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—
Cooper was sureshe’d hear him coming. The front door was stout and thoroughly locked this night. The back door, between the house and the garage, was also solid. The door into the garage from outside was much weaker and had windows that could be broken to reach the doorknob lock. She decided to set up in the kitchen, leaving the door to the garage open just a crack. She could slam it in an instant, or let him come in, so she could kill him.
She could feel the burning ball in her chest. She cocked the gun, absorbing the cold steel beneath her fingers and palm. Sitting on the floor, she called Melton on her burner phone. When Melton picked up, she said, “Keep the connection. We can talk... if you see him.”
A few minutes after she’d found her spot, Cooper heard what sounded like somebody testing the garage door.
She said to the phone, quietly, “He’s trying the garage.”
The noise stopped. She stood, and backed up a bit; a streak of light should be cutting across the garage floor, an invitation to come in. She stood behind the kitchen counter, her elbow on the counter to support her gun arm, the revolver cocked and pointed at the door...
She said, in a whisper, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
—
Hess, peering inthrough one of the windows in the garage door, saw the stripe of light on the floor. Why? Why was that door open, unlocked? Could be carelessness. Or it could be a trap.
He looked at it for ten seconds, turned away, turned back for another ten, then walked around the house into the side yard, feelingthe sweat at his temples. He stopped behind the hedge, checked the street, saw nobody, and jogged across the street to the edge of the bluff, and dropped into the trees.
Melton, now in the office, shouted, “He’s running. He’s running across the street and into the trees.”
Cooper ran up the stairs, too late to see Hess’s retreat. “You’re sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure.” She waved the monocular at Cooper. “Saw him plain as day. He took off.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit. I left the kitchen door open just an inch. I wanted him to see an open door if he looked in the garage, but...”
“You spooked him.”
“I think so. Goddamnit.”
“He can’t be sure it was a trap,” Melton said. “He’ll be back.”
“We should lock up,” Cooper said. “So close. So close. He wasn’t twenty-five feet away. If I’d been in the garage, I could have shot him through a window. Maybe next time.”
Hess slipped down the hillside, moving from tree to tree, then walked across the street below, which was actually a long off-ramp from I-35, and continued just inside the tree line to an intersecting street, turned the corner, and hurried to his car.
He should have gone in, he thought. Could have. But: tomorrow was another night.
Melton said to Cooper: “He’ll be back. You might have spooked him, but he’ll think about it, and he won’t be sure. He did get away tonight, so that might make him feel safer. We know he’s looking around back. Tomorrow night, we’ll be in the garage.”
“I need to kill him, Ann. I need to know he’s dead.”
“I know. I’m with you.”
23
The highway patrol never got an exact count on the number of tips it got about where the body might be buried, but the number was in the high double digits—eighty, ninety, something like that. The patrolmen checked them out and found a lot of wet weeds plus two inebriated catfishermen trying to get a jon boat out of the Mississippi.
However.
John Jacob Orregon, owner of Orregon’s Port-A-Potties, called to say that the night before last, he’d been headed down County 18 Boulevard between the Vermilion and Mississippi Rivers. He was on his way to the Tipsy Turtle Bar and Grill when he saw the white van pulling away from a dirt boat launch on North Lake.
North Lake was a backwater off the Mississippi, and as Orregon told the trooper he spoke to, Russell (Rusty) Craft, “I could touchthe bottom of that lake with my dick and not get my balls wet. Don’t know why anybody would be down there, and the van weren’t pulling no trailer. No canoe on it, neither.”
The trooper, who’d earlier sat in a café with two other patrolmen cursing Flowers and Davenport for being large pains in the ass, had already checked out two remote, wet, nasty, stinking water meadows.
“You’re sure it was at the boat ramp?”
