Broken Prey (28 page)

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 us.”

“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?”

“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.

Couldn’t seem to hear anything except his own words running through his mind:
Go, go, go
 . . .

He ripped all the wires he could see out of the monitoring rooms, and all the monitoring screens went black; and now he had blood on his hands, literally, where he’d torn skin loose. He felt the pain, but ignored it. There were a number of stereolike consoles on a rack, and he threw the rack to the floor, grabbed more connection wires, ripped them loose.

Back in the main room, he physically ripped the control panel loose, reached into it, and began pulling all the wires he could see. Some sparked, but most didn’t. What else? He wanted as much chaos as he could get . . .

Somebody was shouting at him,
Leo, Leo, Leo . . .

He was about to leave when he saw the circuit-breaker panel. He opened it, loosened the two plastic nuts that held on the inner panel, ripped it off, saw the main lines coming through, took the risk: fired three shots into the main lines, the wires sparking, bits of lead and insulation flicking back into his face.

With the third shot, the power went out, and all the lights that he could see. A few seconds later, emergency lights came up automatically, along with an alarm that sounded like an elevator door was stuck:
brenk, brenk, brenk . . .

Good enough. He left the cage, ran through the open door into the interior of the hospital.

Behind him, a woman shouted, “
Leo, Leo . . .
”

People were coming out of locked rooms, most standing wonderingly in the doorways. He saw two staff members running toward a refuge room, and he continued running himself, past the elevators, into a down-stairway. Down two flights into the security wing.

The Gods should be out of their cells, waiting.

Armageddon . . .

LUCAS SHOUTED TO NORDWALL, “Grant’s at the hospital—he’s killing people. Get the guys, get my guys up there, get them to the hospital. Get everybody you can up there . . .”

He turned and ran for the truck, jumped in, did a tight circle, and roared toward the street. He was on the north outskirts of town; the hospital was probably seven or eight miles away. Since he’d be slowed going out to the highway and off the highway up the hill to the hospital, just about that many minutes away. Eight minutes: a hundred people could be dead in that time . . .

Past kids on the sidewalk, nearly T-boning a red Taurus, losing it on a turn, over a sidewalk, onto a lawn, off the lawn back onto the street, down a hill to the highway, right, flooring it, the truck screaming in grief, his cell phone ringing, ringing. He ignored it through the set of curves, shifted into the vacant oncoming lane, and blew past a Harley with a bearded old man on it. He picked up the phone on a straightaway. Sloan: “You know what’s going on?”

“No, but it’s bad. Cale called, he was freaked. Grant’s inside shooting, there are at least three down, I’m coming up on it, I gotta go . . .”

“We’re two minutes behind you . . .”

Off the highway, up the hill, down the approach road, burning past the entry building, fumbling in the seat console for extra .45 clips. There were two of them, and he put them in his jacket pocket. He topped the last rise to the main parking lot, cut past a man on a four-bottom lawnmower, serenely chopping grass, and found a sheriff’s car and an official-looking SUV parked facing the steps to the main entrance, their doors open.

Lucas jammed the Lexus in beside them and jumped out, ran up the steps, his eyes catching an insignia on the SUV, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. A game warden . . . and then he was through the front doors and down a dark hallway to the cage.

Cale was there, with a deputy, a game warden, two armed guards, and two orderlies who were opening the outer doors with a manual crank. A half dozen administrative types stood back, clustered, silent. Lucas saw Beloit on her knees in the cage, behind the bars, with another orderly, working over a body—she must have been caught inside. Cale, face white, eyes crazy, shouted, “We’ve heard shooting . . . all we’ve got is emergency power, the fire alarms are going off . . .”

“You got staffers in there?” Lucas asked.

“There are a couple dozen of them, we know there are twelve or fourteen in refuge rooms, there are some more, I don’t know how many, locked in patient rooms, we’ve more coming in, they’re calling on cell phones, all we got is cell phones, we got people shot, Davenport, we got people shot . . .”

The outer door was opening, an inch, two inches. Lucas pulled his .45, popped the clip, checked it, jacked a shell into the chamber, and asked, “Does anybody know where Grant went?”

One of the administrative types, a woman in a powder blue jacket, said, “He went to the stairs way down on the end. I think he was going down to the security cells. That’s what I think.”

Lucas said to the deputy and the game warden, “Get all the guys with guns and put them in the stairwells. The elevators won’t be working. I don’t know whether they’re trying to get out or on some kind of suicide run, but we can’t let them run us around. We have to move in on them and finish them in a hurry.” The two men nodded, and the game warden pulled his pistol and checked it. As he did, they heard two muffled explosions and turned that way.

“Big gun,” the warden said. His voice was cool.

Lucas said to Cale, “There are more cops coming in, a minute or two behind us. Get them to seal off all the floors, tell them to be careful, that we’re out there.”

Cale nodded, and then his eyes went wider: “Oh, my God.”

Lucas tracked his eyes, looked down the hall to the right. Black smoke boiled out of a door and began filling the hallways.

“Did you call the fire department?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, yes, they’re coming.”

“Get some of your office people, go in behind the guys with guns, take fire extinguishers, but be careful. Make sure they stay behind the guns.”

Game warden: “I think we can get through.”

Lucas said, “Block the stairs, guys. Remember, more people coming. Tell them we’re out there.”

He squeezed through the slowly opening cell door and heard three muffled
boom
s. Beloit was crawling out of the cage, hair hanging in her face, leaving bloody handprints on the floor: nothing he could do, just an image to take with him. He pointed the game warden down to the right, while he went straight ahead toward the shooting. Heard another
boom
, and kept running. . . .

GRANT RAN DOWN the stairs, his feet pounding on the steps, briefcase slapping against his legs, screams ringing in his ears. He burst into the hallway and looked to his left. The door to the security wing was open, and Biggie Lighter was peering around the door frame, a smile wreathing his sallow face. When he saw Grant, Lighter stepped into the hallway.

“Is this it?”

“This is it. That goddamned Davenport got me.” Grant reached into the briefcase, saw Taylor behind Biggie, gave Biggie a pistol, and passed one to Taylor. “Is Chase . . . ?”

“He’s fucked up, but he’s walking around.” Biggie peered at the gun. “How many shots?”

“Eight,” Grant said. “They jumped me, and I didn’t have time to get more clips.” He looked past him at Taylor. “You’ve got ten. Both of them are loaded and ready to go. Push the safety off and pull the trigger.”

Taylor nodded. “I’m familiar with this model.” They heard somebody talking, loud, and Taylor looked over his shoulder. “Here comes Chase.”

Biggie scuttled off down the hall, toward the doorway. “I’m going up to three. I’m going to shoot Morris Knight. See you in hell.” Taylor went after him, calling out, “I get Landis. I get Landis.” Grant watched them go, took his own pistol out of his pocket as Chase pushed through the door.

Chase stared at him for a moment, his eyes shifting to the pistol. He said, “Good. Give it to me.”

“This is mine,” Grant said. “Come on with me, and we’ll get you one upstairs.”

“MINE,” Chase screamed, and he launched himself at Grant; Grant wasn’t ready for it, and they went down to the floor, Grant’s head snapping back against the terrazzo.

Stunned, he struggled to keep the gun, but Chase had it with both hands, Grant had only the one hand, and Chase wrenched it free.

Grant scrambled to his feet. “Give me the goddamned—”

Chase screamed, “Shut up,” and pointed the pistol at Grant’s face.