“. . . is dead, because if he wasn’t dead, he couldn’t stand it when I put my finger on his eyeball like this. But see, he doesn’t even blink. There’s still some blood running out, but that’s gravity, is what it is. Just like when you cut a chicken’s head off, the blood keeps coming for a long time, but the chicken is dead. Have you ever seen anybody do that? No? It’s pretty exciting. You get the chicken and you hold it by its legs, and you rub its stomach and it’ll get real quiet, then you lay the neck on a block and then really quick, chop, and the head flies off. If you let go of the chicken, the body will run all over the place without a head. It’s pretty funny, when you see it . . .”
Jenkins risked a peek. The room was fifteen-by-fifteen feet and the man was sitting with his back to Jenkins, not more than seven or eight feet away. He was pointing a pistol at a woman against the far wall, who sat motionless, head down; she had blood on her blouse. Jenkins was not sure she was alive. He had to assume she was, though, and she was also directly on the other side of the man. If he shot the man, the bullet could go right through him into her . . .
“That’s what people mean when they say that somebody’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off . . . Anyway, this is what dead is . . . when somebody puts his finger on your eyeball, you don’t even blink. I am going to shoot you when I’m finished talking, and you’ll feel all your blood run out, and then to make sure you’re dead, I will . . . don’t move. Just sit there. Just listen, or I’ll pull the trigger . . .”
Jenkins pulled slowly back, listening to the beat of the words, checked his gun, turned to the game warden, and put his finger to his lips. He stood upright, carefully slipped off his loafers, took a breath, then took a quick long silent step into the room, then part of another before the man began to turn . . .
Jenkins fired a single shot down through the Chase’s skull, from a range of nine inches.
The game warden lurched through the door. Jenkins looked down at the dead man and said, “Fuckin’ amateurs.”
They both stepped over to the woman. She was a staffer and wore a black name tag that said Bea; she was alive, and she twitched away from him.
LUCAS SAT IN the stairwell, waiting for Sloan and Shrake to make their move on Biggie. The shooting had trailed off—maybe they were running out of ammunition? Lucas tried to think of how many bodies he’d seen in the hallways. Six? Eight? Plus the three in the cage.
His arm hurt; not the worst hurt he’d ever felt, but it was bad enough. He was okay as long as he didn’t move . . .
The brenk brenk brenk of the alarms suddenly stopped, and the silence was so shocking that Lucas got to his feet . . . and could hear what seemed to be a general, hospitalwide wail, people hurting, people afraid. There was a thump from somewhere below, the sound of feet in the stairwell . . .
LEO GRANT DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been on the floor, but it had been awhile, he thought. He knew he’d been shot but couldn’t pin down the precise circumstances. His head wasn’t working quite right . . .
He tried to push himself up, but his hands slipped. He couldn’t see well, but he looked at one hand, then smelled it, and tasted it. Blood, he was covered with blood. He couldn’t see very well, there was something wrong with his right eye . . .
He tried again to push himself up, holding on to a window ledge. A door was open next to it, a battery-powered emergency light glowing in the ceiling. He stepped into a cell, then turned and looked at himself in the window—the mirrored inside of the one-way glass. Gaped at himself.
His right eye was gone. The side of his head was a mass of blood . . . he put a hand to it. The eye was gone, and a piece of his eye socket, the outer rim. All gone.
Not much pain yet; a stinging, headache sensation, with little points of pain coming with each step. He started walking, not knowing exactly where he was, or what he was doing. Armageddon, he remembered that. He remembered going into the room with the pistols, and then . . .
Had Chase shot him? He seemed to remember that. Chase had taken the gun and had shot him in the head.
“Crazy motherfucker,” he said. He dabbed at his head with his jacket sleeve. Crazy . . . exactly crazy. Why hadn’t they thought of that? All the planning, why hadn’t they thought of the possibility that one of them might try to kill the others? . . . But that seemed so unfair.
He was out of the cellblock now, down the hall, into the stairwell. He looked both ways: a half dozen safety lights provided hardly more illumination than the same number of candles would have.
He could feel the anger rising: he was supposed to be in on this. He was supposed to have a gun. They were his fuckin’ guns. They were supposed to walk down the hallways, shoulder to shoulder, taking who they wanted, letting other people live, people who begged good enough. Or maybe kill them even if they begged good enough, because it’d be fun to shoot the ass kissers.
Now he didn’t even have a gun . . .
He walked past the elevators to the stairway, opened the door, and started up the stairs, hands clenched to his face, trying to hold his head together.
BIGGIE CALLED, “I got four of them in here. Gonna kill them one at a time. You ready? You want to count for me?”
Sloan said to Shrake, “I’m going.”
“He’ll be ready for you, shooting at the doorway,” Shrake said.
“I don’t give a fuck, I’m going. Too many bodies,” Sloan said.
“Tell me when,” Shrake said.
“Now.”
They went at once, and just before they got to the door, Shrake vaulted ahead, crossing the opening in an instant; there was a reaction flash and a bullet pounded itself into the wall opposite.
Sloan peeked, saw Biggie across the room, alone. There were no hostages, just the two bodies in the outer room. Biggie now with his hands up, gun on the floor, smile on his face.
“No, no, no, no!” Biggie shouted. “I’m all out. I give up.”
Sloan did another peek. Biggie stood there with his hands above his head. “Sloan? That you?”
Sloan turned the corner. “Yeah.”
“I quit.”
“Yeah, right, Biggie,” Sloan said, and he shot Biggie Lighter twice in the heart. One of the slugs went cleanly through, shattered on the wall, and fragments of it ricocheted around the room. A piece of hot metal like the ripped-off rim of a dime hit Sloan in the lip and hung there, protruding from the skin. Sloan peeled it off and flicked it away, tasting the blood in his mouth.
Shrake nodded. “Good shooting.”
LUCAS HEARD THE BOOM of the gun, turned his head that way. Then he caught the movement coming up the stairwell, turned back, and saw a man coming toward him. The man’s head was a mass of blood, and he seemed to be trying to stanch the bleeding with his hands.
Lucas said, “Just sit down, the doctors are . . .” and the man jumped at him, screaming, grabbing Lucas by the broken arm, and Lucas screamed back, swung awkwardly with his .45, and then they both went down the concrete stairs, rolling over and over each other.
Grant, or Roy Rogers, or whatever the fuck his name was. His face was shattered, but Lucas recognized the good half. Grant was soaked in blood, holding to Lucas’s broken arm with one hand, swinging with the other, screaming incoherently. Lucas hit the stairs upside down, tumbled, Grant falling over him; he squeezed the trigger of the .45 involuntarily, and the flash lit the stairwell and the surprise and the pain from the broken arm and the recoil pulled the gun out of his hand and he heard it clattering down the stairs.
Grant was underneath him now and they turned again and Grant was on top, scrambling, and Lucas pulled him down and they rolled across the landing and Grant smashed Lucas in the nose; blood flooded into Lucas’s mouth and he sputtered, came up close to Grant’s face, sprayed blood into Grant’s good eye, and they were turning again.
Grant was above him, then, and Lucas saw that he was going for something, the gun, probably, and Lucas managed to tangle up Grant’s knees and Grant went down again
and Lucas rolled up on top of him. Got his good arm around Grant’s neck, got his legs around Grant’s body, locked them at the ankles so that he had Grant in a scissors hold.
Grant tried to pull away along the long axis of their bodies, trying to knee or kick Lucas, and they turned again, upside down on the stairs, and he heard the gun clank, thought, “He’s got it,” and heaved upward as his body weight pushed Grant down.
The gun went off, a flash and a boom, then Lucas got his feet braced against a step, groaned and lifted Grant’s head up, gave a final desperate jerk . . .
Grant’s neck snapped like a tree branch.
He went limp, and Lucas fell on top of him.
Around them, he thought, was nothing but pain and silence: but he was wrong about the silence. In a second or two, when he’d caught his breath and had gotten upright again, he began to hear the screaming, and realized it was coming from everywhere.
27
THE HOSPITAL WAS A SHAMBLES.
A half dozen fires and two dozen fights added to the chaos of the shootings. When the smoke got dense in one wing of the security section, maintenance men used a forklift to break through a locked door to the outside, and frightened, angry, and medicated patients scattered over half a square mile of woods and farmland.
The Big Three, with Grant, killed six people and seriously wounded eight more. The final death toll, including the four killers, was ten.
Of the three people in the cage, one, a woman, had survived because Beloit had gotten to her quickly enough to keep her from drowning in her own blood. The bullet had gone through her cheekbone, her palate, and out through a jawbone, taking along a couple of upper teeth.
The shooting was ending when the fire department got to the hospital, and the paramedics, and three doctors in the hospital itself, quickly got to the other shooting victims.
LUCAS WAS TAKEN to the hospital in Mankato. Sloan rode with him. Sloan kept saying, “This is not a problem. This is not a problem . . .”
Lucas finally said, “Sloan, shut the fuck up. This is definitely a problem.”
THE MORE SERIOUSLY INJURED were flown to Regions Hospital in St. Paul or to the Mayo in Rochester, except for two who needed immediate blood transfusions. They were taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
Lucas was evaluated at Mankato. The bone in his upper arm had been broken by Biggie’s bullet. The bullet itself had not gone through but was stuck on the underside of the skin at the back of his arm. With his good hand, Lucas could actually feel the bullet under the skin.
“So what?” he asked. “I’m gonna need a splint or something?”
“More than that,” the doc said. “We’ll have to go in there to put your arm back together. This will be a little complicated.”
After talking with Sloan, Lucas insisted on being reevaluated at Regions. He was flown out with one of the more severely wounded victims who had been taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
At Regions, as at Mankato, he was told that the arm would need an operation to place screws to hold the bones together. He could expect to be in a cast for three to six months; and there would be physical rehabilitation after that.
“Am I gonna lose anything? Any function?”
“Shouldn’t,” the doctor said. “Maybe a little sensation on the back of your arm.”
SLOAN, JENKINS, Shrake, Del, and Rose Marie crowded in to see him before the operation. Sloan had briefed Rose Marie on the shootings.
“There are already people running around, trying to figure out whom to hang,” Rose Marie said, before Lucas was rolled into the OR. “It’s amazing. It’s like the second reaction. The first is to ask how many are dead, the second is to ask whom we can hang.”
THE OPERATION TOOK two hours and was routine, the surgeon told Lucas in the recovery room. He was given additional sedation when he came out of the recovery room and slept through the night, waking at six o’clock.
A nurse came to see him: “Hurt?”
“Not much,” he said. “I’d like cup of coffee, is what I’d like. And a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “How about a nice glass of orange juice?”
“How about if you hand me my cell phone? And I gotta take a leak . . .”
Both his arm and his face hurt—his nose had been recracked in the fight—but he was able to walk to the bathroom without a problem, pulling a saline drip along behind him.
The lying had already begun.
He added to it.
WEATHER CALLED AT SEVEN, an hour earlier than usual. She’d heard about the shooting after she’d finished her morning work in the operating theater, and called in a panic. Lucas had kept his cell phone on a bedside table.
“I’m fine,” Lucas lied. “But I gotta get into the office. There’s gonna be a political shit storm starting about ten o’clock. Soon as the politicians finish their double-latte grandes.”
“Were you involved in the shooting? Were you in there?” she asked, still scared.
“Yeah, I was right there,” Lucas said. “It’s a goddamn mess, Weather. I don’t want you to think about it. I gotta talk to everybody on the face of the earth in the next two days, covering our asses and getting the story right. I don’t want to have to worry about you, too.”
“You sound . . . hoarse.”
He was, from the anesthesia. He said, “I spent all yesterday screaming at people. I need a couple of cough drops.”
She asked, “What about Sloan?”
“He’s bummed. I gotta get to him, too,” Lucas said.
“Take care of yourself—don’t worry about everybody else,” Weather said.
“Hey, I’m fine,” he lied. When he hung up, he was satisfied that he’d pulled it off.
Then Weather called Sloan’s wife, worried about Sloan’s state of mind, and Sloan’s wife said, “We stayed for the operation, but Lucas was pretty groggy when he came out of it. They said everything went okay . . .”
“What operation?” Weather asked.
Lucas was talking to the docs about getting out and was being told “No,” when Weather called back.
“LUCAS . . . ,” she wailed.
“Ah, shit . . .”
Trapped like a rat.
SLOAN AND JENKINS lied about Biggie’s death.
Jenkins gave the blow-by-blow. He was a superb liar: “He had his back against the wall. I made a move and he fired at me, six feet away, right through the doorway.” He talked with his hands and eyes as much as with his words. “Goddamn, I’m lucky to be here. Sloan came in low, right under Biggie’s shot, and shot him twice. It was all so fast, not even Biggie knew the gun was empty. I mean, we’re talking Bam! Bam-Bam!”
Everybody bought that.
And why not? All the bullet holes were right there. Besides, the reconstruction of events suggested that Biggie’s .45 had killed three people and wounded three more, including Lucas.
SHRAKE’S DESCRIPTION OF Chase’s death had Chase pointing his weapon at the second woman’s face, ready to pull the trigger. The rescued woman was incoherent for two days after the shootings and kept talking about Chase rolling the other body’s eyes back and forth with his fingers.
Nobody wanted to know much more about Chase.
LUCAS TOLD THE absolute truth about Taylor and Grant, and blood analysis proved it.
Later analysis also indicated why the shootings weren’t more deadly than they were. O’Donnell’s guns, used by Biggie and Taylor, were loaded with target loads and cast slugs, apparently homemade by O’Donnell himself, for shooting close range at metal plates. They punched holes in the victims but didn’t expand, and most didn’t penetrate as deeply as combat loads would have. The third gun, a 9mm that did have combat loads, was used by Chase and had only had two or three rounds fired.
SLOAN, DURING ONE OF his visits, reconstructed Grant’s—or Rogers’s, or whoever he was—movements after O’Donnell disappeared. “He killed O’Donnell and dumped him, planted the eviden
ce, and drove up to the airport and left the car where we’d find it,” Sloan said. “Then he took a shuttle back to Mankato and a cab back to his place, and went to work the next day. We know about the cab and shuttle for sure. That night, after work, he actually drove to Chicago, made the call to us, and drove back. The next day, he’s back at work again.”
“Risky . . . ,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. He took risks. And there’s no way to prove he drove to Chicago, but we checked the stewardesses, and nobody remembers him on a flight. Also, he had an oil change at a Jiffy Lube a week and a half ago and got a mileage sticker on his window. He’s driven almost two thousand miles in that time.”
“That’s good,” Lucas said. “You know, if he’d faked a suicide with O’Donnell . . . I don’t know that we ever would have broken it out. He got too complicated for himself.”
THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE believed that Angela Larson was killed in O’Donnell’s workshop; they found traces of blood, with indications that somebody had tried to clean it up with commercial liquid cleanser; the cleanser had actually ruined the blood for DNA analysis, but chemical analysis of the concrete dust on Larson’s feet matched the concrete of O’Donnell’s garage floor. O’Donnell, according to the security hospital records, was working the night that Larson was killed but was not working the night that Peterson was kidnapped. Was he involved? Lucas didn’t think so. He thought O’Donnell was probably Grant’s—or Rogers’s—last line of defense, and had been carefully set up.
THE BIGGEST, MOST complicated lie—if it was a lie, and many people would have denied that it was—appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune four days after the shootings, under the byline of Ruffe Ignace.