He'd always been claustrophobic, one reason he'd never go back to the hospital. The hospital didn't fuck around with beatings; they knew how to really punish you. His claustrophobia had come out early in his stay, and they'd introduced him to the Quiet Room…
Half-crouching, Mail crossed a driveway and climbed a short fence into the first yard. He crossed the yard, ran behind a house with several lights on, and down a line of bridal-wreath bushes, where he crawled over a wire fence, crossed the next yard, and climbed the fence again. He crossed the next yard, came to another fence, and heard the dog. Large dog, woofing along in the night at the other end of the yard. Take a chance? The dog smelled him at the same time he heard it, turned, and rushed the fence where he was hiding, snarling, slavering for him. Big black-and-tan body, white teeth like a tiger's. No way.
Mail went back, crawled over a fence, and turned left, looking for another way.
A cop car flashed past, light rack spinning; dogs were barking everywhere, now, a mad chorus of mutts.
This could take a while…
Lucas called in the plate number on the van, and the VIN.
Thirty seconds later, on the radio: "Lucas: we've got an address down in Eagan."
CHAPTER 28
The bedsprings were too flexible to make decent weapons. They'd hoped for something like an icepick, but the springs would not fully uncurl. When pressed against anything resistant, they flexed.
But if they couldn't get icepicks from the springs, they got two fat, three-inch-long needles, honed on the granite rocks in the fieldstone walls.
Grace stood on the Porta-Potti and began picking at the naiclass="underline" "Lots better," she told Andi. "This works great."
She picked for ten minutes and Andi picked for ten minutes more, then Grace started again. Grace was working on it when it finally came free. She thought it moved under the spring-needle, and grabbed it between a thumb and forefinger. It turned in her fingers, and she held tighter and put weight on it, felt it twist again.
Grace said, breathlessly, "Mom, it's coming. It's coming out." And she pulled it free, like a tooth.
Andi put a finger to her lips. "Listen."
Grace froze, and they listened. But there were no thumps, no footsteps, and Andi said, "I thought I heard something."
"I wonder where he is?" Grace looked nervously at the door. Mail had been gone a long time.
"I don't know. We just need a little more time." Andi took the nail, sat on the mattress, and began to hone it on a granite pebble. The nail left behind what looked like tiny scratches in the rock, but were actually whisper-thin metal scrapings. "Next time he comes, we have to do it," she said. "He'll kill me, soon, if we don't. And when he kills me, he'll kill you."
"Yes." Grace nodded. She'd thought about it.
Andi stopped honing the nail to look at her daughter. Grace had lost ten pounds. Her hair was stuck together in strings and ropes; the skin of her face was waxy, almost transparent, and her arms trembled when she stood up. Her dress was tattered, soiling, torn. She looked, Andi thought, like an old photograph of a Nazi prison-camp inmate.
"So: we do it." She went back to scraping the nail, then turned it in her hand. The rust was gone from the tip, and the wedge-shaped nail point was fining down to a needletip.
"What we have to do is figure out a… scenario for attacking him," she said. Grace was sitting at the end of the mattress, her knees pulled up under her chin. She had a bruise on her forearm. Where'd she gotten that? Mail hadn't touched her, yet, though the last two times he'd assaulted Andi, he hadn't bothered to dress before he pushed her back in the cell. He was displaying for Grace. Sooner or later, he'd take her…
She put a finger to her lips. "Listen."
There was nothing. Grace whispered, "What?"
"I thought I heard him."
Grace said, "I don't hear anything."
They listened for a long time, tense, the fear holding them silent; but nobody came. Finally, Andi went back to honing the nail, the ragged zzzt zzzt zzzt the only sound in the hole.
She had Mail in her mind as she honed it. They'd been in the hole for almost five days. He had attacked her… she didn't know how many times, but probably twenty. Twenty? Could it be that many?
She thought so.
She honed the nail, thinking, with each stroke, For John Mail. For John Mail…
CHAPTER 29
Lucas and Hay wood went past Lucas's building at seventy-Sloan still standing in the lot, now in the center of a circle of plain-clothes cops; an ambulance had hauled Ricky away-slipped onto Highway 280 and then I-94, east to I-35E, south through St. Paul, Haywood hanging on the safety belt, three cars trailing, all with lights.
A dispatcher came back. "Eagan's in. They're pulling a search warrant right now and they ought to have it by the time you're there."
"Patch me through-get them to pull us in there."
The directions from Eagan burped out over the radio and they crossed the Mississippi like a flock of big-assed birds, jumped off on Yankee Doodle Road, killed the flashers, and headed east.
"That's them," Haywood said. He was holding on to the safety belt with one hand and had the other braced on the dashboard. Below them, in a shallow valley, two squad cars and a gray sedan were lined up at the curb. Lucas pulled over next to the sedan and hopped out. A man in a suit hustled around the nose of the car.
"Chief Davenport?"
"Danny Carlton. I'm the chief out here." Carlton was young, with curly red hair and a pink face. "We got your search warrant, but I don't think you're gonna be happy."
"Yeah?"
Carlton pointed down the road, where it rose along the opposite wall of the valley. "The place you're looking for is right up there. But it's one of them self-storage places. You know, like two hundred rental garages."
"Damnit." Lucas shook his head: this sounded unlikely. "We have to check it, we can't fuck around."
The self-storage warehouse was a complex of long, one-story, concrete-block buildings, the long sides of the buildings each faced with twenty white garage doors. The whole place was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. A small blue gatehouse stood next to the only gate through the fence. An elderly man, pale, worried, met them at the gate. He carried a.38 that looked older than he was.
"No problem," he said when they gave him the warrant. "Roses, that'd be fifty-seven."
"Have you seen him?" Lucas asked.
"Hasn't come through here, not tonight."
Lucas showed him a copy of the computer-aged Mail photo. "Is that him?"
The guard held it under a light, tipping his head back the better to use his bifocals, stuck out a lip, raised his eyebrows, then handed it back. "That's him. Got him to a T," he said.
The garage door was padlocked, but one of the Eagan cops had a pair of cutters and chopped the hasp. Lucas knocked it away, and with another cop, raised the door.
"Computers," Haywood said.
He found the light and flipped it on. The room was lined with tables, and the computers were stacked on them, dozens of beige cases and sullen, gray-screen monitors. Under the tables were plastic clothes baskets full of parts-disk drives, modems, sound and color cards, a mouse with its cord wrapped around it, miscellaneous electronic junk.
Nothing human.
A desk and an old cash register sat off to the left. Lucas walked over to the desk, pulled open a drawer. Scrap paper, a single ballpoint. He pulled open another, and found stick-on labels, an indelible pen missing its cap, a dusty yellow legal pad. The middle drawer had another pencil and three X-Men comics in plastic sleeves.
"Tear it apart," Lucas said to the Minneapolis cops crowding up behind them. "Any piece of paper-anything that might point at the guy. Checks, receipts, credit card numbers, bills, anything."