killing and had gone back a few times, just to look. She was a tall, dark-haired woman, but with pale eyes and a kind of wide Slavic forehead and sensuous lips. The first night, while he was still developing into a god on his own, he waited until the shop closed, planning to follow her to her car, and then to her home. The lights went out, and he waited, but she never came out.
The next night, he found her going out the back. He watched her as she walked down to the bar, which had a bigger parking lot than the craft store, slipped into her car. He followed her efficiently, using techniques learned from Robert Ludlum, and was disappointed to find her going into an apartment building. Lots of lights, lots of people around, and since it was mostly students, a lot of awareness.
But that moment in the alley… did she always do that? He watched three more nights, and her routine never varied.
On the night he became a god, he'd waited until she started turning out the shop lights, had pulled into the alley that led to the bar parking lot, and then pulled into a space between her and her car. There was some ambient light from the bar, but not much. He could see her coming as he got out: he was humming a snatch of song, which he later remembered as 'Danger Zone' from the Top Gun movie. And that's what he felt like, like the top gun…
He walked around to the back of the car, checking that nobody else was in the alley: here was the danger zone, at least for him. He messed around in the trunk, as if he were opening a suitcase or something, and watched her with his peripheral vision. He could see by her hesitant step that she thought about turning, and walking away from him, out there alone in the dark, but that would have been embarrassing, and so she came on, angling a bit away from him, but she was still within a step or two as she went by, watching him out of the corner of her eye.
He let her get another step, to relax just that fatal notch, then with a quick two-step approach, hit her with a dowel rod. The dowel was a little more than an inch thick, sold as a clothes-closet rod, and five feet long. He meant to stun her with it: but in the excitement and fear of the moment, he hit her too hard. She went down, he scooped her up, dumped her in the trunk of the car, tossed the stick in after her, slammed it, ran around to the door, jumped inside, and was rolling.
The first time, he'd been intensely frightened. What if a taillight went out? What if he forgot to signal a turn? What if somebody hit him, an accident, and the cops found the body in the trunk?
All kinds of things could happen.
None of them did.
And then the disappointment: he'd hit her too hard.
When he opened the trunk, she moaned but never seemed aware of what he was doing. He picked her up, and her head rolled, and her eye-lids fluttered, and he thought she might be faking. She wasn't.
He was careful, in handling her, to never let her get in a position to slash at him… but she never even stiffened as he hauled her into O'Donnell's shed. O'Donnell was in Madison, seeing his mother. The availability of his car shed had been the key to launch the attack. He'd gotten the shed ready before he went after her-had laid down a plastic painter's drop cloth that he'd bought from Home Depot. He'd hung a piece of nylon anchor rope over one of the exposed ceiling beams, designed to hold the weight of an automobile engine. He tied Larson's hands and lifted her with the rope.
She was absolutely slack, all her weight on her shoulder joints, but she never protested, never made a sound other than the low gagging moan.
'Angela,' he called to her. He'd gotten out his wire flail. 'Angela, can you hear me?'
She couldn't. He snapped the flail at her; the wire cut into her back, and blood seeped out of the cuts. Nothing but the moan, the fluttering eyelids.
He hit her again and then a kind of blankness descended on him, and he began beating her with a fury, hitting her, hitting her, until a misstep sent him skidding across the plastic sheet; he dropped to his hands and knees in the blood, gasping for breath. Looked up at her: she hardly looked human, except for her untouched face. He'd shredded her.
He tried calling to her again, but she was no longer home. Finally, in disgust, he'd cut her throat with a carpet knife. Not a straight razor, but a carpet knife from a Hardware Hank store, stood there and watched the blood pumping out of her throat until her heart stopped, and her blood with it.
THEN RICE. That had been different; and Peterson…
In the room next door, Millie reached a climax and cried out, and Grant cried out with her.
He lay on the bed for a moment: everything was coming down on him now. Everything. He'd never make it to Miami. They'd pull him down, lock him down the hall with Biggie and Taylor and Chase.
Grant staggered away from his bed, sweating, his heart still pounding. Into the bathroom: he felt weird, looked at himself in the mirror. His face was bright pink: his blood pressure must be out of sight, he thought. Had to calm down… he splashed a double handful of water into his face, patted his face dry with a towel. Looked at his watch. What? He'd been on the bed for forty minutes. It had seemed like only a moment…
What to do, what to do… He paced his apartment, gnawing on a knuckle until it was raw. They were coming, and he was getting nowhere.
He went into his bedroom again, opened the closet door, pushed away some shoes. Three guns there. Two from O'Donnell, one of his own. One 9mm, one.40, and a.45.
He picked up the guns, looked at them for a moment, then went back to the living room and got his briefcase. The first briefcase of his life. All done now. He poured out the papers inside and threw in the guns. And the razor. Back to the bedroom, he got the straight razor he'd used on Peterson and slipped it into his pocket. He and Biggie and Chase had figured out how to get them inside-as long as he was coming in on a weekday, and on the second shift…
Which was where they were now.
And Justus Smith had to be in the control booth. Smith always worked the second shift, on weekdays; but what if he was sick? Or if he'd taken a vacation day? If they were actually going to execute the Armageddon, they'd always talked of it, Lighter, Chase, Taylor, and himself as being carefully planned ahead of time, with proper options that would allow them to wait until conditions were perfect. Now it was all ad hoc. Nothing was perfect…
GRANT LOOKED AT his watch. The first shift had just ended. He went to the phone, dialed in to the hospital, and asked for Smith.
A moment later, 'Cage-this is Smith.'
Grant hung up. 'All right,' he said to himself. Justus was in the cage, and God in his heaven. He looked around the apartment. He didn't have to pack: fuck all this stuff. He picked up the briefcase, focused now, ready to make his run. Ready to go down with the Gods Down the Hall. And then it would all be done. No more misery; no more loneliness; no more acid rolling around in his brains, to make him cry at night.
He carried the briefcase down to his car and threw it in, jingled his keys, got into the driver's seat, and thought: Shit. The coin.
He went back upstairs, into the bedroom, and opened the top drawer in his chest of drawers, dug around some socks, and came up with the plastic box. Inside was a gold 1866S double eagle. The coin cost him $1,432, but the same coin, in better condition, might be worth as much as $25,000 to $30,000.
Justus Smith was a coin nut.
HE WAS TURNING TO GO when he heard a thump on the wall. Then faintly, a woman's voice. He looked at the door and then at the stethoscope on the bed. There was no time for this, no time. He went over to the stethoscope on the bed and plugged it into his ears.
Millie Lincoln was doing it again. The rush came, as it always did, but this time there was more than lust. This time there was anger and anxiety and Armageddon coming; he'd never even seen her, not for sure, because he had too much to lose.
Now, there was nothing to lose. Millie Lincoln was just getting started when Grant unplugged himself from the
