She narrowed her eyes. "What're you going to do?"
"Are you willing to perjure yourself and say you didn't know?" Lucas asked. "Because you might want to say that."
Roux's vision seemed to turn inward, although she was gazing at Lucas's face. Then she said, "If it's that way…"
"It's that way, if you want to get them back-and keep your job."
"I'd do any fucking thing to get them back," she said. "But I hope you don't call."
"So do I," Lucas said. "If I do call, it'll mean that everything's gone in the toilet."
Mail picked out a house with lights on in the back. From the alley, he could see an older woman working in what must be the kitchen. He crossed a chain-link fence into the yard, wary of dogs, saw nothing. As he passed the garage, he stopped to look in the window. There was a car inside, a Chevy, he thought, not new, but not too old, either. That would work.
He went on to the house, to the back door, leaned the shotgun against the stoop, took out the pistol, looked around for other eyes, other windows, and knocked on the door.
The woman, curious, came to look. She was sixty or so, he thought, her gray hair pulled back in a bun, her thin face just touched with makeup. She was wearing a jacket over a silky shirt. A saleswoman, maybe, or a secretary. She saw the police hat and the uniform jacket and opened the inner door, pushed out the storm door, and said, "Yes?"
Mail grabbed the handle on the storm door, jerked it open, and before she could make another sound, shoved her as hard as he could, his open hand hitting her in the middle of the chest. She went down, and he was inside, and she said, "What?" She tried to crawl away, slowly, and he straddled her and gripped the back of her neck and asked, "Where are your car keys?"
"Don't hurt me," she whimpered. Mail could hear a television working in the other room and turned his head to look at it. Was somebody else out there?
"Where're the fuckin' car keys?" he asked, keeping his voice down.
"My purse, my purse." She tried to crawl out from under him, her thin hands working on the vinyl floor, and he tightened his grip on her neck.
"Where's your purse?"
"There. On the kitchen table."
He turned his head, saw the purse. "Good."
He stood up to get a better swing, and hammered her on the side of the head with the butt of the shotgun. She went down, hard, groaned, kicked a couple of times, and was still. Mail looked at her for a moment, then made a quick check of the small house, A weatherman with what looked like false teeth was pointing at a satellite loop of the Twin Cities area: "… a lake advisory with these winds, which could kick up into the thirty-mile-per-hour category by this afternoon…"
The bedroom had only one bed, a double, already made up.
A black-and-white photograph of a man in a Korean War Army uniform sat on the nightstand, under a crucifix. Nobody else to worry about.
He started back to the kitchen, and was stopped by his own image peering out of the television.
A woman was saying, "… John Mail, a former inmate at the state hospital. If you know this man, if you have seen him, contact the Minneapolis police at the number on your screen."
Mail was stunned. They knew him. Everything was gone. Everything. But they didn't know where he was. And they didn't say anything about the LaDoux name, they didn't say anything about finding Andi and the kid. And the TV would have that. So he was okay, for a while, anyway. But he had to get out, and get out now.
That fuckin' Davenport. Davenport was the one who'd done this. And it made him angry. That fuckin' Davenport, he wasn't fair. He had too much help.
The woman hadn't moved, and he dumped her purse on the kitchen table: car keys and a billfold. He opened the billfold, found twelve dollars.
"Shit."
He went back to the door, pausing to kick the woman in the side: twelve fuckin' dollars. You can't do anything with twelve fuckin' dollars. Her body moved sideways under the blow, leaving a trail of blood on the vinyl; she was bleeding from her ear.
Mail went on, through the door, picked up the shotgun at the stoop, and walked back to the garage. The side door was locked, and none of the keys fit it. He walked around to the alley side, tried the overhead door. That wouldn't budge, either. He walked back to the side door, used an elbow to put pressure on a window pane in the door, and pushed it in. Then he reached through, unlocked the door, and went inside.
A doorbell button was fixed to a block of wood beside the door. Mail pushed it, and the overhead door started up. He climbed in the car, started it, checked the gas. Damnit. Empty, or close enough. He'd have to risk a stop, or find another car. But there was enough to get him out of the neighborhood, anyway.
After Mail had gone, a neighbor woman looked out the back of her house and said, "That's odd."
"What?" Her husband was eating toast while he read the Wizard of Id in the comics.
"Mary left her garage door up."
"Getting old," her husband said. "I'll get it on the way to work."
"Don't forget," the woman said.
"How can I?" he asked, irritated. "I'm right across the alley."
"You could forget," his wife said. "That's why you've been shaving with soap for what, four days now?"
"Yeah, yeah, well, I'm not supposed to do the shopping for this family."
They argued. They always argued. In the heat of the argument, the woman's odd feeling evaporated-when her husband left, she went to get dressed herself, without waiting to see if he closed Mary's garage door.
The man who found White's body showed Lucas the window. "I saw the guy running, and I went right out front."
"So let's walk through it," Lucas said. He looked at his watch. "You're back here, you walk to the door."
They walked through it, out the front, down to the walk, all the way to the point where the man found White's body.
"Did you hear the cop cars moving out before or after the ambulance got here?" Lucas asked.
"Uh, about the same time. There was sirens everywhere. I remember hearing all the sirens, and then the ambulance got here. There was already four cops here, and they sent everybody running around after the guy."
Sloan walked up as Lucas looked at his watch again. "So it was probably five minutes."
The man said, "It didn't seem like it was that long. The cops, they was here in a couple seconds, it seemed like."
"Listen, thanks a lot," Lucas said. He slapped the man on the shoulder.
"That's fine, I hope I helped."
As they walked away from him, Sloan said, "I go on administrative duty starting with the next shift, until the shooting's okayed."
"Yeah."
"Makes me nervous," Sloan said.
"Don't worry about it," Lucas said. "You got witnesses up to your eyeballs."
"Yeah." Sloan was still unhappy. "What's happening here?"
"I'm not sure," Lucas said. "They probably didn't have the new perimeter up for six or seven minutes. The new perimeter is a half-mile out there. He could have run through it-we haven't found any sign of him, If it was me, I would have run through it."
"Sonofabitch could be in somebody's home," Sloan said, looking at the rows of neat, anonymous little houses. "Laying up."
"Yeah. Or he could be out."
Mail found a cut-rate gas station with no customers and no visible television. He pulled in-the shotgun, the hat and cop jacket in the backseat-and pumped ten dollars' worth of gas into the car. A bored kid sat behind the counter eating a packet of beer nuts, and Mail passed him the old woman's ten-dollar bill. Another customer pulled in as he paid for the gas. Mail walked back out, head averted, got in the car, and left. The other customer filled his tank, walked inside, and said, "That guy who just left-he looked like the guy they've got on TV."