Brian Freeman - Marathon

She was the cause.

She’d made it all happen.

She was Satan.

Khan felt a murderous passion in his heart like no emotion he’d ever experienced. The transformation rolled over him like a tidal wave. The old Khan was gone; the man in the mirror was someone new. He had died, but now he was reborn with a purpose. Every man needed a purpose.

Ahdia and Pak are dead. Who mourns for them? Who gets justice for them?

I do .

He stalked from the restaurant. His breath was loud in his ears, blocking out every other sound. He was conscious of the weight of the gun that was still secured under his belt. It didn’t seem strange or fearful now to hold a gun. To point a gun. To pull the trigger and wreak havoc.

Khan got into the Taurus. He made the engine roar like a snorting bull.

To the south was Minneapolis, freedom, and a new life.

To the north was Duluth and Dawn Basch.

Khan turned north and sped away.

On Wednesday morning, they found the Bug Zappers van.

Maggie bumped her Avalanche over the curb as she parked outside a boarded-up storefront on First Street. She climbed out and dropped down to the grease-stained, cobblestoned pavement. The still, sticky air gave her face a sheen of sweat. She crossed to the four-story U.S. Bank parking ramp that took up most of the opposite block. She trotted up the steps to the roof, where she found Max Guppo waiting next to the van. One of their uniformed officers had identified the vehicle an hour earlier.

“Morning, Max,” Maggie murmured, stripping off her sunglasses. She matched the license plate on the panel van to the photo from the SuperAmerica gas station and confirmed that this was the same van Travis Baker had used to fill up multiple gasoline cans.

“Morning,” Guppo replied, chewing on a peach scone that left crumbs in his mustache.

They were both grim. It had been a bad night and a bad stretch of days. Maggie put her hands on her hips and squinted at Lake Superior through the haze. Her lips bent into a frown.

“Do we know how long the van has been here?” she asked.

“I reviewed the ramp cameras with the security staff. The van entered the lot yesterday evening at about eight o’clock.”

“Was Travis Baker driving?”

“Yeah. Kid looked scared to death.”

“Anybody else in the vehicle?”

“No, he was alone. Two minutes after he pulled into the ramp, the cameras caught him on the sidewalk outside. He headed south on First Street on foot. I added what he was wearing to the BOLO.”

Maggie did a circuit around the van. “The truck’s clean. Not a speck of dirt on it. Travis was trying to cover his tracks.”

“Yeah, but check out the paint near the rear tire on the driver’s side,” Guppo told her.

She squatted and examined the chassis between the left rear tire and the tailpipe. She saw what Guppo had seen. An inch of white paint was bubbled and blackened, as if scorched by fire.

“He set off the blaze a little too close to the van,” Maggie concluded. “Flames licked the paint.”

“Looks like it.”

“Kid’s lucky he didn’t blow himself up.”

Maggie walked to the rear of the van. She cocked her head and assessed the vehicle. Something didn’t look right. “Does this thing look lopsided to you?”

Guppo came and stood next to her. “Little bit, yeah.”

“The right rear tire is low,” Maggie said.

She grabbed a flashlight from her pocket and bent down and aimed the beam deep into the jagged treads of the tire. She whistled and moved to each of the other tires and did the same thing. Everywhere she looked, she saw the shiny glint of something like diamonds.

“What is it?” Guppo asked.

“Glass. There are fragments of glass stuck in the treads on all the tires. One of them must have gone deep enough to produce a slow leak. The gallery blew, the windows shattered, and Travis drove through a field of broken glass as he was getting away. He brought all the evidence with him.”

“It’s nice when criminals are stupid,” Guppo said.

Maggie gestured at the locked rear doors of the van. “Let’s take a look inside and see what else he left for us.”

“Sure.”

The round detective finished his scone with a large bite and waddled to the back of his tan 1998 Oldsmobile and popped the trunk. He took out a thin aluminum stick with a hooked end and gracefully slid it into the window well on the van’s driver’s door. In a few seconds, he undid the lock. With a gloved hand, he opened the door and pushed a button inside to unlock the remaining doors of the vehicle.

Maggie swung open the rear panels. The interior of the van was lined with metal shelves, and she saw a supply of animal cages, rubber gloves, ventilator masks, and plastic canisters labelled as poison. She also saw a large, clear plastic bag on the nearest shelf, and when she squinted, she realized that the bag was stuffed with the corpses of at least thirty rats. Where an orange bucket had tipped, she saw hundreds of dead cockroaches spilling across the rubber-matted floor.

“Holy crap, it’s like a Stephen King novel in here,” she said.

Guppo’s mustache wrinkled with distaste as he assessed the van. “But no gasoline cans,” he said.

“No, he must have jettisoned them. Hang on, though.”

Maggie bent forward until her nose was almost touching the floor of the van. She avoided the bodies of the bugs. The strong odor from the mat made her jerk backward, and she saw drips of dark liquid staining the floor.

“He spilled,” she told Guppo. “The tanks leaked when he was taking them in and out. The floor reeks of gasoline.”

“So we’ve got him,” Guppo said.

Maggie nodded. “Yeah, we’ve got him. Now we just need to find him.”

Travis froze as he was about to push open the glass door that led to the roof of the parking ramp. Not far away, the rear panels of his van were open. He recognized the Chinese police officer from the hospital, and his whole body convulsed with fear. They’d found him. They knew what he’d done.

The cop’s head swiveled in his direction, and Travis stumbled out of sight before she could spot him. With heavy, lumbering footsteps, he ran down the stairwell. He stopped before he reached the street, at the entrance to the second-floor skywalk over Lake Avenue. On the street, any cop in a squad car could come around the corner and pick him out. In the skywalks, he could blend into the workday crowd.

Travis shoved his hands into his pockets and wandered across Lake Avenue in the glass tunnel. He tried to hide the anxiety that swirled in his brain.

The skywalks connected buildings throughout miles of downtown, which meant that Duluthians could avoid the subzero temperatures in January and get around the city without ever going outside. The corridors were long and dark, with a shut-in smell. Popcorn littered the carpet. Air-conditioning hummed. As Travis hurried from building to building, other pedestrians passed him, but no one looked at him twice. He glanced over his shoulder, in case the cops from the parking ramp were following him, but for now, he’d eluded them. Even so, the police were everywhere. When he crossed over Second Avenue, he spotted two squad cars roaring through the intersection, and he turned around to make sure his face wasn’t visible through the glass.

Travis knew they were looking for him.

He ducked into a café in the Holiday Center and bought a cup of black coffee. He nervously eyed the businesspeople moving back and forth around him. He took a seat near the tall windows looking out on the street, away from the skywalk traffic, and dug his phone out of his pocket. He wondered if the police were already monitoring it, but he turned it on, anyway, and dialed Wade’s number. The phone rang and rang, until he got Wade’s voice mail.