1990 - Mine v4 (43 page)

"Slow down," Didi cautioned. "Don't let him see us. Bastard might try to run us off the road."

"He's after Mary. He doesn't want us." Even so, Laura cut her speed and lagged a hundred yards behind the Buick and off to the right.

"I don't trust anybody who fires a bullet close enough for me to hear. Some FBI agent, huh? He didn't care if he hit David or not."

And that was the terrible truth of it, Laura thought. Earl Van Diver was hunting Mary, not to arrest her for her crimes, but to execute her. Whether he killed David or not made no difference to him. His bullets were meant for Mary, but as long as Mary had David, one of those bullets might rip through him just as easily as through her. Laura stayed far behind the Buick, and after a couple of miles she watched it pull over toward an exit ramp on the right.

"Getting off," Didi said. "Good riddance."

Laura eased the BMW over, following Van Diver toward the ramp. "What the hell are you doing?" Didi demanded. "You're not getting off, are you?"

"That's just what I'm doing."

"Why? We could still catch up with Mary!"

"And we still can," Laura said. "But I don't want that bastard catching up with her first. If he stops at a gas station, we're going to take his keys."

"Yeah, right!
You
take his keys! Damn it, you're asking to get shot!"

"We'll see," Laura said, and she turned onto the ramp in the wake of Van Diver's car.

In the Buick, Earl Van Diver was watching the monitor under his dashboard. A little red light was flashing, indicating a magnetic fix. The liquid crystal display read SSW 208 2.3: compass heading, bearing, miles between the main unit and the homer. As he came off the ramp's curve, he saw the display change to SW 196 2.2. He followed the road that led south from I-94, passing a sign that said LAWTON, 3 MI.

"He's not stopping for gas," Didi said. Van Diver had gone straight past a Shell station on one side of the road and an Exxon on the other. "He's taking the scenic route."

"Why'd he get off, then? If he's so hell-bent on catching Mary, why'd he get off?" She kept a car and a pickup truck between them as she followed. They'd gone maybe two miles when Laura saw a blue building with a garish orange roof off to the left. INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PANCAKES, its sign announced. The Buick's brake lights flashed, the turn indicator went on, and Van Diver made the turn into the IHOP's parking lot.

Van Diver's savage grin twitched. The olive-green van, its left side battered and scraped, was sitting in the parking lot between a junker Olds and a Michigan Power panel truck. Van Diver swung the Buick into a parking space up close to the building, where he could watch the exit. He cut the engine and unplugged the monitor, which read NNE 017 0.01.

Close enough
, he thought.

Van Diver put on his black gloves, his fingers long and spidery. Then he slid the Browning automatic from beneath his seat, clicked the safety off, and held it against his right thigh. He waited, his dark eyes on the IHOP's door. It opened in a few seconds, and two men in blue parkas and caps came out, their breath frosty in the morning air. They walked toward the Michigan Power panel truck. Come on, come on! he thought. He'd figured he could be patient after all these years. But his patience had run out, and that was why he'd hurried the first shot that had hit Edward Fordyce instead of Mary Terror's skull.

The skin prickled on the back of his neck. Van Diver sensed movement behind him and to his left. His head swiveled in that direction, his hand coming up with the Browning in it and his heart hammering.

He looked into the snout of a pistol pressed against the window's glass, and behind it stood the woman he'd first seen on the newscasts from Atlanta and later had met in Bedelia Morse's kitchen.

She wasn't a killer. She was a social columnist for the Atlanta
Constitution
, and she was married to a stockbroker. She had, up until the kidnapping of her baby, never felt the agony of heartrending pain. She had never suffered. All these things Earl Van Diver knew, and weighed in the balance as he prepared to bring his gun up and fire through the window at her. His shot would be faster and more deadly because she didn't have the courage to kill a man in cold blood.

But he didn't do it. He didn't, because of what he saw in Laura Clayborne's bruised face. Not hopelessness, not pleading, not weakness. He saw desperation and rage there, emotions he knew all too well. He might get off the first shot, but she would certainly deliver the second. Bedelia Morse suddenly reached past Laura and opened the door before Van Diver could hit the lock. "Put the gun down," Laura said. Her voice was tight and strained. Could she shoot him if she had to? She didn't know, and she hoped to God she wouldn't have to find out. Van Diver just sat there, grinning at her with his frozen face, his eyes dark and alert as a rattlesnake's. "Put it down!" Laura repeated. "On the floor!"

"Take the clip out first," Didi added.

"Yeah. Like she said."

Van Diver looked at the automatic in Laura's hand. He saw it shake a little, her finger on the trigger. When Van Diver moved, both women flinched. He popped the bullet clip out of his Browning, held it in his palm, and put the gun on the floorboard. "Take your keys and get out of the car," Didi told him, and he obeyed.

Laura glanced over at Mary Terror's van and then back to Van Diver. "How'd you know she was here?"

Van Diver remained silent, just staring at her with his fathomless eyes. He'd taken off his woolen cap, and his scalp was bald except for a few long strands of gray hair pressed down on the skin, a fringe of gray-and-brown hair around his head. He was slim and wiry, standing about five ten, by no means a large man. But Laura knew his strength from painful experience. Earl Van Diver was a taut package of muscle and bone powered by hatred.

"What's the antenna for?" Didi asked. She had already checked out the Buick's interior. "There's no car phone."

No answer. "The bastard can't talk without his throat plug," Didi realized. "Where's your plug, shitface? You can point, can't you?" No reaction. Didi said, "Give me your gun," and took it from Laura. She stepped forward and jammed the pistol up against Earl Van Diver's testicles, and she looked him right in his cold eyes. "Came to Ann Arbor to find me, didn't you? What were you doing? Staking out my house?" She shoved the gun's barrel a little harder. "How'd you find me?" Van Diver's face was a motionless mask, but a twisted vein at his left temple was beating fast and hard. Didi saw a garbage dumpster back toward the rear of the IHOP, where a patch of woods sloped down to a drainage ditch. "We're not going to get anything out of him. He's nothing but an" — she pressed her face closer to his — "old fucked-up pig." The
pig
sprayed bits of spittle onto Van Diver's cheeks, and his eyes blinked. "Let's walk." She pushed him toward the dumpster, the gun moving to jam against his back.

"What are you going to do?" Laura asked nervously.

"You don't want him following Mary, do you? We're going to take him into the woods and shoot him. A bullet in one of his knees ought to take care of the problem. He won't get too far crawling."

"No! I don't want that!"

"
I
want it," Didi said, shoving Van Diver forward. "Son of a bitch killed Edward. Almost killed us and the baby, too. Move, you bastard!"

"No, Didi! We can't do it!"

"You won't have to. I'm paying Edward's debt, that's all. I said
move
, you fucking pig!" She punched him hard in the small of the back with the gun's barrel, and he grunted and staggered forward a few paces.

Earl Van Diver lifted his hands. Then he pointed to his throat and moved his finger toward the Buick's trunk,

"Now he wants to talk," Didi said. Under her clothes she had broken out in a cold sweat. She would have shot him if she'd had to, but the idea of violence made her stomach clench. "Open it," she told him. "Real slow." She kept the gun against his back as he unlocked the trunk. Laura and Didi saw the listening dish, the tape recorder, and the sniper's rifle. Van Diver opened a small gray plastic case and took out a cord with a plug on one end and a miniature speaker on the other. He slid the plug's prongs into his throat socket with practiced ease, and then he clicked a switch on the back of the speaker and adjusted a volume control. He lifted the speaker up before Didi's face.

His mouth moved, the veins standing out in his throat. "The last person who called me a pig," the metallic voice rasped, "fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. You knew him by one of his names: Raymond Fletcher."

The name stunned her for a few seconds. Dr. Raymond Fletcher had done the plastic surgery on her face.

"Walk to the car." Didi slammed the Buick's trunk shut and shoved Van Diver toward the BMW. When Van Diver was in the backseat with Didi beside him, the gun trained on him, and Laura sitting behind the wheel, Didi said, "Okay, I want to hear it. How'd you find me?"

Van Diver watched the IHOP's door, but his voice filtered through the speaker in his hand. "A policeman friend of mine was working undercover on Fletcher in Miami, trying to catch him doing surgery on people who wanted to disappear. Fletcher called himself Raymond Barnes, and he was working on a lot of Mafia and federal-case clients. My friend was a computer hacker. He cracked Barnes's computer files and dug around in them. Everything was in code, and it took maybe five months to figure it out. Barnes kept all his case records, back to when he'd first started in 'seventy. Your name came up, and the work you'd had done in St. Louis. That's when I got involved. Unofficially." His black eyes fixed on Didi. "By the time I got to Miami, my friend was found floating in Biscayne Bay with his face blowtorched. So I went to visit the good doctor, and we went to his office to have a nice long talk."

"He didn't know where I was!" Didi said. "I'd moved three times since I had my face changed!"

"You came to Barnes with a letter of recommendation from an ex-Weatherman named Stewart McGalvin. Stewart lived in Philadelphia. He taught classes in pottery. It's amazing what surgical instruments can do, isn't it?"

Didi swallowed thickly. "What happened to Stewart?"

"Oh," the voice from the speaker said, "he drowned himself in the bathtub. He was the tight-lipped type. His wife… well, she must've shot herself in the head when she found him."

"You
son of a bitch
!" Didi shouted, and she pressed the gun's barrel against his throat socket.

"Careful," the speaker's voice cautioned. "I'm sensitive there."

"You killed my friends! I ought to blow your damned head off!"

"You won't," Van Diver said calmly. "Maybe you could cripple me, but you don't have any killing left in you, Bedelia. How did you put it? 'I didn't need a prison cell. I cany one around with me.' I got into your house to plant a microphone bug. I've been watching your house for almost four years, Bedelia. I even moved from New Jersey to be close to you."

"How'd you find me if Stewart didn't tell you anything?"

"His wife remembered you. You'd sent her a set of plates. Nice work. She mailed you a check for six cups to go with them. She had the canceled check, made out to Diane Daniells. The First Bank of Ann Arbor's stamp was on the back, and your signature. When I saw you for the first time, Bedelia, I wanted to sing. Do you understand how a person can love someone and hate them at the same time?"

"No."

"I can. See, you were always a rung on the ladder. That's all. You were a hope — however slim — to find Mary Terror. I watched you come and go, I checked your mailbox, I camped in the woods outside your house. And when you went on your trip, I knew something important was going on. You'd never left Ann Arbor before. Mary was in the news. I knew. I
knew
." The voice through the speaker was terrible, and bright tears glistened in Earl Van Diver's eyes. "This is what my life is about, Bedelia," he said. "Executing Mary Terror."

Laura had been listening with fascinated horror, and at that moment she saw the object of Van Diver's attention emerge from the IHOP with David's bassinet in her arms.

"Mary," Van Diver's voice whispered. A tear streaked down his cheek, over the gnarled scar tissue of his mouth. "There you are."

Mary had just finished her meal of pancakes, eggs, hash browns, and two cups of black coffee. She'd fed Drummer, and changed his diaper in the bathroom. Drummer was content now, sucking on his pacifier, a little bundle of warmth. "Good baby," Mary said. "You're a good baby boy, aren't —" And then she looked up and saw the BMW sitting there in the parking lot, not far from her van, and her legs seized up. She saw Laura Clayborne at the wheel, Didi sitting in the back with a man she didn't recognize. "Goddamn it!" she snarled. How the hell had they found her? She held Drummer with one arm, and her other hand snaked into her shoulder bag and touched the Colt, the Compact Magnum automatic farther down amid the baby things. Blow out the tires! she thought, enraged. Shoot that bitch in the face, and kill Didi, too! She took a couple of strides toward the BMW, but then she stopped. The sounds of the shots would bring other people out of the IHOP. Somebody would get her tag number. No, she couldn't open fire here. It would be stupid, when she knew at last where Lord Jack was waiting. Smiling thinly, she walked to the BMW and Laura Clayborne got out.

They stood about twenty feet apart, like two wary animals, as the wind swirled around them and sliced to their bones. Laura's gaze found a Smiley Face button on Mary's sweater, pinned over the heart.

Mary brought the Colt out and rested it against Drummer's side, because she saw that Didi was holding a gun. "You must have good radar," she said to Laura.

"I'll follow you all the way to California if I have to."

"You
will
have to." She looked at the
Go home
scratched on the windshield. "Somebody gave you some good advice. You ought to go home before you get hurt."

Laura saw the woman's bloodshot eyes, her face lined and weary. "You can't keep driving without sleep. Sooner or later you'll nod off behind the wheel."