Bad Men

“For Mr. Verso,” said Tell, “it’s on the house.”

The bottom of the bag exploded and the investigator staggered backward. Tell’s second shot sent him sprawling across the bed. Verso tried to run for the bathroom, but Tell shot him in the back before he got to the door, then stood over him and fired two shots into the back of his head. He fired one more into the man on the bed, then walked swiftly back down to the van. Shepherd started it as soon as Tell reached the door.

“Your mask,” he said.

“Shit.” Tell pulled it back down before he climbed in. Behind him, the pizza-delivery guy sat with his knees drawn up to his chin.

“You okay?” asked Tell.

“Yeah,” said the kid.

“You did good,” said Tell. “You got nothing to worry about. Put this on your head.”

He handed the insulated bag to the kid, who did as he was told. They drove back onto the highway, then pulled over at a deserted rest stop. Tell opened the back door and helped the kid over to one of the wooden picnic benches.

“There’s a phone to your right. I was you, I wouldn’t use it for about another twenty minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You breathing okay under that thing?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good.”

“Mister?” said the kid.

“Yeah.”

“Please don’t kill me.”

As Shepherd had noted, the kid was smart. Tell raised the silenced pistol and pointed it at the insulated bag.

“I won’t,” he said as he pulled the trigger.

They bought hamburgers at a fast-food joint off exit 122, and ate them seated in the back of the van while they waited for Shepherd and Tell to join them. They were avoiding toll booths and were sticking to the speed limits. In the back of the van, Moloch had clipped his hair, shaved his beard, and now wore a pair of blackrimmed glasses. His driver’s license claimed that he was John R. Oster of Lancaster, Ohio.

“How much longer?” Moloch asked.

“Hour, maybe,” said Dexter. “We can rest up then.”

Moloch shook his head. “We move on. They’re already looking for me, and pretty soon my picture will be on every TV station from here to Canada. We need to find her, and find her fast.”

Despite what he said, he wasn’t too concerned yet. He had sometimes spoken of Mexico as his preferred final destination in the event of an escape from custody, because Mexico, following a decision by the Mexican Supreme Court that life sentences breached a constitutional article that stated all men were capable of being rehabilitated, would not extradite Americans facing life sentences. Moloch didn’t believe that for one moment, but he figured that there would be those in the prison population who would recall his comments and who would pass them on. It would not be enough to prevent checks to the north and west as well as to the south, but he hoped that it might force the police to concentrate their efforts on monitoring the southern routes.

He sat back in the van and closed his eyes. He was strong, and he had a purpose. He allowed himself to drift into sleep, and dreamed of a woman.

A woman dying.

Chapter Four

Danny was pleading.

“Mom, just ten more minutes. Five more minutes. Please!”

Marianne peered at him from over the rim of her glasses. Danny was in his pajamas, which was something, but it had taken her an hour to convince him to do even that. He seemed to have grown up so much in the last year, and she was beginning to find him more and more difficult to handle. He was always questioning, always doubting, testing the limits of her authority in every little thing. But that incident with the bird had thrown him, exposing his vulnerability and drawing him back to her for a time, his head pressed against her breasts as he cried over-

Over what? Over the fact that Joe Dupree had been forced to kill the dying bird with his bare hands to put it out of its misery, or because Danny hadn’t been allowed to touch it, to play with it first? Danny sometimes hurt creatures: she had watched him do it, had caught him burning ants with a piece of broken bottle or tormenting cats by flinging stones at them. She supposed that a lot of boys behaved that way, not fully understanding the pain that they were causing. In that, maybe Danny was just being a typical six-year-old. She hoped so. She didn’t like to think that it might be something deeper, something that he had picked up from his father, some faulty gene transmitted from generation to generation that would manifest itself in increasingly vicious ways as he grew older. She did not like to think of her Danny-because he was her Danny, make no mistake about that-becoming such a man.

And he was asking questions now, questions about him, and it bothered her that the lies she was forced to tell Danny caused him pain. Danny seemed to have vague memories of his father, and he cried when she told him that he was dead. Not the first time, curiously, but rather on the second occasion, as if it had taken him the intervening days to absorb the information and to come to terms with what it meant to him and for him.

How did he die?

A car accident.

Where?

In Florida.