At five minutes after ten, three students carrying books came out the front door of Peik Hall. They stopped on the steps for a moment; then one of the men went left, the man and woman right. Another minute passed, and another knot of students came out of the building, talking, and walked away together. A bank of lights went off in the target windows, then another. Druze drifted out toward University Avenue again, then down Pillsbury, toward the parking lot. He walked to the far end of the lot, stepped between two bushes, waited, waited…
Two men walked into the lot, from along the side of the building. He could hear their voices, at first like a faraway typewriter, clacking, then as human speech:
"… Can't figure out how they won it, given the way the company failed to warn anybody about the gas-tank leaks…" The speaker was the shorter of the two men.
"Juries. You have to keep that in mind, always. There's no absolutely good way to predict what they'll do, even with the best screening program. In this particular… Oh, shit." The conversation stopped. Druze started back up the sidewalk toward the building. If there were two of them, he'd have to forget it. "Look at the goddamn tire. It's only three months old…"
"You want me…" the other man offered. A student, Druze thought.
"No, no, I can change it in two minutes," George said, peering down at the tire in disgust. "But it pisses me off, excuse the expression. I should be able to drive over railroad spikes with those tires… Now, there's a case for you, Mr. Brekke. Sue the goddamn tire company for me…"
"Glad to…"
There was more talk and a clatter of tools as the slender student stood and watched the heavyset professor dismount the spare from the Jeep. Druze, feeling something almost like relief, thought the student would stay. But after watching for a couple of minutes, the man looked at his watch and said, "Well, my wife will be wondering…"
"Go on. This'll just take a minute."
The student was gone, rolling out of the lot, never looking toward Druze's bush. Druze let him go, heard his car accelerate down University… The professor had his jacket off, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and he grunted and cursed in the night. The flat came off, the spare went on. He seemed to know what he was doing, working without wasted motion. With a series of quick twists, the spare was lugged down.
Druze took a deep breath, got a grip on the sharpening steel with his right hand and stepped into the parking lot, jingling his car keys with his left hand, moving slowly.
The professor popped open the back of the Jeep, leaving the keys in the lock-everything was moving slowly for Druze now, everything was in needle-sharp focus-lifted the flat, holding it carefully clear of his trousers, and heaved it inside the Jeep.
Druze was ten feet away, checking, checking. Nobody around. Nothing coming on Pillsbury, no cars: The professor, a big, beefy blond man, slamming the back of the Jeep, now turning at the sound of Druze's keys… The keys would be a soothing sound, suggesting that Druze was headed for the last car in the lot…
"Flat tire?" Druze asked.
The professor nodded without a flicker of recognition, although Druze was less than a long step away. "Yeah, damn thing was flat as a pancake."
"Got it under control?" Druze asked, slowing. He looked around a last time: Nothing. The handle of the sharpening steel was cool in his hand.
"Oh yeah, no problem," George said, pulling on his jacket. His hands were black with grease from the lug nuts.
"Well…" Druze drew the steel behind his leg and stepped on, heading for his car, then pivoted and swung the steel one-handed, half overhead, like a whip, or a machete chopping sugarcane. The steel crashed through the side of George's head, two inches above his right ear. The professor bounced off the Jeep and down. Druze hit him again, but it was unnecessary: the first blow had crushed the side of his head. A sudden stench told Druze that George's bowels had relaxed. Neither he nor Bekker had thought about the stink the body could make in the car.
No reason to be furtive now: if anyone came in the next thirty seconds, it was over. Druze grabbed George under the arms, dragged him to the station wagon. The building lights, which had seemed remote and inadequate a few moments before, now seemed bright as stadium lights. Druze snatched open the wagon's back door and threw the body on the black plastic garbage bags that covered the floor behind the front seat. A short-handled spade was on the floor below the bags. When George's body hit the floor, it landed on the tip of the blade, and the handle popped up, tearing the bags. Druze swore and pushed the handle down, but now the body rolled…
George was heavy, and his legs were still sticking out of the car. Druze struggled, half frantic, trying to bend the legs; then he grappled with the overweight torso, pulling on the sport coat lapels, not seeing the bloody twisted head, trying to lift the torso farther into the car while he pressed the feet in behind. The spade bounded up and down like a teeter-totter, obstructing everything. Druze was sweating heavily by the time he finished.
Never been scared… He was scared now. Not badly, but enough to identify the emotion, a feeling that went back to the days of the burning. The hospital baths, where they peeled the dead skin… those had scared him. The transplants had scared him. When the doctor had come to check his progress, that had scared him. He hadn't been scared since he'd left the hospital. But he felt it now, a distant tingle, but definitely there…
When George was fully inside the car, on the floor behind the front seat, Druze covered the body with more black plastic garbage bags and then folded the back seats down over it. The seats didn't quite cover it, but to anyone looking casually inside, the wagon would appear empty.
He slammed the door, went back to the Jeep, got the keys out of the back door, shoved them between the curb and the front tire, then checked the meter: ten minutes. Druze took more quarters from his pocket, put in two hours' worth, then went back to the wagon. Nobody around. Nothing but the lights of Minneapolis, over across the river, and the distant sound of an unhappy taxi horn on Hennepin Avenue.
What if the wagon wouldn't start? What if… The wagon turned over, and he rolled it out of the lot, took a right. Met no cars. Turned onto University Avenue, let a breath out. Past the frat houses… Checked the gas gauge for the hundredth time. Full. He drove down Oak Street, then left, and then onto I-94, and pointed the car east toward Wisconsin.
The drive was eerie. Quiet. He had the feeling that the car was standing still, with the lights zooming by, like a nightmare. A cop crossed the overhead ramp at Snelling. Druze kept his eyes glued on the rearview mirror, but the cop continued south on Snelling, and out of sight.
He crossed the Fifth Street exit, past Highway 61, and exited at White Bear Avenue. Drove into a Standard station, called the number Bekker had given him, got the answering machine and spoke a single syllable: "Yes."
Back on I-94, fifty-five miles per hour all the way, ignoring the signs for sixty-five, through the double bridge across the St. Croix River at Hudson, out of Minnesota and up the Wisconsin side. The interstate mileage signs started on the western ends of each state, so he could count the ascending numbers as he moved deeper into Wisconsin, ten miles, twelve. He took the exit specified by Bekker, heading north.
Four-point-two miles, three red reflectors on a sign at the turnoff. He found it, right where Bekker had said, took the turnoff and bumped down a dirt track. Two-tenths of a mile. The track ended at a simple post-and-beam log cabin, a door in the center, a square window on either side of the door. The cabin was dark. In the headlights, he could see a brass padlock hanging from a hasp on the door.
Beyond the cabin, Druze could see moonlight on the lake. Not much of a lake; almost like a large pond, rimmed with cattails. He turned off the car lights, got out and walked down to the water, his feet groping for the path between the cabin and the water. There was a dark form off to his left, and he stepped next to it, trying to figure out what it was. Boards, on a steel frame, tires… a rollout dock. Okay.