“I wish ...” Joe began. Then, “I’m not sure we oughta be doing this. This is like, remember that Walt Disney cartoon with the tar baby? It’s like we’re getting more stuck in the tar baby.”
Lyle Mack took a quick circular pace, his jowls shaking, and he said, “Joe ... She saw ya, goddamnit. We gotta do something about it, while we got the chance.” He looked at Cappy: “By the way, I got a question. That goddamn shotgun, even cut down ... how you gonna manage that?”
“Not using the shotgun,” Cappy said. He took a revolver from his pocket, wrapped in Saran Wrap, turned it sideways so the Macks could look at it. “Got it in Berdoo. Perfect bike gun. Can’t touch it, because I wiped it.”
“What the hell is that?” Lyle Mack asked.
“It’s the Judge,” Cappy said. “Three .410 shells with Four-O buckshot, that’s five pellets the size of a .38 in each shell. And two .45 Colts in the other two chambers. Gotta get close, but I won’t do it unless the barrel’s touching her window glass.”
“Dude,” Lyle said, “you got the equipment.”
As HE AND JOE went over to get the bike, Cappy thought about killing people for money. Well, what was the difference between that and killing a guy for his bike? Maybe that was when he crossed some kind of line—the first guy he killed, he did almost out of self-protection. Later on, he did it because it was interesting.
He’d seen all kinds of killing on TV, ever since he could remember—crime movies and war movies, cop shows, people being killed every way you could think of. Machine-gunned and executed and shot with long-range rifles and stabbed and strangled and poisoned and electrocuted and beat with baseball bats, everything. Real airplanes flying into real buildings, guys blowing themselves up on the news.
You’d always get some news chick telling you how bad you should feel about it, but Cappy didn’t feel much of anything, except interested, and neither, he thought, did the news chick. Or anybody else. It was entertainment, was what it was, and in real life, it was kind of more entertaining.
Like riding a bike too fast: you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. It was almost like he was killing people in a movie, except more. Like you see Bruce Willis cap somebody, that’s how much he felt it, times ten. Times a hundred. He liked rerunning it, when he’d pulled one off, but he liked rerunning Bruce Willis movies, too.
The thing is, it was intense.
But, Lyle Mack was right. How would you get in touch with the people who needed the work done? Maybe you could find some big Mafia guy and contract out for it. Have to think about it.
“HERE WE GO,” Joe Mack said, as they turned down an alley. He pointed out the garage: “The white one with the red doors. I’ll drop you off right in front of it. Nobody can see us, unless they’re right in the alley. Got to get in and out quick, though.”
Cappy nodded. “I can do that.” He reached under the seat and pulled out a Penney’s bag with the handgun in it. “See ya.”
He seemed really calm, Joe Mack thought, as he dropped him. Joe Mack could hardly hold on to the steering wheel, and every time he closed his eyes, he saw the smiling faces of Mikey and Shooter, followed by a fade-in of the dead faces. It was creeping him out. He planned to drink a lot that night, so he’d get some sleep.
In fact ...
He fished a pint of bourbon out from under the seat and took a pull. Looked both ways for cops, and took another one.
AT THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon, the sun was already dipping toward the horizon. Weather came out of the parking garage, looked both ways, took a left, down toward the I-94 entrance. She’d take it only a mile or so to the Cretin Avenue exit, then head south.
She was tired. She needed to get home and take a nap. The surgery she’d done hadn’t been difficult, but the stress around the operation was taking a toll that she really hadn’t expected. It wasn’t the work, it was the talk afterward. The fact was, they could go in and dissect the dura mater from Sara’s brain in a half hour or so; they could finish the bone cutting, take out the dura mater, leave it with Ellen, close up, and Ellen would be good.
Sara would die. In medical papers, they would say that a patient was sacrificed so the other could live. Sacrificed. Nice. The idea of making that decision made her skin crawl. Separating the dura mater, so that each baby could drain blood back into the venous system, was the time-eater. The neurosurgeons were advancing toward each other a millimeter at a time, sorting veins, saving everything they could.
But if something went too wrong ...
JUST NEEDED A NAP, she thought. The surgery could resume in the middle of the night, if Sara’s heart function improved. Or, if it worsened enough that they were compelled to let Sara go, and attempt to rescue Ellen.
As she came out of the parking garage, she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw the biker break away from the curb a block behind her; paid no attention, saw the stoplight ahead turn yellow, and floored the accelerator, clipping the red light as she went through. She kept the speed up down the block to the next light, and caught an odd motion in her rearview mirror; the biker had flat run the red light, and had almost been taken out by a car coming through.
Asshole.
She made a right and was on the long sweeping entry ramp, accelerating as she went. She liked to drive fast, and felt, as a surgeon, with a surgeon’s reflexes, that she was entitled to; and she’d had that race training, although there had been some knocks and bumps over the years ... unforeseen circumstances, she claimed in her own defense ... like when she drove through the garage door. She smiled, thinking of Lucas as he came running out of the house. He’d wanted to kill her, but had pretended to be totally calm about it, and understanding.
COMING DOWN THE RAMP, she saw the biker again, leaning into the turn, coming fast. Since she’d be getting off quickly, she stayed in the right lane.
She merged with traffic, pushed her speed to sixty-five, and in her left mirror saw the single headlight weave between cars in the right and the right-center lanes, two hundred yards back but coming very fast now. Too dark to see much.
As the bike came up beside her, she glanced back, saw the face shield, black leathers. He was on her back quarter-panel when he took his left hand off the clutch and pulled something from beneath his jacket.
She could feel him focused on her window, still coming, saw him lift his hand, in a peculiar way, and of the thousand things that might have occurred to her, only one rang true: she was a cop’s wife and she thought, Gun.
She flicked the car left, into his lane, and at the same instant she hit the brakes on the Audi, hard, and the bike flicked left and surged past her, the rider, snapping his head around, dropped whatever it was, tried to grab it with his clutch hand, lost it, and she still thought, Gun, and she yanked the wheel left and fell in behind him, and with a surge of road rage, floored the accelerator again.
She hadn’t had time to process it, but instinct told her that this was one of the guys from the robbery, one of the guys who killed Don, and now they were after her: and she was not the turn-the-other-cheek sort.
Though the Audi was fast, it was no match for the bike. The rider glanced back, saw her coming and took off, the front wheel lifting off the ground. She got the impression of a small man. The people from the hospital were supposed to be fairly big ... but there was no doubt about what he’d tried to do, not in her mind.
She stayed with him for a few hundred yards, but he sliced up the white line between two cars and was pulling away when the Cretin Avenue exit came up.
She swerved onto it, up to the top, turned right, stopped beside the golf course, unsnapped her seat belt and turned to watch traffic, as she pulled out her cell phone and punched in 911.
“Is this an emergency?”
“My name is Weather Karkinnen, and I’m a surgeon. A man just tried to kill me. He’s on I-94 going east toward Snelling on a motorcycle. He’s going really fast ...”
LUCAS SHOWED up fifteen minutes later.
Weath
er had driven around the golf course to the clubhouse. She parked, went inside, told the restaurant manager that she was waiting for police. The first cops arrived two minutes later; in the interval, she’d called Lucas.
“I’m pretty sure,” she told him on the phone. “Whatever it was, the gun, if it was a gun, he dropped it, and then he took off.”
“You know where he dropped it?” Lucas asked.
“Just after 280. Right there ... maybe three or four hundred yards east,” she said.
“Okay. Any chance he saw where you went? That you’re at the club?”
“No. I called nine-one-one, and then came right here to wait for the police,” she said.
“Stay there, stay inside. I’m coming.”
WHEN THE FIRST St. Paul cops showed up, they were skeptical. When she explained that she might have seen the face of one of the robbers who took down the hospital, they became interested. When she mentioned that Lucas was her husband, and that she had some familiarity with assholes, and this particular asshole may have dropped a gun on the highway, they got busy.
Lucas arrived in the truck, shouldered past the cops and asked, “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She was fine, but she could see that he was not. He was white-faced with anger.
He turned to one of the cops and said, “Did you get somebody to look for a weapon?”
The cop nodded. “We’re rolling on it. We’ve got a highway patrol guy to block off 94, and two of our cars down there with him. It’s gonna be a mess, though. Rush hour.”
Back to Weather: “The guy you saw yesterday. He’s got to be the robber. What kind of a bike was it? Anything you recognize?”
“It wasn’t a Harley, that’s all I know,” she said. “The guy’s legs were behind him, so he was leaning over the handlebars. When he took off, the front wheel came right off the ground. He was wearing a black helmet. But he was kind of a small guy, I think. That’s the impression I got.”
“Crotch rocket,” one of the cops said. “The highway patrol guy had a stop just east of downtown, and when Miz Davenport called, they passed the word to him and he was looking for the bike. Nothing came through, so the guy got off somewhere.”
“Not many bikes at this time of year,” the other cop said. “Too much snow and ice.”
“Clear right now,” Lucas said.
“On I-94 it is, but you wouldn’t want to cut any corners on the back streets,” the cop said.
Lucas nodded: the cop was right. “Had any reports of stolen bikes?”
“We’ll check.”
LUCAS TURNED BACK to Weather. “We’ve got to lose you until we find the guy. We could put you in the University Radisson....”
Weather shook her head. “Nope, nope. I need my sleep, and I need to be at home, with the kids, and I need to get to the hospital at the right time every day. And maybe in the middle of the night.”
“How’re the twins?”
“Sara’s heart is a problem,” Weather said. “They’re working on it now, but the stuff they need to give her causes problems for Ellen. So—maybe we’ll be good tomorrow.”
“Tired?”
She shrugged. “Not terribly—but it could get bad if this goes on for a few days. We knew it might, but hoped it wouldn’t. That’s why I need to be at home.”
Lucas said, “What would you think about a house guest?”
She shook her head. “Lucas, I don’t want Shrake or Jenkins bumbling around the house. I mean, those guys could fall on the piano and break it.”
“I called Virgil. He said he would be here in an hour.”
She nodded. “Virgil would be okay. Besides, it sounds like it’s settled.”
“Yes, it is,” he said.
She recognized the tone. They both had tempers, and they had learned to recognize when the other was putting his/her foot down, when things had moved beyond negotiation. She nodded: Virgil it was.
LUCAS CALLED the cops’ supervisor, an old friend named Larouse, who said he’d call with any news. “You want a car outside your house?”
“You don’t have to park it, but if you’d cruise it pretty steadily, that’d be good.”
“We’ll check every movin’ dog,” Larouse said. Then, “Hang on a minute.” There was a moment of silence, then Larouse was back. “We’ve got a gun. A Taurus revolver. Listen to this: it’s loaded with three .410 shells and two Colt .45s. Got run over about two hundred times, but the shells are still inside. Maybe we’ll get something off them.”
They talked for a couple of more minutes, then Lucas signed off: “Get back to me, man.”
Weather had been listening and she asked, “Good news?” “Well, you weren’t hallucinating—they found the gun.”
“I knew it.”
“It’s all beat up. Got run over a lot. They’re running it back to the lab. They’ll check the shells for prints and then ship them over to us and see if we can pull any DNA.”
“Doesn’t sound too hopeful.”
“Hey: if there’re prints on the shells, Lodmell will pull them up. And I believe the guy’ll be on record. You don’t send somebody out with a man-killer and a crotch rocket if he’s a virgin.”
“A man-killer?”
He looked at her: “You got lucky.”
“Not just lucky,” she said. The two cops had gone off a way, and she told him about flicking the Audi into the biker’s lane, causing him to fumble the gun, and about going after him with the car.
“Crazy woman,” he said, and wrapped an arm around her head, in a headlock, and gave her a noogie.
But he was scared.
THE NOOGIE made her laugh, at least a bit, and then Lucas went off to talk to the cops again, leaving her, and suddenly, for the first time in years, she flashed back to a winter day with a motorcycle crazy named Dick LaChaise, at Hennepin General Hospital in Minneapolis.
LaChaise and two killer friends had come to town looking for Lucas, because Lucas had led a major crimes squad that had killed LaChaise’s wife and sister during a bank robbery. LaChaise had taken Weather hostage at the hospital. Lucas had come to negotiate in person, to talk LaChaise out of killing her.
At least, that’s what Weather had thought, and LaChaise, too.
But as soon as LaChaise moved the muzzle of his pistol an inch from Weather’s skull, a concealed sniper had shot him in the head. Weather went down, covered with blood, brains, and fragments of skull.
She hadn’t been able to stay with Lucas after that; it had taken years to get back. But they had gotten back, and now here was another motorcycle hoodlum coming for her on the highway, and suddenly she was there again, in the hallway, and LaChaise’s head was exploding behind her ...
“No.” She shook it off.
She might flash back again, she thought, but she wasn’t having it, this time. She’d worked all through it. LaChaise was dead, and this had nothing to do with Dick LaChaise or Lucas Davenport.
Lucas touched her on the shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I suddenly got scared,” she said. “Before, I was too busy to be scared.”
CAPPY SWORE and tried to grab the gun, fumbled it, then heard the scream of an angry engine, looked back, and realized that the bitch was coming after him. He hit the accelerator, felt the rush as the front wheel lifted free, cut down a center line and was gone. He watched her lights and saw her swerve left, and she was gone up the off-ramp. He took the next one, quick right at the top, then a left, down through the dark streets, careful about the leftover snow, and the black ice at intersections. Three blocks from Central High School, four minutes after he made the attempt on Weather, he stuck the bike between a couple of parked cars, walked a crooked route down to Central, watching his trail, to where Joe Mack was waiting in his van.
“Missed,” Cappy said, climbing into the passenger seat. “Bitch saw me and came after me with her car. Goddamn near ran me down. I lost the fuck
in’ gun.”
Mack stretched his neck, looking out of the van in all directions: “You’re clean? Nobody’s behind you?”
“Nah, that part went fine. Dropped the bike, walked away, nobody saw my face with the scarf and all.”
“The gun ...”
“Gun’s clean, too. Hated to lose it, though. I needed that gun. I never fired a shot. I dunno.”
Two minutes and they were back on I-94, headed east. Joe Mack said, “I’m thinking about going over to Eddie’s. You know? Got some guys who’ll say I’ve been around for a couple weeks, had the haircut all the time.”
“Yeah?” Cappy wasn’t too interested. He was thinking about what had happened; the lack of respect. And he’d noticed the alcohol that Joe Mack was breathing all over him: that didn’t seem right. Your pickup guy shouldn’t be getting drunk.
He said, “That bitch tried to run me down. I was coming beside her, running good, and all of a sudden, she like, jukes into my lane. I goddamn near ran up her tailpipe. I got only one hand on the handbar, and I freak and I drop the gun, but I get back on top of the bike and the next thing I know, she’s about six feet behind me and coming for me. What kind of bitch is that?”
“The thing about Eddie’s is, you know, you ever been in fuckin’ Green Bay?”
“I oughta kill the bitch for free, after that,” Cappy said.
“What?”
Cappy looked at him and realized that Joe was dead drunk. “Pull over,” he said. “Let me drive.”
CAPPY DROVE back to his room, in an old house in St. Paul Park, and Joe said he was fine, took the keys and headed back to Cherries. Lyle was waiting in the back.
“No go,” Joe Mack said. He told Cappy’s story, then shook his head. “I think we made a mistake bringing Cappy into it. If this chick talks to the cops, they’ll be looking at bikers. Before, they weren’t looking at bikers. If they start showing her pictures, I might turn up.”
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