"Outa fuckin' shape," Haywood said. "Let's go."
Lucas took the first set of steps: there were a half-dozen cars parked in the first floor, and they checked them quickly. Then up the next set of steps, and Lucas, looking over the low, concrete deck wall, saw taillights flicker to the north, headed toward the railroad tracks.
"Did you see that?"
"What?"
The lights flickered again. "There."
"Yeah. Somebody crawling along in the dark, no headlights," Haywood said.
"Sonofabitch, that's him." Lucas put the radio to his face: "I need a car at the… what the fuck is the name of this building? I need a car by the Hansen dairy place, first road west of the Hansen dairy trucks. We've got the suspect in sight, going down toward the elevators."
Haywood was already running across the slab and down the stairs, Lucas a few steps behind. The blacked-out vehicle was almost two blocks away, and once they were on the ground, they could no longer see it. They were running awkwardly over the uneven ground toward the grain elevator when one set of headlights caught them in the back, then another. They turned and saw two squads coming down toward them; Lucas waved them on and kept running.
When the cars caught up, Lucas pointed up ahead. "He was going under the elevator."
The driver in the lead car was a sergeant. "No way out of there," he grunted, "That's all dead end back there."
"Could he just bump it across the tracks?"
The cop shrugged. "Maybe. But we'd see him. He might be able to snake his way out alongside of them." He picked up his radio and said, "We need a car on the 280 overpass across the tracks. Put some light down onto the tracks. Where's the chopper?"
"Chopper's just leaving the airport, he'll be five minutes. We're confirming the car on the tracks."
"Get some K9 down here," Lucas said.
The sergeant said, "We called them; they're on the way." And the car pulled ahead of them, the second car close behind him. The sergeant spoke into the radio: "We need some guys north of the tracks."
"Gonna be dark in there," Haywood grunted as they jogged up toward the elevators.
"But once we got him, even if we only get his van, we get the VIN even if he's pulled the plates… then we get a name and an address."
"You're counting your chickens," Haywood said.
"First goddamn chicken we've had to count, and I'm counting the sonofabitch," Lucas said.
CHAPTER 27
The cop slipped down the side of the building, his right hand cocked away from his body.
Carrying a gun, Mail thought. The night air was thick, cool, and moist, and the night seemed particularly dark; he couldn't see that well, but the cop was too small to be Davenport.
Still, it had been a trap, a rudimentary one. Mail smiled and turned to go, then slowed, turned back, lingered. Davenport's building was a block away and he felt remote from it, as though he were watching a movie. The movie was just getting good.
He'd found Ricky on a Hennepin Avenue street corner, half-drunk, his face sullen, his hair stuck together like cotton candy. He'd whispered cocaine, and just a bunch of computer pussies in there, and Ricky'd started slavering. He couldn't wait to get started.
Ricky needed drugs to function; without cocaine, speed, acid, grass, peyote, alcohol, even two or three of them at a time, the world was not right. He'd spent years on the inside and barely remembered a time where he didn't have a drug flowing through his veins-and what he remembered about that drugless state, he didn't like. He needed more dentists, he thought, people who'd say, "Here-I'll numb that up for you."
Even inside, with very strange people around-people who spoke to God, and got personal letters back-Ricky had been considered mad as a hatter.
But he could function in society, the shrinks said, so they had let him out and seemed proud of themselves when they did it. Now Ricky ate from trashcans and shit in doorways and carried a piece-of-crap revolver in his waistband. He gobbled up any pill he could beg, buy, or steal.
Now Ricky was out of sight, trying the windows on the far side of the building. The cop was running along the back of the building, to the side where Ricky was; he looked like an inmate in a prison movie, caught in a spotlight as he ran along a wall. The cop stopped at the corner, did a quick peek, pulled his head back, peeked again, ran out from the building, pointing his gun, and the shouting began, the words indistinguishable in the distance.
Again, Mail turned to go. Then he heard the gunshot, and turned back: "Sonofabitch."
He smiled again, amused; he almost laughed. What a joke. They'd shot Ricky, or Ricky had shot one of them. The cop he could see had dropped his pistol to his side and moved forward. So it had been Ricky.
Time to move.
He ran across the parking ramp, down a short flight of stairs, to the street. The van was already pointed into University Avenue. He'd be a mile away in a minute and a half. He unlocked the door, hopped in-he'd leave the lights blacked out for a few hundred feet-pulled up to the corner, looked right, looked left. And heard the sirens, saw the lights.
A cop car, far down the street to the left, coming in a hurry: but that was the way he wanted to go. If he turned right, he'd have to drive past Davenport's building. He didn't want to do that.
He hesitated. The cop was probably on the way to the shooting. He could wait until he passed.
Mail shifted into reverse and started to back up-but then the cop car, still six or eight blocks away, unexpectedly slewed sideways across the street. And then he saw more lights far down to his right, and then another car joining the squad blocking the street to his left.
"Motherfuckers."
He felt as though a hand had grabbed his heart and squeezed it. He'd underestimated Davenport. The building wasn't the trap. The whole goddamn area was the trap.
Headlights still off, he did a quick U-turn and rolled down the street toward a grain elevator at the end. He hadn't been down there, didn't know what to expect, but once out of the immediate neighborhood, he could work his way through back streets until he was completely clear.
A cold sweat broke on his face, and his hands held the steering wheel so tightly that they hurt. He had to break out of this.
But he couldn't see much without the lights. Strange, odd shapes, wheelless tractor trailers, loomed off to the left. Here and there, a machine with claws, like mutated, earth-moving equipment. He drove between two elevator buildings, slowed. The van dropped into a pothole seven inches deep and half as long as the van itself, then climbed out the other side. Two trailers were parked against a loading dock. Another van was tucked in between them, facing out.
Mail leaned toward the windshield, trying to see better, then rolled down the side window, trying to hear. The area smelled of milled grain, corn, maybe. He bumped along through the dark, then into a lighter patch, the light thrown from a naked bulb over an office door.
No lights on in the office, though…
The road ended at a gate, a gate closed and locked, with dark buildings behind it. A dead end? There'd been no dead-end sign. He backed up, found a gravel track that went east along the side of the grain elevator. Ahead, he could see the lights of a busy street, a little higher than he was, maybe up a hill? If he could work his way over there… But what was that?
A cop car, lights flashing, stopped on the hill, and Mail realized it was not a hill at all but an overpass. No way up, no way to the street. The track he was on went from gravel to dirt. To the left, there was nothing but darkness, like an unlit farm field. To the right, there was a line of the boxes that looked like the wheelless tractor trailers he'd seen back in the lot.
He slowed, thought about going back, looked over his shoulders, and saw the cop lights at the elevator. Had they seen him? He had to go forward.