Some murmuring: "Back from the door. Three, two, three, two. From the door." Clyde fell quiet. The silence stretched itself out and out, and just as David was certain Clyde had hung up, he spoke. His voice came low and growling. "I'll make you quiver," he said. "I'll make you beg."
"Try it," David said.
The sound of Clyde spitting came through loud and clear. When he spoke again, his voice was eerily calm. "It's gonna get worse. A lot worse."
A chill ran through David's body from his scalp to the soles of his feet. Good, he thought. Then let's play.
The line had gone dead.
His heart was pounding--good competitive bursts of adrenaline.
When Ed returned David's page seconds later, David simply said, "Bingo." Ed called back three minutes later and said, "Pay phone at the Chevron at Venice and Lincoln. Clyde's old stamping grounds."
"What? He hasn't left the area? I've got to head over. I'll call Yale now."
"And say what? Based on an illegal phone trace, you have reason to believe that an escaped felon placed a phone call from a gas station? Don't bite the hand that's dealing you, Spier. That's our deal."
"So what do we do?"
"First, we slow down. We figure out what new information we've gleaned from the phone call."
David started to protest but held his tongue, remembering the last time Ed walked him through this exercise and the helpful information it yielded. "Okay. . . . He's probably hiding in an area near the pay phone."
"Why?"
"His face has been on the cover of the LA Times six times in the past week, plus there's an APB out on his car. It's daytime, so there's no way he'd risk a big trip. The farther he travels from his hiding place, the higher risk he runs of being spotted."
"Unless he knew the call was being traced and is purposefully misdirecting the investigation."
"You're right," David said. "That's an option."
"What else?"
"He was no longer slurring when he spoke. That means he probably hasn't been taking lithium, just as we hypothesized, so his blood level is dropping. That makes him more menacing physically, because his balance problems will disappear. He'll be able to run and drive more effectively, as we already surmised. Plus, it makes him more menacing psychologically, because whatever benefit the lithium was providing in reducing his violent tendencies--if it did at all--is now gone."
"And perhaps he filled up his tank," Ed added, "which would explain why he was at the gas station. We're assuming he doesn't have any money, but if he does, you might look at new apartment rentals in the area."
"He's an addicted smoker. If he'd risk going out for gas, he'd probably also risk heading out for cigarettes. I'll go down there with his newspaper photo and ask around at 7-Elevens and Quickie-Marts. And the gas station too, obviously. First thing that yields, I'll call Yale. Then I'll have a concrete reason for red-flagging the area for the cops."
"And if you spot Clyde? What are you gonna do?"
"Talk him in."
"Oh that's right. I forgot how well versed you are in hostage negotiations and combat tactics."
"Sarcasm suits you better when you're in drag, Ed."
"I am not fucking around here, Spier. Watch your ass."
The small concrete storage unit stayed cold, so cold Clyde curled into the fetal position on the cigarette-burnt cushioning of the front seat of his car, his abundant rear end pushed against the driver's door, the cool Beretta pressed to his cheek. The ocean was far enough away that its hypnotic sounds were lost beneath the hum of electric lines and the whir of passing cars, yet close enough that the chill had crept off its surface last night and slunk its way through the streets of Venice, a malicious mist.
Clyde turned and grunted, adjusting his arms under his head. Frustration and then anger found their way into the small noises he made as he shifted. He got out of the car and circled it a few times in the enclosed space. He pulled two cigarettes from a pack of Marlboros in the glove box and smoked them until the cherries singed his lips. Using the tip of the pistol, he slid his dirty T-shirt up and gazed at the pattern of alkali burns across his chest. They looked fearsome, with white, dead skin flaking off around the edges, but they were healing well.
Opening the trunk, he gazed at the mix of oddities he kept stored there. Surgical tools, spare scrub tops and bottoms, a container of liquid DrainEze. Unscrewing the DrainEze cap, he sniffed the alkali solution, then set it on the ground. His hand, tumbling through tire irons and stained towels, found and clutched a Pyrex beaker. He slammed the trunk lid, then set the beaker and the DrainEze on it. Two thick metal runners for the roll-up storage door ran across the ceiling. Around one of them, he'd looped a length of rope. He'd left a makeshift gag dangling from the noose at the rope's end. A recipe for fear.
His call should have drawn David by now--a phone trace, or at least caller ID, would be in place after his last call. Retrieving the pistol from the passenger seat of the car, Clyde walked over to the roll-up storage door, inches away from the front bumper of his Crown Vic, and slid it up a few inches. Daylight streamed in like a gold twinkling river, pooling around his wide calves. He gazed down at the light for a few moments, transfixed and smiling, before taking a knee and peering out of the unit. Dangling from a hasp was the broken combination lock he'd smashed with a tire iron to gain entry to the unit. The lure.
Squinting into the bright light reflecting off the white quartz gravel, he peered down the row of boxy, garage-style units with bright orange metal doors. The strip of storage spaces terminated in the back of a 7-Eleven. A large cracked sign set up on posts--poppy's self-storage--angled toward the road to entice drivers-by. Across the street, cars crammed into lines at the Chevron station's pumps.
The loose skin of Clyde's face drew up around his eyes in a half squint, half scowl when he spotted the olive Mercedes, ashole lettered on the side. Right on schedule. It pulled over into the lot and Clyde watched it, his mouth pulsing slowly as if working a cud of tobacco, his hand tightening around the Beretta's stock.
David stepped out of his car and headed toward the 7-Eleven. He paused for a moment, his eyes sweeping across the storage units. Clyde bounced slightly with excitement. A family of four pulled into the parking lot about fifteen feet away from Clyde's hiding place and noisily began loading items into the storage unit next door. Clyde's bouncing slowed. Stopped. His meaty hand sneaked through the gap in the roll-up door and snatched the incriminating broken lock from the hasp. He eased the rolling door down until it tapped the concrete, then gripped the inside handle and set all his weight down against it.
He waited in the darkness.
David exited the 7-Eleven, peeved at the teenager behind the counter with a faceful of pierces. The kid had barely bothered to look at the photograph before saying he'd never seen Clyde before. The Chevron worker across the street had been equally unhelpful--he'd recognized Clyde's photograph only from the news. David's heart had quickened when he'd spotted a dilapidated Crown Vic at the curb, but closer examination had revealed it was not Clyde's.
POPPY'S SELF-STORAGE sign drew David's eye again. His feet crunched on the quartz rock as he made his way across the lot. A man struggled to unload an antique bureau from a Jeep, his family watching with concern. David offered to help, but the man waved him off, his face red and sweaty. A manly man. See you in the ER with a slipped disk.
At the bottom of each unit was a hasp, and each hasp housed a lock. Except one. David walked over to the empty hasp and crouched before the roll-up door. Some of the paint was chipped behind the hasp, as if it had been struck by a blunt object.
David grabbed the door handle and yanked upward, but it barely gave. He crouched so as to get his legs into it and pulled, but again, it scarcely moved. Probably jammed.
He headed back to his car, squinting to cut the glare coming off the ground.
The drive to the Pearson Home took only a few minutes. Walking distance for Clyde, as David had estimated. He pulled over t
o the curb and got out. Up the street, a few kids clicked bright yellow spray cans and further assaulted the beat-to-shit phone booth.
David's feet crunched across the gravel and broken glass of the abandoned lot beside the building. A figure moved in the upstairs window, behind a rippling curtain. Wide and dancing. Layla.
David came to the scorched car and, on an impulse, climbed in. When he slammed the door, the glove box fell open. Inside was a heap of cigarette butts, filling the interior. Mashed together in twos--the way Clyde smoked them. A quickening of David's heart.
David looked up at Layla's shadow dancing awkwardly behind the curtains. 'Ometimes he ooks at me from his car, she'd said. Kind and controlling Rhonda Decker had misunderstood, misdirected. This car. This broken car. It hadn't been chance that Clyde had hidden here the night David pursued him from Healton's. It was his hideout.
What dark thoughts rushed through Clyde's head when he sat here and stared at his childhood home? Coveting. Watching girls dance in the very bedroom where he'd once strung up boys and relished their fright.
The reek of stale nicotine filled the car. David reached over and felt a cigarette butt on the top of the mound. The cotton filters were soft and spongy. He picked one out from deeper in the pile, knowing the smell would taint his fingers and not caring. Dry and brittle. It crumbled under pressure from his thumb. His heartbeat quickened with excitement.
The top cigarettes were newer. Though David was no smoker, he'd guess they'd been smoked within the past day or two. Yale and Forensics could figure that out. Clyde had stayed in the area, in his hideout, smoking and watching, despite the great risk of getting caught. His pull back to his childhood home must have been stronger than David imagined.
His pager vibrated, startling him. The telephone number to Diane's room at the hospital, with 911 punched in after it.
Heading back to his car, he dialed the number on his cell, trying to quell the panic rising in his throat. It rang about nine times, but Diane didn't answer. As he squealed away from the curb, he had the hospital operator put him through to Ninth Floor Reception, but no one picked up there either, the voice mail kicking in after four rings. Maybe Clyde had drawn David across town with the phone call so he could attack Diane back at the hospital. Growing increasingly frantic and speeding up, David had the operator put him through to hospital security, whom he alerted. Then he called Peter's office.
"Dr. Alexander is in with a patient, can I take a message?" the office manager intoned.
"It's an emergency. Pull him out." David ran two red lights as he waited for Peter to pick up. "Peter, it's David."
"I'm glad you called. What's this nonsense about police wanting to follow me around everywhere I go? I told them--"
"We'll talk about that later. I just received a 911 page from Diane's room, but when I returned it, there was no answer. Security's on their way up, but I was wondering if you could check in to make sure nothing's wrong. I'll be there in" --David checked his watch-- "fifteen minutes."
"Of course. I just wrapped up a vasectomy, so I'll go now. When I get there, I'll call you on your cell phone."
"Thank you." David hung up and raced across town, honking for slower-moving cars to get out of his way. Two women screamed at him, their moving mouths visible through their fast-retreating windshields, and one innovative gentleman in a Chevy flipped him the bird. It seemed an eternity to get across town to Westwood Village, and David pounded the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change at Wilshire and Westwood.
He zoomed up Westwood and made a screeching right onto Le Conte. He recognized Peter's distinctive gait as Peter waddled slowly back from the hospital toward his office, his cane moving in concert with his right leg. David tried to read his demeanor from a distance. Peter did not seem to be alarmed--he even nodded casually at a crew of lunching construction workers as he passed them by. David pulled his car over and hopped out, hailing Peter just as he made his way beneath the scaffolding flanking the building.
Peter watched David approach, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. "Everything's fine," he called out. "Diane wasn't in her room because she checked out this morning after a good set of exams. She's safe and sound at home as we speak."
David stopped a few feet off the curb. "Then who paged me?"
A loud revving behind him. Peter's face changed instantly, his bushy eyebrows drawing apart and up. "Move!" he cried out.
In dreamlike slow motion, David pivoted and saw the chipped brown Crown Victoria peeling out from an alley onto Le Conte, Clyde's wide figure hunched over the wheel, pistol-bearing hand extended toward the windshield. The alley was no more than fifteen yards away, and the vehicle bore down on him quickly. For an awful instant, David's legs froze. He felt the pounding of his heart in his ears as the car barreled toward him, and then he turned and dashed for the cover of the scaffolding.
The deafening report of a gunshot. The bullet cracking the air beside David's head as it sailed past. He did not turn; he kept his eyes ahead, focused on the next four steps, which would bring him to the curb.
The car seemed to fill the air behind him. David dove off the street into the safety of the scaffolding, knocking over a toolbox and rolling to a stop between a sledgehammer and two sturdy 4-by-4s. The Crown Victoria hit the curb about ten feet away, one tire popping. It hurtled at David, plowing through the scaffolding, snapping the rails like toothpicks and sending chunks of wood airborne. A sharp pain seized David's left side, and he felt himself go momentarily light-headed. A raised wedge of plywood intervened just before the Crown Victoria could crush David, tilting the car to one side so the remaining inflated rear tire could no longer find purchase.
Clyde revved the engine to a deafening pitch, the back tires spinning and sending up showers of splinters and dirt, then the car suddenly quieted, the steaming front grill so close to David's face he could have reached out and stroked the grimy metal.
The scaffolding leaned and creaked fearsomely overhead, but did not collapse.
Behind him, David heard Peter rustling in the debris. He felt moisture spreading through his shirt around the site of his pain, but he did not tear his eyes from the car. A bullet had penetrated the window in its lower left quadrant, spiderwebbing the glass around it. Clyde's face, pressed forward against the steering wheel, drew suddenly back, and the flat eyes, accented by the bright red smear of a forehead gash, stared at him.
The pistol had tumbled from Clyde's grip on the car's impact with the scaffolding, and it lay on the dash against the windshield, gleaming in the diffuse sunlight. David's and Clyde's eyes seemed to fall on the weapon simultaneously, and Clyde lunged for it with a meaty hand as David anticipated he would. David's hand had been sifting through the debris as if of its own volition, searching for a plank or some suitable weapon. It closed on the handle of the sledgehammer.
David drew himself to his feet, pain seizing his left side in a fiery grip, as Clyde fumbled the pistol across the dash. Clyde finally grasped the pistol firmly. As he brought it up, aiming at David through the once-shattered glass of the windshield, David drew the sledgehammer back like a baseball bat, and hammered it sideways at the nose of the hood, directly between the two square headlights.
The air bag inflated with a boom, knocking Clyde's arms back up in his face and pinning him to his seat. David went weak with pain, the sledgehammer dropping from his grasp. The crack of a gunshot echoed within the enclosure of the scaffolding, and the air bag went limp. Clyde clawed and shoved his way through the material and out the door, landing on all fours. The gun skidded from his hand.
A streak of bright yellow on Clyde's forearm. The information shifted and fell into place. The freshly spray-painted phone booth by the abandoned lot. Clyde had been watching David. He'd placed the fake distress page from the booth right around the corner from the Pearson Home, then followed David back to the hospital.
Clyde's head rotated to face David slowly, mechanically. His eyes moved past David, finding Peter, then
returned to David. Standing, Clyde wiped the blood from his brow, his eyes widening with the intensity of his rage. His face was twisted, flushed a deep red. Wrathful. He let out a cry, an unintelligible expression of fury. His hands curling into fists, he advanced on David, who remained rooted to the spot.
Someone knocked David to the ground from behind with a sudden, forceful blow. Pain screeched up his side and his mouth filled with sawdust. He rolled over, looking up at the dark figure of a man towering protectively over him, his workman's overalls unbuttoned and hanging down, the dark, twisted form of a swastika tattooed across his chest. Zeke Crowley.
Clyde's expression changed to one of nervous alarm. He backpedaled a few steps, stooping to pick up the Beretta, and sprinted off up the street, turning into the alley from which his car had sprung.
Zeke looked down at David. "Motherfucker," he said dolefully. "Motherfucker."
It took David a moment to realize that Zeke was gazing at David's side. For the first time, David looked down and saw the length of splintered 2-by-4 protruding about ten inches from his side. The shard was no more than two inches at its thickest. Blood had colored David's shirt black around the puncture site. David's eyes moved drearily back up to Zeke's. "Could you please call me an ambulance?" he said calmly. "And, if you wouldn't mind, check on Dr. Alexander there behind you."
Peter's gruff voice. "I'm fine." Peter's bespectacled face staring down at David. "I wish we could say the same for you."
A group of spectators had gathered along the wrecked scaffolding, clustering around Clyde's abandoned car. A reporter was already snapping photographs--how did the press arrive quicker than the police? David gripped the shard protruding from his side so no one would be tempted to pull it out. Straining, he tried to feel behind him to see if the point had penetrated the other side. When he spoke, his voice was even weaker. "Call Detective Yale at the West LA Police Station. And keep the crowd away from the car. That's evidence."
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