He studied himself in the window and liked what he saw. But he wasn’t satisfied. He hadn’t changed the appearance of his jawline or his mouth, and a lot of people looked there first when they looked at somebody. Everyone in Minneapolis was looking at his picture on the news and in the paper.
He had the five o’clock shadow. That was helpful, but not enough. He had the bruises from the night before. He reached into his mouth and took out his bridgework, leaving a couple of black holes in his smile. Better, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He rummaged through the junk in the ragman’s cart, looking for something that might spark an idea.
Street people kept the damnedest stuff. This one had a collection of near-empty aerosol cans, mostly spray paint and hair spray. For huffing the fumes, Karl knew. A cheap high. There were half a dozen one-off shoes that all looked to have been run over in the street. There was a trash bag with some aluminum cans and glass beer and liquor bottles. These were probably the source of the money Karl now had in his pocket and taped to his privates. There was a claw hammer, which Karl took and strapped to his ankle with shoestrings under his pant leg. There was a pliers.
Karl picked it up and studied it, ideas turning over in his mind. He put a fingertip in the mouth of it and squeezed a little.
Standing in front of the store window, he tugged up the T-shirt he wore and put it over his lower lip. Then he took the pliers and very methodically began to squeeze the lip hard, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. From one corner of his mouth to the other and back again, he pinched his lip with the pliers.
When he started to get faint from the pain, he stopped and looked at himself in the glass once more. The lip was already swelling, there were some lines from the teeth of the pliers, but he had only broken the skin a couple of times.
He was a satisfied man. This would do for now.
Slouched and shuffling, fat lip sticking out from his face, Karl abandoned the ragman’s cart and went back out on the street. The day was glorious. The sky was an electric shade of blue, and the air was warm-well, fairly warm for this place with fall slipping away. But there were hardly any people on the streets. Nothing much happened on Saturdays in this part of town. Businesses were closed. People had no call to be walking up and down.
The lack of people, however, did not stop the city buses from running. Karl sat at a bus stop, slumped, and waited. Some lonely soul before him had left a newspaper scattered in sections on the bench. On the front page was a mug shot of himself, and a photograph of Judge Carey Moore in her judge’s robes, sitting up on the judge’s bench, overseeing some trial or another.
Karl’s heart pumped a little harder. His picture and the picture of his angel on the same page. His mother would have said it was a portent, a sign. Karl didn’t believe in signs, except for now. Carey Moore had taken a beating on account of him, because she had ruled in his favor. He couldn’t imagine any other judge doing that. Everyone in the state wanted him dead.
She was a woman with the courage of her convictions. Karl found that idea excited him. A strong and passionate woman who wouldn’t back down from anybody.
The city bus rumbled up to the curb and groaned and hissed like an old man letting a fart. Karl folded up the newspaper and got on, heading toward his heroine.
18
STAN DROVE OUT of the city in the 1996 Ford Taurus he had owned since it rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. It ran well, got him from one place to another. He’d never seen a reason to trade it in. He wasn’t one to need status symbols.
Now that he had decided on a plan of action, he needed a base. When one of his fellow detectives came to question him at his home about the attack on Judge Moore-and they would-they would find the videotape, and they would be looking for him.
It had been important to him that he left it, that they found it. It was important everyone understood who he was and what he stood for and how he had come to be the man he was now. What this case had done to him. The overwhelming sense of impotence, sitting behind a desk; sitting in the office of a shrink, staring at the wall; knowing all the power to put Karl Dahl away or put him back on the street was in the hands of other people. People who didn’t understand what evil was.
In better days, Stan had been quite a fisherman. The lake had been his escape from the job and from the silent disappointment of his wife. He enjoyed the solitude, the time alone, without noise, without voices, without the pressure of having to interact with other people.
The country west of Minneapolis and its suburbs was marshy and peppered with lakes large and small and tangles of woods all connected by narrow, twisting roads. The lake Stan fished was too small to be of interest to weekenders with powerboats and too difficult to find for the casual fishermen. He had been fishing that lake for nearly forty-five years.
His uncle owned a small cabin on the southwestern shore. Nothing to brag about, just a little tar-paper shack with a small kitchen and a smaller bathroom with a tin shower stall. It had a tiny cellar and a screened porch where a person could sit on summer evenings without being devoured by mosquitoes. And there was a big shed where Stan kept his little fishing boat during winter and where his uncle’s old Chevy pickup sat.
This place had been Stan’s hideaway since he was a boy. His uncle was elderly now and had been in poor health for years. When he died, the place would pass on to Stan.
He stopped at a country store and bought supplies-food, water, cigarettes, toilet paper. The clerk was a fat girl with a ring in her nose and jet-black hair streaked with yellow in front. She had no interest in Stan. She looked right through him, same as most people did.
The lake was glistening like blue glass in the sun. The rushes and reeds had dried to a golden alabaster shade. The far shore was dotted with clumps of paper-white birch trees, their remaining leaves bright gold. Maples and oaks made up the woods beyond, an artist’s palette of reds, oranges, and bronze. As far as Stan could say, this was the most beautiful place on earth.
A couple of huge old trees anchored the yard of his uncle’s property and kept the grass thin and sparse. The cabin looked the same as it always had, with the exception of bars on the windows and the door. Places like this one-which were occupied infrequently and mostly on weekends-were a target for vandals and thieves. Local kids with nothing better to do with their time.
Stan unlocked the door and took his groceries inside. The place always smelled vaguely musty. The damp seemed to seep in through the tar paper and drywall and settle into the cushions of the old couch, which also served as a bed.
He went back out to the shed, unlocked the big padlock, and rolled the door open. He popped the hood on the pickup and hooked up the cables of the battery charger, then went back to moving in.
From the trunk of his car, he lifted out a couple of black duffel bags and took them into the cabin. Tools and things he had packed, not knowing what he might need for the job he was setting out to do. A couple of handguns. A couple of knives. Handcuffs. Duct tape.
In a part of his mind, Stan watched himself examine these items with a weird, calm sense of horror, but it was not so strong that he made any attempt to stop himself. His decision was made. For the most part, he went about his business methodically, on autopilot, as if this were routine and normal, preparing to take the law into his own hands.
After he had made himself a few bologna sandwiches, he chose several close-range weapons, packed his essentials, and left the cabin, locking up behind himself.