“Please, ma’am? Just a cup of coffee. A biscuit. Anything…”
The woman appeared unmoved, but the fact that she hadn’t started screaming at him seemed a good sign to Karl.
“If you could be so kind, ma’am,” he said softly. “The Lord loves them what helps the down-and-out.”
The waitress snorted at that, turned on the heel of her orthopedic shoes, and walked off.
Karl wondered if she would go into the kitchen and tell the squat man to come run him off. Until he would find out, he watched the news on the television that was bolted to the wall above the diner counter.
He was the news. His escape, the search for him, the warning to citizens not to approach him but to call the police if they thought they had spotted him. Larger than life, Karl thought, and it pleased him. It wasn’t often in his life that he had been considered important.
When the newspeople moved on to the next story, it was of Judge Carey Moore. She had been attacked in a parking ramp last night and rushed to the Hennepin County Medical Center. Karl wondered if she had been there at the same time he had. That would be something, he thought, that the woman who had championed him that very day would be in the same emergency room as him, and maybe even because of him.
She had been the talk of the county jail. Much of it lewd and crude talk, because she was a beautiful woman and all men in prison tended to think about-besides getting out-was having sex. The notion that she was a judge excited them all the more. To take a woman in a position of power and dominate her was a very erotic fantasy. Karl felt it working on him as he watched file footage of Judge Moore giving a press conference.
Her eyes were large and unblinking, her expression very serious. Her mouth was every man’s wet dream-the upper lip a perfect Cupid’s bow, the lower one full and slightly down-turned, as if she was on the verge of a pout. Her neck was smooth and pale and elegant.
Karl had never known a woman like that, not in any sense of the word. She was an angel. She was his angel.
The television was showing a picture of her home. A live shot, the crawler on the bottom of the screen said. It was a beautiful brick house with a neat yard and a black iron fence. Not a mansion, but the kind of a house a lady would live in.
The reporter talked about how people in that neighborhood were never bothered by terrible crimes, but a crime had been visited upon one of their own. How one of their own was paying the price for siding with a murderer.
Live near Lake of the Isles, Candy Cross, Channel 3 News.
Lake of the Isles…What a fine-sounding place…
The large Greek lady came across the room of empty tables, still scowling, but with a styrofoam carton and cup. She set them on the table and stepped back before Karl’s lice could jump on her.
“Here,” she said. “But you can’t eat here. You scare my customers. Go away.”
“God bless you, ma’am,” Karl whispered, and handed the woman the twenty.
She folded the bill and stuffed it down her cleavage.
She didn’t come back with change.
15
KOVAC WOKE TO a pounding he thought was inside his head. The clock read 7:32. In the morning. On Saturday.
He rolled out of bed, naked as the day he was born, and went to look out the window. On the roof of the house next door, his idiot neighbor was swinging a hammer. The sound reverberated in the otherwise-still morning air like gunshots.
Kovac shoved the old double-hung window open. “Hey! Elmer Fudd! What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
The neighbor looked over at him, hammer cocked in his hand like he might throw it. The guy was seventy-plus, with mean, piggy little eyes and more hair growing out of his ears than on his head. Not that his head could be seen. He wore his favorite red plaid bomber cap with the flaps tied up on top of his head. The ends of the ties stuck up like antennae.
“Getting a jump on the Christmas lights!” he said.
“At seven-fucking-thirty in the morning?”
The old man frowned deeply. “You’ve got a filthy mouth on you!”
“I’m not even warmed up,” Kovac said. “Are you out of your fucking head? Christmas? It isn’t even Halloween!”
“Shows what you know!” the old man shouted. “Farmer’s Almanac says it’s an early winter. Could be a blizzard by Halloween.”
“Could be I’m gonna shoot you dead off that roof if you don’t stop with the hammer.”
The neighbor gave him a face. “I’m within my rights. City ordinance says I can bang all I want after seven-thirtyA.M. ”
Dismissing Kovac, the old man teed up a nail and smacked it into his roof. Every year it was the same thing-the most god-awful array of mixed holiday messages filled the man’s yard, crowned his roof, hung from the eaves, lit up the trees. Santa Claus bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. The herald angel beaming down on an army of plywood snowmen. All of it illuminated with more wattage than the whole of Times Square. For eight weeks it was like living next door to the sun.
“You ever hear of common courtesy, you rancid old fart?”
The old man stuck his tongue out.
Kovac turned around and mooned him.
So began his day. A shower. The patch. Coffee. A couple of doughnuts, just to perpetuate the stereotype. The local morning news was all about Karl Dahl’s escape and the public outcry caused by it. The attack on Carey Moore was a distant second. Half the city probably thought she deserved it. Now that the newsies had all but announced her home address, there would probably be a steady stream of cars driving by to egg her house.
Or worse…
Kovac sighed, rubbed a hand over his face, and tried to decide where to start. He or Liska would have to speak to the judge’s clerk. See if she had any hate mail on file. Cross-reference the phone number from the two threatening calls with the judge’s phone logs. They needed to get a printout of any recently released felons Carey Moore had put away in her capacity as either prosecutor or judge.
They had to meet Lieutenant Dawes downtown at nine so she could impress upon them what her boss had no doubt already impressed upon her, and right up the food chain to the chief, who had already been read the riot act by the mayor, and the county attorney, who had heard it from the state attorney general. Kovac and Liska would be lectured on the gravity of the situation, like they were morons who hadn’t managed to figure that out for themselves.
Christ, how he hated the politics of the system. He had always wanted to line up the brass monkeys, ask those who hadn’t worked on the street in the last decade to take a giant step back, and have them drop into a big black hole.
If he could avoid that meeting, postpone it until, say, the case was solved, he would.
He needed to speak with Stan Dempsey.
Man, you are desperate.
Kovac had never balked at going after a bad cop. A wrong guy was a wrong guy, badge or no. He’d even toughed out a stretch working Internal Affairs a million years ago. He hadn’t liked it, but he’d done it. But Stan Dempsey wasn’t a bad cop. Kovac felt nothing but pity for the man.
Stan Dempsey was a guy who had plodded along through life mostly under the radar. A decent cop, but no one the brass would take notice of until they decided he was a liability. He was a guy who really didn’t have any friends, because he was odd and quiet and antisocial. Stan Dempsey would probably have been more comfortable working in the morgue than on the streets, but he was a cop, and that was probably all he had ever wanted to be.
Kovac doubted that anyone Dempsey had ever partnered with knew much of anything about him. But everyone knew Dempsey had lost it in the interview room when they had first questioned Karl Dahl for the Haas murders. Dempsey had exploded into a rage that was three times bigger than he was. Totally out of his head. It had taken two other detectives to pull him off Dahl. Ranting, eyes rolling back in his head, practically foaming at the mouth. He had had to be sedated.