catching him under the chin with his bare foot. Kicked again even as the man’s head was snapping back and felt his big toe find the Adam’s apple. Saw at the same time the ring of keys on the man’s black leather belt.
Mustache had his 9mm out of its holster and was raising it when Mandle swung himself out of the van. The guard got off a wild shot just before Mandle landed almost up against him and head-butted him. Mandle bent low and slit Mustache’s throat with the sharp screw. Picked up the dropped 9mm with his right foot, transferred it to his hand, and shot the driver. The driver didn’t want to die quite yet, so Mandle hopped over and pummeled his head and face with the handgun. Yanked his gun from its holster to match the one he had.
It took him seconds to get the driver’s keys, maybe another thirty seconds to find the one that unlocked the cuffs and leg manacles.
Mandle stole a glance around. No sign of anyone behind him. The van’s headlights illuminated the street ahead. No one. A car passed at the cross street, barely slowing down to obey a stop sign. The van’s lights would have blinded the driver even if he had bothered to look all the way up the street.
Mandle worked the dead van driver’s wallet from his hip pocket and flipped it open. Bills. Maybe fifty dollars’ worth. He didn’t bother with Mustache’s wallet; he had to get out of there.
He sprinted halfway down the block and felt a pain in his right side. Maybe Mustache had aimed well after all, but the wound didn’t feel serious. He cut into a dark passageway. He felt good now despite the throbbing pain beneath his ribs. Exhilarated. His approach startled something behind a trash bag. A dark cat flashed out and streaked through the night to disappear down the alleyway.
The Night Spider grinned.
There were hours of darkness left. More than he needed. Resourcefulness was his training and his life, his survival. He knew he could find clothes somewhere somehow, ditch the Rikers jumpsuit, and fade into the city the way the cat had blended with the night. He had supreme confidence in himself and his destiny. Soon he’d have his wound tended and healing. He’d have food, shelter, cover. A new identity.
Revenge.
37
They were back at the Home Away.
After Mandle’s escape was discovered at 3:16 A.M., Rollie Larkin had phoned Horn, who’d already left in a charter boat for a rich fishing area twenty miles out in the Gulf. Bickerstaff, who hadn’t been able to sleep, had caught the news on his TV in Minnesota-watching Nina Count in the anchor job she’d landed at CNN in Atlanta-and phoned Paula, who was working a double shift. He left a disbelieving and agitated message on her machine. Harry Linnert, lying alone in Paula’s bed listening to it, decided it would do no good to bother her with it till morning.
But Paula learned of the escape when she was paged just after dawn and phoned into the precinct on her cell phone. After cutting the connection, she’d gone into a hotel rest room and been sick.
Afterward, she’d called Horn at the Florida resort and was told he was fishing, and that Bickerstaff had also called Horn. She called Bickerstaff and got his answering machine, because he’d gone out to paddle his canoe in the lake to work off stress. She called her machine and listened to Bickerstaff’s message. Then Linnert got on the phone and unsuccessfully tried to make her feel better.
When she hung up, she thought if Aaron Mandle could know all this he’d be delighted.
When Horn got back to shore at two o’clock the next afternoon after not catching a marlin, he returned Larkin’s call.
Three hours later, in the air over the Carolinas, he called Paula and Bickerstaff. He told Bickerstaff he should stay retired. Bickerstaff told Horn what he could do with the entire notion of retirement while Mandle was again at large. Horn didn’t mind. He found out when Bickerstaff and Paula could make it, then set up the meeting at the Home Away.
Paula didn’t know how the others felt, but she couldn’t shake the eerie feeling they’d been moved like chess pieces back into the past to relive it, as if destiny wanted to change what had happened last time around. Destiny was always fucking with people.
“There’s still no word on Mandle’s whereabouts,” Horn was saying, seated in the same booth toward the back of the diner. “He disappeared like smoke after killing the other prisoner and the two guards.”
“Disappeared with their guns,” Bickerstaff pointed out. He’d lost some weight and grown a scraggly beard. He looked healthier. But right now, not happier.
“Looks like what he used on the prisoner and one of the guards was a wood screw about four inches long,” Horn said, “honed so the point and threads were sharpened. There was flesh from the prisoner and the dead guard lodged between the screw’s threads.”
Bickerstaff made a face over his coffee cup. “Where the hell’d he get a long screw he could make into a weapon?”
“In court, it looks like,” Horn said. “Gradually worked it out of the underside of the table while his lawyer was mesmerizing the jury and judge and bailiff and millions of TV viewers. It was one of the long screws that helped fasten the legs to the table.”
“Jesus!” Bickerstaff said. “That’s why he spent most of his trial sitting at the table with his head bowed, so he could work at the screw. Maybe he used a coin or something for a screwdriver.”
“Maybe,” Horn said. “What matters now is he’s on the loose again. And nobody’s seen him. Or called the police if they have.”
“Difficult to imagine a fugitive who looks like that, wearing a prison jumpsuit, can stay unreported very long,” Paula said. But she didn’t really believe it. Not about this fugitive. “He has to change his clothes. At least you’d think somebody’d find the jumpsuit.”
“He might have burned it,” Bickerstaff said dejectedly. “By now, he might be a thousand miles away in a different city.”
“There’s not much chance of that,” Marla said. They hadn’t realized she’d been standing so near. “He won’t leave. Or if he does, he’ll soon come back. This is where it all has to play out for him. His life and death have to create a certain symmetry, or what he’s done and is going to do are meaningless. He can’t accept that he’s without meaning, that he can die or be imprisoned without attaining his own twisted idea of grandeur. He’s crossed the Rubicon and believes in destiny. And in vengeance.”
They sat staring at her, knowing in a way deeper than logically that she was right.
She smiled tentatively, as if suddenly embarrassed.
Topped off their coffee.
Alice Duggan figured she had the part nailed. For over a year she’d been understudy to the star of the off- Broadway hit comedy
Alice knew the show’s author wasn’t keen on her stepping into Marnie’s role on a regular basis, but the director and producer wanted her to have the inside track. Alice’s agent had taken the risk of hinting that if Alice didn’t assume the role, she might follow Marnie in leaving the show, necessitating finding another understudy. An hour ago Alice had gotten word that the strategy seemed to have worked.
She felt great when she left the theater after morning auditions. On the sidewalk were scattered playbills from the show, along with inserts from last night announcing that she was playing Marnie’s role for that performance. She saw the fluttering white inserts stuck to the concrete with stepped-on gum, or pinned by the breeze against the theater wall, as a good omen.
After taking the subway downtown to within a few blocks of her apartment near Twelfth Street and Broadway, she stopped in at a drugstore to buy toothpaste and a
