Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“All right,” Lucas said. “Where are you staying?”

“In the Point. The top floor, with some other guys.”

“Wasn’t that one of Ray Cuervo’s places? Before he got cut?”

“Yeah.” Yellow Hand was staring at the crack on Lucas’ palm.

“Okay.” Lucas tipped the four remaining rocks back into the test tube and handed it to Yellow Hand. “Stick this in your sock and get your ass back to the Point. If I come looking, you better be there.”

“I will,” Yellow Hand said eagerly.

Lucas nodded. The back door of the squad had no handles and he had carefully avoided closing it. Now he pushed it open and stepped out, and Yellow Hand slid across and got out beside him. “This better be right. This Bluebird,” Lucas said, jabbing a finger into Yellow Hand’s thin chest.

Yellow Hand nodded. “It was him. I talked to him.”

“Okay. Beat it.”

Yellow Hand hurried away. Lucas watched him for a moment, then walked across the street to the Indian Center. He found Wentz in the director’s office.

“So how’s our witness?” the cop asked.

“On his way home.”

“Say what?”

“He’ll be around,” Lucas said. “He says the guy we want is named Tony Bluebird. Lives down on Franklin. I know the house, and he’s got a sheet. We should be able to get a photo.”

“God damn,” Wentz said. He reached for a telephone. “Let me get that downtown.”

Lucas had nothing more to do. Homicide was for Homicide cops. Lucas was Intelligence. He ran networks of street people, waitresses, bartenders, barbers, gamblers, hookers, pimps, bookies, dealers in cars and cocaine, mail carriers, a couple of burglars. The crooks were small-timers, but they had eyes and memories. Lucas was always ready with a dollar or a threat, whatever was needed to make a snitch feel wanted.

He had nothing to do with it, but after Yellow Hand produced the name, Lucas hung around to watch the cop machine work. Sometimes it was purely a pleasure. Like now: when the Homicide cop called downtown, several things happened at once.

A check with the identification division confirmed Yellow Hand’s basic information and got a photograph of Tony Bluebird started out to the Indian Center.

At the same time, the Minneapolis Emergency Response Unit began staging in a liquor store parking lot a mile from Bluebird’s suspected residence.

While the ERU got together, a further check with utility companies suggested that Bluebird lived in the house where Yellow Hand had put him. Forty minutes after Yellow Hand spoke Bluebird’s name, a tall black man in an army fatigue jacket and blue jeans ambled down the street past Bluebird’s to the house next door, went up on the porch, knocked, flashed his badge and asked himself inside. The residents didn’t know any Bluebird, but people came and went, didn’t they?

Another detective, a white guy who looked as if he’d been whipped through hell with a soot bag, stopped at the house before Bluebird’s and went through the same routine.

“Yeah, Tony Bluebird, that’s the guy’s name, all right,” said the elderly man who met him at the door. “What’s he done?”

“We’re not sure he did anything,” said the detective. “Have you seen this guy lately? I mean, today?”

“Hell, yes. Not a half an hour ago, he came up the walk and went inside.” The old man nervously gummed his lower lip. “Still in there, I guess.”

The white detective called in and confirmed Bluebird’s presence. Then he and the black detective did a careful scan of Bluebird’s house from the windows of the adjoining homes and called their information back to the ERU leader. Normally, when they had a man pinned, they’d try to make contact, usually by phone. But Bluebird, they thought, might be some kind of maniac. Maybe a danger to hostages or himself. They decided to take him. The ERUs, riding in nondescript vans, moved up to a second stage three blocks from Bluebird’s.

While all that was going on, Betty Sails picked Bluebird out of a photo spread. The basketball player confirmed the identification.

“That’s a good snitch you got there, Lucas,” Wentz said approvingly. “You coming along?”

“Might as well.”

The ERU found a blind spot around the back door of Bluebird’s house. The door had no window, and the only other window near it had the shade pulled. They could move up to the door, take it out and be inside before Bluebird had even a hint of their presence.

And it would have worked if Bluebird’s landlord hadn’t been so greedy. The landlord had illegally subdivided the house into a duplex. The division had been practical, rather than aesthetic: the doorway connecting the front of the house to the back had been covered with a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood.

When the tac commander said “Go,” one of the ERUs tossed a flash-bang grenade through Bluebird’s side window. The terrific explosion and brilliant flash would freeze anyone inside for several seconds, long enough for the ERU team to get on top of him. When the flash-bang went off, another ERU blew the back door open with an AVON round fired from his shotgun, and the team leader went through the door, followed by three of his men.

A young Mexican woman was lying half asleep on the sofa, a baby on her stomach. An older kid, a toddler, was sitting in a dilapidated playpen. The Mexican woman had been nursing the baby and her shirt was open, her breasts exposed. She struggled to sit up, reacting to the flash-bang and the AVONs, her mouth and eyes wide with fear.

The team leader blocked a hallway, and the biggest man on the squad hit the plywood barrier, kicked it twice and gave up.

“We’re blocked out, we’re blocked out,” he shouted.

“Is there any way to the front?” the team leader yelled at the Mexican woman. The woman, still dazed, didn’t understand, and the team leader took his men out and rotated them down the side of the house.

They were ten seconds into the attack, still hoping to do it clean, when a woman screamed from the front of the house. Then there were a couple of shots, a window shattered, and the leader figured Bluebird had a hostage. He called the team off.

Sex was strange, the team leader thought.

He stood with his back against the crumbling white siding of the house, the shotgun still in his hand, sweat pouring down his face. The attack had been chaotic, the response—the shooting—had been the kind of thing he feared, a close-up firefight with a nut, where you might have a pistol right up your nose. With all that, the image of the Mexican woman’s thin breast stayed in his mind’s eye and in his throat, and he could barely concentrate on the life-and-death confrontation he was supposed to be directing . . . .

When Lucas arrived, two marked squads were posted in front of Bluebird’s house, across the street, and ERUs waited on the porches of the houses on either side of Bluebird’s. A blocking team was out back. Drum music leaked from the house.

“Are we talking to him?” Lucas asked the tac commander.

“We called him on the phone, but we lost the phone,” the tac commander said. “Phone company says it’s out of order. We think he pulled the line.”

“How many people are in there?”

The tac commander shrugged. “The neighbors say he’s got a wife and a couple of kids, preschool kids. Don’t know about anybody else.”

A television truck rolled up to the end of the street, where a patrolman stopped it. A StarTribune reporter appeared at the other end of the block, a photographer humping along behind. One of the TV crew stopped arguing with the patrolman long enough to point at Lucas and yell. When Lucas turned, she waved, and Lucas ambled down the block. Neighbors were being herded along the sidewalk. There’d been a birthday party going on at one house and a half-dozen kids floated helium balloons over the gathering crowd. It looked like a carnival, Lucas thought.

“What’s happening, Davenport?” the TV reporter yelled past the patrolman. The reporter was a Swede of the athletic variety, with high cheekbones, narrow hips and blood-red lipstick. A cameraman stood next to her, his camera focused on the Bluebird house.

“That killing down at the Indian Center today? We think we got the guy trapped inside.”

“He got hostages?” the reporter asked. She didn’t have a notebook.

“We don’t know.”

“Can we get any closer? Any way? We need a better angle . . . .”

Lucas glanced around the blocked-off area.

“How about if we try to get you in that alley over there, between those houses? You’ll be further away, but you’ll have a direct shot at the front . . . .”

“Something’s going down,” the cameraman said. He was looking at the Bluebird house through his camera’s telephoto setting.

“Ah, shit,” said the reporter. She tried to ease past the patrolman to stand next to Lucas, but the patrolman blocked her with a hip.

“Catch you later,” Lucas said over his shoulder as he turned and started back.

“C’mon, Davenport . . .”

Lucas shook his head and kept going. The ERU team leader on the porch of the left-hand house was yelling at Bluebird’s. He got a response, stepped back a bit and took out a handset.

“What?” asked Lucas, when he got back to the command unit.

“He said he’s sending his people out,” said a cop on a radio.

“I’m backing everybody off,” said the tac commander. As Lucas leaned on the roof to watch, the tac commander sent a patrolman scrambling along the row of cars, to warn the ERUs and the uniformed officers that people were coming out of the house. A moment later, a white towel waved at the door and a woman stepped out, holding a baby. She was dragging another kid, maybe three years old, by one arm.

“Come on, come on, you’re okay,” the detective called out. She looked back once, then walked quickly, head down, on the sidewalk through the line of cars.

Lucas and the tac commander moved over to intercept her.

“Who are you?” the tac commander asked.

“Lila Bluebird.”

“Is that your husband in there?”

“Yes.”

“Has he got anybody with him?”

“He’s all alone,” the woman said. Tears streamed down her face. She was wearing a man’s cowboy shirt and shorts made of stretchy black material spotted with lint fuzzies. The baby clung to her shirt, as though he knew what was going on; the other kid hung on her hand. “He said to tell you he’ll be out in a minute.”

“He drunk? Crack? Crank? Anything like that?”

“No. No alcohol or drugs in our house. But he’s not right.”

“What’s that? You mean he’s crazy? What . . .”

The question was never finished. The door of the Bluebird house burst open and Tony Bluebird hurdled onto the lawn, running hard. He was bare-chested, the long obsidian blade dangling from his neck on a rawhide thong. Two eagle feathers were pinned to his headdress and he had pistols in both hands. Ten feet off the porch, he brought them up and opened fire on the nearest squad, closing on the cops behind it. The cops shot him to pieces. The gunfire stood him up and knocked him down.

After a second of stunned silence, Lila Bluebird began to wail and the older kid, confused, clutched at her leg and began screaming. The radio man called for paramedics. Three cops moved up to Bluebird, their pistols still pointed at his body, and nudged his weapons out of reach.

The tac commander looked at Lucas, his mouth working for a moment before the words came out. “Jesus Christ,” he blurted. “What the fuck was that all about?”

CHAPTER

3

Wild grapes covered the willow trees, dangling forty and fifty feet down to the waterline. In the weak light from the Mendota Bridge, the island looked like a three-masted schooner with black sails, cruising through the mouth of the Minnesota River into the Mississippi.

Two men walked onto a sand spit at the tip of the island. They’d had a fire earlier in the evening, roasting wieners on sharp sticks and heating cans of SpaghettiOs. The fire had guttered down to coals, but the smell of the burning pine still hung in the cool air. A hundred feet back from the water’s edge, a sweat lodge squatted under the willows.

“We ought to go up north. It’d be nice now, out on the lakes,” said the taller one.

“It’s been too warm. Too many mosquitoes.”

The tall man laughed. ‘Bullshit, mosquitoes. We’re Indians, dickhead.”

“Them fuckin’ Chippewa would take our hair,” the short one objected, the humor floating through his voice.

“Not us. Kill their men, screw their women. Drink their beer.”

“I ain’t drinkin’ no Grain Belt,” said the short one. There was a moment’s comfortable silence between them. The short one took a breath, let it out in an audible sigh and said, “Too much to do. Can’t fuck around up north.”

The short man’s face had sobered. The tall man couldn’t see it, but sensed it. “I wish I could go pray over Bluebird,” the tall man said. After a moment, he added, “I hoped he would go longer.”

“He wasn’t smart.”

“He was spiritual.”

“Yep.”

The men were Mdewakanton Sioux, cousins, born the same day on the banks of the Minnesota River. One had been named Aaron Sunders and the other Samuel Close, but only the bureaucrats called them that. To everyone else they touched, they were the Crows, named for their mothers’ father, Dick Crow.

Later in life, a medicine man gave them Dakota first names. The names were impossible to translate. Some Dakota argued for Light Crow and Dark Crow. Others said Sun Crow and Moon Crow. Still others claimed the only reasonable translation was Spiritual Crow and Practical Crow. But the cousins called themselves Aaron and Sam. If some Dakota and white-wannabees thought the names were not impressive enough, that was their lookout.

The tall Crow was Aaron, the spiritual man. The short Crow was Sam, the practical one. In the back of their pickup, Aaron carried an army footlocker full of herbs and barks. In the cab, Sam carried two .45s, a Louisville Slugger and a money belt. They considered themselves one person in two bodies, each body containing a single aspect. It had been that way since 1932, when the daughters of Dick Crow and their two small sons had huddled together in a canvas lean-to for four months, near starving, near freezing, fighting to stay alive. From December through March, the cousins had lived in a cardboard box full of ripped-up woolen army blankets. The four months had welded their two personalities into one. They had been inseparable for nearly sixty years, except for a time that Aaron had spent in federal prison.

“I wish we would hear from Billy,” said Sam Crow.

“We know he’s there,” Aaron Crow said quietly.

“But what’s he doing? Three days now, and nothing.”

“You worry that he’s gone back to drinking. You shouldn’t, ’cause he hasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

Sam nodded. When his cousin said he knew, he knew. “I’m worried about what’ll happen when he goes for the hit. The New York cops are good on a thing like this.”

“Trust Billy,” said Aaron. Aaron was thin, but not frail: wiry, hard, like beef jerky. He had a hundred hard planes in his face, surrounding a high-ridged nose. His eyes were like black marbles. “He’s a smart one. He’ll do right.”

“I hope so. If he’s caught right away, the television coverage will come and go too fast.” Sam had a broad face, with smile lines around a wide, soft chin. His hair was salt-and-pepper, his eyes deep and thoughtful. He had a belly, which bore down on a wide belt with a turquoise buckle.

“Not if Leo moves. He should be in Oklahoma City tomorrow, if his car holds out,” said Aaron. “If the two . . . attacks . . . come right on top of each other, the TV’ll go nuts. And the letters are ready.”

Sam paced down to the water’s edge, watched it for a moment, then turned and spoke back up the sand spit.

“I still think the first two were a mistake. We wasted Bluebird, doing that second one. Those killings won’t have the impact we need . . . .”

“We needed some low-risk attacks to start . . . .”

“Wasn’t low-risk for Bluebird . . .”

“We knew he might have a problem . . . but we had to set a tone. We had to make it a war. We can’t just have a couple of assassinations. We have to make the media think . . . War. We have to pump this motherfucker up. It has to be big, if we want to get . . .”

“The Great Satan,” Sam snorted. “It’ll be for nothing if we can’t get him out here.”

“It wouldn’t be for nothing—the ones we’ve already taken are bad enough. But he’ll come,” Aaron said confidently. “We know he comes out here. We know why. We know where. And we can get at him.”

“No,” said Sam. “We know he used to come here. But maybe no more. He’s got the media watching. He wants to be president . . . . He’s careful . . . .”

“But once he’s here, he won’t stay away. Not with the monkey he’s got on his back.”

“Maybe,” said Sam. He thrust his hands into his pockets. “I still think the first two were bullshit killings.”

“You’re wrong,” Aaron said flatly.

Sam stared out at the water. “I don’t want to waste anybody, that’s all.” He bent, picked up a flat rock and tried to skip it across the river. Instead of skipping, it cut into the surface like a knife and was gone. “Shit,” he said.

“You never were any good at that,” Aaron said. “You need more of a sidearm.”

“How many times have you told me that?” Sam asked, hunting up another rock.

“About a million.”

Sam flipped the second rock out at the water. It hit and sank. He shook his head, thrust his hands back into his jean pockets, stood quietly for a moment, then turned to his cousin. “Have you talked to Shadow Love?” he asked.

“No.”

“Are you still planning to send him to Bear Butte?”

“Yeah. I want him out of here,” Aaron said.

“Shadow Love is a weapon,” Sam Crow said.

“He’s our kid.”

“Every man comes to earth with a purpose. I’m quoting the famous Aaron Crow himself. Shadow Love is a weapon.”

“I won’t use him,” said Aaron, walking down to the water’s edge to stand by his cousin.

“Because he’s our kid,” Sam said. “Don’t let that fuck you up.”

“It’s not that. The fact is, Shadow scares the shit out of me. That’s the real problem.” Aaron kicked off his battered sneakers and took a half-step so his toes were in the water. It felt cool and healing. “I fear for what we did to that boy, when we left him with Rosie. We had work to do, but . . . She wasn’t quite right, you know. She was a lovely woman, but she had some wrong things in her mind. You say we made a weapon. I think we made a crazy man.”

“Remember, once, a Crazy Horse . . . ?”

“Not the same. Crazy Horse loved a kind of life. A warrior life. Shadow’s not a warrior. He’s a killer. You’ve seen him; he hungers for pain and the power to create it.”

The two men fell silent for a moment, listening to the water ripple past the sandbar. Then Aaron said, in a lighter tone, “How long before we fuck up, do you think?”

Sam threw back his head and laughed. “Three weeks. Maybe a month.”

“We’ll be dead, then,” Aaron said. He made it sound funny.

“Maybe not. We could make it up to Canada. Sioux Valley. Hide out.”

“Mmmm.”

“What? You think we don’t have a chance? We’re just a couple of dead flatheads?” asked Sam.

“People who do this kind of thing . . . don’t get away. They just don’t.” Aaron shrugged. “And there’s always the question, Should we try?”

Sam ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus,” he muttered.

“Exactly,” Aaron said, with a quick, barking laugh. “If we go down . . . it’d make the point. Everybody knows Sitting Bull, because he died. Everybody knows Crazy Horse, because he died. Who knows about Inkpaduta? He was maybe the greatest of them all, but he went to Canada and got old and died. Not many remember him now. We’re going to . . . war . . . to wake up the people. If we just sneak off, I don’t think that’ll be the same.”

Sam shook his head but said nothing. He found another flat rock and sidearmed it at the water. It sank instantly. “Asshole,” he called after the rock.

Aaron looked down at the sandbar at his cousin, sighed and said, “I’m going back to town with you. I hear too many voices tonight. I can’t handle it.”

“You shouldn’t come here so often. Even I can feel them, groaning under the sand.” He made a brushing motion that took in the sandbar, the river and the hillside. The land around the island had once been a concentration camp. Hundreds of Sioux died in it, most of them women and children.

“Come on,” Aaron said. “Let’s load the truck and get our ass out of here.”

Billy Hood lay on the Jersey motel bed and stared at the ceiling. He’d made a preliminary reconnaissance, across the river into Manhattan, and concluded that he could do it. He could kill the man. The stone knife weighed on his chest.

To cut a man’s throat . . . Hood’s own throat tightened. Last year, hunting out of Mille Lacs in central Minnesota, he’d taken a deer. He’d spotted it walking through a grove of birches, a tan wraith floating through the white-on-white of trees and snow. It had been a doe, but a big one. The .30– .30 had knocked it down and it hadn’t gotten up again. It hadn’t died, either. It had lain there on its side in the shallow snow, its feet making feeble running motions, its visible eye blinking up at him and his brother-in-law Roger.

“Better cut her throat, brother,” Roger had said. Roger was smiling. Turned on? Feeling the power? “Put her out of her misery.”

Hood had taken his hunting knife from its sheath, a knife he’d honed to a razor sharpness. He’d grabbed the doe by an ear and lifted its head and cut its throat with a quick, heavy slash. Blood had spurted out on the snow and the doe had kicked a few times, its eye still blinking up at him. Then the death film crossed it and the doe went.

“It’s the only place you ever see red blood, you know?” Roger had said. “In the snow. You see blood out in the woods in the fall, or in the summer, it always looks black. Boy, in this snow, it sure does look red, don’t it?”

Andretti’s blood would look black on the beige carpet of his office. That’s how far Hood had gotten on his recon run. Andretti was famous for his long hours. The hall all around his office was closing down, but his “team” stayed on the job. Andretti called it a team. A photograph on an employee bulletin board outside his office showed Andretti and his staff gathered around a cake, wearing basketball jerseys. Andretti, of course, wore number 1.

“Mother,” Hood said, closing his eyes to dream and maybe to pray. The stone pressed on his chest. Andretti’s blood would be black on the carpet. He would do it tomorrow, just after the hall closed.

The night was dark and filled with visions, even in the suffocating motel room. Hood woke at one o’clock, and three, four and five. At six, he got up, weary but unable to sleep. He shaved, cleaned up, put on his best suit, feeling the stone weight around his neck, the small pistol in his pocket.

He walked to the train station, caught a ride across the river, walked to Central Park. Checked the zoo and the Metropolitan Museum. Cruised the van Goghs and the Degas, lingered with the Renoirs and Monets. He liked the outdoor lushness of the Impressionists. His own country, out along the Missouri in South Dakota, was all brown and tan for most of the year. But there were times, in the spring, when you’d find small mudflats overflowing with wildflowers, where side creeks ran down to the river. He could peer at the Monets and smell the hot prairie spice of the black-eyed Susans . . . .

It took forever for the time to come. When it did, he rode downtown on the subway, pinching out his emotions, one by one. Thinking back to his hours on Bear Butte, the arid, stoic beauty of the countryside. The distant scream of the Black Hills, raped by the whites who promoted each natural mystery with a chrome-yellow billboard.

By the time he reached the hall, he felt as close to stone as he ever had. A few minutes before five, he walked into the hall and took the stairs to the fifth floor.

Andretti’s welfare department took up twelve floors of the hall, but his personal office consisted of a suite of four rooms. Hood had calculated that six to eight people regularly worked in those rooms: Andretti and his secretary; a receptionist; three aides, one male and two female; and a couple of clerks on an irregular basis. The clerks and receptionist fled at five o’clock on the dot. He shouldn’t have more than five people to deal with.

On the fifth floor, Hood checked the hallway, then walked quickly down to the public rest room. He entered one of the stalls, sat down and opened his shirt. The obsidian knife hung from his neck on a deerhide thong, taken from the doe killed the year before. He pulled the thong over his neck and slipped the knife into his left jacket pocket. The gun was in his right.

Hood looked at his watch. Three minutes after five. He decided to wait a few more minutes and sat on the toilet, watching the second hand go ’round. The watch had cost twelve dollars, new. A Timex; his wife had bought it when it looked as if he might get a job with a state road crew. But the job had fallen through and all he had left was the Timex.

When the Timex said 5:07, Hood stood up, his soul now as hard as the knife. The hallway was empty. He walked quickly down to Andretti’s office, looking to his right as he passed the main hall. A woman was waiting for the elevator. She glanced at him, then away. Hood continued to Andretti’s office, paused with his hand on the knob, then pushed it open. The receptionist had gone, but he heard laughter from the other side of the panel behind her desk.

Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, on the gun, he stepped around the panel. Two of the aides, a man and a woman, were leaning on desks, talking. Through an open door, he could see Andretti, working in shirtsleeves behind a green goosenecked lamp. There was at least one more person in his office with him.

When he came around the panel, the woman didn’t notice him for a moment, but the man saw him and frowned slightly. Then the woman turned her head and said, “I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

Hood took his hand from his pocket, with the gun in it, and said, “Don’t say a word or make a sound. Just walk into Mr. Andretti’s office.”

“Oh, no,” said the woman. The man clenched his fists and slipped off the desk.

Hood pointed the gun at his head and said, “I don’t want to kill you, but I will. Now walk.” He had now moved out of Andretti’s line of sight. “Move,” he said.

They moved reluctantly, toward Andretti’s office. “If you do anything, if you touch a door, if you say anything, I will shoot you,” Hood said quietly as they approached Andretti’s office.

The man stepped inside, followed by the woman. Hood said, “Off to the side.” The man said, “Boss, we’ve got a problem.” Andretti looked up and said, “Oh, shit.”

A woman was slumped in a chair in front of Andretti’s desk, her face caught in a smile which seeped away when she saw Hood; Hood thought the word seeped, because of the slowness with which it left. As though she didn’t want to disturb him. As though she wanted to think it was a joke.

“Where’s the secretary?” Hood asked Andretti.

“She went home early,” Andretti said. “Listen, my friend . . .”

“Be quiet. We’ve got some business to do, but I have to arrange these people first. I don’t want them rushing me while we talk.”

“If you’ve got a problem . . .”

“I’ve got a problem, all right,” Hood interrupted. “It’s how to keep from shooting one of these people if they don’t do what I say. I want you to all lay down, facedown, on the rug against that wall.”

“How do we know you won’t shoot us?”

“Because I promise not to. I don’t want to hurt you. But I promise I will shoot you if you don’t get down on the floor.”

“Do it,” Andretti ordered.

The three backed away toward the wall, then sat down.

“Roll over, facedown,” Hood said. They flattened themselves out, one of the women craning her neck to see him. “Look at the rug, lady, okay?”

When they were staring at the rug, Hood moved slowly around Andretti’s desk. Andretti was a big man, and young; early thirties. No more than thirty-five.

“Let me explain what I’m about to do, Mr. Andretti,” Hood said as he moved. He and Bluebird and the others had thought this out, and decided that lying would be best. “I’m going to put some cuffs on you and then I’m going to make some phone calls downtown on behalf of my people. I’m going to put the cuffs on because I don’t want you causing trouble. If everybody cooperates, nobody gets hurt. Do you understand?”

“I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand what you want.”

“We’ll talk that out,” Hood said reassuringly. He was behind Andretti, and he reached out and touched him on the temple with the barrel of the pistol. “Put your hands behind your back, clasp them.”

When Andretti had done that, Hood said, “Now, look straight back. No, arch your back and tilt your head back. I want to show you this before I do it.”

“What?” Andretti asked, dropping his head straight back.

“This,” Hood said. He’d changed the gun for the knife, caught Andretti’s hair in his left hand and slashed him with the stone, cutting deeper, much deeper, much fiercer, than he had with the doe.

“Ahh,” he grunted as the blood spurted from Andretti’s neck. Andretti’s hands pounded on his desk and he began coughing, choking, looking for Hood. One of the women half sat, saw Andretti and screamed. Hood fired a single shot at her white face and she dropped down. He didn’t know whether he had hit her or not, but the man now rolled and the other woman began scrambling across the rug. Hood hollered “Stop” and fired a shot into the man’s back. The man arched and Hood was out the door, down the hallway and in the stairwell, running, the screams fading as doors closed.

Gun in pocket, knife in pocket, first landing down. He looked at his hands. Clean. Looked at his pants. Clean. Blood on his shirt, a spot on his jacket. He pulled the jacket shut, third landing down. Ground floor. Into the lobby. Guard at the desk, looking up. Past the guard, into the street. Down a block. Into the subway. The token. Wait. Wait. Wait for running feet, shouts, cops, but nothing but the damp smell of the subway and the clatter of an approaching train.

It took him an hour to get back to Jersey. A half-hour after that, he was in his car, heading west into the setting sun.

In Oklahoma City, Leo Clark stood outside the federal courthouse and looked up. Scouting. The stone blade hung heavy around his neck.