24
THE MAN WHO CALLED himself Leopold Grant lay writhing on his bed, pale and naked, in a steaming mix of odors, sweat, semen, tobacco, and bed-sheet starch, plugged into a stethoscope. The black sensor cable led from his ears to a hole in the bedroom wall; in the slanted white light knifing across his body from the half-turned slats in the Venetian blinds, he looked like a movie cyborg recharging its batteries.
He was, in a way. On the other side of the wall, Millie Lincoln was enjoying a visit from Mihovil. Grant was only two feet from her, just on the other side of the wall. With the stethoscope’s sensor duct-taped to the back side of the Sheetrock above Millie’s bed, he could hear every gasp, groan, giggle, and lick.
He lived for them.
An hour earlier, he’d run out of the security hospital. One of the nondangerous patients, who worked in Personnel, had tracked him down to tell him that they were pulling all the information on him; that they were calling all his references; that the cops had called from St. Paul and asked for every speck of information.
Not for everybody—just for Grant. So they had him.
His first impulse had been to run. He’d run most of his life, it was nothing new. Get back to his apartment, take everything of value, load it into his car, get it up to the Twin Cities, rent another car, run to Chicago, dump the rental . . . He could see himself arriving in Miami, a roll of cash in his pockets, white teeth through a new beard, a new name, a new profession, a Hawaiian shirt.
That had been the impulse; and he’d left the hospital in a shit-faced panic.
But the Gods Down the Hall had gotten to him in some elemental way. They didn’t let go; they tried to pull him back. That talk of a glorious Armageddon. And then when he got back to his apartment, that goddamned Millie Lincoln was at it again. Didn’t she ever study? Didn’t she ever do anything but f*ck?
She’d stopped the flight in its tracks, put him on his bed, sweating, writhing, his imagination gone amok.
He’d first heard her three months earlier, and had heard her three or four afternoons or nights every week, with an eager lover, probably another college kid. He thought it was the same guy every time, because the voice had a distinct, baritone vibration.
But it wasn’t the guy who did it to him. It was Millie. Millie didn’t just have orgasms. She worked up to them slowly, and she gave directions: “Oh, do that again, oh, do that. Oh, oh. Ohhhh, c’mon, slow down, go up a little, oh, oh, God, oh . . .”
Grant had at first heard her only faintly. He’d heard her bed knocking on the wall, a rhythmic bump-bump-bump that could be only one thing. He’d pressed his ear to the drywall, and first heard her groans along with some unintelligible words.
He’d tried pressing a glass against the wall, the better to hear. There was some marginal improvement, but not enough. Then, at the hospital, one of the docs had left a stethoscope lying unattended at a nurses’ station, and he’d stolen it. He cut a hole in the wall behind the headboard of his bed, and taped the sensor to the wall on the other side. The stethoscope made a major difference. He could hear individual words; he learned her name; and he soon understood that these were modern children, who had an idea of what they wanted and were clear in their requests, which really turned him on . . .
He’d gone looking for her, then.
They lived in an apartment complex. Their building had two floors, with eighteen pairs of back-to-back red-brick units on each floor, like an old army barracks but new. Millie’s entrance was on the opposite side of the building from Grant’s. When he checked the mailboxes, he found four female names.
He watched their doors when he could do it without being obvious. Two of the women were blond, one was fairly dark. The fourth was a bit overweight, chubby but attractive, with fair skin and reddish-brown hair. He thought she might be the one, but he wasn’t sure.
Millie . . . Millie was causing him trouble this afternoon. He’d come home, planning to run, and had then heard the bumping on the wall. Ten minutes later, she was pounding away, and here he lay, naked, writhing with her, eyes clenched, ears plugged into the stethoscope, riding with her . . .
Remembering the first woman, Angela Larson:
The first woman hadn’t been very interesting. He’d noticed her in an art store six or seven months before the killing and had gone back a few times, just to look. She was a tall, dark-haired woman, but with pale eyes and a kind of wide Slavic forehead and sensuous lips. The first night, while he was still developing into a god on his own, he waited until the shop closed, planning to follow her to her car, and then to her home. The lights went out, and he waited, but she never came out.
The next night, he found her going out the back. He watched her as she walked down to the bar, which had a bigger parking lot than the craft store, slipped into her car. He followed her efficiently, using techniques learned from Robert Ludlum, and was disappointed to find her going into an apartment building. Lots of lights, lots of people around, and since it was mostly students, a lot of awareness.
But that moment in the alley . . . did she always do that? He watched three more nights, and her routine never varied.
On the night he became a god, he’d waited until she started turning out the shop lights, had pulled into the alley that led to the bar parking lot, and then pulled into a space between her and her car. There was some ambient light from the bar, but not much. He could see her coming as he got out: he was humming a snatch of song, which he later remembered as “Danger Zone” from the Top Gun movie. And that’s what he felt like, like the top gun . . .
He walked around to the back of the car, checking that nobody else was in the alley: here was the danger zone, at least for him. He messed around in the trunk, as if he were opening a suitcase or something, and watched her with his peripheral vision. He could see by her hesitant step that she thought about turning, and walking away from him, out there alone in the dark, but that would have been embarrassing, and so she came on, angling a bit away from him, but she was still within a step or two as she went by, watching him out of the corner of her eye.
He let her get another step, to relax just that fatal notch, then with a quick two-step approach, hit her with a dowel rod. The dowel was a little more than an inch thick, sold as a clothes-closet rod, and five feet long. He meant to stun her with it: but in the excitement and fear of the moment, he hit her too hard. She went down, he scooped her up, dumped her in the trunk of the car, tossed the stick in after her, slammed it, ran around to the door, jumped inside, and was rolling.
The first time, he’d been intensely frightened. What if a taillight went out? What if he forgot to signal a turn? What if somebody hit him, an accident, and the cops found the body in the trunk?
All kinds of things could happen.
None of them did.
And then the disappointment: he’d hit her too hard.
When he opened the trunk, she moaned but never seemed aware of what he was doing. He picked her up, and her head rolled, and her eyelids fluttered, and he thought she might be faking. She wasn’t.
He was careful, in handling her, to never let her get in a position to slash at him . . . but she never even stiffened as he hauled her into O’Donnell’s shed. O’Donnell was in Madison, seeing his mother. The availability of his car shed had been the key to launch the attack. He’d gotten the shed ready before he went after her—had laid down a plastic painter’s drop cloth that he’d bought from Home Depot. He’d hung a piece of nylon anchor rope over one of the exposed ceiling beams, designed to hold the weight of an automobile engine. He tied Larson’s hands and lifted her with the rope.
She was absolutely slack, all her weight on her shoulder joints, but she never protested, never made a sound other than the low gagging moan.
“Angela,” he called to her. He’d gotten out his wire flail. “Angela, can you hear me?”
She couldn’t. He snapped the flail at her; the wire cut into her back, and blood seeped out of the cuts. Nothing but the moan, the fluttering eyelids.
He hit her again and then a kind of blankness descended on him, and he began beating her with a fury, hitting her, hitting her, until a misstep sent him skidding across the plastic sheet; he dropped to his hands and knees in the blood, gasping for breath. Looked up at her: she hardly looked human, except for her untouched face. He’d shredded her.
He tried calling to her again, but she was no longer home. Finally, in disgust, he’d cut her throat with a carpet knife. Not a straight razor, but a carpet knife from a Hardware Hank store, stood there and watched the blood pumping out of her throat until her heart stopped, and her blood with it.
THEN RICE. That had been different; and Peterson . . .
In the room next door, Millie reached a climax and cried out, and Grant cried out with her.
He lay on the bed for a moment: everything was coming down on him now. Everything. He’d never make it to Miami. They’d pull him down, lock him down the hall with Biggie and Taylor and Chase.
Grant staggered away from his bed, sweating, his heart still pounding. Into the bathroom: he felt weird, looked at himself in the mirror. His face was bright pink: his blood pressure must be out of sight, he thought. Had to calm down . . . he splashed a double handful of water into his face, patted his face dry with a towel. Looked at his watch. What? He’d been on the bed for forty minutes. It had seemed like only a moment . . .
What to do, what to do . . . He paced his apartment, gnawing on a knuckle until it was raw. They were coming, and he was getting nowhere.
He went into his bedroom again, opened the closet door, pushed away some shoes. Three guns there. Two from O’Donnell, one of his own. One 9mm, one .40, and a .45.
He picked up the guns, looked at them for a moment, then went back to the living room and got his briefcase. The first briefcase of his life. All done now. He poured out the papers inside and threw in the guns. And the razor. Back to the bedroom, he got the straight razor he’d used on Peterson and slipped it into his pocket. He and Biggie and Chase had figured out how to get them inside—as long as he was coming in on a weekday, and on the second shift . . .
Which was where they were now.
And Justus Smith had to be in the control booth. Smith always worked the second shift, on weekdays; but what if he was sick? Or if he’d taken a vacation day? If they were actually going to execute the Armageddon, they’d always talked of it, Lighter, Chase, Taylor, and himself, as being carefully planned ahead of time, with proper options that would allow them to wait until conditions were perfect.
Now it was all ad hoc. Nothing was perfect . . .
GRANT LOOKED AT his watch. The first shift had just ended. He went to the phone, dialed in to the hospital, and asked for Smith.
A moment later, “Cage—this is Smith.”
Grant hung up. “All right,” he said to himself. Justus was in the cage, and God in his heaven. He looked around the apartment. He didn’t have to pack: f*ck all this stuff. He picked up the briefcase, focused now, ready to make his run. Ready to go down with the Gods Down the Hall.
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 f*ck 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.