"Where're the fuckin' car keys?" he asked, keeping his voice down.
"My purse, my purse." She tried to crawl out from under him, her thin hands working on the vinyl floor, and he tightened his grip on her neck.
"Where's your purse?"
"There. On the kitchen table."
He turned his head, saw the purse. "Good."
He stood up to get a better swing, and hammered her on the side of the head with the butt of the shotgun. She went down, hard, groaned, kicked a couple of times, and was still. Mail looked at her for a moment, then made a quick check of the small house, A weatherman with what looked like false teeth was pointing at a satellite loop of the Twin Cities area: "… a lake advisory with these winds, which could kick up into the thirty-mile-per-hour category by this afternoon…"
The bedroom had only one bed, a double, already made up.
A black-and-white photograph of a man in a Korean War Army uniform sat on the nightstand, under a crucifix. Nobody else to worry about.
He started back to the kitchen, and was stopped by his own image peering out of the television.
A woman was saying, "… John Mail, a former inmate at the state hospital. If you know this man, if you have seen him, contact the Minneapolis police at the number on your screen."
Mail was stunned. They knew him. Everything was gone. Everything. But they didn't know where he was. And they didn't say anything about the LaDoux name, they didn't say anything about finding Andi and the kid. And the TV would have that. So he was okay, for a while, anyway. But he had to get out, and get out now.
That fuckin' Davenport. Davenport was the one who'd done this. And it made him angry. That fuckin' Davenport, he wasn't fair. He had too much help.
The woman hadn't moved, and he dumped her purse on the kitchen table: car keys and a billfold. He opened the billfold, found twelve dollars.
"Shit."
He went back to the door, pausing to kick the woman in the side: twelve fuckin' dollars. You can't do anything with twelve fuckin' dollars. Her body moved sideways under the blow, leaving a trail of blood on the vinyl; she was bleeding from her ear.
Mail went on, through the door, picked up the shotgun at the stoop, and walked back to the garage. The side door was locked, and none of the keys fit it. He walked around to the alley side, tried the overhead door. That wouldn't budge, either. He walked back to the side door, used an elbow to put pressure on a window pane in the door, and pushed it in. Then he reached through, unlocked the door, and went inside.
A doorbell button was fixed to a block of wood beside the door. Mail pushed it, and the overhead door started up. He climbed in the car, started it, checked the gas. Damnit. Empty, or close enough. He'd have to risk a stop, or find another car. But there was enough to get him out of the neighborhood, anyway.
After Mail had gone, a neighbor woman looked out the back of her house and said, "That's odd."
"What?" Her husband was eating toast while he read the Wizard of Id in the comics.
"Mary left her garage door up."
"Getting old," her husband said. "I'll get it on the way to work."
"Don't forget," the woman said.
"How can I?" he asked, irritated. "I'm right across the alley."
"You could forget," his wife said. "That's why you've been shaving with soap for what, four days now?"
"Yeah, yeah, well, I'm not supposed to do the shopping for this family."
They argued. They always argued. In the heat of the argument, the woman's odd feeling evaporated-when her husband left, she went to get dressed herself, without waiting to see if he closed Mary's garage door.
The man who found White's body showed Lucas the window. "I saw the guy running, and I went right out front."
"So let's walk through it," Lucas said. He looked at his watch. "You're back here, you walk to the door."
They walked through it, out the front, down to the walk, all the way to the point where the man found White's body.
"Did you hear the cop cars moving out before or after the ambulance got here?" Lucas asked.
"Uh, about the same time. There was sirens everywhere. I remember hearing all the sirens, and then the ambulance got here. There was already four cops here, and they sent everybody running around after the guy."
Sloan walked up as Lucas looked at his watch again. "So it was probably five minutes."
The man said, "It didn't seem like it was that long. The cops, they was here in a couple seconds, it seemed like."
"Listen, thanks a lot," Lucas said. He slapped the man on the shoulder.
"That's fine, I hope I helped."
As they walked away from him, Sloan said, "I go on administrative duty starting with the next shift, until the shooting's okayed."
"Yeah."
"Makes me nervous," Sloan said.
"Don't worry about it," Lucas said. "You got witnesses up to your eyeballs."
"Yeah." Sloan was still unhappy. "What's happening here?"
"I'm not sure," Lucas said. "They probably didn't have the new perimeter up for six or seven minutes. The new perimeter is a half-mile out there. He could have run through it-we haven't found any sign of him, If it was me, I would have run through it."
"Sonofabitch could be in somebody's home," Sloan said, looking at the rows of neat, anonymous little houses. "Laying up."
"Yeah. Or he could be out."
Mail found a cut-rate gas station with no customers and no visible television. He pulled in-the shotgun, the hat and cop jacket in the backseat-and pumped ten dollars' worth of gas into the car. A bored kid sat behind the counter eating a packet of beer nuts, and Mail passed him the old woman's ten-dollar bill. Another customer pulled in as he paid for the gas. Mail walked back out, head averted, got in the car, and left. The other customer filled his tank, walked inside, and said, "That guy who just left-he looked like the guy they've got on TV."
"Don't got no TV. Asshole owner won't let me," the kid said dully. He did the credit card, and the other man said, "Sure looked like him, though," and went off to work, where he talked about it most of the morning.
Mail went on down the block, stopped for a red light, turned on the radio. They were talking about him. "… apparently a long-time mental patient who faked his own death. Police have not yet identified the body found in the river."
Good. A break.
But they could be lying. Davenport could be mousetrapping him.
Another voice said, No big difference. There's no way out anyway. Anger cut through him, and he thought: no way out.
Another voice: sure you can…
He was smart. He could get down to the house, pick up what cash he had, take care of Manette and the kid, make it out to the countryside, knock off some rich farmer, somebody whose death wouldn't be noticed right away. If he could get a car for forty-eight hours, he could drive to the West Coast. And from the West Coast… he could go anywhere.
Anywhere. He smiled, visualized himself driving across the west, red buttes on the horizon, cowboys. Hollywood.
As the light changed to green, Mail saw the free-standing phone booth at the side of an Amoco station. He hesitated, but he wanted to talk. And shit, they knew who he was-they just didn't have the LaDoux name. He pulled into the station, dropped a quarter, and dialed Davenport.
The phone rang and Sloan looked at Lucas, and said, "If it's him, give me the high-sign, and I'll tell the Cap."
Lucas took the phone out, flipped it open. "Davenport."
Mail's voice was dark but controlled. "This was not fair. You had a lot more resources on your side."
"John, we're all done," Lucas said, jabbing a finger at Sloan. Sloan ran off to where the uniform captain was talking by radio with the cars on the perimeter. "Come on in. Give us Manette and the kids, huh?"
"Well, I just can't do that. That'd just be losing all the way around, you know? I mean, if they go away, then you've lost, too. You know? You've really lost, completely, in fact, because that's all you really want."