“And you don’t think the feds know this?”
“They might, but since Abe was second banana here they’re going to tear apart Susan Tunis’s life first.”
“I could tell ’em what you told me. About how you believe the attack was timed to coincide with when your friend got here.”
Mercer shook his head. “That won’t make a bit of difference. They have procedures, and once they figure out the ghost of Osama bin Laden didn’t murder those people, and that this is a robbery and not terror related, they’re going to lose interest and pull resources. They might not get around to Abe’s place for two, maybe three, days.”
“So what’s your favor?” Gerard asked as if he didn’t know.
“Let me go,” Mercer said. “Keep me out of this. Make Bill Gundersson a hero by telling the FBI that he tried to ram the pickup when he saw all the guns.”
“You know that’s not going to happen.”
Mercer sagged a little in his seat, deflating.
“On the other hand,” Gerard said. “Suppose I went outside to have a smoke and you happened to sneak on outta here?”
“You’d do that for me?” Mercer asked, hoping against hope.
“Nope,” Gerard said, putting on a ridiculously large cowboy hat and getting to his feet. “But I would do it for a state cop killed about twelve years ago who approached a disabled vehicle not knowing the driver was wanted by the FBI. Seems it wasn’t information they were willing to share. Our guy took three to the chest. His vest stopped two of the slugs, but the third tore into his heart. The perp stole his cruiser and kept going for another three hours before he was taken down at a roadblock.”
Gerard straightened his jacket. “The feds are going to think I’m a rube no matter what. You’re just another witness as far as my notes will show.” He had spoken seriously all through their conversation, but now his voice took on a flinty edge. It would have been clichéd had the state detective not been so earnest. “You’re going to see this thing through, right?”
Mercer answered as simply as he could. “To the bitter fucking end, Detective.”
“I’ll be back in ten.”
Paul Gerard stepped out of the office and ducked through the towering sliding doors and into the rain, a cigarette pursed between his lips and the brim of his hat ready to shield his smoke from the drizzle. Mercer waited a beat and followed the state cop. Gerard was at the far corner of the warehouse, chatting with the guy they were using to replace the dead hoist operator. Judging by the cloud of smoke wreathed around their heads, Gerard had shared from his soft pack of Marlboros.
Mercer would have loved to take the opportunity to clean up. He still wore his filthy and torn coveralls and steel-toed boots, but there wasn’t the time. Gerard had given him a limited window. He left the building and made his way to a nearby single-wide trailer painted white with a faded blue stripe. The trailer had first been towed off the dealer’s lot sometime in the late sixties, and the old mine represented the last in a long string of incrementally more dismal homesteads. Inside the reconfigured structure were shower stalls, lockers, and a kitchen with seating for eight. Mercer and his students used the mobile home to change after each day’s lesson before they drove down to the motor inn where they were all staying.
Three of them were at the table with a state trooper, held over because they had seen the gunmen’s pickup. All four men had the glazed eyes of extreme boredom.
“Hey, Mercer, what’s going on?” Hans asked.
“No talking,” the cop said automatically.
Mercer addressed the crew-cut patrolman with the Smokey Bear hat and Sam Browne belt. “Detective Gerard said he’s done with me and I can take off. He also said to give him a few minutes before sending over the next witness.”
“Did he say who he wanted?” the young officer asked. He’d been trained to be in control of any situation, and yet he felt himself automatically deferring to Mercer.
“He said to leave it up to you,” Mercer replied. He recognized the kid’s inexperience and gave him an outlet to show he still had some authority.
The young trooper had no idea how easily he’d been manipulated. “Okay. If Detective Gerard has your contact information, I guess it’s all right.”
“Thanks.” Mercer addressed his students, “Sorry about all this, guys. We’ll finish up our last lesson tomorrow and have our party afterward.”
One of the men was about to correct Mercer but then caught what their teacher was doing. He wanted to buy some time, and they would be more than happy to give it to him.
“Ist nicht kein Problem,” Hans said, stressing his accent to the point of parody. He’d keep Gerard busy for hours playing up the language barrier in case the state cop changed his mind about letting his star witness go.
Mercer grabbed his civilian clothes from a locker, fished the keys to his rental from the front of his jeans pocket, and strode out of the trailer without a backward glance.
Hertz had given him a GMC Yukon, an SUV only slightly smaller than the steam dredges that once plied its namesake river in search of placer gold. Mercer slid into the driver’s seat, grateful that he’d gotten insurance because the stains he’d just transferred from his coveralls to the fabric seat looked permanent. The big V8 rumbled to life, and he pulled out of the parking lot, carefully threading his way around the haphazardly parked state and local cop cars. The low clouds reflected the hypnotic blue and red flashes of all the rooftop lights.
One cop detained him for only a moment at the gate and waved him through when Mercer explained that Gerard had said he could leave. Driving down the access road he could see the wanton path of destruction he’d carved with the big Caterpillar front-end loader. It really did look like some mechanical animal had gone on a rampage.
At the base of the haul road, a group of cops had cordoned off the bright yellow earthmover while a couple of guys in wet Tyvec suits were examining the bullet-riddled machine. No doubt they would be admonished by the federal forensic teams for not waiting.
Mercer was waved through by another miserable-looking state patrolman in a rain-slicked poncho who’d likely been radioed from above. Mercer turned in the opposite direction from the shooters, knowing no answers would be found in that direction. He wasn’t even sure what questions he needed answered at this point. All Mercer knew for certain was that he had not lied to Gerard. He was going to see this through, all the way to the end.
The distances in the American heartland were vast, something he’d forgotten from his occasional cross-country trips when he was in Boulder at the Colorado School of Mines and drove back to visit his grandparents in Vermont. He had left the Leister Deep at nearly six at night. The sun was well down and the miles were mesmerizing. By midnight he felt like he’d covered most of the Midwest but realized he was less than halfway to his destination. He saw why the snobs in New York and D.C. called this flyover country. You sure as hell didn’t want to drive it.
He knew he should pull over into one of the brightly lit oases of civilization that flanked both sides of the four-lane interstate, each promising several multistory hotels with recognizable names, chain restaurants not unlike the ones he’d left back in Minnesota, and twenty-four-hour gas stations abuzz with truckers hauling hard for the coasts. He passed several such sanctuaries, all nearly identical, but when he finally realized he was becoming a danger to himself and others if he remained behind the wheel, the next exit was as dark and deserted as an abandoned logging road, forcing him down several miles of twisty macadam until he came across a town that was nothing more than a crossroads with a building at each corner. One was a two-story storefront that housed a closed diner, a lawyer’s office, and a barbershop below, while above was a sign for Sukie’s Dance Studio in a large window so caked with dust that even in the darkness it looked like it hadn’t seen a student since the Lindy was the rage, or at least the Hustle. Opposite that was another, larger commercial building set back from the road and surrounded by small farm machinery for sale: skid-steers, tines to convert front-end loaders into forklifts, mechanical splitters, hoers, reapers, and tractor attachments whose purpose Mercer could merely guess. The words Feed Lot were written over the large windows, and the gravel parking area was crisscrossed with spilled winter wheat seed. Another corner of the town was a low ambling building with two identical wings of darkly painted doors off a central office/reception area that had been made to look like a bell tower, though the belfry was faded paint and the bell was just a plywood outline. Across the street, a gas station’s spiderlike canopy hovered in the sodium-vapor glow of its own lights, like one of the alien space ships in Close Encounters. That’s how Mercer described it to himself, and he recognized the depth of his exhaustion by the way he was torturing metaphors in his head. Another sign of fatigue was how the dingy roadside motor court, with its cheesy bell-tower motif, looked to him as inviting as the Ritz Paris or New York’s Mandarin Oriental.