by Mason Cross
“Funny time to check out,” she commented. She took the cash and looked at the bills with open suspicion.
“Turns out I’m not tired.”
As I pushed the exit door open, the chill in the air caught me by surprise after a day confined in a slightly overheated hotel room. I breathed cold air in through my nostrils, letting it wake me up a little, bring me back to the present. I’d left the car back in Chicago, so the first order of business was to find a replacement.
Banner had listened. I gave her that. But in the end, I hadn’t been able to convince her. Her final words came back to me as I stepped out into the night:
I can’t just toss everything else out of the window to focus on a hunch.
But I can, I’d said after a beat. It’s what I’m here for.
The motel parking lot was an unevenly patched square of asphalt, about fifty yards on a side. It was half full, evidently oversized for the hotel’s occupancy, and lit by the yellow glare of sodium lights. I was halfway across before I noticed the guy in the black coat with the beanie hat shading his eyes.
He was at the far side of the lot, leaning against the short wall that marked the hotel’s property off from the highway, right beside the entrance.
A number of warning signs lit up for me: his demeanor, the attempt to hide his face, the fact I could see he was concealing something inside his jacket. But it was his position that really made me alert. Because, unless I wanted to turn around and walk back into the hotel, the only way I could leave this lot was to pass within a couple of feet of this guy. And before I got to him, I’d have to pass between two high-sided vehicles: a minivan and a chunky SUV.
The guy in the beanie stayed put as I paused midstride. He didn’t look up. I kept watching him—stared at him for twenty seconds. I caught the slightest hint of a head movement, as though he’d glanced to his left. That meant someone was behind the parked van. Possibly more than one someone.
I understood the scenario. It was something I ought to have expected: a sudden, violent event that had disturbed the small-town ennui and gotten everyone excited, quickening the pulses of the local tough guys. Put that together with an influx of journalists with expensive phones and iPads and minds on other things, and you have the perfect opportunity to mix business with pleasure.
I considered my options. I knew one thing for sure: If I carried on between the two parked vehicles toward the exit, two, maybe three people would attempt to mug me. The smart thing to do would be to walk back inside the hotel and either find another way out or call the police.
I didn’t have time to do the smart thing.
I glanced around to check there was no one else lurking around, then started walking, quickening my pace and aiming directly for the guy in the beanie. He stiffened slightly but didn’t look up. I rolled my shoulders as I walked, limbering up. As I reached the spot between the minivan and the SUV, the guy finally looked up at me, jutting his chin in my direction defiantly.
“Give me the bag and your wallet.”
I didn’t break stride. I could feel the weight of the Beretta where it was strapped across my chest. I resisted the temptation—I knew taking it out would mean having to use it. I tightened my grip on the handle of the leather laptop bag.
The guy blinked as I closed the gap between us, obviously unsure as to why I hadn’t stopped. “Give me the fucking bag,” he repeated, angry now. I kept coming and he opened his coat, pulling out a baseball bat. The minivan was parked six inches farther from the wall than the SUV, giving me a good idea of the direction from which the first attack would come. As I drew level with its rear fender, I brought the laptop case up to shield the right side of my head. Another bat swung from behind the van, slammed into the padded leather. The case stopped it easily; whoever it was hadn’t overcommitted to the swing. It didn’t help them. The point of impact allowed me to triangulate the position of the assailant, so that the sole of my right foot was planted square in his solar plexus before the bat had stopped moving on the deflection. The connection was solid. I felt the kick go deep into a fleshy midsection. I didn’t bother looking at the guy I’d just incapacitated. I was too busy with the next guy. Not the guy in the beanie, front-row-center, but the third guy, coming at me from left field.
This was a wiry younger man with a blond buzz cut. He was almost albino-blond, a blade in his left hand. That was annoying: I hate fighting southpaws. He looked a little surprised: The three of them had obviously worked out a game plan that was predicated on me being hit in the face by the bat first. I’d messed that up, and now I was going to take full advantage of the two seconds of confusion I’d caused.
I gripped the handle of the laptop bag with both hands and slammed it against the albino’s head so hard that the handle snapped and the zipper broke open. Albino lurched backward, stunned but not down. The padding on the case had worked against me this time, cushioning the blow.
Beanie was coming for me now, a little hesitantly after seeing what I’d just done to his buddies, but I gave him credit for trying anyway. I reached between the zippers, gripped the hard edge of the laptop itself, and let the busted case slide off it, like some rectangular reptile shedding its skin. I stole a glance at the first one I’d hit. He was a balding fat guy, on his knees, trying to force some air into oxygen-starved lungs, the bat by his side. Beanie tried a couple of jabs with his own bat, using it like a spear, trying to keep some distance. I dodged the jabs easily and got in closer. Too late, he swung at me one-handed. I leaned in to the swing, caught his forearm under my left arm, and jerked my whole body back. He let out a high-pitched scream as his radius and ulna snapped like firewood.
I knew I’d left the albino unattended for too long. I released the beanie guy and spun, holding the laptop up to cover my midsection. I was just in time: The point of his blade caught the laptop and scored a trench in the plastic casing, nearly amputating two of my fingers as it slid off the side.
I heard a scuff behind me as the beanie guy made a halfhearted follow-up. I turned my body sideways and kicked him hard in the groin. Not exactly subtle, but put together with the broken arm, it would be more than sufficient to discourage him from another try.
The albino was coming for me again, jabbing with the knife. He knew how to use it—wasn’t extending too far, using his right hand to feint effectively.
I stepped back from two fast swipes of the blade and used the laptop to block a quick stab. The point of the blade caught it straight-on this time and penetrated, the tip of the blade going through and coming out the other side. I wasted a moment being glad I always worked off a flash drive, then punched the albino hard in the face while he was still in range.
He shook it off and came at me again, aiming at my fingers, around the edge of the laptop. I faked as if to fall back and then went on the offensive, slamming the hard corner of the laptop into the nerve cluster in his left shoulder. It worked: He dropped the knife and his arm hung limp. I blocked a wild right hook and jabbed the laptop into his face, catching him right across the bridge of the nose. His working arm came up to cover his face, and I swung the laptop as hard as I could from the opposite side. The casing shattered across the left side of his head, the screen ripped free of its hinges, and the albino went down like a rag doll.
I turned my attention to the other two men and saw that they were already across the road and running. I looked down at myself, examining my arms and center mass for injuries I might not have felt in the heat of combat, but found nothing. My computer, alas, was another story.
I dropped the remains of it next to the unconscious albino and walked away quickly. I didn’t have the time to waste on this situation, but something was niggling at me, and it wasn’t just the loss of my computer. I’d beaten off an attack by three armed thugs in less than a minute, but that was the problem: It shouldn’t have taken me that long. The albino had displayed skills, discipline. Either he wa
s made of sterner stuff than your usual street tough, or I was getting rusty.
It was a question for another time, though. I had a far more pressing concern, and he’d be resting up already, getting ready for a new morning. Less than ten hours until first light and six hundred miles to go.
DAY TWO
19
8:32 a.m.
As soon as I passed the legend that read Welcome to Fort Dodge, Iowa, I knew I was in the right place. I didn’t know why, exactly, but the moment the white wooden sign appeared in my high beams was when a strong hunch transmogrified into something like a hard certainty. The process of predicting how far and in which direction Wardell might have traveled had been a combination of solid theory and intuition, but I was at a loss to explain quite how I knew my quarry was in this town.
Once I’d decided where Wardell was headed, it had simply been a matter of plotting a likely route and taking into account a number of factors: like the assumption that he had indeed taken the Cedar Rapids bus and whether he’d kept using public transportation or found a car, either by hitchhiking or stealing one. Wardell wouldn’t rush. If I was right about his eventual destination being Lincoln, Nebraska, then it was a little too far to make the journey in one day. He could make it most of the way across the state before nightfall, but he’d want to get some sleep, having been awake for nearly two days straight.
Des Moines had sounded good at first, but it was too big a city. Wardell would know that the cops would be on alert in major population centers in any of the states bordering Illinois. That probably wouldn’t bother him under normal circumstances, but he was tired and I guessed he’d want to rest in relative safety on the first night. Looking at the other midsized towns he could have reached in the same time frame, I had decided on Fort Dodge. It was small enough, at a population of twenty-five thousand, but at the same time large enough to provide a choice of kill zones and cover to slip away.
So there it was: Fort Dodge. Had to be. When you laid it out like that, it was almost like a simple mathematical equation. Or perhaps that was all just bullshit. Perhaps it was just a plausible-sounding way of justifying an informed hunch. I often wonder about that. If I’m superstitious at all, it’s about the process. I never want to analyze it too closely.
I shifted my mind away from the unknowns to the knowns. If Wardell was keeping to his established MO, he’d want to rise early and kill again before he resumed his journey. I was almost certain of this for two reasons: one, his message about ‘killing season’ being open, together with his contacting the media, said that he meant business—he wouldn’t want to let up on the pressure. Two, he’d screwed up on yesterday’s shooting, requiring more than one shot for the first time in his career. He’d want to strike again quickly, to prove that it had been a one-off. In fact, I had worried that Wardell might not want to wait for the morning, might act sooner. If that had happened, at least it would have confirmed his direction of travel. But it hadn’t, so here I was, in Fort Dodge, Iowa.
But where to look in Fort Dodge? That was the question I’d been mulling over while I made the long drive north. Finding a vehicle had proved slightly more difficult than expected, since Cairo had not counted a car rental company among its amenities. I’d found a place in the next town that was almost out of stock, and settled for the one thing they had left: a silver Cadillac DTS luxury sedan. It had a 4.6 liter V8 engine, leather seating, and a moonroof, whatever that was. Yes, I’d settled for it the way Arthur Miller settled for Marilyn Monroe.
I’d driven through the night, made Fort Dodge a little before seven in the morning. It was a busy town, nestled in the gently rolling hills of the Des Moines River Valley, about ninety miles northwest of Des Moines itself. From here, it was another hundred and sixty miles to the Nebraska state line, assuming you took the most direct route to Lincoln.
There were a few major hotels and plenty of smaller places where one could check in unobtrusively. It would take a man working alone a full day to check them all, and that would be operating on the shaky assumption that Wardell would even use a hotel. He was a Marine Corps Scout Sniper who’d endured three deployments in Iraq and five years in the United States Supermax Prison at Marion, so I guessed he was used to forgoing home comforts. I made a round of the big hotels and a handful of the smaller guest houses anyway—just to cross the T’s, as Banner had said. As I’d expected, I came up with nothing.
So I cruised the predawn streets, looking for nondescript cars parked alone in empty malls and office parking lots, cars that might have out-of-state plates or contain a sleeping occupant. Nothing. Clearly, this wasn’t one of those jobs that would be resolved through dumb luck.
As the first light of dawn began to creep hesitantly over the eastern horizon, the sun glinting off the frontage of a place called the Red Ball Café caught my eye. I parked outside and bought a newspaper, as well as a black coffee and a donut to raise my blood sugar. I took them out to the car and scanned the headline story on Wardell in twenty seconds, lacking the luxury of more time to waste on it.
I once read that you’ll find at least five mistakes in any given news story if you know enough about the subject. From a cursory glance, the Des Moines Register was way ahead of the curve in terms of inaccuracy. They had the broadest details right, but everything else was a mix of rumor, speculation, and good old-fashioned sensationalism. For all that, though, the media was doing exactly the same thing I was: waiting for the next one.
I discarded the paper on the passenger seat and unfolded the map I’d bought from a gas station on the edge of town. In my head I went over the top three kill zones I’d identified.
On the face of it, the most likely option was a mall on the eastern edge of town, one that offered near-identical conditions to the shooting Wardell had carried out the previous morning. Another large open space offering a choice of unsuspecting targets, again providing plenty of cover and a choice of exfiltration routes.
Then there were a couple of spots in the center of town: Central Avenue would offer the single greatest amount of targets during rush hour and had a certain symbolic value: the beating heart of a small heartland city.
Five minutes’ walk away, City Square Park provided almost as many targets. It wasn’t the biggest of the city’s parks, but it would provide more viable positions from which to take the shot than any of the others.
I juggled the possibilities in my head as I sat in the parking bay outside the Red Ball, sipping the coffee and watching the morning traffic picking up. I’d developed a feel for the place in the last couple of hours; I guessed I knew the town about as well as a rookie cabdriver would. And even with the morning traffic approaching its zenith, the place was compact enough to be easily navigable. The three potential kill zones were all within easy reach of my current position. The mall was half a mile away. I estimated I could make Central Avenue in four minutes. City Square Park in seven. The only problem? I couldn’t be in all three places at once.
I eliminated the mall first. It was an ideal setup, and it was what Wardell had done yesterday; but that was why I found it so easy to discount. Five years before, Wardell had been scrupulously varied in his choice of both locations and victims.
Down to two strong possibilities, then: Central Avenue or the park. I drained the last of the coffee, keyed the ignition, and pointed the Cadillac south, toward the center of town.
Exactly four minutes later, I was headed west along Central. Full daylight had taken its time to arrive. Maybe it was as reluctant as anybody else to begin a cold day in late October. Rush hour was in full swing, which in a town this size, wasn’t saying much.
I covered the length of the town’s main street with relative ease, stopping only at a broken signal when instructed to by a traffic cop. As I waited for my stream of traffic to be granted permission to move on, I scanned the roofline on either side of the street. Nothing more threatening than pigeons. The big clock on the c
ounty courthouse at the top of the street was ten minutes slow. I peered up at the bird-festooned parapet on the roof of the building. It would make a dramatic vantage point for a shooting, albeit with some logistical drawbacks. Then again, it didn’t offer any intrinsic advantage over the open window on the sixth floor of the office building across the street, or indeed, the small park at the other end.
I took a right at the cross street after the courthouse, then zigged a left and zagged a right, to bring the car out on the east side of City Square Park.
The park was the width of two blocks. Commuters crisscrossed the green space, heading for offices and stores and schools and the big public library building. The square was flanked on all four sides by six-story buildings, all uniform and all with accessible-looking flat roofs. The sun had not yet risen above the level of the surrounding buildings, meaning the park was entirely in shadow and a gunman could aim from any of the overlooking rooftops without having to face into any glare.
I scanned the skyline. I saw nothing, but then I hadn’t really expected to. Wardell was hardly likely to be perched on a parapet with his legs dangling, rifle in one hand, latte in the other as he picked out his next target. They drum that kind of behavior out of you at the sniper academy.
I spotted a couple of open windows here as well, despite the fact the temperature was just a hair above freezing. It meant nothing. Although I’ve never worked in an office, I’ve visited a lot of them in my time. While waiting for appointments, I liked to kill time by making observations in the manner of a visitor to a strange land. Observations like the fact that people who work in offices don’t pay the utility bills, so when the heating is on a little too high, they just open a window rather than turning it down.