Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"
Автор книги: John Sandford
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Текущая страница: 65 (всего у книги 105 страниц)
CHAPTER
32
Lucas sat outside Daniel’s office, six feet from the secretary’s desk. She had tried talking to him but eventually gave up. When the secretary’s intercom beeped, she tipped her head toward the office door and Lucas went inside.
“Come in,” Daniel said. His voice was formal, his office was not. Papers were scattered across the top of his desk and an amber cursor blinked on his computer screen, halfway down a column of numbers. A veil of cigar smoke hung in the room. Daniel pointed to the good guest chair. “What a fuckin’ week. How are you?”
“Messed up,” Lucas said. “I’d only known Cassie for a few days, and I don’t think we would have lasted . . . but shit. She was pulling me up. I was feeling almost human.”
“Are you going back over the edge?” Daniel’s face was questioning, concerned.
“Christ, I hope not,” Lucas said, rubbing his face with his open hands. He was exhausted. After the arrest, he’d gone home and crashed, slept the night and the day through, until he was shaken out of bed by Daniel’s call. “Anything but that.”
“Hmm.” Daniel picked up a dead cigar, rolled it between his fingers. “You’ve heard about the answering machine.”
“No, I’ve been out of it . . . .”
“One of the crime-scene guys—you know Andre?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Andre was going through Bekker’s office, and a secretary said she’d seen Bekker coming out of the next office down from his. She thought he was just doing some housekeeping for his neighbor, who’s off in Europe on a fellowship. Anyway, Andre gets on the phone and calls this guy in Europe, tells him what happened, gets his okay, and they check out his office. There’s an answering machine in his desk and it’s turned on. Andre pushes the button and the tape just stops; it’s been rewound. But when he pushes it again, it starts running, and it’s a message from Druze to Bekker, telling him it’s done . . . . We went back to the phone company, checked it, and the call came in a half-hour after the woman was killed at Maplewood. There’s another fragment of conversation under that, just a few words, but it’s Bekker.”
“So that ties it,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. And there are a couple of other things, coming along.”
“What about Loverboy?” Lucas asked.
“I pulled Shearson off the shrink. Shearson thinks he’s the one, but we’ll never know. Not unless he just comes out and tells us.” Daniel rolled the cigar between his palms. He looked more than unhappy.
“What’s wrong?” Lucas asked.
“Shit.” Daniel backhanded the cigar butt at the wall, where it bounced off the black-and-white face of Robert Kennedy and fell to the floor.
“Let’s have it,” Lucas said.
Daniel swiveled his chair to look out the window at the street. Spring was definitely coming, the days stretching toward summer. The street was sunlit, although the temperatures hung in the forties. “Lucas . . . God damn it. You beat up Bekker. His fuckin’ face . . . And remember that pimp, that kid, Whitcomb? His goddamn attorney has been back to Internal Affairs—Whitcomb’s family don’t believe a word of that pimp story, they think their little boy fell into the hands of a bad cop. They’re talking about the courts . . . .”
“We’ve handled it before . . .” Lucas suggested.
“Not like this. You’ve been in fights. These people . . . Shit, these people didn’t have much of a chance.”
“Whitcomb is a fucking violence freak,” Lucas said, leaning forward. “Has his attorney looked at the girl he worked over?”
“Yeah, yeah. Whitcomb’s a criminal—but you’re not supposed to be. And now there are rumors about you going into Druze’s apartment. Too many people know about it. If you tried to deny it at a hearing, you’d be perjuring yourself. And there’s more . . . .”
“Like what?”
“A guy from Channel Eight was talking about making a formal complaint that you gave special privileges to one of the reporters from TV3. That wouldn’t be any big deal, normally, except that Barlow picked it up, and decided that you fed her confidential investigatory material.”
“You could quash that,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. That. Or any one of the others. But the whole bunch . . .”
“Cut to the action,” Lucas said. “What’re you telling me?”
Daniel sighed, turned back and leaned over his desk. “I can’t fuckin’ save you.”
“Can’t save me?” Lucas said it quietly, almost pensively.
“They’re gonna hang your ass,” Daniel said. “The shooflies and a couple of guys on the council . . . And I can’t do a fuckin’ thing about it. I told them that you’d maybe had some psychological problems, they were straightening out. They said bullshit: If he’s nuts, get him off the street. And you’ve killed a few guys. You see that Pioneer Press editorial? Our own serial killer . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Lucas said. He levered himself out of the chair and took a turn around the office, looking at all the black-and-white mug shots, the smiling sharks, a lifetime of politicians. He stopped at the color, the Hmong tapestry, the Minnesota weather calendar. “I’m gone?”
“You could fight it, but it’d be pretty bad,” Daniel said. “They’d be asking about the break-in, about the fight with Whitcomb and about Bekker’s face . . . . I mean, Jesus, you look at a picture of the way Bekker used to be, and his face now. Jesus, he looks like Frankenstein. On top of it all, you haven’t gone out of your way to win any popularity contests.”
“There are some people in the press . . . .”
“They’ll turn on you like rats,” Daniel said. “Nothing gives an editorial writer more satisfaction than seeing somebody else booted out of his job.”
“I’ve got friends . . . .”
“Sure. I’m one. I’d testify for you . . . but like I said—and I’m a politician, I know what I’m talking about—I can’t save your ass. As a friend, I tell you this: If you resign, I can turn it all off. I can short-circuit it. You walk away clean. If you decide to fight it, I’ll stand with you, but . . .”
“It wouldn’t do any good.”
“No.”
Lucas stared bleakly at the weather calendar, then nodded and turned to face Daniel. “I knew I was getting close to the end of my string,” he said. “Too much shit coming down. I just kind of wish . . .”
“What?”
“I wish I’d dumped Bekker. Damn it . . . .”
“Don’t talk like that. To anybody,” Daniel said, pointing a finger at Lucas. “That can only bring you grief.”
“When do I go?”
Daniel tipped his head. “Soon. Like now.”
“Do you have a sheet of department paper?” Lucas asked.
Lucas hunched over Daniel’s desk, writing it out in longhand, two simple sentences. Please accept my resignation from the Minneapolis Police Department. I’ve enjoyed my work here, but it’s time to pursue new interests. “Twenty fuckin’ years,” he said, as he dotted the i and crossed the ts in interests.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. He had turned his back again, and was staring out the window. “The retirement’ll be there, of course, if you care . . . .”
“Fuck retirement . . . .” Lucas looked at his hand, found that he was holding a square of pink paper, a receipt from a tire store. On the back was a list, with the word “Loverboy” at the top. He crushed it into a tight little wad and tossed it toward the big plastic basket that stood in an alcove behind Daniel’s desk. The paper wad rimmed out, and they both watched it bounce across the rug. “I dated the letter tomorrow—I’ve got some official things to clean up. And I want to slide some of my files over to Del.”
“Okay. Del . . . I know he pounded on Bekker, but he doesn’t have the history . . .”
“Sure. If there’s a problem, if Internal Affairs gets on his case, tell them to talk to me. I’ll take the heat for it.”
“Won’t happen. Like I said, I can contain it, if you’re not around to goad them. And I can do something else, I think. I can take your resignation and put you on reserve . . . .”
“Reserve? What the fuck is that?”
Daniel gestured helplessly. “It’s nothing, right now. But maybe, if you get out clean, let things cool down, we could get you back . . . . If not full-time, in some kind of consultant capacity . . .”
“Sounds like bullshit,” Lucas said. He looked at Daniel for a moment, then said, “You could do more than contain it . . . but you can’t, can you?”
Daniel turned, uncertain. “What?”
“You can’t have me around. I’d . . .” He looked at Daniel for another long minute, then shook his head and said, “I’m outa here.”
Daniel, still confused, said in a rush, “Do something, Lucas. You’re one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. Go to law school. You’d make a great attorney. You got money: see the world for a while. You’ve never been to fuckin’ Europe . . . .”
As Lucas was going out the door, he stopped, and he turned back again to look at Daniel, who was standing behind his desk, his hands in his pockets. Lucas looked for a long three seconds, opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head and walked out, pulling the door closed behind him.
From the chief’s office he went down to the evidence room, signed for the box on Bekker and started through it. The physical evidence was there—plaster casts of the footprints at the Wisconsin burial site, the pieces of the bottle used to kill Stephanie Bekker, the hammer used to kill Armistead, the notes from Stephanie’s lover.
Tape pickups had been used to preserve the lover’s footprints from the floor of Stephanie Bekker’s bedroom. They’d been sealed in plastic bags, with a label stapled to the top of the bag. They were gone.
After checking out of the evidence room, Lucas got his jacket, locked his office and walked up the stairs to the street level, out past the bizarre but strangely interesting statue of the Father of Waters, and onto the street.
Where to go? He waited for the pull of the guns, down there in the safe in the basement. They’d be glowing, wouldn’t they, like a luminescent brand of gravity . . . .
“Not a lot left, fuckhead,” he said aloud to himself as he wandered toward the corner.
• • •
“Hey, Davenport.” A uniformed cop was calling from the door to City Hall. “Somebody looking for you.”
“I don’t work there anymore,” Lucas shouted back.
“Neither does this one,” said the cop, holding the door open and looking down.
Sarah, in a pink frock and white shoes, toddled through the door looking for him, her face breaking into a happy smile when she spotted him. She had a pacifier in one hand, waved it and gurgled. Jennifer was a step behind, her face flushed with what might have been embarrassment. The whole scene was so blatantly contrived that Lucas started to laugh.
“Come here, kid,” he said, squatting, clapping his hands. Sarah’s face turned determined and she came on full-steam, dashing toward a soft landing in Lucas’ hands.
“So we start talking, if it’s not too late,” Jennifer said as Lucas tossed the kid in the air.
“It’s not too late,” Lucas said.
“The way you were the other night . . .”
“I was full of shit,” Lucas said. “You know about . . . ?”
“Sloan heard rumors, and called me,” Jennifer said. She poked her daughter in the stomach and Sarah clutched Lucas’ neck and grinned back at her mother. “I think Sarah’s got a future in the TV news business. I coached her on going through the door, and she did it like a natural. She even got her lines right.”
“Smart kid . . .”
“When do we talk?”
Lucas looked down the street toward the Metrodome. “I don’t want to do anything today. I just want to sit somewhere and see if I can feel good. There’s a Twins game . . . .”
“Sarah’s never been.”
“You wanna see a game, kid? They ain’t the Cubs, but what the hell.” Lucas lifted Sarah to straddle the back of his neck and she grabbed his ear and him with the pacifier. What felt like a gob of saliva hit him in the part of his hair. “I’ll teach you how to boo. Maybe we can get you a bag to put on your head.”
When Lucas had gone, Daniel gathered his papers together, stacked them, dropped them into his in tray, shut down the computer and took a lap around the office, looking at the faces of his politicians. Hard decisions. Hard.
“Jesus Christ,” the chief said quietly, but aloud. He could hear his heart beating, then a rush of adrenaline, a tincture of fear. But now it was ending, all done.
He stepped back toward his desk, saw the paper wad that Lucas had fired at the wastebasket. He picked it up, meaning to flip it at the basket, and saw the ballpoint ink on the back. He smoothed the paper on his desk.
In Davenport’s clear hand, under the heading “Loverboy”:
–Heavyset, blond with thinning hair. Looks like Philip George.
–Cannot turn himself in, or even negotiate: Cop.
–No hair in drain or on bed: Cop.
–Called me through Dispatch on nontaped line: Cop.
–Extreme voice disguise: Knows me.
–Served with S. Bekker in police review board study.
–Knew Druze was the killer.
–Didn’t call back after advertisement in newspaper and pictures on TV: Already knew Druze was dead and that he was S. Bekker’s killer.
–Had Redon flower painting on calendar; same calendar at Institute of Arts has cyclops painting for November; changed it for weather calendar.
–Assigns fuck-up to chase phony Loverboy.
Then there was a space, and in a scrawl at the bottom, an additional line:
–Has to get rid of me—that’s where IA is coming from . . .
“Jesus Christ,” Daniel said to himself.
He looked up, across the office at the weather calendar, which hung on the wall amid the faces of the politicians, all staring down at him and the crumpled slip of paper. Stunned, he looked out the window again, saw Davenport tossing a kid in the air.
Davenport knew.
Daniel wanted to run down after him. He wanted to say he was sorry.
He couldn’t do that. Instead he sat at his desk, head in his hands, thinking. He hadn’t been able to weep since he was a child.
Loverboy wished, sometimes, that he still knew how.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
SILENT PREY
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1992 by John Sanford
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
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ISBN: 1-101-14624-9
A BERKLEY BOOK®
Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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Berkley and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: May, 2002
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER
1
A thought sparked in the chaos of Bekker’s mind.
The jury.
He caught it, mentally, like a quick hand snatching a fly from midair.
Bekker slumped at the defense table, the center of the circus. His vacant blue eyes rolled back, pale and wide as a plastic baby-doll’s, wandering around the interior of the courtroom, snagging on a light fixture, catching on an electrical outlet, sliding past the staring faces. His hair had been cut jailhouse short, but they had let him keep the wild blond beard. An act of mercy: the beard disguised the tangled mass of pink scar tissue that crisscrossed his face. In the middle of the beard, his pink rosebud lips opened and closed, like an eel’s, damp and glistening.
Bekker looked at the thought he’d caught: The jury. Housewives, retirees, welfare trash. His peers, they called them. A ridiculous concept: he was a doctor of medicine. He stood at the top of his profession. He was respected. Bekker shook his head.
Understand . . . ?
The word tumbled from the judge-crow’s mouth and echoed in his mind. “Do you understand, Mr. Bekker?”
What . . . ?
The idiot flat-faced attorney pulled at Bekker’s sleeve: “Stand up.”
What . . . ?
The prosecutor turned to stare at him, hate in her eyes. The hate touched him, reached him, and he opened his mind and let it flow back. I’d like to have you for five minutes, good sharp scalpel would open you up like a goddamn oyster: zip, zip. Like a goddamn clam.
The prosecutor felt Bekker’s interest. She was a hard woman; she’d put six hundred men and women behind bars. Their petty threats and silly pleas no longer interested her. But she flinched and turned away from Bekker.
What? Standing? Time now?
Bekker struggled back. It was so hard. He’d let himself go during the trial. He had no interest in it. Refused to testify. The outcome was fixed, and he had more serious problems to deal with. Like survival in the cages of the Hennepin County Jail, survival without his medicine.
But now the time had come.
His blood still moved too slowly, oozing through his arteries like strawberry jam. He fought, and simultaneously fought to hide his struggle.
Focus.
And he started, so slowly it was like walking through paste, trudging back to the courtroom. The trial had lasted for twenty-one days, had dominated the papers and the television newscasts. The cameras had ambushed him, morning and night, hitting him in the face with their intolerable lights, the cameramen scuttling backward as they transferred him, in chains, between the jail and the courtroom.
The courtroom was done in blond laminated wood, with the elevated judge’s bench at the head of the room, the jury box to the right, tables for the prosecution and defense in front of the judge. Behind the tables, a long rail divided the room in two. Forty uncomfortable spectator’s chairs were screwed to the floor behind the rail. The chairs were occupied an hour before arguments began, half of them allotted to the press, the other half given out on a first-come basis. All during the trial, he could hear his name passing through the ranks of spectators: Bekker Bekker Bekker.
The jury filed out. None of them looked at him. They’d be secluded, his peers, and after chatting for a decent interval, they’d come back and report him guilty of multiple counts of first-degree murder. The verdict was inevitable. When it was in, the crow would put him away.
The black asshole in the next cell had said it, in his phony street dialect: “They gon slam yo’ nasty ass into Oak Park, m’man. You live in a motherfuckin’ cage the size of a motherfuckin’ refrigerator wit a TV watching you every move. You wanta take a shit, they watchin’ every move, they makin’ movies of it. Nobody ever git outa Oak Park. It is a true motherfucker.”
But Bekker wasn’t going. The thought set him off again, and he shook, fought to control it.
Focus . . .
He focused on the small parts: The gym shorts biting into the flesh at his waist. The razor head pressed against the back of his balls. The Sox cap, obtained in a trade for cigarettes, tucked under his belt. His feet sweating in the ridiculous running shoes. Running shoes and white socks with his doctor’s pinstripes—he looked a fool and he knew it, hated it. Only a moron would wear white socks with pinstripes, but white socks and running shoes . . . no. People would be laughing at him.
He could have worn his wing tips, one last time—a man is innocent until proven guilty—but he refused. They didn’t understand that. They thought it was another eccentricity, the plastic shoes with the seven-hundred-dollar suit. They didn’t know.
Focus.
Everyone was standing now, the crow-suit staring, the attorney pulling at his sleeve. And here was Raymond Shaltie . . .
“On your feet,” Shaltie said sharply, leaning over him. Shaltie was a sheriff’s deputy, an overweight time-server in an ill-fitting gray uniform.
“How long?” Bekker asked the attorney, looking up, struggling to get the words out, his tongue thick in his mouth.
“Shhh . . .”
The judge was talking, looking at them: “ . . . standing by, and if you leave your numbers with my office, we’ll get in touch as soon as we get word from the jury . . .”
The attorney nodded, looking straight ahead. He wouldn’t meet Bekker’s eyes. Bekker had no chance. In his heart, the attorney didn’t want him to have a chance. Bekker was nuts. Bekker needed prison. Prison forever and several days more.
“How long?” Bekker asked again. The judge had disappeared into her chambers. Like to get her, too.
“Can’t tell. They’ll have to consider the separate counts,” the attorney said. He was court-appointed, needed the money. “We’ll come get you . . .”
Pig’s eye, they would.
“Let’s go,” said Shaltie. He took Bekker’s elbow, dug his fingertips into the nexus of nerves above Bekker’s elbow, an old jailer’s trick to establish dominance. Unknowingly, Shaltie did Bekker a favor. With the sudden sharp pulse of pain, Bekker snapped all the way back, quick and hard, like a handclap.
His eyes flicked once around the room, his mind cold, its usual chaos squeezed into a high-pressure corner, wild thoughts raging like rats in a cage. Calculating. He put pain in his voice, a childlike plea: “I need to go . . . .”
“Okay.” Shaltie nodded. Ray Shaltie wasn’t a bad man. He’d worked the courts for two decades, and the experience had mellowed him—allowed him to see the human side of even the worst of men. And Bekker was the worst of men.
But Bekker was nevertheless human, Shaltie believed: He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone. . . . Bekker was a man gone wrong, but still a man. And in words that bubbled from his mouth in a whiny singsong, Bekker told Shaltie about his hemorrhoids. Jail food was bad for them, Bekker said. All cheese and bread and pasta. Not enough roughage. He had to go . . . .
He always used the bathroom at noon, all through the twenty-one days of the trial. Raymond Shaltie sympathized: he’d had them himself. Shaltie took Bekker by the arm and led him past the now empty jury box, Bekker shuffling, childlike, eyes unfocused. At the door, Shaltie turned him—docile, quiet, apparently gone to another world—and put on the handcuffs and then the leg chains. Another deputy watched the process, and when Bekker was locked up, drifted away, thinking of lunch.
“Gotta go,” Bekker said. His eyes turned up to Ray Shaltie.
“You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” Shaltie said. Shaltie’s tie had soup stains on it, and flakes of dandruff spotted his shoulders: an oaf, Bekker thought. Shaltie led Bekker out of the courtroom, Bekker doing the jailhouse shuffle, his legs restricted to a thirty-inch stride. Behind the courtroom, a narrow hallway led to an internal stairway, and from there, to a holding cell. But to the left, through a service door, was a tiny employees-only men’s room, with a sink, a urinal, a single stall.
Shaltie followed Bekker into the men’s room. “Now, you’re okay . . .” A warning in his voice. Ray Shaltie was too old to fight.
“Yes,” Bekker said, his pale-blue eyes wandering in their sockets. Behind the wandering eyes, his mind was moving easily now, the adrenaline acting on his brain like a dose of the purest amphetamine. He turned, lifted his arms up and back, thrusting his wrists at Shaltie. Shaltie fitted the key, uncuffed the prisoner: Shaltie was breaking the rules, but a man can’t wipe himself if he’s wearing handcuffs. Besides, where would Bekker go, high up here in the government building, with the leg chains? He couldn’t run. And his wildly bearded face was, for the moment at least, the most recognizable face in the Cities.
Bekker shuffled into the stall, shut the door, dropped his trousers, sat down. Eyes sharp now, focused. They used disposable safety razors in the jail, Bics. He’d broken the handle off one, leaving only the head and a stub, easy to hide during the shakedowns. When he’d had a chance, he’d burned the stub with a match, rounding the edges, to make it more comfortable to wear. This morning he’d taped it under his balls, fixed with the end of a Band-Aid. Now he peeled the razor off himself, pulled the remaining tape off the razor, and began hacking at his beard.
He’d grown the beard to cover his furrowed face. Bekker, once so beautiful, the possessor of a classic Nordic face, a pale, uninflected oval with rose lips, had been beaten into a grotesque gnome, torn to pieces and only poorly repaired. Davenport. Get Davenport. The fantasy seized him: opening Davenport, using the knife to peel the face, lifting the skin off inch by inch . . . .
He fought it: fantasies were for the lockup. He forced Davenport out of his mind and continued shaving, quickly, raggedly, the razor scraping over his dry skin. The pain prompted a groan. Outside the stall, Shaltie winced.
“ ’Bout done in there?” Shaltie called. The bathroom smelled of ammonia, chlorine, urine, and wet mops.
“Yes, Ray.” Bekker dropped the razor in his jacket pocket, then worked on the toilet-paper holder. Originally, it had been held in place with four screws. He’d removed and flushed two of them during the first three days of the trial, and had worked the other two loose. He’d actually had them out the day before, to make sure the holder would pull free. It had. Now he removed the screws one last time, dropped them in the toilet and eased the paper-holder free from the wall. When he grasped it by the roller, it fit his hand like a steel boxing glove.
“Okay now, Ray.” Bekker stood, pulled his pants up, pulled off his jacket, dropped the coat over the iron fist, flushed the toilet. Took a breath. Put his head down, as though he were looking at his fly. Opened the door. Shuffled forward.
Shaltie was waiting with the cuffs: jowly, freckled, slow on the uptake. “Turn around . . . .”
Seeing Bekker’s face, realizing: “Hey . . .”
Bekker was half-turned, wound up. He dropped the jacket, his right hand whipping like a lash, his mouth open, his white teeth flashing in the fluorescence. Shaltie lurched back, tried to cover with a hand. Too late, too late. The stainless-steel club hit him above the ear: Shaltie went down, cracking the back of his head on the porcelain sink as he fell.
And then Bekker was on him, lifting the steel fist, smashing it down, lifting it, feeling Shaltie’s skull crack, the blood spatter.
Hit hit hit hit . . .
The synapses of Bekker’s brain lit with the static sparks. He fought it, fought for control, but it was hard, the smell of fresh blood in his nose. He stopped swinging, found his left hand on Shaltie’s throat. Pulled the hand away, half stood, brain not quite right: He said aloud, shushing himself, “Shhh. Shhhhhh,” finger to his lips.
He straightened. His blood was running like water now, like steam, filling him. Now what? Door. He hobbled to the door, flipped the catch. Locked. Good. He went back to Shaltie, who was supine on the tile floor, blowing blood bubbles through his torn nose. Bekker had watched the deputy handle his keys, and the keys had gone in Shaltie’s right pocket . . . . He found them, popped the locks on the leg chains. Free. Free.
Stop. He brought himself back, looked in the mirror. His face was a mess. He retrieved the razor from his jacket pocket, splashed water and liquid soap on his face and raked the razor across it. Listened to Shaltie, breathing, a gargling moan. Shaltie’s head lay in a puddle of blood, and Bekker could smell it.
Bekker threw the razor in a trash basket, turned, stooped, caught Shaltie under the shoulders, dragged him to the toilet stall, sat him on the toilet and propped him against the wall. Shaltie made a snoring sound and more blood bubbled from his nose. Bekker ignored him. Not much time.
He stripped off his suit pants, put the Sox hat on his head, and used the pants to wipe up the blood on the floor. When he finished, he threw the pants, jacket, shirt and tie over Shaltie’s body. Checked himself in the mirror: green tank top, red shorts, gym shoes, hat. A jogger. The face was bad, but nobody had seen him close up, without a beard, for weeks. A few of the cops would know him, a couple of lawyers. But with any luck, they wouldn’t be looking at joggers.
Davenport. The thought stopped him. If Davenport was out there, had come to see the verdict, Bekker was a dead man.
No help for that. He threw off the thought, took a breath. Ready. He stepped inside the stall with Shaltie, locked it, dropped to his back, slid under the door, stood up again.
“Motherfucker.” He said it out loud, had learned it in jail: the standard, all-purpose curse. He dropped back on the floor, slid halfway under the stall, groped for Shaltie’s wallet. Found it, checked it. Twelve dollars. One credit card, a Visa. Not good. Money could be a problem . . . . He slipped the wallet into his underpants, went to the door, listened.
Could hear Shaltie breathing, bubbling. Bekker thought about going back into the stall, strangling him with his belt. All the humiliations of the past weeks, the torture when they took away his chemicals . . . Not enough time. Time was hurting him now. Had to move.
He left Shaltie living, turned the lock knob, peered into the hallway. The internal corridor was empty. Went to the next door—public hall. Half-dozen people, all down at the public end, near the elevators, talking. He wouldn’t have to walk past them. The stairs were the other way: he could see the exit sign, just beyond the fire hose.
Another breath. And move. He stepped out into the hall, head down. A lunchtime bureaucrat-jogger on his way outside. He walked confidently down the hall to the stairs, away from the elevators. Waiting for a shout. For someone to point a finger. For running feet.
He was in the stairway. Nobody took the stairs, not from this high up . . . .
He ran down, counting the floors. As he passed six, a door slammed somewhere below and he heard somebody walking down ahead of him. He padded softly behind, heard another door open and shut, and stepped up the pace again. At the main level, he stopped and looked out. Dozens of people milled through the reception area. Okay. This was the second floor. He needed one more. He went down another level, and found an unmarked steel door. He pushed it open. He was outside, standing on the plaza. The summer sun was brilliant, the breeze smelled of popcorn and pigeons. A woman sitting on a bench, a kid next to her. She was cutting an apple with a penknife, her kid waiting for the apple.
