As Tim started to cut through the crowd, Dobbins rose and began to head in his direction. He walked with a deliberate gait, his beak nose pointed down, watching his shoes.
A movement from his left side, a thick plug of a man parting the crowd, solid and purposeful, seeming to glide through the bustle. Black jacket, low baseball cap, head ducked, hands in pockets. Mitchell.
Tim ran, cried out, his voice lost with the shouts of gleeful children.
Despite all else that had gone down, he was shocked that Mitchell would attempt a shooting in an area crowded with kids. The thought barely had time to register when Mitchell’s hand flashed up from his pocket, gripping a plastic flex-cuff. One tough plastic strip was curved around to make a dinner-plate-size circle, the notched end already snared through the catch. Just waiting to be tightened.
Mitchell swept behind Dobbins, who continued walking toward Tim, studying the ground at his feet, oblivious. Tim yelled, shoving a father out of the way. Dobbins’s head was just rising to check out the commotion ahead when the loop of the flex-cuff dropped over his head like a snare.
Even over the low rumble of the crowd, Tim heard the shrill zippering sound of the plastic pulling through the catch, and then Dobbins sucked in a creaking gasp, hands at his throat, and fell to his knees. A little girl screamed, and there was a flurry within the already-moving crowd, people running away, kids dashing to parents.
Mitchell was several strides from Dobbins now, but he turned as Tim approached, now fifteen yards away. Their eyes locked. Mitchell’s expression of utter tranquillity never gave way, not even as he drew, a quick, reflexive lift of his. 45 that rivaled Tim’s own. Tim’s weapon was clear of his waistband but pointed directly down at the ground; he didn’t dare raise it with children and parents streaming through his line of sight, crying and shouting.
Splitting the distance between them, Dobbins lay on the ground, now flat on his back, expelling great, abbreviated choking sounds. His body was remarkably still, save for one foot that ticked back and forth, pendulum-steady, the untied laces brushing asphalt. Over Mitchell’s shoulder Tim saw a tan Cadillac coast into view on the street behind the park, Robert at the wheel.
Tim stared down the bore of Mitchell’s gun, a hypnotic black dot that sucked in all his thoughts, leaving him with only a nonspecific buzz in his head. Mitchell’s right eye was closed, his left focused on Tim’s face over the lined sights. Children flashed between them.
Mitchell lowered his gun and took two jogging backward steps, then turned and sprinted to the car. Tim raced after him but got only a few steps past Dobbins before his conscience leash-jerked him back.
He slid to Dobbins, the asphalt scraping his knees even through his jeans. Dobbins’s neck sported deep scratch marks above the tight band of the flex-cuff; Tim could see the corresponding flesh stuck beneath the nails of his scrabbling fingers.
A cluster of people had gathered, watching warily from a few feet. Children were crying and being pulled away. The mother Tim had observed earlier looked shell-shocked, her weighty purse slung over one shoulder, her notepad flat against her thigh. Three people were on cell phones, anxiously providing the park’s address and a queasy description of the emergency.
The mother stepped forward, pulling an overburdened key chain from her purse and letting it dangle. “I have a knife.”
Tim grabbed the key chain and snapped off the pocketknife-an elegant sterling-silver trinket from Tiffany. The blade was thin, which would help, but not serrated, so sawing against the thick plastic would be tough going.
Tim moved Dobbins’s hands away, but they shot back to his bloody throat, obscuring Tim’s view. He pinned one of Dobbins’s arms beneath a knee and slapped the other away until a man stepped from the crowd and held it down.
Dobbins’s face was tomato red. A vein bulged on his forehead, and the skin around his neck was sucked in tight, leaving hollows.
Tim slid the blade under the embedded band, cutting through a thin layer of Dobbins’s skin in the process. He tried to turn the knife to get the cutting edge up against the flex-cuff, but there was not enough give; Mitchell had yanked it incredibly tight, smashing down the top half of Dobbins’s Adam’s apple.
Beneath him Dobbins jerked and expelled a ticking gurgle.
Tim turned the knife, fingering through the blood to find Dobbins’s larynx. He walked his fingers down until he felt the soft give of the cricothyroid membrane, then cut a lengthwise slit through Dobbins’s flesh. A burst of air shot out through the hole, accompanied by a spray of blood.
“Your pen. Give me your gold pen.” Tim snapped his fingers, his hand out to the mother. Anticipating him, she unscrewed the pen barrel and shook it so the rollerpoint ink cartridge fell. She handed him the hollow tube of the top half of the pen, and he turned it and inserted the tapered end into the bloody gap. It slid in smoothly.
The sound of sirens, still distant.
Tim sucked once to clear the tube and spit a mouthful of blood on the pavement, fighting off images of hepatitis and HIV, and then Dobbins’s body lurched forward as he drew air through the pen barrel directly into his throat. His sloped eyes gave off no anger, just a panicked disorientation.
“Come here,” Tim said. The woman came forward and crouched. “Hold this. Hold this.” She took the pen barrel from Tim’s blood-moist fingers, tentatively at first. He firmed her hands with his own, then rose.
The crowd parted, leaving him a few feet on either side. A crimson spray decorated the front of his shirt; his hands were stained to the knuckles. He jogged out of the park, back down the sidewalk to his car, spitting a bit of blood every few steps.
Driving away, he passed an ambulance and two cop cars just turning onto the block.
38
TIM CHANGED OUT of his shirt and took a prolonged shower, scrubbing his hands and under his nails, letting the bathroom fill with steam. Turning the dial almost all the way to “hot,” he stood beneath the stream, shoulders slumped, head hung, letting the water strike him at the crown and run down over his face. It felt blissful and clean and painful.
Once dressed, he went to the corner booth and called Hansen at the Nextel office to check what cell site had been routing Robert’s and Mitchell’s outgoing calls.
“Your boys are smarter than you think. Not a single call. I’d say either they dumped the phones or they’re using another phone for outgoing.”
Before he could express his doubt that Robert and Mitchell were sufficiently technologically sophisticated to take those countermeasures, a thought struck him: The Stork was. Having a second phone exclusively for outgoing calls was a brilliant idea-one that none of Tim’s fugitives had ever come up with.
“Well, I just had a little run-in that may provoke a phone call,” Tim said. “Will you mind keeping on it, just in case they slip up?”
Tim thanked him and walked up the street to the store from which he’d rented his Nokia. The diminutive store owner didn’t so much as comment on the last phone he’d rented Tim, now scattered in pieces at the side of the 110. Tim selected the same model, and the owner word-lessly started the paperwork for the identical financial arrangement they’d agreed upon previously. Money doesn’t just talk; it silences.
Tim would keep the Nextel, too, because that was the number Robert and Mitchell knew and the only means they had of getting in touch with him. His elaborate game of musical phones would have made a mutt like Gary Heidel proud.
Tim charged his phones side by side near the outlet and sat Indian style on the floor staring at exactly nothing.
He recalled Mitchell’s expression of confusion on the playground-he’d truly been surprised Tim had come after him. Depending on whether their surveillance on Dobbins had overlapped with the police’s picking him up last night, they might not even be aware that the authorities had been alerted.