'And we still can,' Laura said. 'But I don't want that bastard catching up with her first. If he stops at a gas station, we're going to take his keys.'
'Yeah, right! You take his keys! Damn it, you're asking to get shot!'
'We'll see,' Laura said, and she turned onto the ramp in the wake of Van Diver's car.
In the Buick, Earl Van Diver was watching the monitor under his dashboard. A little red light was flashing, indicating a magnetic fix. The liquid crystal display read SSW 208 2.3: compass heading, bearing, miles between the main unit and the homer. As he came off the ramp's curve, he saw the display change to SW 196 2.2. He followed the road that led south from I-94, passing a sign that said LAWTON, 3 MI.
'He's not stopping for gas,' Didi said. Van Diver had gone straight past a Shell station on one side of the road and an Exxon on the other. 'He's taking the scenic route.'
'Why'd he get off, then? If he's so hell-bent on catching Mary, why'd he get off?' She kept a car and a pickup truck between them as she followed. They'd gone maybe two miles when Laura saw a blue building with a garish orange roof off to the left. INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PANCAKES, its sign announced. The Buick's brake lights flashed, the turn indicator went on, and Van Diver made the turn into the IHOP's parking lot.
Van Diver's savage grin twitched. The olive-green van, its left side battered and scraped, was sitting in the parking lot between a junker Olds and a Michigan Power panel truck. Van Diver swung the Buick into a parking space up close to the building, where he could watch the exit. He cut the engine and unplugged the monitor, which read NNE 017 0.01.
Close enough, he thought.
Van Diver put on his black gloves, his fingers long and spidery. Then he slid the Browning automatic from beneath his seat, clicked the safety off, and held it against his right thigh. He waited, his dark eyes on the IHOP's door. It opened in a few seconds, and two men in blue parkas and caps came out, their breath frosty in the morning air. They walked toward the Michigan Power panel truck. Come on, come on! he thought. He'd figured he could be patient after all these years. But his patience had run out, and that was why he'd hurried the first shot that had hit Edward Fordyce instead of Mary Terror's skull.
The skin prickled on the back of his neck. Van Diver sensed movement behind him and to his left. His head swiveled in that direction, his hand coming up with the Browning in it and his heart hammering.
He looked into the snout of a pistol pressed against the window's glass, and behind it stood the woman he'd first seen on the newscasts from Atlanta and later had met in Bedelia Morse's kitchen.
She wasn't a killer. She was a social columnist for the Atlanta Constitution, and she was married to a stockbroker. She had, up until the kidnapping of her baby, never felt the agony of heartrending pain. She had never suffered. All these things Earl Van Diver knew, and weighed in the balance as he prepared to bring his gun up and fire through the window at her. His shot would be faster and more deadly because she didn't have the courage to kill a man in cold blood.
But he didn't do it. He didn't, because of what he saw in Laura Clayborne's bruised face. Not hopelessness, not pleading, not weakness. He saw desperation and rage there, emotions he knew all too well. He might get off the first shot, but she would certainly deliver the second. Bedelia Morse suddenly reached past Laura and opened the door before Van Diver could hit the lock. 'Put the gun down,' Laura said. Her voice was tight and strained. Could she shoot him if she had to? She didn't know, and she hoped to God she wouldn't have to find out. Van Diver just sat there, grinning at her with his frozen face, his eyes dark and alert as a rattlesnake's. 'Put it down!' Laura repeated. 'On the floor!'
'Take the clip out first,' Didi added.
'Yeah. Like she said.'
Van Diver looked at the automatic in Laura's hand. He saw it shake a little, her finger on the trigger. When Van Diver moved, both women flinched. He popped the bullet clip out of his Browning, held it in his palm, and put the gun on the floorboard. 'Take your keys and get out of the car,' Didi told him, and he obeyed.
Laura glanced over at Mary Terror's van and then back to Van Diver. 'How'd you know she was here?'
Van Diver remained silent, just staring at her with his fathomless eyes. He'd taken off his woolen cap, and his scalp was bald except for a few long strands of gray hair pressed down on the skin, a fringe of gray-and-brown hair around his head. He was slim and wiry, standing about five ten, by no means a large man. But Laura knew his strength from painful experience. Earl Van Diver was a taut package of muscle and bone powered by hatred.
'What's the antenna for?' Didi asked. She had already checked out the Buick's interior. 'There's no car phone.'
No answer. 'The bastard can't talk without his throat plug,' Didi realized. 'Where's your plug, shitface? You can point, can't you?' No reaction. Didi said, 'Give me your gun,' and took it from Laura. She stepped forward and jammed the pistol up against Earl Van Diver's testicles, and she looked him right in his cold eyes. 'Came to Ann Arbor to find me, didn't you? What were you doing? Staking out my house?' She shoved the gun's barrel a little harder. 'How'd you find me?' Van Diver's face was a motionless mask, but a twisted vein at his left temple was beating fast and hard. Didi saw a garbage dumpster back toward the rear of the IHOP, where a patch of woods sloped down to a drainage ditch. 'We're not going to get anything out of him. He's nothing but an' – she pressed her face closer to his – 'old fucked-up pig.' The pig sprayed bits of spittle onto Van Diver's cheeks, and his eyes blinked. 'Let's walk.' She pushed him toward the dumpster, the gun moving to jam against his back.
'What are you going to do?' Laura asked nervously.
'You don't want him following Mary, do you? We're going to take him into the woods and shoot him. A bullet in one of his knees ought to take care of the problem. He won't get too far crawling.'
'No! I don't want that!'
'I want it,' Didi said, shoving Van Diver forward. 'Son of a bitch killed Edward. Almost killed us and the baby, too. Move, you bastard!'
'No, Didi! We can't do it!'
'You won't have to. I'm paying Edward's debt, that's all. I said move, you fucking pig!' She punched him hard in the small of the back with the gun's barrel, and he grunted and staggered forward a few paces.
Earl Van Diver lifted his hands. Then he pointed to his throat and moved his finger toward the Buick's trunk,
'Now he wants to talk,' Didi said. Under her clothes she had broken out in a cold sweat. She would have shot him if she'd had to, but the idea of violence made her stomach clench. 'Open it,' she told him. 'Real slow.' She kept the gun against his back as he unlocked the trunk. Laura and Didi saw the listening dish, the tape recorder, and the sniper's rifle. Van Diver opened a small gray plastic case and took out a cord with a plug on one end and a miniature speaker on the other. He slid the plug's prongs into his throat socket with practiced ease, and then he clicked a switch on the back of the speaker and adjusted a volume control. He lifted the speaker up before Didi's face.
His mouth moved, the veins standing out in his throat. 'The last person who called me a pig,' the metallic voice rasped, 'fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. You knew him by one of his names: Raymond Fletcher.'
The name stunned her for a few seconds. Dr. Raymond Fletcher had done the plastic surgery on her face.
'Walk to the car.' Didi slammed the Buick's trunk shut and shoved Van Diver toward the BMW. When Van Diver was in the backseat with Didi beside him, the gun trained on him, and Laura sitting behind the wheel, Didi said, 'Okay, I want to hear it. How'd you find me?'
Van Diver watched the IHOP's door, but his voice filtered through the speaker in his hand. 'A policeman friend of mine was working undercover on Fletcher in Miami, trying to catch him doing surgery on people who wanted to disappear. Fletcher called himself Raymond Barnes, and he was working on a lot of Mafia and federal- case clients. My friend was a computer hacker. He cracked Barnes's computer files and dug around in them. Everything was in code, and it took maybe five months to figure it out. Barnes kept all his case records, back to when he'd first started in 'seventy. Your name came up, and the work you'd had done in St. Louis. That's when I got involved. Unofficially.' His black eyes fixed on Didi. 'By the time I got to Miami, my friend was found floating in Biscayne Bay with his face blowtorched. So I went to visit the good doctor, and we went to his office to have a nice long talk.'
'He didn't know where I was!' Didi said. 'I'd moved three times since I had my face changed!'
'You came to Barnes with a letter of recommendation from an ex-Weatherman named Stewart McGalvin.
