She gave it a shot, working the cuff on her wrist. She probed with the needle, having no clear idea of what to do.
How did locks work, anyway? She'd never even thought about it. Something about tumblersor was that only the kind of locks they had on safes?
She was a moron. She didn't know the simplest practical thing. She had spent her time learning history and English lit when she should have been teaching herself street skills, survival skills. It was her mom's fault. If Robin hadn't sent her to that private school amp;
"Yeah, blame her," she whispered. "Real mature."
She struggled with the lock for what seemed like a long time. One thing was clear: The TV shows had lied. It was not easy to pick a lock. It was, as far as she could tell, impossibleat least without the right tools.
Finally she gave up. Her efforts had failed. She couldn't find a handcuff key in the detective's clothes, and she couldn't pick the lock. She couldn't do anything except wait for Tomlinson to regain consciousness and kill her, or for Gabe to come back and kill her, or for some other bad guy to drop by and kill her.
The bottom line was that she was going to die. She had delayed her execution for a short time, but it was coming, and she was out of options. She would die in the factory, a dead place suitable for the dead.
Gabe had to get rid of her. And he was no angel. She knew that now. She knew how he'd used her. She knew how stupid she had been. She knew it alltoo late.
Chapter Forty-seven
Gray circled the office building in the dark, his headlights off, only the parking lights shining. If there were cops staking out the place in a slickback, he needed to know it now, before he tried going inside.
Inside. He shook his head. Fuck, he must be a candidate for the puzzle factory to be even thinking about pulling this shit. Here he was, having just eluded the police back on the boulevard, and what was he doing to celebrate? He was cruising the corner where Doc Robin had her office, so he could commit a little after-hours B 'n' E.
Nuts. That's what it was. He wondered about himself sometimes. The people who thought he was crazy for killing high school girls had gotten it all wrong. There was nothing crazy about some good old-fashioned all-American blood sport. But what he was doing now, risking his freedom for a look in the doc's office amp; that was crazy, no two ways about it.
He was going to do it, though. Hell, he'd already decided. If he changed his mind, it would be like backing down from a fight.
He saw no black-and-whites in the neighborhood. No TV trucks either. He'd been worried that the newspeople might be hanging out here, but they'd gone. When he arrived, he'd seen the last couple of news vans hightailing it out of the area like they had a hot tip.
Where to stash his car was a problem. Couldn't leave it too close to the building. If any cops came along and saw it there, they'd know he was inside for sure. On the other hand, he couldn't park too far away. Might need to make a quick escape. Suppose there was an undercover car in the vicinity. He hadn't spotted any action like that, and he was pretty sure he could sniff a stakeout, but there was a chance someone was waiting for him to return to the scene. If so, he would have to run for it, and his wheels had to be close.
He compromised by parking the Firebird in the alley beside the building. He eased the car against a brick wall, maneuvering it behind a trash bin. The car was invisible from the street. Unless a patrol unit went down the alley itself, there was no way his ride would be spotted.
He left the car unlocked with the key in the ignition, ready to roll. Nobody was going to steal the fucking thing in the next ten minutes, and ten minutes was all the time he planned to spend inside the office building.
With the deputy's gun stuffed in his waistband, he headed out of the alley and crouched by the fence that surrounded the parking lot. He took a minute to suss out the area. If any watchers had eyeballed him driving into the alley, he would expect them to be moving in on him now. He saw no movement, heard no footsteps. More important, he got no sense of trouble. Sensing itthat was a street thing, a knack he'd picked up somewhere along the line. He knew when the boys in blue were around. It wasn't like the short hairs stood up or anything. He just knew.
He was willing to bet they weren't around now.
The fence was gated and locked at night, but it was more for show than anything else. There was no concertina wire on top, and any homeboy worth his spit could climb the thing without breaking a sweat. Gray went up and over, then quickly advanced, sticking close to the building's rear wall.
The parking lot was empty, the building dark. A few lights burned in the upper windows, but none on the ground floor. He guessed that the place had been emptied out so The Man could do his Sherlock thing, collecting hairs and fibers and all that happy crap. These days cop work was more like fuckin' brain science, and there was something deeply wrong about that. The bad guys didn't use no lasers or microscopes, and the lawmen shouldn't, either. Ought to be a level playing field.
Brain science was the doc's turf. She was smart. Finding him at the arcade, now, that was friggin' genius. How the fuck could she have known he'd go there, when he didn't half know it himself? It was creepy, almost like she could read his damn mind even without plugging him into her machine.
He reached the back door and looked around. Still no movement. No shouts of "Freeze, police!" No lights snapping on, no Sam Brownes jingling with handcuffs and keys and batons and guns and Mace and rover radios.
The door was locked. He'd been expecting that, although optimistically he'd thought the door might be left unlocked at night because of the false security provided by the fence. He'd also hoped that even if there was a lock, it might be one of those corner-hardware-store varieties that he could defeat with his trusty screwdriver. No such luck. It was a nice solid dead bolt. With the right tools he might've tackled it, but he didn't have no tools so he had to go in another way.
It was no big thing. The ground-floor windows were unbarred. Leaving them that way was a risk in this part of town, but he guessed the egghead yuppies who rented these cubbyholes didn't want to sit staring at iron bars all day. Besides, the fence and the dead-bolted door probably made them feel nice and safe.
He picked a window at random, punched in the pane with his elbow, cleared away the clinging shards, and climbed through. He checked his back. The parking lot was still dark and quiet. If there were any bozos with badges around here, they were asleep on the job.
The office he'd entered was filled with computers and stacks of paperan accounting firm or something. He made his way through the dark suite to the door and eased it open. The hall was empty. He saw no surveillance cameras. Easy pickings. He ought to come back sometime and rip off this place.
Doc Robin's office, on the opposite side of the corridor, was a few doors down. No problem spotting it. It was the one festooned with yellow tape warning POLICE CRIME SCENEDO NOT CROSS. He ripped down the tape and tossed it aside. The door's simple spring latch was no problem. He shimmed it open, using the doc's own credit card. Poetic freaking irony.
Inside the waiting room, he shut the door and turned on the overhead light.
There was blood on the carpet where Gomer Pyle had bled out like a stuck pig. Stuck pigthat was a good one. The sound of his own laughter was startling in the stillness.
He went into the main room, the inner sanctum, the theater of cruelty, Dr. Cameron's House of Pain. The lab where he ran through mind mazes like a trained rat earning his cheese.
In here he left the lights off. It was always possible the LAPD was watching the windows. Anyway, he didn't need much light to find the file cabinet next to the desk.
Reading the files was a different proposition. He thought about carrying stacks of them into the other room, but that would take too long. He solved the problem by rooting around on the floor by the mind-fucking machine till he found the flashlight pen Doc Robin had dropped when she took that hit to the noggin. The light still worked. He was surprised the bag-and-tag brigade hadn't snapped it upbut now that he thought about it, he realized that most likely there hadn't been any of that nerd-squad action here, after all. The lawmen already knew who their suspect was. They didn't need hairs and fibers and fingerprints. They'd got him made, and the doc sure as shit hadn't said anything to change their minds.