Michael Prescott - Shiver

When he turned to face the guards, one of them noticed that his glasses were now secured by only a single stem. The right temple, the one with the broken hinge, was missing.

“Hey, what happened to you, four-eyes?” a guard asked.

Rood just stared at him.

“Fuck that,” the other guard said. “Let’s get moving.”

They hustled him out of the cell, then along the corridor to the elevator. Rood’s heart was beating hard, but not with fear-never with fear. With energy. With power.

On the ground floor the guards transferred him to the custody of three deputies, stern square-shouldered men who wore gun belts and riot batons. They led him to a Department of Corrections cruiser parked in the underground garage.

The Los Angeles County Jail was located at 441 Bauchet Street in downtown L.A. The Criminal Courts Building, where the hearing was to be held, was several blocks away, on Temple Street, between Spring Street and Broadway. The drive would take at least five minutes.

Five seconds was all he would need.

He climbed into the rear of the cruiser. One of the deputies slid in beside him. The other two sat up front. A wire-mesh prisoner screen divided the front and back seats.

The car left the garage through a gated exit. As it crawled along Bauchet to Vignes Street, Rood twisted slightly in his seat so that his manacled hands were no longer within view of the deputy beside him.

With his right hand, he reached underneath his left sleeve.

His plan had formed whole in his mind yesterday afternoon, in the moment when he held his glasses up to the light and saw the vein of flattened steel running through the plastic temple. The plastic had been molded around a thin blade of metal for added sturdiness. It was this metal stem, in fact, to which the broken hinge was soldered.

Last night, once the lights were out and the other convicts were snoring and muttering under their blankets, he cracked open the plastic temple in his powerful hands, then extricated the steel blade. He scraped off clinging crumbs of plastic with the heel of one of his black prison-issue shoes, then carefully wedged the tip of the metal stem under the heel and pulled up on the longer end until it was bent at a ninety-degree angle.

For the rest of the night, he turned the metal tool over and over in his hands, admiring it in the dark. He was sure it would work. From his readings on the art of locksmithing, he knew that a handcuff lock was remarkably easy to pick. A common locksmith’s tool called a button hook would do the job. And a button hook-crude but, he believed, entirely adequate for his needs-was what he’d just made.

As the cruiser continued west on Vignes, Rood’s questing fingers found the strip of adhesive tape, formerly used to mend his glasses, which now affixed the button hook to his left forearm. He peeled off the tape and removed the tool.

Carefully, doing his best to betray no hint of the subtle manipulations behind his back, he inserted the short end of the steel stem into the keyhole of the left handcuff, then turned it.

Click.

The cuff was opened.

He was free.

The cruiser cut south onto a narrow side street empty of traffic and people. A stop sign was just ahead. Rood felt the car decelerate as the driver eased his foot down on the brake.

Now.

He whipped his hands out from behind his back. The handcuff on his right wrist was still locked, the chain and the left cuff swinging with it. The deputy beside him barely had time to pivot in his seat before Rood smashed the empty handcuff into his face. The man’s nose burst like a snail. Rood grabbed at the gun in his holster, but the deputy jerked away, shouting to his partners, his own hand on the gun butt. The two men up front were turning, drawing their revolvers.

Rood wrapped his arms around the deputy and twisted the man roughly in front of his own body to shield himself. For a second time he swatted the cop hard in the face with the steel manacle. The deputy groaned and released his grip on the gun. Rood jerked it free.

The driver squeezed off a round, firing through the prisoner screen. The bullet impacted on the back of the seat inches from Rood’s head. Rood lurched sideways, cocked the deputy’s revolver, and jammed the muzzle up against the wire screen. He fired four times. The windshield was sprayed with red.

The deputy sharing the backseat with him moaned softly as Rood put the gun to his head and squeezed the trigger.

Then it was done. All three of them were dead.

Panting hard. Rood grabbed for a door handle, found none. The rear doors of the car could be opened only from the outside. He smashed the side window with the butt of the revolver, then reached through and fumbled the door open.

Swiftly he climbed out of the cruiser. The street was still empty. Someone might be watching from a window, but even so, it would take the cops awhile to piece together what had happened. Quite possibly nobody in the neighborhood had heard anything more than the repeated backfiring of a balky car; the cruiser’s rolled-up windows would have muffled the gunshots.

Rood slipped behind the wheel, shoving the driver onto the lap of the dead man in the passenger seat. He laid his foot on the gas pedal, and the cruiser rocketed forward.

He heard himself laughing as he wiped blood off the windshield with the sleeve of his shirt.

It occurred to him that he could do whatever he liked now. He could switch cars and drive to the Mexican border. Once on the other side, he could create a new identity for himself and start a new life. In time he could resume killing. There were many attractive young women in Mexico.

On the other hand, if he went through with the plan he had in mind, there would be no possibility of escape. He was certain to die.

But the bitch would die first.

Which mattered more to him? Ending her life-or preserving his own?

He considered the question carefully, and then, with full understanding of the consequences, he made his choice.

Parking at a curb, Rood unlocked the other handcuff, then ran to a pay phone, feeling terribly conspicuous in his blue overalls and prison grays. He leafed hurriedly through the directory hanging by the wire cord from the sheet-metal shelf. It took him less than thirty seconds to find the listing in the White Pages.

He smiled as he remembered driving the bitch down Santa Monica Boulevard in the stolen Dodge he’d passed off as an unmarked police car. As the towers of Century City glided by, she remarked, “I work there.” He asked what sort of work she did. “I write informational booklets for an actuarial firm,” she answered, then added helpfully, “Iver and Barnes.”

He studied the company’s address and memorized it.

A block away he pulled into an alley. He dumped the deputies’ bodies on the pavement, then opened the trunk of the car. Inside, among the blankets and spare coats, he found a shotgun.

He hefted the gun. It was a Remington 870, a 12-gauge pump-action job fitted with a shoulder sling and pistol grip instead of a full buttstock. The magazine held five shells. Rood searched the interior of the trunk till he found two boxes of additional shells, twenty-five in each. The shells, he was pleased to see, were three-inch Magnums loaded with 00 buckshot. Powerful artillery, perfect for hunting deer or other large game.

He shrugged on a long raincoat from the trunk, stuffed the boxes of ammo in the deep pockets, and carried the shotgun with him as he slid back into the driver’s seat. He sped off, heading toward Century City and the offices of Iver amp; Barnes.

Along the way he stopped at an art store in Hollywood. He pumped the Remington’s action and released a spray of buckshot, laughing as the clerk and his customers dived to the floor. They gave him no trouble as he searched the shop and took a box of modeling clay.