He thought about the bloodshot eyes looking at him in the food court. The horrific way people stretched their hands out at him and bared their teeth. The shrill screams. The rage.
Could he have sat still for that? It was one thing to put on a blindfold and take a bullet or to have a doctor administer a lethal dose. Those things were quick. What would it be like to be scratched and bitten until you lost so much blood your heart gave out? He knew the crowd wouldn’t have wasted any time killing him, but it would have been an agonizing death.
No matter the moral calculation of his pain versus those of others, nothing could make him want to go down like that. He’d die for someone else but not like that. Not that way.
The newsreader was still talking.
“Police have told us that they’ll be making a statement in approximately a half hour from now. We’re hearing now that they may have a person of interest they’d like to speak to.”
Fuck.
“In other news an area man is wanted for questioning in the assault of a parking enforcement official and two other people.”
Double fuck.
“Police would like to speak to Mitchell Roberts, who was last seen on foot near the scene of the altercation.”
Trifecta fuck. They had his name. Of course they had his name from what happened with the parking officer. They had his damn car and they had Rachel and Rick. They had everything about him at that point.
Everything except that he was also the person of interest at the mall. Person of interest. It was such a silly way to say “guilty” without saying it. Nobody had any doubt what made this person so interesting.
At this point it was reasonable to assume that there was some kind of low-level manhunt and APB put out for him for what happened that morning. If it hadn’t been for the mall, he bet that would have been the story of the day. Unfortunately for his pursuers, he’d created one horrific distraction. From the news, it was a distraction they were still trying to pull bodies from.
Once they connected him to that, everything would escalate. He’d become a really fucking interesting person at that point. It wasn’t just cops waiting for him at his apartment or workplace. It’d be people looking for him at train stations and airports. When they talked to the old lady whose car he took, they’d throw the license plate and car makeup on every electronic sign on the highway. Every cop would have his face on the computer screen in their cars.
“Unofficial reports from Park Square Mall are coming in that Department of Homeland Security officials are on the scene. Officials are downplaying that this was a terrorism-related incident but haven’t ruled it out just yet. As we pointed out earlier, police are expected to give us an update in 30 minutes…”
Terrorism? Holy Christ. Had he just gone from fugitive of the day to Unabomber and DC Sniper status? Was he in Osama bin Laden’s league now?
Mitch shut off the radio. He’d check back in later to find out what they knew. For the moment he needed to get proactive. He looked around the empty house. He couldn’t stay. He also needed to figure out how exactly he was going to go into hiding. Right now he was on the run. Full-on hiding out meant being able to spend days or weeks without getting caught. That meant survival. Food, shelter and ways to protect himself.
In the house, it was only a matter of time before either the police found it through Mike at the radio station or someone else came to check up on it. It was also totally empty of food. He could make it a day or two without eating after that he knew he would get weak and make stupid decisions.
He looked at his backpack. He had his iPad, radio, comics, some notebooks, a charger and another shirt. Was there anything else in the house?
He remembered the door to the attic in the garage. He went back in and pulled the ladder down and climbed up. He found the light switch and turned it on. There were boxes of Christmas decorations, luggage and a box of old clothes. He took the box down from the attic to rummage through it.
He pulled out all the men’s clothing and went back to the master bathroom. He didn’t have to try on the pants to know that they were too small. There was a golf shirt and a pair of shorts that fit. He also found a blazer and a golf cap. A pair of cleated shoes were going to be useless unless he wanted to hide out on a golf course and play the back nine, thought Mitch.
Mitch put on the blue golf shirt. He decided to wear it instead of the T-shirt he had in his bag. It made him look slightly less like a person of interest in his mind. The more upper-middle class he could look, the better.
He decided to shove the blazer and shorts into his bag. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a manhunt from a helicopter where the bad guy ran away in a suit jacket. In a pinch, he could throw the jacket on and look slightly different. That might be the difference between getting stopped and making a clean getaway.
To make a getaway, he needed to know where to get. He wanted to turn on his iPad and just pull up Google Maps and see if anything came to mind. The risk of having it give up his position was too great.
The car in the garage. Old people still used maps. Mitchell ran back to the car and opened the glove compartment. It was filled with pill bottles. He started to throw them on the floor but decided he should see what was in them. If he got an infection or some other injury, he wasn’t going to be visiting a pharmacy any time soon.
Most of the bottles were for various old-age conditions. He did find a bottle of painkillers. Those could be helpful. He didn’t want to take them with him and add “junky medication thief” to his growing rap sheet, but he knew survival could mean the difference between being able to keep moving despite pain and being crippled by it.
The pill bottle was mostly full. He looked back at the label. “Beatrice Stein.” Mitchell stared at it for a moment. Beatrice, with her bright red hair and gnashing teeth, was the first person he consciously did something wrong to unprovoked. It was one thing to try to stop people from chasing you. It was another to take an innocent person’s car. Mitch put the bottle in his pocket. If roles were reversed and he’d pulled into that parking lot and seen her running, he’d given her his car if he knew she was seconds away from being torn apart.
Under the bottles he found three maps. One was of South Florida, the others were for the entire state and Georgia. He put the other bottles back and then put the boxes back into the attic. The less it looked like he had been there, the better.
Mitchell walked back into the living room and gathered all his stuff into the backpack. He needed to be ready to go in an instant. He opened up the map of South Florida and laid it on the floor. He sat down over it and looked at it in the sunlight filtering through the venetian blinds. It was just a piece of paper, but looking down at it like he was god looking down at Earth gave him a sense of control. He could imagine a miniature Mitch and miniature pursuers trying to capture him. As long as he knew where he was going, he could be a step ahead of them. It was a fucking board game.
Rather than be some loser who tried to rob a cashier and was shocked by how fast the cops caught up with him and had to make a pathetic attempt to run, he could be a mastermind and plot this out like a heist. He looked around the floor and noticed a dime near the impression of where a couch had been. He traced the map and located where the house he was in was at and placed the dime there.
Mitchell looked around the map. How could he get that dime as far away as possible, as safely as he could?