Shaking more from fear than from the cold, he said, “Money I got,” and I heard his teeth clicking. Motioning him toward the spruce trees some thirty feet away, I let him walk ahead; then, when he was ten feet from a solid bank of wood, I shot him twice in the back.
The silencer went pffft-thud; the fat man flew forward; splintering wood echoed. I set my stopwatch at eight minutes for ultra-caution, then counted to twenty slowly, to give my victim time to die. When I was sure he would not disturb me with reflex jerks or blood sprays, I grabbed him by the heels and dragged him over to the set of trees most likely to have caught the death rounds. Seeing the ends of the hollow points imbedded side by side in a young sapling, I pried them out with my fingers and put them in my jacket pocket, then hauled the man through an open tree space and over to a snowdrift already three feet deep. Covering my gloveless hands with my sleeves, I took his billfold from his inside jacket pocket, extracted a wad of hundreds, twenties and tens and a collection of credit cards. Stuffing them into my rear pants pockets, I stood back, deep-breathed and unhitched the Polaroid from my shoulder.
4:16 elapsed.
I inventoried my person, touching magnum, spent rounds, stolen cash and plastic. The footprints and blood were fait accomplis; fresh snow would cover them soon. Looking down at the dead man, I saw that his crown of snow gave him an air of the Romantic era, as if he were a fop in Beethoven’s time disguising his ugliness with a powdered wig. That thought jarred me, and I leaned over and snapped a close-up of the back of his head. The camera ejected blank paper, and when the snow-crown image came through, I put the picture in my front pocket, flipped the man over and snapped his eyes-bulging, mouth-bloodied death mask. My memory was blipped again, and with six minutes down I scooped snow over the corpse until it was a pristine white mound. Finishing the job, I studied the face shot on my way back to the Deathmobile.
With the .357 back in its safety compartment, I continued my journey, the photos on the dashboard where I could view them against the powdered-wig snow. I drove on slowly, hugging the right lane, imagining Mother Nature covering my tracks back at the death site. The storm was reaching blizzard proportions, and I knew Lake Geneva before nightfall was impossible — I would have to seek shelter soon. My wiper blades were barely able to dent the powder hitting the windshield; after turning into a long S-shaped bend, I had to get out and clear it by hand.
That was when I saw the roadblock.
It was sixty yards up, and I knew it couldn’t be for me — I had killed the fat man clean, an hour and a half earlier, and if I was identified as the killer, the police would have made a moving approach. Drawing myself drum-tight inside, I scrubbed the windshield clean with my sleeve, got back in the cab and tore the death pictures into pieces and dropped them into the snow outside my passenger door. Remembering the spent shells and credit cards in my pocket, I flung them out, then dropped the Deathmobile into gear and eased up to the barricade.
State troopers holding shotguns were lined up against the strung-together sawhorses, and there were a half-dozen blue-and-white cruisers behind them. As I braked, two cops approached the Deathmobile in a flanking motion, shotgun muzzles pointed straight at me. From behind the roadblock, an electrically amplified voice barked: “Man in the silver van! Open the door of your vehicle, get out with your hands above your head and walk to the middle of the pavement! Do it slow!”
I obeyed, very slowly, snow raining down on me, the two troopers continuing to hold their beads, the eyes of their 12-gauges huge and black against the snowfall. When I reached the middle of the asphalt, a third cop grabbed my arms from behind, drew them behind my back and handcuffed my wrists. Once I was immobilized, a swarm of troopers leaped over the sawhorses and descended on the Deathmobile, and the two shotgun cops lowered their weapons and approached. The handcuff cop frisked me from behind and said, “Clean,” and the other two pointed me to my van. Troopers were over, under and in Deathmobile II; it made me angry, and I sensed that indignant was the way to play my first hard interrogation since Eversall/Sifakis four years earlier. “What the fuck is this?” I said.
The shotgun cops pressed me into the side of my van, and leaned into it themselves. It gave all three of us a break from the wind and snow, and the older cop, who had a lieutenant’s bar pinned to the front of his Smokey the Bear hat, said, “Your name?”
“Martin Plunkett,” I said.
“Address?”
“I don’t have an address. I’m going to Lake Geneva to look for work.”
“What kind of work?”
I sighed angrily. “Lift operator or bartender in the winter, maybe caddy during the golf season.”
The other cop took over. “You a professional transient, Plunkey?”
“Call me by my correct name,” I said.
The lieutenant plucked my wallet from my back pocket and handed it to a trooper inside the Deathmobile’s cab. “Run him all-points,” he said. Turning to face me, he said, “Mr. Plunkett, you have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have legal counsel present during questioning. If you cannot afford counsel, an attorney will be appointed to you free of charge.”
I breathed the pitch in. In the background I could hear my name and driver’s-license stats being spoken into a radio mike, and the van shakedown looked to be just about over. The wise-guy cop said, “You got a statement to make, Plunkey?”
I sneered à la Bogart. “You suck cock, dick breath?” The trooper balled his fists, and the lieutenant grabbed me and led me a few yards away. I heard a voice yell, “Vehicle looks clean, Skipper!” and the lieutenant said, “Don’t affect an attitude, young man. It’s not the time or the place.”
I affected a hurt look. “I don’t like being rousted.”
“Rousted, eh? Been ‘rousted’ before?”
“I was arrested for burglary about ten years ago. I haven’t been in trouble since.”
The lieutenant smiled and brushed snow from his lips. “That’s the kind of story I like to hear, especially if it gets corroborated by the warrant check we’re running on you.”
“It will be.”
“I sincerely hope so, because three young ladies have been raped and murdered around here lately — one this morning back near the Illinois line — which is what this is all about. What type blood you got, Martin?”
I didn’t know how to react to the coincidence, and the shocked look on my face must have been convincing, because the lieutenant shook his head and said, “Ain’t that the worst possible? What’s your blood type, boy?”
“O negative,” I said.
“That’s mighty fine, and I tell you what we’re gonna do. First, assuming you haven’t got any outstanding warrants, you’re gonna drive your van to the next town, Huyserville, and you’re gonna hang out in a nice clean cell at the jail and get a blood test, and if it comes back O negative, you’re a free man, because we typed the rape-o sonuvabitch we’re looking for from his semen, and he’s O positive. Thank mom and dad for their genes, boy, ’cause any O positive stranger in my stretch of Southern Wisconsin is in for some rousting.”
A trooper stuck his head out the van’s driver’s window. “The sleds squeaky, and daddy-o’s got no wants or warrants. One burglary conviction back in ’69, that’s it.”
The lieutenant unlocked my handcuffs and removed them, then said, “Greer, you ride shotgun with Mr. Plunkett here to Huyserville, find him a cozy cell and get Doc Hirsh over to administer a blood test. Martin, you drive carefully, and resign yourself to a night in a hick burg, because these roads ain’t fit for man or beast. Now get going.”