On his hands and knees, Gideon crawled along the row of cages, peering inside, until at last he found the wrecked Ford Escape. He removed the bolt cutters and a thick cotton rag. Winding the rag around the first chain link, he waited for the laugh track; made the cut; rewound the rag around the next link; waited for the laugh track; cut again.
He finished as the show ended with the usual burst of pseudo-Copacabana music. Opening the flap he’d created, he crawled inside.
The car was an absolute mess. It had been pried apart and cut into several pieces that were so mangled they were only vaguely recognizable as belonging to a vehicle. It was still drenched in blood and gore and smelled like a butcher shop on a hot summer’s day. Crawling around it, Gideon located the rear passenger area where Wu had been sitting and wormed his way inside. The seat was sticky with blood.
Trying his best to tune this out, he forced his hands into the space behind and groped around. Almost immediately he felt something hard and small. He grasped it, slipped it into a ziplock bag he pulled from his pocket, and sealed the bag with a feeling of triumph.
A cell phone.
21
In Roland Blocker’s four years of working the night shift at the warehouse, nothing had ever happened. Absolutely nothing. Night after night it was the same routine, the same rounds, the same comforting parade of late-night, black-and-white television sitcoms. Blocker loved the peace and quiet of the vast space. He had always felt safe, cocooned in the warehouse with its heavy metal doors and alarms and ceaselessly vigilant cameras, all safely enclosed within a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped by concertina wire. He’d never been bothered, no burglary attempts, nothing. After all, there was nothing to steal either inside or out — except wrecked cars, cars hauled out of the rivers with dead bodies in them, cars found with bodies locked in their trunks, burned-out cars, drug-smuggling cars, shot-up cars. What was there to steal?
But now, after the incident, with the cops gone, he felt spooked for the first time. That had been the strangest damn thing, that voice outside the door. Had he really heard it? A couple of the cops who’d responded to his alarm hinted around that maybe he’d been sleeping and had a dream. That pissed Blocker off — he never slept on the job. The surveillance cameras were always on and God only knew who might check the tapes later.
I Love Lucy had ended and the next show up was The Beverly Hillbillies, Blocker’s favorite of the night’s lineup. He tried to relax as the theme song started, the twang of banjos and the overdone hick accent always making him smile. He bent down to crank up the A/C and adjust the vents so they blew more directly on him.
And then he heard a sound. A clink—as if a piece of metal had dropped lightly onto the cement floor of the warehouse. He dropped his legs off the desk and, fumbling for the remote, muted the TV set to listen.
Clank came the sound again, closer this time. Suddenly his heart was pounding in his chest. First the voice, now this. He scanned the bank of inside CCTV monitors, but they showed nothing.
Should he pull the alarm again? No, the cops would never let him live that down. He considered calling out and realized that was plain stupid — if some intruder was in the warehouse, they wouldn’t answer.
Heaving himself out of the chair, Blocker unhooked his Maglite and headed in the direction of the second sound, moving cautiously, his free hand resting easily on the butt of his service piece.
Reaching the area from which the sound had come, he shone the light around. This corner contained stacked pallets of old shrink-wrapped pieces of cars, all labeled — evidence that had been cut from vehicles years before but couldn’t yet be tossed.
Nothing. He was just nervous, spooked by the earlier thing — that was all. Maybe rats had gotten into the warehouse. He went back to his little office and sat down, turning the sound of the television up, a little higher than usual this time. The noise comforted him. It was the episode where the banker fakes an attack of wild Indians on the Clampett mansion, one of his favorites. He cracked open a fresh Diet Coke and settled down to enjoy it.
Clank.
He sat up again, muting the television, listening intently.
Clank.
It was such a regular sound, unnatural, almost deliberate, coming from the same damn area. The CCTV monitors remained empty. Once again he rejected the idea of pulling the alarm.
Getting back to his feet, he yanked out the flashlight and shifted it to his left hand, unsnapping the keeper on his sidearm with his right and sliding out the weapon. He walked back to the corner from which the sounds had come and paused, hoping to hear it again. Nothing. He advanced, this time deciding to go behind the stacks of pallets to see if there was something or someone hiding between them and the wall.
He slowly walked down a long aisle between pallets, pausing just before the last one, listening. Still nothing. Weird.
Moving tentatively now, he approached the final stack of pallets and ducked around the corner, shining his light along the wall.
He felt something not unlike a displacement of air behind him and spun around; a black shadow burst out of the darkness but before he could scream there was a flash of steel and he felt a violent tug across his neck, and then everything was tumbling and crazy and red — and then it was over.
22
Gideon Crew waited, listening. There was someone else inside the warehouse who was not the guard: he was sure of it. The guard had heard it, too, and gone to inspect; returned; then investigated again. The second time he had not returned and Gideon had heard a faint scuffling sound, following by the sound of something wet landing softly on the floor.
He waited, absolutely still and unmoving. From his vantage point inside the car, he could see through several breaks in the wreckage, giving him a view of the central, cleared aisle of the warehouse, very broad, that ran to the security area at the far end. The guard was still gone, and he was taking much too long to investigate.
Gideon heard a soft plop, and then something rolled out from between two stacks of pallets on the right side and came slowly to rest in the open area.
The guard’s severed head.
Gideon’s mind kicked into overdrive. He knew instantly it was a trap — a way to flush him out, frighten him, or induce him to investigate. Another person was loose in the warehouse — and now Gideon was the target.
Quickly he reviewed his options. He could stay and fight, stalk his stalker. But his opponent was holding all the cards; he evidently knew exactly where Gideon was, he had worked it all out, he had lured and killed the guard so efficiently that there hadn’t even been a sound…Gideon’s instincts told him this guy was very, very good, a true professional.
So what to do? Get the hell out. He already had the cell phone, and additional searching had turned up nothing else.
But that was obviously one of the things his opponent — or opponents — expected him to do. Opponents. Now that was a chilling thought.
He needed to do the unexpected. But what could be unexpected here? Gideon was well protected inside the twisted car, but any move he made to leave it would potentially expose him.
He was fucked.
As he mulled it over, he realized that the killer, or killers, had been tracking his progress all along. Now they were probably in position, aiming at his cage, just waiting for his appearance. They wouldn’t have rolled out the head if they didn’t know where he was.