Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  And then it would all be done. No more misery; no more loneliness; no more acid rolling around in his brains, to make him cry at night.

  He carried the briefcase down to his car and threw it in, jingled his keys, got into the driver’s seat, and thought: Shit. The coin.

  He went back upstairs, into the bedroom, and opened the top drawer in his chest of drawers, dug around some socks, and came up with the plastic box. Inside was a gold 1866S double eagle. The coin cost him $1,432, but the same coin, in better condition, might be worth as much as $25,000 to $30,000.

  Justus Smith was a coin nut.

  HE WAS TURNING TO GO when he heard a thump on the wall. Then faintly, a woman’s voice. He looked at the door and then at the stethoscope on the bed. There was no time for this, no time. He went over to the stethoscope on the bed and plugged it into his ears.

  Millie Lincoln was doing it again. The rush came, as it always did, but this time there was more than lust. This time there was anger and anxiety and Armageddon coming; he’d never even seen her, not for sure, because he had too much to lose.

  Now, there was nothing to lose. Millie Lincoln was just getting started when Grant unplugged himself from the stethoscope and ran out the door, letting it bang open behind him.

  He didn’t know Millie, but he knew where her door was.

  MIHOVIL HAD JUST gotten up to go to the bathroom to rinse off when Millie heard what sounded like an explosion; the noise was loud enough, and close enough, that she called, “What was that?”

  Before Mihovil could answer, there was another boom, and the apartment shook with the impact. She hopped out of bed and picked up her underpants and there was a third impact, and a splintering sound, from close by. Mihovil shouted, “What the hell?” and there was another impact, and Millie picked up her top and pulled it over her head and stepped to the bedroom door.

  Mihovil, naked, was standing in the front room, looking toward the outer door. Another boom, and pieces of Sheetrock buckled around the door jamb, and then boom, and the door flew open. A man came through: he was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and tan slacks and loafers, and might have been straight-enough-looking, but there was nothing straight about his eyes. They burned straight through Mihovil, and the man said, “Hello, Millie.”

  Millie shouted, “Who are you? Get out of here . . .” and the man, his face a teeth-bared mask, a lion’s face, raised a hand and a razor flashed, a razor like Mihovil’s father’s razor, and he went after Mihovil like a sword fighter, slashing with the razor hand, trying to punch or grab with the other.

  Millie started screaming, never thought of dialing 911 or locking herself in the bedroom, never thought of anything but Mihovil when blood exploded out of his shoulder and he and the stranger went twirling into the kitchen and Mihovil went down under the kitchen table.

  When he went down, the stranger turned and came after her. Then she thought of the bedroom, then she stepped back, screaming, tried to slam the bedroom door, but the stranger was right here, flailing with the razor, and then Mihovil was there, too, swinging a kitchen chair.

  The stranger saw it coming and fended it off with one arm, but then Mihovil was all over him with the chair, Mihovil himself screaming, bleeding from a terrible wound on his shoulder, not quitting . . .

  They twisted and turned around the apartment, breaking furniture and glass, dumping electronics and dishes, Mihovil now completely wild; and then the stranger broke and ran and Mihovil ran after him, stepped in a streak of blood at the corner of the kitchen’s vinyl floor, and went down. The stranger went out the door and was gone. Millie grabbed a towel and ran to Mihovil, shouting, “Stay down, stay down, you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding.”

  Mihovil, with a sickly smile, looked up and asked, “Who the fuck was that?” and took the towel and pressed it against his shoulder and said, “Call nine-one-one—we’ve got an artery here.”

  Millie snatched the phone off the kitchen counter and punched in the number and started screaming. They weren’t far from the hospital; she was still on the phone when she heard sirens . . .

  GRANT RAN DOWN the center stairwell, out to the parking lot, climbed in the car. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Millie’s lover had been no kid.

  Millie’s lover had eyes like he’d seen on the beach at Venice, killer eyes, eyes that had been out on the edge for a long time. The guy would have torn him apart if he’d stayed to fight.

  Grant heard sirens as he cleared the parking lot.

  Going home, he thought. Going home.

  25

  LUCAS LIKED DRIVING FAST and had gotten in trouble a few times because of it; even liked driving fast in a truck, and now had the Lexus screaming in pain as they roared toward Grant’s address. The navigation system put them right into the apartment complex. The fat tires squealing around the turns, the antiroll buzzer beeping in protest, Sloan talking to Jenkins as they tore along a leafy street toward the apartments, Shrake and Jenkins a car-length back.

  They turned a corner past a cluster of lilacs and burst into a parking lot, past a swimming pool behind a chain-link fence, and Sloan said, “There!” Lucas looked that way and saw the cluster of expectant bystanders at an apartment doorway—there were always expectant bystanders for the first responding car.

  Lucas went that way—he could hear sirens coming in behind them—and he hopped out of the truck, shouted at Jenkins and Shrake, “One of you guys stay here for the city cops,” and he headed toward the door, a half step ahead of Sloan.

  A heavy woman with frizzy blond hair, a red bandana, and eyes big with fear, said, “There’s a crazy man here. He hurt a man up on two, cut him with a razor.”

  “Where’s the stairway?”

  She pointed, and Lucas said, “Show us, take us up . . . Is the guy still here?”

  As they jogged across an atrium, she said over her shoulder, “Yes. He’s hurt, really bad, there’s blood all over the place.”

  They were in the stairwell, her ass bouncing in Lucas’s face as they went up. “He’s hurt?” Sloan asked. Shrake was coming up behind them now. “The crazy man?”

  “No, not the crazy man. He ran. The other man . . .”

  Lucas said, “Shit . . .”

  Then they were out of the stairs and running down a hallway toward another cluster of the curious, and Lucas called, “Police, coming through.”

  The cluster broke, and Lucas went in, found a young woman in underpants and a T-shirt crouched over a man who wore nothing but jeans. The man was awake and talking. Lucas went to his knees and looked at the woman and said, “What happened? How bad?”

  The man answered for her, good English, but accented: “A crazy man. We have not seen him before. He cut me with a straight razor, an old kind, and then he went out. He cut a small artery in my shoulder. I’ll be okay if they get me soon to the hospital. We must cauterize the artery. For now, we put pressure on it.”

  “He’s a doctor,” the young woman said, and Lucas nodded.

  “Ambulance is coming,” Shrake said. He was on his phone, talking to the 911 dispatcher. “One minute out. The locals are looking for the car.”

  Lucas asked the injured man and the woman, and then the people jammed into the doorway, “Was the guy’s name Grant? Does anybody know if the guy’s name was Leopold Grant?”

  One woman in the doorway, an older woman with harsh red lipstick, said, “I didn’t see the attack, but I know Leo. He lives on the other side of the building.”

  The man on the floor said, “I have never seen him before this.” The woman with him said, “Me, either. He just kept kicking the door. I thought it was an earthquake. He knew my name. He called me Millie . . .”

  Lucas said to the lipstick woman who knew Grant, “Show me where Grant’s room is.”

  GOING BACK DOWN the hallway, they ran into Jenkins, with the Mankato cops in tow. Lucas said to a sergeant, “Get the ambulance guys up here quick, we got an arterial. Keep these people isolated, the witnesses. Jenkins, you come with u
s.”

  “Where’re we going?”

  “We’re following her.” He pointed at the woman who was taking them to Grant’s apartment, and they fell in behind her. To get to Grant’s, they had to go back down the hallway, through the second-floor lobby, and out the opposite side into another hallway. They’d walked fifty or sixty feet down the hallway, and the woman said, “It’s right up ahead. The next door.”

  “Just about back-to-back with that chick’s apartment,” Shrake said.

  Lucas came up slowly, pulled his gun, pushed the woman back, and pressed a finger to his lips. He could see that the door to Grant’s apartment was open an inch or two. He stopped at the door, and Jenkins, gun in hand, went on past. With Jenkins lined up on the other side, Lucas pushed the door open. They could hear a radio—and then Lucas realized that it was coming from somewhere else. From the apartment, he could hear nothing at all.

  Jenkins said, “I can’t see anything.”

  “Gonna go,” Lucas said. He got his .45 out in front and stepped through, one step, two, three, ready to fire, Sloan right behind him, Sloan’s gun tracking to the right while Lucas’s gun tracked left. Two bedrooms, two baths. Open-plan kitchen, nobody in that. Cleared a bedroom used as an office, cluttered but not torn up, cleared the master bedroom, the bathrooms, the closets.

  “He’s a freak,” Jenkins said. He’d come in behind them, and he nodded at the bed. Lucas stepped over to look, saw the stethoscope trailing out of the wall.

  “Listening to the chick,” Shrake said. “They looked like they’d been fucking, the guy must’ve been over here, must’ve cracked.”

  Lucas put his gun away. “All right. I’ll call the co-op center, put out a call on the car. It’s a snake hunt now.”

  THEY BACKED OUT of the apartment, not wanting to hack up any evidence: best to let the crime-scene crew deal with it. As they went, Jenkins said, “He didn’t take much, looks like his clothes are still here.”

  They closed the door, got a city cop to come down to watch it until they could get it sealed. As Lucas talked to the co-op center, Jenkins, Shrake, and Sloan went down to Millie Lincoln’s apartment. The halls were full of frightened people, and Lucas heard a woman talking about the man hauled away by the ambulance. He went to the lobby windows, finished with the co-op guys, and called Rose Marie Roux.

  “We know who he is, but we don’t have him yet. He’s running.”

  “But we’ll get him,” she said.

  “One way or another. He could stick a gun in his ear . . . But yeah. It’s over.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Tonight, an hour or two. There are a couple of loose ends down here.”

  “Call me . . .”

  Lucas rang off and saw the sheriff’s car pull into the lot, and Nordwall got out. Lucas looked at the crowd of cops around Millie Lincoln’s apartment, decided they had enough help, and walked down the stairs and out into the parking lot.

  Nordwall, no athlete, was chugging across the parking lot, a young deputy trailing him. “What happened?”

  “We’re looking for a Leo Grant. He’s a psychologist up at the security hospital. Before he ran out of here, he tried to attack a woman up on the second floor . . .” He told Nordwall about the sequence that led to Grant.

  When he was done, Nordwall grunted, scratched his nose, then awkwardly patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, “I knew I was calling the right guy.”

  “I’m gonna dream about Peterson,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, but you know what? I read all those true-crime books,” Nordwall said. “Like on the Green River guy. I was afraid we might lose ten people, or fifteen. When we were looking for Pope, it seemed like he was invisible.”

  “There’s that.” Lucas’s phone rang. He answered, expecting somebody from the co-op center. Instead, he got a voice that sounded like an angry squirrel, high-pitched, chattering, incoherent, frightened.

  “Wait, wait, calm down,” he said. “Who is this, what happened?”

  “This is Cale,” the voice shouted. “Up at the hospital. Leo Grant just shot three people, and he’s loose in the hospital. He’s got guns. We don’t have any lights, all the doors are open, we’ve got a fire in the cage. We’ve got the ambulances coming, we’re calling the sheriff. Jesus, are you coming? Where are you? Where are you?”

  26

  GRANT WAS HURT: the pain narrowed his focus. Maybe everybody at the hospital knew about him, but it was home. He was wanted there. Needed. He could reach the glory . . .

  And the cops had only been asking for information. Maybe they hadn’t made a move yet. If they had, it was all over anyway; yet if he was ready, he could still reach the glory, there in the administrative wing, even if he couldn’t make it to the Gods.

  He screamed out of the apartment parking lot, down through the quiet streets, past a couple of girls on Rollerblades, out to the highway. He turned north and saw, on the other side of the highway, an SUV and a sedan coming south, fast, the sedan with a flasher on the roof.

  Was the sedan chasing the SUV? He slowed, automatically thinking, Cop, and watched as the two vehicles went past. In the first, in the driver’s seat, he recognized Davenport.

  They were coming after him. Going to the apartment . . .

  “Go,” he shouted to himself. “Go, go, go, go . . .”

  The odds of getting to the Gods Down the Hall suddenly seemed slimmer. Yet . . . there was no choice, really. Go for the hospital, go for glory, or die on some highway like a dog.

  He gripped the steering wheel, focused, saw the Gods waiting for him, as though in a vision, and chanted, “Go, go, go, go, go . . .”

  UP THE HILL. Past the reception building: empty parking lot. Flags limp on the flagpole, blue sky behind it, Postcard of a Nuthouse . . . Guy mowing yard to the right, lifting a hand . . .

  He jammed the car into the handicapped space nearest the door. He had the smallest pistol, a 9mm, in his pocket, two more in his briefcase. He hurried toward the steps . . .

  And bumped into Dick Hart coming out. Hart held up a hand: “Hey, Leo, did you see that in-bound file on Mark North? Somebody stuck it somewhere.”

  Grant shook his head, sidled past. “Haven’t seen it. I had to run out . . . Anything going on?”

  Hart shrugged. “The usual. Cary decided to pee down the halls again, God only knows what we did.”

  “Somebody ought to wire that guy shut,” Grant said. He turned and started back up the steps.

  Hart called, “You coming Saturday?”

  “I kind of doubt it,” Grant called back. “I’ve got a lot going on.”

  HE PUSHED THROUGH the tall doors, and as he went through, the space of the hospital narrowed farther, a tunnel red around the edges, rough, and he was walking down to the mouth of it. One goal, now: the cage. The congenial exchange with Hart spurred him on. They didn’t know. He couldn’t believe it: they didn’t know.

  He was hurrying down the tunnel of his own vision, passing the various administrative offices, brushing past people, feeling the walls close down, suppressing the urge to jog. He had the coin in his pocket, the gun in his jacket. Right now, he could still turn and run.

  But not really, he thought. Because . . . he felt so good. He’d been made for this. Yes. Everything would be resolved now. Everything. He would break out of the closed room of his life . . . He was free.

  GRANT WALKED UP to the outer barred door, pushed the buzzer button, put his ID on the scanner box, and waved to Justus Smith inside the glassed-in cage. The stress was going to his head. He felt as though he were underwater and hadn’t taken a breath in too long. He relaxed, took a breath, took another . . .

  The outer door rolled open. Instead of walking straight ahead, through the security scanner, he turned right, toward the cage, took his hand out of his pocket, and held it up to Smith. The outer door rolled shut behind him.

  Smith looked at the coin through the thick yellowish glass and said, “Hey—where’d you get that?”r />
  “Internet. Could you take a look?” Smith was a big coin investor. He said coins would be good for two or three years, would probably double in price. And he reveled in his specialist knowledge, never lost a chance to show off.

  “Yeah. Just a sec . . .” Against policy—but it was done occasionally, the strict safeguards breaking down, especially when the guy outside the cage was a trusted staffer, a professional, a doctor in a white coat . . .

  Smith stepped over to the cage’s security door, as Grant and the Gods knew he would, and popped it open. Grant had his hand on the 9mm, safety off, finger on the trigger. Last chance to turn around . . .

  Smith popped open the door, an expectant eye—raised smile on his face. “Which Web site did you . . .”

  GRANT HAD THE 9MM OUT, eight inches from Smith’s heart. Smith’s eyes just had time to widen, his mouth to open a quarter inch, and Grant pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening; Smith went down like a punctured balloon, and then Grant was inside the cage.

  Marian LeDoux had a husband and three children and brown mousy hair and beautiful turquoise eyes. She knitted when nothing was going on and had once had a brief affair with the manager of the cafeteria. She was at the board, and she swiveled and stood up, eyes widening, reaching for a red alarm button, and Grant shot her in the face from three feet.

  Jack Lasker built furniture in his home workshop and always had cuts and nicks on his hands; he was famous for his Band-Aids. He was in the monitoring room, and he fell as he tried to get to the door, to wedge it shut, his watery blue eyes up and looking at the gun, he said, “No, Leo,” and Grant shot him in the neck and then, when he went down, again in the chest.

  Grant stepped back to the board, breathing hard now, feeling his heart beating against his rib cage. He opened the inner doors, and then unlocked everything in the building. He could see people running on the other side of the outer doors, but nobody with a gun.