Sloan ran back through the door and down to three, but at three, Carmel was already going by, and he ran down to two, and she was coming and he knew he was too late, so he kept going, and at one he burst into the lobby and screamed at Sherrill, 'She's coming down the ramp…'
As he ran toward the front door, he registered Lucas on his knees, the blood,
Sherrill with the gun, and then the red Jag blasting through the wooden guard arms at the exit and out into the street, wheels screaming, car sliding, going away from him and Sloan ran out into a street full of people and couldn't fire his gun…
Lucas had done an inventory and was shouting 'Not bad, not bad,' and was trying to get up, while Sherrill screamed, 'Lay down, you're hurt, lay down,' and Lucas finally pushed her roughly out of the way and hobbled toward the front of the building and saw Sloan running away down the street and Carmel's Jag just turning the corner at the far end…
'Didn't think of this,' he said, trying to grin at Sherrill. Blood trickled down at the corner of his mouth. 'That she'd do this. She cracked.'
'Lucas, ya gotta sit down, the ambulance…'
'Fuck a bunch of ambulances…' And they saw people at the other end of the block, turning to stare, and Sherrill shouted, 'She's coming back, she went around the block.'
Lucas started to run, half-hobbled, toward the end of the block, Sherrill finally leaving him to run on ahead, her pistol out, shouting at people,
'Police, get away, police…'
Lucas saw her stop at the curb, then raise her gun… and the Jag came from behind the building and Sherrill pointed her pistol at the sky as the Jag hurtled by and Lucas came up and said 'Jesus Christ, she's doing a hundred and twenty…'
Carmel wasn't feeling much: a kind of mute stubbornness, a will to do what she pleased. She turned the last corner, realized that she was going the wrong way on a one-way street: and the wrong way in any case – the hospital was behind her. Instead of trying to turn, she focused her eyes on the Target Center, the auditorium where the Minnesota Timberwolves played basketball. Focused on the building and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
She was going seventy at the end of the first block, a hundred when Davenport saw her, at the end of the second. The car topped out at the end of the fifth block, at about a hundred and thirty. She drove straight down the white line between two lanes, cars dodging away from her, white faces going by like faces on postage stamps, half-seen, half-realized, frozen in expression. She hit a stout black man carrying a grocery sack, in which he had milk and cookies and a dozen oranges. He never saw her as he crossed at a crosswalk, looking into the grocery bag, thinking about opening the cookies. He was too heavy, he shouldn't have bought them, his wife would kill him… He never saw Carmel coming and she hit him with the very center of the Jag and he flew over the car as though lifted by angels.
At a hundred and thirty miles an hour, Carmel hit the curb outside the Target
Center and the Jag went airborne, turning, tumbling…
Lucas and Sherrill watched, appalled, as the car hit first the black man and then the concrete wall.
The black man was dead in a tenth of a second; he'd felt nothing but a sudden apprehension. As for Carmel, the transition from life to death was so sudden that she never felt it.
In the silence following the shattering impact, an even dozen oranges bounced and rolled in the dirt along the street, bright and promising like the best parts of a broken life.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Charlie Ross and his yuppie flip-fone pals at the Merchants Bank in Portland,
Oregon, had invented a new classification system for women. One that went down, not up. One duckling was a woman who bordered on the acceptable. Ten ducklings was a truly ugly duckling.
Ross was hacking his way through the billing entries for that month's box rentals, and incidentally keeping his eye on the safety-deposit counter while the regular clerk was at lunch, when a six-duckling came to the counter. She was bad news. If you were even tempted to throw her a mercy fuck, you'd want to put a rug over her head first. All of that went through Ross's bottlecap-sized brain as he pushed himself up from the desk and dragged his lard-ass over to the counter.
The woman was small, dark-haired, olive-complected. She had a mole by the corner of her mouth, a notable mole, nearly black, and another one beside her nose. And she wore over-sized glasses, the kind that are supposed to turn dark in sunlight, but always made your eyes look yellow when you were indoors. She handed him a key and he took it, ran it through the file machine, found her card, and brought it to the counter for her to sign.
But she was no longer looking at him: she was looking at the television that the bank had screwed to the ceiling of the lounge area, where visitors waited while their spouses or friends went into the vault. The TV was permanently tuned to
CNN Headline News, which at that moment was showing the wreck of a bloody-red
Jaguar that had plowed halfway through a cement-block wall.
'Ma'am?' Ross said. 'Ma'am, can I help you?'
The woman apparently didn't hear him as she drifted closer to the TV, listening, looking up at it, her mouth half-open.
'Happened last night,' Ross said helpfully. He'd already seen the loop a dozen times. The ugly duckling watched until another story started, this one involving a dog getting oxygen from a fireman, then turned back to the counter. He dropped her from six ducklings to four: she had a really nice ass, like a gymnast's. She seemed dazed.
'Hope it wasn't somebody you knew,' Ross said.
'No, no. I just wish they wouldn't show so much violence on TV,' Rinker said.
She signed the card and pushed it across the desk at him. He noticed that her hand was trembling, and he hoped it wasn't some weird foreign disease.
Lucas had been patched up in the emergency room and sent home. The patching had been messy. A slug had burned through the skin on the side of his neck, leaving a groove, which was sewn closed. A fragment of lead – he'd been hit by a storm of ricochet fragments
– had pierced the skin on his skull, behind his right ear, but hadn't reached the bone; the fragment was removed with tweezers, and two stitches used to close the wound.
'Just like that Wooden Head guy,' Sherrill said happily. She'd cheered up a lot when the doctors said that he wasn't badly injured.
Another fragment had struck his hip, which also made Sherrill happy.
'Hit in the butt,' she said. 'Hip.'
'Looks like a big butt to me,' she said. 'Your hip is over here, on the side.'
More fragments were taken from his side and legs. To get at one, just over his kidney, the doc had to make an additional small cut. The wounds in his legs were all superficial, but nasty; three got stitches. When it was done, they gave him a sample pack of ibuprofen and told him not to play basketball that weekend.
'That's it?' he grumped. 'Don't play basketball?' 'Well, we also extend our deepest sympathy,' the doctor said.
Lucas got down from the examining table, put on his pants, tottered to the door.
'You know what hurts the most?' he asked Sherrill. 'I really dove into her apartment. She was blasting away and I really racked up my elbow and ribs. I'm gonna be sore for a week.' 'Better than the alternative,' she said.
He was sore for a week, and hobbled by the feeling that all the stitches were about to unravel. But the stitches came out on Thursday, and by Friday, when
Malone came to town with her FBI team, he was beginning to loosen up.
'No sign of Rinker,' Malone said. She was sitting in his visitor's chair, wearing a somber blue suit with a red necktie. 'But we'll get her.'
