Joyride (13 page)

At three fifteen Covitski was dreaming about a bust.

Not his wife Mae’s lying there dreaming beside him, which was substantial. No. A burglary bust.

Somebody had broken into a home very much like the Gardner home and had stolen the following: one hundred dollars in rolled-up quarters, untraceable, a thousand dollars’ worth of ladies’ shoes, and steaks from the downstairs freezer, also untraceable, five thousand dollars’ worth of camera gear and computer equipment, very rough to trace if the guy was any good at his work—and a parrot.

Hell, they were never going to find
any
of this shit!

And then there he is walking by the Tats Are Us Tattoo Emporium—which doesn’t exist—it seems like only a second later, the fastest investigation in the history of the world, and he sees this parrot in the window.

He opens the door and the parrot is whistling. The theme is instantly familiar. The owner of the parrot, the shoes, the steaks, the electronics gear and the rolls of quarters has told him the parrot sings
exactly this song.
And
only
this song. The theme from
The Andy Griffith Show.
Dada-
DAT-DAA
-da-da-dat-
DAA
-da-da-dat…

He makes his arrest on the spot.

It’s a moment to remember. A moment of absolute purity, of happiness and yes, it’s time to party!

Then his phone rings.

Not in his dream but in real life, such as it is.

Mae rolls over. “God damn it,” she mutters. She adjusts her curlers on the side she’s sleeping on now and before Covitski can get the phone off the stand and up to his ear she’s out again.

God bless her.

“Yeah.”

It’s Rule.

“Covitski, we’re on again.”

“Ah Jesus…”

“We got a witness to murder, Covitski. And Lock’s gone interstate.”

“He’s interstate?”

“Right.”

“How do we know?”

“Girl and her boyfriend met up with him just outside of Plymouth some time before midnight, eleven thirty maybe. He pulled a gun on them but used a hammer on the boyfriend. Raped her and left her there for dead. Plymouth DA’s office says she’s talking a blue streak, enough particulars to convict him half a dozen times, mad as hell and tough as they come.

“The thing I don’t like, she says he was alone. No passengers.”

“No Gardner and no Edwards.”

“Right. But then, get this. They had a drive-by in Hanover just a few hours earlier. Some kid. Right in the goddamn center of town. Weapon, a .357 Magnum…”

“So
there’s
the Magnum! He’s screwing around with weapons, with MOs.”

“That’s right.”

“Any ID on the car?”

“Nobody saw it. But you can bet it’s our guy. Listen, I’m leaving now. How soon can you meet me?”

“I can be out of here in ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Try for ten, okay?”

“You got it.”

He slipped his pants over the day-old shorts. Who gave a shit.

Two more dead, he thought. Some poor girl raped. And the two passengers, male and female, disappeared.

It was fucking grim. It really was.

Still—he could almost hear the parrot.

Wayne turned on the overhead light.

He took out his pad.

He began to read the names.

Lepke radioed it in just past the New Hampshire state border near Bradford and read them the plates.

He had his instructions.
Follow, do not apprehend. Repeat. Do not apprehend.

That was fine with him.

They were sending in the troops. Fine.

He was a highway cop in a cruiser. Nobody told him that hero was part of the job description.

He wondered if the guy in the Volvo was headed back to Barstow. You never knew with loonies. And judging from the dispatches this one was a certified Toon. Drive-bys, rape. The whole nine yards.

He was tailing one of the bad guys. One of the
real
bad guys. It felt pretty good.

There was nobody much on the road so he dropped back a ways. So far he felt sure the guy hadn’t made him but he was riding a cherry and the guy wasn’t blind. There was somebody coming up behind him, moving slowly up on his left, he could see the headlights in the rearview mirror. Maybe he could get this citizen here between them. He’d be much less conspicuous. He dropped back.

The citizen was driving a brand-new Mazda, blue. Lepke glanced over. A male suit in his late forties. The guy crept past Lepke the way they always do passing a cop, signaled nicely and got into lane ahead of him.

Very good.

And they cruised along that way for a while.

Then the Mazda got antsy. You couldn’t blame him—the Volvo wasn’t exactly going hell bent for leather, the guy was doing maybe five to seven under the limit. The Mazda signaled and pulled out into the fast lane.

Lepke watched him crawl up parallel to the Volvo, real slow, still aware of the cruiser behind him.

Watch, he thought, another mile or so, another hill between them, and the Mazda would be up to seventy. Like Lepke wouldn’t know this. Like all cops are dummies.

He could scoot over the hill and take the Mazda in three minutes flat.

He was thinking this and picturing it and thinking that another time and he’d have done exactly that when something that sounded like a fucking cannon went off ahead of him,
Jesus
! and he saw the glint of metal out the Volvo’s driver’s-side window and saw the splash of glass and something else, something dark and wet, bursting out of the Mazda.

And then three things happened simultaneously.

The Mazda started to drift, decelerating rapidly but still doing maybe forty, forty-five, toward the metal guardrail that separated the northbound from the southbound lanes. The guy was leaning on his horn. Something was.

And the Volvo was picking up speed. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five on the radar. And Lepke had to wonder if the guy hadn’t made him as a cop from square one.

He was reaching for his mike and hitting the emergency channel and tromping on the gas pedal himself, deciding he had no choice now but to go after the crazy bastard, when the Mazda hit the rail.

And the timing was all fucked up.

Because the Mazda ground screeching, sparks flying, up against the rail for five or six feet and then turned and drifted back, aimless as a poleaxed steer into his lane at about thirty miles per hour, did this just as Lepke was about to pass him—and he couldn’t judge whether to hit the brakes or not it was so fast and close so he just kept going, accelerating, going after the son of a bitch, praying that this speed was exactly the right speed, and he heard his call numbers on the radio
come in come in
as the Mazda rammed his door and caved it in on him.

He felt his legs go first and then his ribs and then his forearm snap against the steering wheel, all in rapid-fire succession, the steering wheel snapping too, and then he was spinning in some screeching-metal waltz with the Mazda a full three hundred and sixty degrees and there were flames licking at him bursting over him pinned there, clothes going, seared into his body,
becoming
his body, hair going, eyes already beginning to fucking fry inside him as he screamed and writhed and screamed and glanced through the splintered windshield and saw the last thing he would ever see.

The empty highway. The hill. The Volvo gone.

There was as much energy in the room as Rule had ever seen there and it was four in the morning.

Hamsun, called in with no more sleep than Rule had gotten, which was none, was in his cubicle with the door wide open, on the phone to the State Highway Patrol. There were cops on phones taking reports, and other cops filing them, typewriters going like a secretarial pool. Somehow the press had gotten wind of it, and papers were calling from as far away as New York City. The phones were ringing like they were holding a telethon in there.

Wayne-Aid.

When Covitski walked in, he’d just gotten off the line to Bradford.

“You ready?” he said. “He killed a cop.”

“He what?”

“He killed a cop.” Rule gave him the thumbnail. “Look,” he said.

He got up and walked to the wall map.

“This guy is pretty strange. First we make him here on 89 heading down toward Montpelier. Then he’s across the state line into Hanover; he shoots the kid there with the Magnum. Next he’s all the way over in Plymouth. Rapes one student, kills another. And finally here. Across the line again out of Bradford.”

“He’s making a circle.”

“Looks like it. He sure as hell isn’t headed for Mexico.”

“What’ve we got going?”

“We’ve got cars at his house, the Gardner place, Susan Olsen’s, and his mother’s rest home, though that’s one hell of a long shot. We’ve got an interstate APB so that the entire east coast from D.C. up to Canada is keeping an eye out for him.

“A red Volvo, for chrissake. The crazy son of a bitch doesn’t even have the sense to switch cars.

“And the feds are in this, too. Once he crossed the border with Gardner and Edwards, he bought himself a federal kidnap rap along with everything else. It’s a matter of time. We’ll get him.”

“What now?”

“We do what everybody else is doing. We answer the phone. We wait. The feds will be over in about”—he checked his watch—“twenty minutes. Pick our brains. Wonderful, right? You want some coffee?”

“I’m thinking about Edwards and the Gardner woman. It doesn’t look good, does it.”

“No. Not with five dead that we know of it doesn’t.”

The phone rang. Covitski sat down and picked it up.

“Black,” he said.

“Huh?”

“The coffee. Make it black.”

He saw them the moment he turned onto his street. The car was unmarked, but he knew who they were.

He could practically smell them.

He cut his lights and crawled to a stop. Parked the Volvo half a block down.

He reached into the backseat, found what he needed, and then got out and quietly closed the door.

He heard someone pounding inside on the lid of the trunk. That meant they were still alive. He was glad they were alive. He wanted them alive.

His witnesses.

The streetlight had gone out a week ago and no one had been around to fix it yet. That was a problem living in this part of town. But now, of course, it was all to his advantage. He thought that even the town itself was playing right into his hands.

It was only right. The town belonged to him.

He stayed close to the hedges. There was a little boy and a little girl living here in this house. Twins. They were probably seven years old. Across the street a pair of old ladies, spinsters. He kept moving.

He stopped in front of the Crocker house. The woman was named Rebecca and the man was called Lance. What in hell kind of a name was Lance? They kept a nice place, you had to give them that. The lawn was neatly
trimmed. He would see the man out there mowing every Saturday.

They were in his book, though, because of the name. The name offended him.

The car was directly in front of him, parked by Ed Schorr’s. Ed was all right. He worked in the post office. Whenever he went in there for stamps or something, Ed was very efficient and had a pleasant manner. It was his wife who was a bitch. She wore too-tight dresses and too much makeup and when you smiled at her she didn’t smile back. Like she was somebody. And not the wife of some fucking postal clerk.

The two policemen were sitting with the windows open, the idiots. Of course, it was hot. But they were making it easy. He knew exactly how it was going to play.

He stepped over.

Treat and Burkeman were still fresh.

They were used to the night shift and they’d only been sitting there an hour and a half. In fact, Treat, behind the wheel, still had almost half a cup of 7-Eleven coffee in his hand.

Burkeman had finished his, along with a jelly roll and a two-pack of Twinkies. Burkeman liked junk food, which partly accounted for the fact that at thirty-three he still had problems with his complexion. Zits grew on him during the night like toadstools. He kept his face scrupulously clean, but it didn’t help. Zits liked him. What could you do.

They were talking about Willie Bly, a cop who had unloaded on a bunch of teenagers three nights earlier after sitting at Logan’s all day drinking whiskey. Yelling
at the kids, calling them every name in the book because they were out there smoking cigarettes and leaning on his ten-year-old Chevy when he came out of the bar. Bly loved that Chevy and he hated teenagers. The fact that he had three of his own probably had something to do with it.

The teenagers complained to their parents and their parents complained to Bly’s supervisor and now Bly was suspended for a week. The fact that one of the kids was a councilman’s daughter probably had something to do with that, too.

Burkeman thought it was unfair. But Treat held that Bly was going to have to learn to keep his trap shut someday, anyhow—did Burkeman remember when Bly called Hamsun, a fucking captain for chrissake,
that lardass no-Dick Tracy?

In front of half the squad room?

Burkeman did, and they were laughing over that and Treat was sipping at his tepid coffee when the guy came out of nowhere and leaned in through Burkeman’s window, smiling, and stabbed him in the throat with an eightinch high-carbon stainless steel kitchen knife, pushed it all the way through so that Treat was looking at three inches of bloody steel sticking out of his partner’s neck as he dropped his coffee and reached for his gun and the guy brought up his other hand and popped him one in the forehead.

Burkeman was still alive then, barely, knife and all. Enough so that he saw the two inches of green rubber garden hose the guy had used as a home-made silencer fall off into his lap, thinking,
Jesus I’m fucked, I’m truly fucked,
and then
What the hell is that?
as he looked down stunned at the length of hose and Treat bounced off the
driver’s-side door and slumped over onto Burkeman’s shoulder, a neat little hole in the center of his forehead oozing blood. He had just time to be aware of all this, hands moving sluggish, slow-motion to his neck, when the guy reached in and took the handle of the knife and pulled it forward. He felt his windpipe go and the guy tugged again and he saw the spray.

And that was that, thought Wayne, for their silly outpost.