Still breathing.
Peck walked around the barn, looking at the body. Still breathing. He didn’t want to risk another shot, so finally, impatient, he went over and kicked the wounded man in the head. King sputtered out some blood, and Peck lost it, and kicked him in the head another half-dozen times. That did it and the breathing stopped.
Being a doctor, he also checked for a pulse in King’s neck. Nothing.
“I feel much better after the workout,” Peck told Katya. He needed the conversation; a way, he thought, to resolve the situation in his own mind. The big cat stared at him from behind the chain-link fence and didn’t contribute a thing. “You know, you figure out what you have to do and then you execute. That’s so important. Execution is. You have to carry through. A lot of people can’t do that.”
The cat said nothing.
19
Virgil was working the phones, spreading the word among police agencies about the search for Barry King and the Simonians. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and he had to be content to sit and wait and think about something he might do.
One thing he didn’t do was watch the local television news, where the BCA-meaning him-was getting ripped for not finding the tigers. The talking heads had no suggestions about how that might be done; they simply wanted it done, never mind that the BCA was looking for one or two people in an area with a population of three and a quarter million.
Virgil still believed the tigers were nearby, but he had resigned himself to the idea that they were probably dead. He also had the sense that they weren’t down in somebody’s basement in suburban Woodbury, or any other suburb, because there were too many people around. But where would they be?
In the meantime, following up on a tip from the Simonians themselves, he gave Hamlet Simonian’s phone number to Sandy, who talked to Apple about lost phones, found out how you tracked them, and determined that the phone was moving west out of Denver, down I-70.
“We need to find the guy who’s got it,” Virgil said. “Any ideas would be appreciated.”
“Lots of cars on I-70,” Sandy said. “I don’t think the Colorado highway patrol is going to shut down an interstate and start searching cars for a cell phone.”
“We gotta do something-we need that phone,” Virgil said.
“I can call around,” she said. “I wouldn’t count on getting it.”
“I gotta think,” Virgil said. “I mean, I am thinking, but I’m not coming up with anything.”
–
While they were doing that and Peck was murdering King, Sparkle was sneaking into the Castro canning factory with a woman named Ramona Alvarez. Alvarez’s husband unloaded trucks, while Alvarez worked on the topping line, where open jars coming down a roller track were topped up with pickle slices.
“Not as many people here as I thought,” Sparkle muttered to Alvarez, as Alvarez walked past the time-card rack. She wouldn’t be checking in; the ghost workers didn’t have time cards.
“There are a lot of people here; you don’t see them so much, except down at the loading docks,” Alvarez said in good but heavily accented English. “Here, it’s mostly machines. We got to watch for Stout. If he sees you here, there’ll be lots of trouble. They put you in jail for trespassing.”
The factory, Sparkle thought, looked like what she imagined the inside of a coffeemaker might look like-hot, lots of moving parts, saturated with a wide variety of odors, ranging from fresh cucumber to the smell of the spices and vinegars that made pickles. While the exterior of the place was foreboding, that big dark brick wall, the interior was painted a uniform beige, with a slick easy-wash finish.
A few minutes after Sparkle and Alvarez entered the factory, the pickle-packing machinery shut down momentarily for a shift change. Alvarez changed into a blue apron, hairnet, and plastic gloves, and took her spot next to a bin of wet pickle slices, waiting for the jars to come down the roller track.
Four other women worked the line, two facing Alvarez and a third on Alvarez’s side, five feet away. After three or four minutes, with a clatter and a bang, the line started moving again, the jars coming down fast, side by side, maybe eighty percent full of sliced pickles. Alvarez started topping up the jars.
Sparkle watched for a while, took a couple of photographs with a point-and-shoot camera, and Alvarez said, “You seen it. It ain’t gonna change for the next eight hours. Kills my legs.” She kept topping the jars as she spoke; every once in a while a pickle slice got away from her and landed on the concrete floor.
“What happens if you miss a jar?” Sparkle asked.
“You don’t miss any,” Alvarez said. “If you make a bad drop-you know, you’re working fast and you miss the jar-then you gotta catch that jar and work faster coming back to your station, getting them all full. If one gets away from you now and then… that’s just what it is. If it’s too many, they’ll dock Leandro’s pay. Say he came in late.”
“Criminals,” Sparkle said. She watched for another couple of minutes, then stepped back from the line as another woman came in with a broom and started pushing discarded pickles into piles and scooping them into a plastic bucket. Sparkle muttered to Alvarez, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“What?”
Sparkle didn’t answer, but stepped away, turned, and walked along the backside of the large stainless-steel tanks. She was the only one back there, and she slipped through the factory, taking pictures of women sorting cucumbers before they went into a huge vat; other women pulling cucumbers off a moving track into separate bins to be speared, sliced, or discarded; a woman monitoring a machine that dumped brine into the jars.
The place smelled like a huge wet cucumber, Sparkle thought, and so did she, after twenty minutes in the building.
She was looking at the brining operation when a heavyset man in a white shirt with a Castro label on the pocket walked out from behind a machine on the other side of the factory and saw her. He called, “Hey!”
Sparkle pretended not to hear and ambled away, and he shouted again, “Hey!” And then, to somebody out of sight, “Vic, grab that woman! Grab that woman!”
Sparkle still didn’t see anybody, but she ran.
Thirty feet down the wall of the factory, she saw an intersecting hallway and took it, and down that, another thirty feet, two restrooms. She ducked into the women’s restroom, realized it was a dead end, ran back out to a T intersection, took a right toward what looked like daylight.
Behind her, she heard a man shouting. She didn’t look.
The daylight turned out to be an office with nobody in it. On the far wall was a line of old-style sash windows. She went to one not visible from the hallway, pulled it up, unlocked the outside window, pushed it open, clambered out, turned, and pulled the inner window back down, then pushed the outer window back in place.
She was on the side of the factory, with twenty feet of short scraggly grass between her and a line of trees. She dashed across the grassy strip into the trees, down into the sand of a dry, seasonal creek. Her car was parked off the side of the county road, four or five hundred yards from the factory. She jogged out to the road, looked both ways, then down the road to the car.
Elapsed time, from the moment the man shouted at her to the car, perhaps four minutes. She was breathing hard, her lungs aching when she got to the Mini. She drove out of the turnout, took a right, and rolled away from the factory.
Should she have been frightened? She didn’t know. She didn’t particularly care, either. With her photographs of fifty or sixty Mexican women working in the plant, on this single shift, she had her dissertation in the bag.
–
Virgil was sitting with his feet up on his temporary desk, talking with Sandy when he took a call from a Wisconsin deputy sheriff.