“Run,” I screamed at my sister collies. “Run!”
There was no time to ponder or debate.
I either make it to the ravine … or I die.
CHAPTER 30
Everyman didn’t know how Dog Man’s golden retriever had gotten a bead on him so quickly. He’d not even begun sliding out from under the tree when the cadaver dog tipped off Reid. He’d researched human remains detection dogs and knew they keyed in on decomposition scents—on blood and bone and decaying flesh.
And he’d purposely made a mess of Weston Davies’s chest to keep the damned mutts in hog heaven.
Reid’s golden retriever had gummed up the schedule all right—he’d wanted to work his way much closer before being detected; Everyman wanted point-blank range—but it was worth the price of admission to douse the critter in bear spray. The golden furball had such high hopes and dreams and lofty ambitions—plans on how it would destroy Everyman’s afternoon—only to have those hopes and dreams go up in smoke or, more accurately, come crashing down in a cloud of capsaicin, which is basically the active component of chili peppers. When the furry fucker dropped to earth like a bag of cement, spun like a kid’s top, scuttled blindly under the pine tree, and smashed against the trunk, Everyman almost held up a palm to ask Reid for a truce, so they could go out for a beer and relive the sight from every angle.
Unfortunately, Everyman’s mirth and good cheer nearly did him in. It kept him from noticing the hulking ape of a cop as he snuck in from the sidelines. Of course Everyman dropped the can of bear spray and began to raise his left arm. Everyman watched in his periphery as the police officer approached. To get off a good shot he needed the cop to come closer, and closer still, but Reid began to shout a warning and Everyman went O.K. Corral.
Afterward, Reid began to scurry, his collies ahead of him—already leaping into the ravine. Everyman tore after the Dog Man, wasting a shot, realizing at this distance that a running man trying to peg another running man wasn’t going to happen. But it was a clearing, basically a meadow, so Everyman went into an Isosceles stance—feet shoulder-width apart, support foot a little in front, elbows locked, two-handed grip—keyed in on center mass, and pulled the trigger as Dog Man Reid lunged over the side of the ravine.
And damned if he didn’t tag him.
CHAPTER 31
Something punched at my armpit, twisting me sideways as I plummeted into the ravine. I bounced off the mud eight feet below, somehow scrambled to my feet, and took off after my collies. The creek ran at a trickle this time of year. I stayed to the side, near mangled branches and exposed roots, hoping they’d provide cover, and damned near cheered when I cut right around the first bend without incoming fire.
It finally registered I’d been shot. Each step stung like a beehive. I squeezed my arm to my chest with my right hand, stumbled forward, and then poured it on, running as fast as possible on the muck and uneven dirt. I breathed hard, sucking in air and performing mental gymnastics, figuring another hundred yards before I hit Cohansey—one of the side roads that sections off Gomsrud Park—maybe double that if the creek serpentined its way toward the street.
My collies came back for me, but I nudged them along with my chin. “Run, girls. Run.”
Then I heard sirens—screeching and piercing—from the front side of Gomsrud, maybe they were pouring into the lot where I’d parked my pickup. I thought maybe Ennis had called in the dead body or maybe Lansing PD overheard the skirmish through Ennis’s radio or maybe there were multiple reports of gunshots.
The knife in Davies’s chest and the choker necklace clasped about his throat flashed through my mind. I peeked down at my shoulder, saw my shirt turning crimson, and staggered ahead as best I could.
When I hit Cohansey I felt giddy and thought I might be slipping into shock, my arm now numb as though it were asleep. I lurched across Cohansey during a gap in traffic, flagging the two girls along with me, turning to look for Vira, feeling sick when I remembered she was still in the park, recovering from the pepper spray, hoping she stayed in hiding, hoping that pepper spray would soon wear off my poor little girl.
I cut inside the nearest shop—an A&W—and stumbled to the front of the line. The guy ordering seemed upset at first, but after a glance at me—covered in muck and blood—he backed away, maybe even left.
“Call 911,” I shouted at the staff, all now milling about on the other side of the counter, knowing that Lansing’s entire police department was likely at Gomsrud Park as all of us in the A&W could still hear the sirens. “And those are my dogs,” I said, pointing outside their front door as I slid down to the floor. “Don’t let anything happen to my dogs.”
Fearing I’d pass out at any second, I kept repeating the don’t let anything happen to my dogs refrain to anyone who passed my orb as two squad cars and an ambulance arrived. I parroted it to the paramedics as they cut off my sleeve, examined my underarm, applied bandages and pressure.
The paramedics must have determined my wound was not life-threatening as I kept repeating my mantra to the wide-eyed officers who took my truncated statement: “Officer Ennis and I were attacked in the field by the north trail, between the pine trees and the ravine, before the landscape breaks upward into Knob Hill, near the bunny hill; we were attacked where we’d found the body of the missing senior citizen.”
The officers wanted to know about their friend and colleague.
“I think he’s dead,” I could barely choke out and felt tears rush to my eyes. “I’m afraid he’s dead.”
Before they shut me in and closed the back of the ambulance, I caught a glimpse of Vira standing next to Maggie and Delta—blinking her eyes and staring my way.
Thank you, God, I thought. Thank you.
CHAPTER 32
Everyman tore off his ski mask in his mad dash to the lip of the ravine, hoping there was time for the Dog Man to see his true face before taking his last breath. He hit the edge at full tilt, nearly tumbled into the hollow himself and … goddamnit, there was no Mason Reid.
Everyman scanned right, his SIG 1911 sweeping along with his line of vision, and he caught sight of the Dog Man stumbling around a creek bend. He’d winged the son of a bitch—saw blood in the filth and mud where Dog Man had crash-landed—but it wasn’t a kill shot. It took every ounce of self-control to keep from leaping into the creek bed and tearing off after the lucky son of a bitch. Everyman knew he’d catch Reid in a minute or less, he knew he could make Reid look into his eyes—make him look into his true face—and then he’d aerate the pesky fucker once and for all.
But the police sirens clinched the deal.
Everyman stormed back; grabbed his backpack, canister, and mask; did two seconds crossing the ravine; and then bolted for the bunny hill. By the time he’d made it to the park’s “shut-for-the-season” tow rope, he’d donned the John Deere hat and Buddy Holly glasses. Ten feet later he sported the Chicago Bears windbreaker. Everything else went into the backpack, now covered by his windbreaker. Any eyewitnesses turned up during police canvassing might mention they saw some nimrod cutting up the Knob Hill tow rope from Gomsrud, and just assumed the silly-looking dork lived nearby.
Everyman didn’t want to kill the police officer, had been hoping Lansing PD wouldn’t take his call to Silver Years too seriously—at least until a body showed up—and would only send Reid and his dogs to scour the damned park. Killing a cop would mean a handful of detectives might actually put down the donuts and start asking questions.
Killing a cop would bring beaucoup heat.
Everyman figured the squad cars were at the park’s entrance by now, filling the main guest lot. Soon, if not already, they’d figure out their cars could fit on the hiking and biking trails. He had to assume the dead cop had radioed in where Weston Davies had been found—field before the ravine—which meant he only had about a minute. Everyman picked up his pace. He didn’t take off in an uphill sprint, as that might signal his being the cause of the police sirens to any potential wit
nesses, but at a quicker, more-sturdy hiker’s aerobic stride. Near the hilltop, he turned to look back. Knob Hill did have a hell of a view, he had to admit, and squad cars had yet to roll into the clearing. From his elevation he could see his handiwork—both bodies—the dead cop and Weston Davies and … Jesus Christ.
At the bottom of Knob Hill sat a golden retriever, motionless, staring back up at him. Even at this distance Everyman knew it was the goddamned dog he’d blasted with bear spray. Everyman gazed back at the golden—like a staring contest when you were a kid—then realized what he was doing and got his ass back into high gear.
At the top of Knob Hill, he glanced back down. A squad car was pulling into the field, slowly, not wanting to get stuck or mess up the crime scene, but that goddamn golden retriever was nowhere to be found.
Three minutes later Everyman was in his rental car.
Five minutes later, he was leaving Lansing.
CHAPTER 33
“This makes zero sense, Reid,” Detective Hanson marched into my hospital room at nine p.m. sharp and spoke without preamble while his partner, Detective Marr, stood in the doorframe. “Hell, I’d arrest you if I could figure out how you managed to shoot yourself in the armpit from behind.”
They were keeping me overnight at Community Hospital in Munster, a five-minute skip east into Indiana. With feral-boy having already slashed my left forearm and me now getting shot in the left armpit, the only decent takeaway is thank God I’m right-handed. They had a cop sitting outside my room, like you see in the movies, and the hospital had its own security guards making their rounds. It didn’t really matter; I was too medicated to feel frightened. The doctors had me on morphine to control the post-surgical pain and, though groggy, I did my best to answer any questions the Lansing investigators—boomeranging in and out of my room—had for me.
At some point along the way someone must have paged the two CPD detectives.
“Tell me you’ve contacted the Grohls,” I’d voiced my concern about Becky Grohl’s safety to every officer, detective or not, who’d wandered into my orbit. If this was tied into Nicky Champine and his feral son, Becky Grohl might also be in danger.
“They’re heading to a friend’s cabin in Oregon,” Hanson replied. “We were at their house right after this broke. Marr even carried her dad’s rifle to the minivan.”
Marr lifted a hand my way from the doorway. “Least I could do.”
“From the look on Mr. Grohl’s face, they’re probably halfway there by now.”
“Did you see the old man’s body?”
Both detectives nodded in unison and Hanson said, “The knife is the same make and model as the one the Champine kid had. The black velvet choker necklace is newish—at least as those go—so likely not from Nicky Champine’s sister’s collection.”
“But no missing girl,” I said. “And why the old guy?”
“No fuss, no muss,” Hanson said. “Weston Davies lived in an old fogey home down the street and walked those trails every morning. He more than served his purpose.”
“What was his purpose?”
“I think you know,” the detective said to me. “To lure you into the woods, Reid. To lure you in and kill you.”
I then shared with the two investigators how someone had been poking about the woods near my trailer home in the wee hours of the morning last week, and how Vira and the collies had gone crazy—waking me, warning me. And how I no longer believed it to be a trick of the light … how I truly saw someone fade back into the shadows of the trees and the brush.
“That was your dogs saving your life,” Hanson replied. “Sort of like they did today.”
CHAPTER 34
Everyman took I-94 out of Lansing. He stayed in the right lane and followed the speed limit as though it were gospel. He pulled into a McDonald’s drive-thru at Roseland and ordered three Big Macs, a large fry, and coffee.
Killing made him hungry.
Everyman parked in a spot farthest away from the restaurant’s entrance and, between sips of black coffee, made short order of one burger as well as the entire batch of fries. Then he smeared the remaining two burgers and special sauce over the ski mask, crumpled the remaining mound of mush together as though he were kneading bread dough and dropped it into the bag his order had come in. Everyman walked inside, stuffed the bag into the nearest trash bin, hit the restroom and washed his hands.
Although he’d paid cash, he tore up the receipt and flushed it.
Everyman then sat in the car again and took apart the SIG Sauer 1911—ejected the magazine, cleared the chamber, field stripped the frame, and removed the barrel from the slide. He went through the drive-thru a second time, refilling his coffee and buying a couple items off the dollar menu. He dumped the small burgers onto the passenger seat and put the pieces of the SIG 1911 into the McDonald’s bag. He thought about popping the trunk and putting the bag with the rental’s spare tire but said fuck it and headed out.
Everyman headed straight into the city, took Lake Shore Drive, and found a parking spot near the Chicago Yacht Club. Everyman put on a hat—not John Deere this time, a Cubs baseball cap—and sunglasses. He stuffed the McDonald’s bag filled with SIG Sauer parts into a side pocket of his oversized windbreaker and headed out for a pleasant stroll along the lake.
A mile later the throng of walkers thinned in the late-afternoon sun. Everyman rounded a bend and found the spot he’d been looking for. He walked to the shoreline—the color of the water was beautiful—smiled in the sun, and began tossing pebbles and small stones into Lake Michigan. As Everyman continued his walk along the shore, he mixed in SIG Sauer parts—frame, barrel, springs, magazine—with the pebbles and stones until his McDonald’s bag was empty.
On the way back to his car, he dumped the bag in a trash bin along the walkway.
Everyman wouldn’t want to litter.
He returned the rental car—speed checkout, again settling in cash—tossed the burgers in his backpack and used their restroom. He washed the canister of bear spray with towels and half the soap from the dispenser, and used more towels to wipe it down and placed it back in his pack. As he hiked a few blocks to the nearest bus stop, he dropped the canister inside a fence at an empty playground. Kids would find it after dinner, dick around with it, and that would be that.
Everyman thought about how the movies make their villains omnipotent, and ghostlike. They never screw up until the final minute and perhaps not even then if there’s a sequel in the works. In those films there are never a hundred potential eyewitnesses capturing the killer on their cell phone cameras, the heavy never leaves prints or DNA at the crime scenes, and, when cornered, the baddie is able to fight like a cross between Bruce Lee and Godzilla. Quite frankly, Everyman grew philosophical on the city bus returning him to his regular vehicle, when you get right down to it, killing was easy—thirteen-year-old gangbangers did it all the time—getting away with homicide was the tricky part.
Everyman was left-brain dominant, high in analytical skills, sound in logic, and talented in math and science. Left-brain dominant or not, he was also aware of his faulty wiring. He’d read studies on people like himself—years ago, back when he felt a need to know the things the experts knew, what the profilers knew—back when he thought the knowledge might matter, that it might be useful. He’d read so much abnormal psych it became tedious. Everyman knew he didn’t process emotions normally. Fear and love meant nothing, they were mere abstracts—constructs—otherwise Everyman could never have accomplished the things he’d achieved.
Sure, he cared not to get captured and would do everything in his power to avoid that … what with prison cuisine being what it was.
There were only two large-scale sensations that in some manner or another got through to him. First, the absolute adrenaline rush of doing what he did. Perhaps that’s what it was all about, the ultimate in a thrill-seeking addiction. And that addiction went hand in hand with the complete anarchy Everyman had discovered in murder.
&nb
sp; The second large-scale sensation was the anger.
The anger didn’t come often—in fact, anger was too weak a word for it—and he was shocked the few times it washed over him, flooding his senses. It was debilitating, nearly uncontrollable. He couldn’t think straight.
Instead he saw red.
Blood red.
Just like the night in Bridgeport when he spotted the forensic pathologists carrying the Champine boy out in a body bag. It was all he could do to keep from rushing forward into Nicky Champine’s front yard and emptying his SIG 1911 into every cop and every detective and every ambulance driver in his path, and then drawing his knife to finish off the rest.
Of course that would have been a suicide run.
Instead, he’d forced himself to his knees that night in Bridgeport, a migraine of fury drilling into his cerebellum. Everyman was stunned to find he had this level of feeling—perhaps some kind of affection—for the little fucker … as there he was, on his goddamned knees, crippled in rage over the boy’s death. He knelt there on the ground for five straight minutes until the answer came to him and, with the answer, the blood red passed.
The Dog Man put that boy in the body bag, ergo, Everyman was going to kill the Dog Man.
Although Mason Reid had been wounded today, he’d been saved by his dogs twice so far … three times if you count his night in the basement of the Bridgeport rambler.
But Everyman had all the time in the world.
And he was left-brain dominant.
There would not be a fourth.
CHAPTER 35
“Can you hear me, Mace?”
I opened my eyes and may have mumbled something to effect of, “Perfyzzertquees.”
The Finders Page 13
