The paramedics got to the Werschels’ house before the maddog got home, but it was too late for Sally Johnson and Carl Werschel. The paramedics took one look at Werschel and wrote him off, but Sally still had a thin thready heartbeat and they started saline and tried to compress the neck wound and there was nothing to do about the head wound and they got her in the ambulance, where they lost the heartbeat, injected a stimulant, and started toward Hennepin Medical Center, but her pupils were fixed and dilated and they kept trying but they knew she was gone . . . .
Lucas knew she was gone. When they took her out, he stood on the boulevard outside the Werschel house and watched the flashers until they disappeared. Then he headed back to the fenced yard, where two more paramedics were working with Lois Werschel and Sickles, who were both descending into shock. Carl Werschel, looking like a beached whale, lay belly-up in a bed of brown, frost-killed marigolds.
“Who was that in the car, squealed the tires?” Lucas asked quietly. Blaney glanced at Cochrane and Lucas caught the glance and Cochrane opened his mouth to explain and Lucas hit him squarely in the nose. Cochrane went down and then the light hit them and Lucas grabbed Cochrane by the shirt and lifted him halfway to his feet and hit him again in the mouth with his other hand and York wrapped Lucas up from behind and wrestled him away.
“You motherfucker, you killed Sally, you ignorant shithead,” Lucas screamed and the light blinded him and York was hollering “Hold it hold it” and Cochrane was covering his broken nose and teeth with one hand and trying to push up off the ground with the other, his face cranked toward Lucas, his eyes wide with fear. Lucas struggled against York for a few seconds and finally slumped, relaxed, and York pushed him away and Lucas turned and saw the TV camera and lights over the fence, focused on the group in the yard. The figures behind the lights were unrecognizable and he started toward them, intending to pull down the lights, when Annie McGowan emerged from them and said, “Lucas? Did you get him?”
• • •
Daylight was leaking in the office windows when the meeting convened. Daniel’s face look stretched, almost gaunt. He had not shaved, was not wearing a tie. Lucas had never seen him in the office without a tie. The two deputy chiefs looked stunned and fidgeted nervously in their chairs.
“ . . . don’t understand why we didn’t have automatic stop on all Thunderbirds the instant something started happening,” Daniel was saying.
“We should have, but nobody decided who was going to call. When it went down and the fight started and Blaney started hollering for backup and then for the ambulances, we just lost it,” said the surveillance crew’s supervisor. “Lucas was on the air pretty quick, six minutes—”
“Six minutes, Jesus,” said Daniel, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed. He was talking calmly, but his voice was shaky. “If one of the surveillance crews had called the instant it started going down, it would have been rebroadcast and we’d have had cars on the way before Blaney got on the air. That would have eliminated the foul-up by the dispatcher. We’d have been eight minutes or nine minutes faster. If Lucas is right and he was parked up near the entrance to the Interstate, he was downtown having a drink by the time we started looking for his car.”
There was a long silence.
“What about this Werschel guy?” asked one of the deputy chiefs.
Daniel opened an eye and looked at an assistant city attorney who sat at the back of the room, a briefcase between his feet.
“We haven’t figured it out yet,” the attorney said. “There’s going to be some kind of lawsuit, but we were clearly within our rights to go into his yard in pursuit of the killer. Technically, his dogs should have been restrained, no matter how high the fence was. And when he came out and opened fire, Sickles was clearly within his rights to defend himself and his partner. He did right.”
“So we got no problem there,” said one of the deputy chiefs.
“A jury might give the wife a few bucks, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” the attorney said.
“Our problem,” Daniel said in his remote voice, “is that this killer is still running around loose, and we look like a bunch of clowns running around killing civilians and each other. To say nothing of beating each other up afterward.”
There was another silence. “Let’s get back to work,” Daniel said finally. “Lucas? I want to talk to you.”
“What else you got?” he asked when they were alone.
“Not a thing. I had . . . a feeling about the McGowan thing—”
“Bullshit, Lucas, you set her up and you know it and I know it, and God help me, if we could do it again I’d say go ahead. It should have worked. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.” Daniel pounded the top of his desk. “We had him in the palm of our hand. We had the fucker.”
“I blew it,” Lucas said moodily. “That gunfight went up and I came across the fence and saw Werschel lying there and I knew he wasn’t the maddog because the maddog was all dressed in black. And Sally was down and still pumping some blood and Sickles was there to help her, and the other guys, and I should have kept going. I should have gone over the back fence after the maddog and left Sally to the other guys. I thought that. I had this impulse to keep going, but Sally was pumping blood and nobody else was moving . . .”
“You did all right,” Daniel said, stopping the litany. “Hey, a cop got blown up right in front of you. It’s only human to stop.”
“I fucked up,” Lucas said. “And now I don’t have a thing to go on.”
“Nails,” Daniel said.
“What?”
“I can hear the media getting out the nails. We’re going to be crucified.”
“It’s pretty hard to give a shit anymore,” Lucas said.
“Wait for a couple days. You’ll start giving a shit.” He hesitated. “You say Channel Eight got some film of you and Cochrane?”
“Yeah. God damn, I’m sorry about that. He’s a rookie. I just lost it.”
“From what I hear, it’s going to be pretty hard to take back what you said. Most of the cops out there think you’re right. And Sally had some years in. If Cochrane had just taken it easy, he’d have been right down that alley before the maddog knew you were coming. You’d have squeezed him between you and nobody would ever have gone into the yard with those fuckin’ dogs.”
“Doesn’t make it better to know how close we came,” Lucas said.
“Get some sleep and get back here in the afternoon,” Daniel said. “This thing should start shaking out by then. We’ll know what to expect from the media. And we can start figuring out what to do next.”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” Lucas said. “I’m running on empty.”
CHAPTER
23
They didn’t come for him.
Somewhere, in the back of his head, he couldn’t believe it, that they didn’t come for him.
He staggered through the connecting door from the garage into his apartment, took a step into the front room, realized that he was tracking sticky yellow clay onto the carpet, and stopped. He stood for a minute, breathing, reorganizing, then carefully stepped back onto the kitchen’s tile floor and stripped. He took off everything, including his underwear, and left it in a pile on the floor.
His leg was bleeding and he sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked at it. The bites were not too deep, but they were ragged. In other circumstances, he would go to an emergency room and get stitches. He couldn’t now. He washed the wounds carefully, with soap and hot water, ignoring the pain. When he had cleaned them as well as he could, he pulled the shower curtain around the tub and did the rest of his body. He washed carefully, his hands, his hair, his face. He paid special attention to his fingernails, where some of the clay might have lodged.
Halfway through the shower, he broke down and began to gag. He leaned against the wall, choking with adrenaline and fear. But he couldn’t let himself go. He didn’t have the luxury of it. Nor did he have the luxury of contemplating his situation. He must act.