She wore the robes and a serious expression that made her seem aloof. Her eyes were the color of a winter sky-a cold, piercing blue-gray. Stan knew she could use that look to make a man feel like he was nothing more than a cockroach crawling at her feet.
A reporter live in the parking ramp was talking about the assault on Judge Moore. The scene was still taped off, and numbered markers on the concrete showed where possible evidence had been discovered, bagged, and tagged.
Judge Moore, fresh from ruling for the defense in the matter of Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts, had entered the ramp from the skyway. The perp had come out of the shadows, attacking her from behind. He had knocked her down and struck her and struck her and struck her…
Stan felt himself flush not only with anger but with excitement. A part of his mind he didn’t recognize came with the thought that she’d gotten what she deserved. She needed some sense knocked into her. She needed to know what it was like to be a victim, to feel that helpless, to be that terrified.
Stan had never been a violent man, but neither had he ever been the man he was now, in the wake of the Haas murders. He felt himself enjoying the idea of striking Carey Moore, venting his rage and frustration on her. And the rage and frustration doubled because she could make him feel these feelings, which went against the nature he’d had most of his life.
These thoughts swarmed in his brain as Stan tried to open the new box of Total with raisins. He couldn’t get his blunt-tipped fingers under the edge of the flap. He had no fingernails to scratch at it.
He felt his head start to pound. He could hear it in his ears, a roaring that sounded like the sea was inside his skull. He could feel the pressure building and building.
The television was showing Judge Moore’s home on Lake of the Isles. A brick fortress for the princess safe behind her gate, safe inside a security system. She had probably believed the Karl Dahls of the world could never touch her.
The box top wouldn’t give. Stan dug at it with his fingers, fumbled the box, dropped it to the floor. As he bent to pick it up, the pressure in his head nearly made him pass out.
He flung the box down on the counter, grabbed a knife, and began stabbing the box over and over, his rage boiling over the rim of his control.
He jabbed the knife down again and again with such force that the tip was biting into the old linoleum countertop. He was aware that that sound was coming out of him and that it was a raw, animal call that came from a place so deep and primal inside of him he knew no other way to access it.
Cereal flew in all directions. He knocked the milk carton sideways, and milk spewed out of it. The knife stuck hard into the countertop, and he cut himself trying to pull it out. He grabbed the sugar bowl and threw it and smashed it, and sugar went everywhere.
All because of Carey Moore.
All because of careless jailers.
All because of Karl Dahl.
His life was out of control, all because of people who didn’t care anything more about him than if he was a speck of dirt on the floor. His life meant nothing. All the good he had done in his life meant nothing.
Clamping his hands around his head, tears streaming down his face, Stan Dempsey slid down to the kitchen floor and sat there with his back against the cabinets and his mouth torn open as if to scream. But no sound came out of him now, and no one was there to hear it if it had.
Karl had catnapped beside the ragman off and on during the night, stirring at the least sound coming down the alley. He would awaken and sit up for a while to listen. He passed the time absently sawing long clumps of matted hair from the ragman’s head, using the steak knife he’d found in the shopping cart.
The police car had not come back, and no one had come looking for his dead friend under the stairs behind the upholstery shop.
Anonymity had come with darkness. Now the new day was at hand, and with it a keen tension at the idea that he would be out among the public. But people would glance over him, not see who he was but what he was. And in their minds people would dismiss him as being beneath their notice. After all, they had more important things on their minds-an accused triple murderer was walking their streets.
Karl felt he should move, slowly begin to put some distance between himself and the hospital, and between himself and the corpse under the stairs.
The first order of business was to relieve himself, then find something to drink. His throat hurt something awful from the choking Snake had given him. He could feel it was all swollen inside. His voice box didn’t feel right, and he could barely swallow. The mother of all headaches was banging inside his damaged skull.
He crawled slowly out from under the stairs on his hands and knees and worked his way up to standing. A rusted old van with faded blue paint sat parked off to the side of the small loading dock behind the upholstery shop. It looked to have died there. One tire was flat to the rim. The radio antenna had been fashioned from a wire coat hanger.
Karl went over to it and relieved himself on the far side of it, then turned the side mirror so he could see himself. The whites of his eyes had turned bloodred, the blood vessels bursting as he had struggled for air during the attack. His face was bruised and swollen, his lip split and crusted with blood. He didn’t look himself at all, and that was a very good thing for a man in Karl’s current position.
Taking one matted rope at a time, he shoved the hair he had cut from the dead man’s head halfway up under the wool cap, letting the ends trail down his forehead and down the sides of his face, giving himself one more layer of disguise.
Pushing the ragman’s shopping cart, Karl made his way down the alley, checking in the trash along the way. Some worker had left half a bottle of beer sitting on a vegetable crate behind the diner. Karl helped himself, then climbed up on the Dumpster he had hidden in, and scored a pork chop bone with some meat still on it and a piece of liver that had dried to the texture of shoe leather. He sunk his teeth into the cold, greasy meat of the pork chop.
“Hey! Get outta my trash!”
A squat man in a dirty apron and dirtier thin white undershirt came out the back door of the restaurant. He wore a dingy white knit cap on his head, rolled up on the sides, and a lot of blue tattoos on forearms roped with muscle.
“Get out, you crazy old lice head! Get the fuck outta here!”
Karl threw the pork chop bone in his direction, turned, and left, his shopping cart rattling over the pitted, uneven pavement of the alley. At the end, he turned the corner, went around to the front of the block, parked his shopping cart where he could see it, and went inside the diner through the front door.
A large woman with jet-black hair up in a bun, and a face like a cigar store Indian, came away from the counter with a ferocious expression and a damp rag in one hand.
“Hey, you! Out!” she shouted. She had an accent he thought might be Greek.
Karl pulled a twenty out of his coat pocket and shook it at her. For the first time since he’d been choked, he tried to speak. His voice was as rough as the back of a rasp, and it hurt like hell to use it.
“I got money,” he said. “All I want is a cup of coffee, ma’am, and maybe some eggs. I got money. Please, ma’am?”
The woman stopped a good ten feet away from him and gave him the eye.
“I’m down on my luck, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t mean no harm. You can take the whole twenty if that’s it. I just want a square meal. It ain’t often I can afford to have one someone else ain’t throwed out first.”
She was still glaring at him, her arms crossed beneath her ample bosom. “You can’t eat here. You scare my customers.”
There were no other customers in the place.