The makeshift sap missed Randall's blind-flailing arm and struck the side of his head with a dull pop, caving it in.
Randall's bowels released with a gurgle. His knees gave, and he toppled over, the sock wedged inside the neat oval of missing skull.
Tim frisked him but found no weapon. He staggered to the door and peered through the tiny square of glass at the top. His face a fishy gray, Chad mopped Stanley John's juices around on the slick floor, making little headway.
Tim gently tried the knob. Locked.
To buy some time, he let out a few groans, as if he were still being tortured.
A scouring of Randall's pockets turned up a driver's license. Light-headed, Tim made his way back to the door and started working the lock, but the license was too wide for Tim to get a good angle.
Chad looked up and let out a garbled cry.
Tim began bending Randall's license back and forth lengthwise. "Let me out."
Chad was quivering. "Where's Randall?"
His tongue felt like an anvil. "Turn on the light and see."
Resting the heel of his hand on his pistol, Chad inched forward. His fingers found the switch and flicked it on. Tim stepped aside to provide a good view, and Chad let out a gasp.
His voice rose to a desperate whine. "You're gonna be in deep shit when Dr. Henderson gets back."
Tim managed to rip the license in half along the seam. "I won't lay a finger on you. I'll just walk out of here. You can say it was Randall's fault. That he came in and left the door unlocked. He certainly won't mind."
"You're out of your mind. Like I'd let you out now."
"If I stay here, you'll regret it."
"Yeah, right. Sure." Chad's chest shook with a few sobs that he hid under a nervous stutter of a laugh. "What are you gonna do?"
Tim turned his head slowly, eyebrows raised, indicating Randall's body.
Chad's face convulsed as if he'd bitten into something sour.
Tim slid the halved license beneath the latch bolt and shoved the door open.
Chad yelped and drew back against the wall, the Sig pointing at Tim's head though Tim was a good ten feet away and could barely stay on his feet.
No exterior doors in view. The only window had been blacked out.
Tim heard Winona's voice before he saw her. "Chad, Dr. Henderson says if there's gonna be two bodies, we should prepare them inside before -"
She rounded the corner, nearly colliding with Tim. Her eyes barely had time to flutter wide with alarm when Tim struck her above the ear with the side of his closed fist.
She glided weightlessly a few feet before collapsing to the floor.
Tim faced Chad across her body. The gun shook in Chad's hand.
Winona stirred and coughed up a mouthful of vomit on Chad's shoes. Broken blood vessels squirmed through her right cheek like crimson maggots.
"If you call out," Tim said, "I'll come back and kill you."
He left Chad frozen and hobbled down the hall, his bare foot slapping linoleum. A window looked out on Randall's van, still parked tight to the building beside a sporty Lexus – Tim's ears had betrayed him. Displeased and slightly panicked, Henderson was aborting Plan A, tugging Stanley John's stiff body back out of the van. It landed on the asphalt with a thump.
Searching for an exit, Tim slid past the window and banged through two swinging doors, leaving bloody handprints on the metal plates. The sound boomed back from the distant reaches of a massive warehouse.
He wiped the run of blood from his eyes and halted, shocked. Rising vertiginously from a bedrock of pallets were colossal pillars of videotapes, DVDs, and CD-ROMs, all sporting TD's close-up and a jagged advertisement bubble proclaiming, Your Free Program Software!
A virtual army of tape sessions awaiting deployment.
Tim took a few shaky steps into the product labyrinth, disoriented by the surrounding sameness. He registered a flutter of footsteps at the doors, then a shout. More voices answered; all three were on the prowl now.
Tim dashed between two forklifts and down a lane of DVDs, trying to source the voices. He followed a forced turn and came up against a wall of videotapes, TD's portrait leering at him in mosaic from beneath endless cellophane wrappers.
An engine revved sharply, then tires chirped against concrete. Truck forks punched through the rise of VHS cassettes, bringing them raining down on Tim.
He was buried instantly.
Chapter forty-six
At 7:12 P.M. Dray snatched the phone off the hook the instant it chirped, knocking over an untouched glass of vodka she'd poured and sat staring at since Bear phoned an hour ago to let her know the print from the car key was a seven-point match.
Bear said, "We didn't find him -"
Her breath pushed through her teeth like steam.
"- but Metro Division just got a hit on Leah's car."
"I could give a shit about Leah's car right now."
"They pulled a guy over off Florence downtown, pretty far afield from the ranch. Denley and Palton took over custody, picked him up from Parker Center. We've got him upstairs. Name of Leo Henderson." Bear cleared his throat, then cleared it again. "The thing is…"
"Yeah?"
"The thing is, we found some supplies in the trunk."
"Like what? Bear? Like what?"
"Heavy-duty garbage bags. Bleach. Lye. And a hatchet."
Dray let out a noise she didn't recognize.
"Thomas and Freed are working him."
She snapped into focus. "On what? They'd better not be mentioning Tom Altman or if Tim is still -"
"They're just questioning him on the car and the supplies. But he's not putting out. He sits there wearing this complacent smile. He's got the thousand-yard stare and everything. And his knuckles are bruised."
"He was coming from Tim." She drew a deep breath. "Or going back to him."
"Maybe he hasn't done it yet."
"I can't hear 'maybe' right now, Bear."
They both let the silence draw out and out until Dray almost forgot they were on the phone. Finally Bear grumbled under his breath, a litany of seething fricatives.
"Say I tell Thomas and Freed to take a coffee break. Say I go in there and me and him work some shit out."
Dray pressed a hand to the bridge of her nose. "No, no violence like that. The rules apply when it's our family on the line, too. If they don't, the rules don't mean shit. And we don't mean shit." She realized she was standing, and she eased herself down into a chair. A stampede of anxiety overtook her; she waited for the dust to settle. She couldn't survive another funeral. She couldn't endure identifying Tim's body, seeing the cold face beneath the Tom Altman-dyed hair and fake goatee. An idea sailed through her grief, setting her back in the chair.
"Bear?" Her voice was shaky, excited. "Bear, where's Leah's car?"
"Police impound lot. They towed it to the one on Aliso off Alameda. Why?"
"We gotta make a phone call."
Wearing dark slacks, twice-cuffed shirtsleeves, four-inch lifts, and a contentious scowl, Pete Krindon approached the heavyset city worker at the impound lot. The guy manned a station resembling a Hertz rental booth near the front gate. Behind the high-rising fences capped with barbed wire, Ferraris and Pintos commingled, an egalitarian paradise for the appropriated.
The worker tugged at his jowls and suspiciously regarded the biohazard-orange zippered bag swinging at Pete's side.
Pete's hand moved to his hip; a badge glinted, then disappeared. "Derek Cliffstone, Department of Homeland Security. I'm looking for a stolen Lexus IS 300, license plate four-xray-union-Paul-zero-two-two, impounded this A.M. from a Middle Eastern male, alias Leo Henderson."
"Leo Henderson?"
"Persian. They make 'em light-skinned, too, there, chief." Pete leaned forward in his oxblood loafers, the heel of his hand resting on his holstered Glock. He ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip and spit on the curb. "Sometime today might be nice."