Cross the lobby. Get in the elevator. Get out of the elevator and walk down the hall.

  When the lights came on in two adjacent windows on the fifth floor, he waited another minute, until the curtains opened on the window to the left. He caught a quick glimpse of the young agent. That meant Alex was in the other room.

  Fifth floor. Fourth room from the end.

  He took his bag from the vehicle and locked it. He was about to cross the street, then stopped himself when he saw another car pull up to the front. A man and a woman got out, taking out two suitcases and putting them on the sidewalk. The man left the woman there, got back in the car, and drove away. Going off to park the car, but the woman was obviously uncomfortable standing out on the empty sidewalk in the darkness. Livermore stayed hidden behind his vehicle, watching her. He wondered why she didn’t just go inside and wait there. Just because she didn’t want to leave the two suitcases outside? Were the contents of those bags more valuable to her than her own life?

  I could pull up next to her right now. Pretend I’m another guest checking in, give her a smile, take a quick look up and down the street . . .

  He felt a warmth spreading through his body as he saw it in his head, every movement perfectly choreographed, as if it was written down on a script.

  Push her into the backseat, drive off before she can make a sound. The man would come around the corner a minute later, wondering where his wife had gone.

  But at least the suitcases would be safe.

  He waited another minute, watching the woman shivering on the sidewalk, until the man came back from parking the car around the corner. The woman had something to say to the man, and they stood out there talking about it for a few seconds. The argument ended, and he hugged her. Then they went into the lobby.

  Livermore crossed the street again, carrying his bag. There was one man behind the check-in desk. He was talking to the couple. Livermore put his head down and opened the door. He walked through the lobby without so much as a sideways glance. A man who belonged there. He headed right for the door marked STAIRS, opened it, stepped through, and went up the stairway.

  When he got to the sixth floor, he counted down four rooms. He knocked softly on the door, then waited a few seconds, listening carefully. Then he took a quick look down the hallway in both directions, got down on one knee, and opened up his bag. Purchase number one at the hardware store was a long, thin strip of metal, eight feet long and bent into quarters. Livermore unfolded the strip and then refolded one end into a hook, about six inches in length. Then he placed the strip against the door, noting the exact distance between the floor and the door latch. He made another fold, then another to accommodate the thickness of the door. Then finally one more hook to use as a handle.

  He worked the strip under the door, careful to preserve the folds, then turned it so that the hook inside the door would be extended upward. He worked the strip sideways, moving carefully until he felt it make contact with the door latch. He maintained the tension as he pulled down . . . a little more . . . a little more . . .

  Until he heard the lock open.

  He pushed the door and stepped inside.

  The door wasn’t stopped by the safety latch. If it had been, he would have had to refold the strip, running it higher up the door to push the latch open first. He turned on the light to make sure the room was unoccupied. The bed was made. There were no suitcases in the room.

  Perfect.

  Livermore put his bag down on the bed. Then he went back out into the hallway, careful to leave the door ajar, and walked to the stairwell door, then down the stairs to the ground floor. As he looked through the little window in the door he saw that the clerk had been replaced by a young woman. Maybe the clerk was helping the couple bring their suitcases up to their room. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter. He paused just long enough to put a smile on his face.

  I’m the airplane pilot from Minnesota, he told himself. Only now I’m on a layover. I fly for Southwest Airlines. I stay at a lot of hotels.

  He opened the door and went into the lobby. The woman behind the desk looked up at him and smiled right back.

  “How are you tonight, sir?” She spoke with a slight Latin accent, and she looked a little heavier now that he was closer to her. But he liked the way her dark hair fell to her shoulders.

  “Happy to be on the ground,” he said, taking a quick look around the lobby. They were alone.

  “We get a lot of pilots here,” she said, nodding her head. “Must be doing something right.”

  He smiled again and waited a beat. She was very good at her job, Livermore could see. Very good at making someo
ne feel like she would do anything to make sure you had a wonderful stay in her hotel.

  “I hope everything’s satisfactory with your room,” she said. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “Some extra towels would be nice. Room 604.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll bring those right up.”

  “No rush,” he said with another smile. Then he went back to the stairwell.

  “Sir,” she said from behind him. “The elevator . . .”

  He turned to look at her.

  “I know it’s slow,” she said, shrugging her shoulders like What are you gonna do? “But it’s coming back down now.”

  Livermore looked at the lighted number above the elevator, as the 3 turned into a 2. The door would open and the other clerk would step out, the man who’d taken the suitcases up to the couple’s room.

  “I like the stairs,” Livermore said. “Gets your blood flowing.”

  He smiled one more time and went through the door, just as he heard the elevator open behind him. He went back upstairs and into room 604. He had just enough time to get up onto the bed and tap the ceiling, to find where the joist ran above the plaster. He took out the cordless drill he had bought at the hardware store, and one of the two bits. After drilling the pilot hole into the ceiling, through the plaster and into the wood, he took the large metal hook and screwed that into the pilot hole. He brushed the sawdust from the bedcover. Then he took the twenty feet of grade-30 galvanized anchor chain he had bought and hung that from the hook. He pushed the bed away from the center of the room and tested the hook with his own weight.

  It wouldn’t be a work of art, but just like in Amarillo, he didn’t want to waste his ropes here, didn’t want to have to leave them behind when he left. And this chain would be much quicker, too.

  He took out the last hardware store purchase from his bag. Another drill bit, this one bigger and almost comically long. It was used by electricians to drill holes all the way through thick walls, but he knew it would work here.