John Sandford - Escape Clause

King said, “I’m sorry, then. I didn’t really think you did it. I had to consider the possibility.”

Peck said, “Listen, Barry, if you run to Chicago, you’ll be skipping out on your job and the cops will know exactly who gave us the key to the tiger den. Then they’ll hang you for Hamlet’s murder, even though you didn’t do it and I didn’t do it. You’ve got to go back to work, pretend nothing happened.”

“How am I going to do that?” King asked. “The cops are gonna find out that the guys in the RV kidnapped me and beat me up. I should be talking to them right now, asking them why I got picked up. If I don’t go to them, they’ll know I was involved.”

“Ahhh… shit. Then maybe you ought to go to them… you could say… I dunno.” Peck looked around the parking lot; an elderly couple, pushing a shopping cart and pulling along two towheaded boys, paid no attention to them. He said, “Look. We’re processing the tigers out at a farm, not far from here. Five miles. Let’s go talk to Hayk, see what he thinks. He knows how to deal with cops. You can follow me out.”

–

King agreed, and as they left Cub supermarket and turned east on the interstate, Peck watched in the rearview mirror to make sure he didn’t change his mind.

As they drove to the farm, in addition to monitoring King, Peck considered his own psychological condition. Was he now a serial killer, or about to become one? You probably had to kill three, didn’t you, to be considered serial?

On the whole, he thought he was not a serial killer. Serial killers got off on the killing. In Peck’s case, he didn’t feel much at all. Killing didn’t get him sexually excited or emotionally wrought. Killing was simply a work-related task.

Would he be classified as a spree killer? Again, he thought not. Spree killers didn’t kill as work-related tasks. They went nuts and killed everybody they could see.

Peck had no political motives, wasn’t interested in politics, held no grudges, so he wasn’t that kind of psycho. No, he decided, he was clearly a sociopath whose life had been shoved into a difficult corner. Lots of people were sociopaths, some of them very successful in life.

–

Furthermore, killing people was actually a pain in the ass. Kill somebody, and there were all kinds of logistics to work out: how to keep your DNA off the victim, how to get rid of the body, what to do with the dead man’s car. The last matter was particularly perplexing. You could drive the car someplace and drop it off, though you’d have to be careful about DNA and fingerprints. But you wouldn’t want to drop it off near the murder scene, and if you didn’t, how did you get back to your own car? Walk? That seemed inefficient. Take a taxi? Then you had a witness. He was sure there were ways to do it, but he’d have to research it on the Internet.

–

When they turned into the farmyard, Peck pulled up to the barn, hopped out, and waved at King, who’d pulled up behind him. Peck walked straight to the barn door, and as he pushed it open, called, “Hayk? Hey, I’ve got Barry King here. We need to talk.”

Hayk didn’t answer, being dead, and now lying in a ditch fifteen miles away. The rifle was leaning against the wall next to the meat-cutting table, along with a box of cartridges. Peck picked it up, pulled the bolt, slipped a cartridge into the chamber, and walked back toward the door.

When King pulled it open and stood there in a halo of sunlight, Peck shot him in the chest. King fell heavily against the door and slid down it, closing the door in the process. When Peck tried to get out, he found the body was blocking the door, and because there was a small cavity in the earth outside the door, and King’s body was in it, he couldn’t immediately get the door open. He had to kick it, and then push it, and then kick it some more, growing increasingly panicky-the body was in plain sight if somebody drove past the farmhouse-until finally he could squeeze through the crack between the door and the doorjamb.

When he did get outside, he found that King was unconscious but not yet dead. Peck dragged King’s body out of the cavity, got the door fully open, and pulled him inside.

Still breathing.

Peck walked around the barn, looking at the body. Still breathing. He didn’t want to risk another shot, so finally, impatient, he went over and kicked the wounded man in the head. King sputtered out some blood, and Peck lost it, and kicked him in the head another half-dozen times. That did it and the breathing stopped.

Being a doctor, he also checked for a pulse in King’s neck. Nothing.

“I feel much better after the workout,” Peck told Katya. He needed the conversation; a way, he thought, to resolve the situation in his own mind. The big cat stared at him from behind the chain-link fence and didn’t contribute a thing. “You know, you figure out what you have to do and then you execute. That’s so important. Execution is. You have to carry through. A lot of people can’t do that.”

The cat said nothing.

Virgil was working the phones, spreading the word among police agencies about the search for Barry King and the Simonians. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and he had to be content to sit and wait and think about something he might do.

One thing he didn’t do was watch the local television news, where the BCA-meaning him-was getting ripped for not finding the tigers. The talking heads had no suggestions about how that might be done; they simply wanted it done, never mind that the BCA was looking for one or two people in an area with a population of three and a quarter million.

Virgil still believed the tigers were nearby, but he had resigned himself to the idea that they were probably dead. He also had the sense that they weren’t down in somebody’s basement in suburban Woodbury, or any other suburb, because there were too many people around. But where would they be?

In the meantime, following up on a tip from the Simonians themselves, he gave Hamlet Simonian’s phone number to Sandy, who talked to Apple about lost phones, found out how you tracked them, and determined that the phone was moving west out of Denver, down I-70.

“We need to find the guy who’s got it,” Virgil said. “Any ideas would be appreciated.”

“Lots of cars on I-70,” Sandy said. “I don’t think the Colorado highway patrol is going to shut down an interstate and start searching cars for a cell phone.”

“We gotta do something-we need that phone,” Virgil said.

“I can call around,” she said. “I wouldn’t count on getting it.”

“I gotta think,” Virgil said. “I mean, I am thinking, but I’m not coming up with anything.”

–

While they were doing that and Peck was murdering King, Sparkle was sneaking into the Castro canning factory with a woman named Ramona Alvarez. Alvarez’s husband unloaded trucks, while Alvarez worked on the topping line, where open jars coming down a roller track were topped up with pickle slices.

“Not as many people here as I thought,” Sparkle muttered to Alvarez, as Alvarez walked past the time-card rack. She wouldn’t be checking in; the ghost workers didn’t have time cards.

“There are a lot of people here; you don’t see them so much, except down at the loading docks,” Alvarez said in good but heavily accented English. “Here, it’s mostly machines. We got to watch for Stout. If he sees you here, there’ll be lots of trouble. They put you in jail for trespassing.”

The factory, Sparkle thought, looked like what she imagined the inside of a coffeemaker might look like-hot, lots of moving parts, saturated with a wide variety of odors, ranging from fresh cucumber to the smell of the spices and vinegars that made pickles. While the exterior of the place was foreboding, that big dark brick wall, the interior was painted a uniform beige, with a slick easy-wash finish.