Rusty dropped it in reverse and, silently, the black car glided out of the driveway.
Eight blocks away, Rusty pulled to a stop in a less populated area. While he was trying to work out the next part of his plan, he heard a soft moan from the back seat. His eyes darted up into the rearview and saw a rustle of movement.
Shit. He’d taken for granted Brady would bleed to death; it hadn’t occurred to him the guy might recover. Rusty turned, so he could look over the seat, and saw that Brady’s eyes were open, his head crammed at an unnatural angle up against the rear driver’s-side door. His hands were clutched around the hilt of Rusty’s hunting knife, still stuck in his midsection. The fucker was trying to pull it out.
Rusty got out of the car, looked up and down the street in both directions, came around to the rear door, and yanked it open. Brady’s head fell out into the open space and he stared at Rusty, blinking. Avoiding Brady’s eyes, Rusty leaned in over him, slapped Brady’s hands away from the hilt of the knife, pulled it out of the big guy’s gut, and stabbed him in the chest.
Rusty repeated the motion four more times, deeper with each thrust, wrenching the knife out of a splintered bone after the last stab. He shoved Brady’s head and torso back into the car as far as he could, slammed the rear door on them, and slid back behind the wheel.
East Aurora Medical Center was a massive complex a mile and a half from Cayuga Lane that served three counties. Between staff, patients, and visitors, the main parking garage held seven or eight hundred vehicles on any given day. Rusty cruised, sharklike, through the pitch-black space until he found an empty spot on a crowded floor and backed into it.
He worked quickly, hyper-focused. He popped off the BMW’s vehicle ID tag from the front dash, down in the corner where it met the windshield. He pulled off the license plates and dug the wallet and satellite phone out of the dude’s pockets. He knew the car could still be identified from the VIN that was etched into the engine block, but really, what were the odds that the cops were going to be trying that hard to identify a dead John Doe in the middle of the biggest public emergency the nation had ever seen?
Plus Rusty knew he was on a roll now. Once things started to fall your way, they tended to keep falling your way. This would too. He took the blue duffel bag from the front seat of the car, locked the BMW, chucked the keys into a trash can three levels down, and started the hour-long walk back to his truck.
Halfway there, he got his last and best piece of luck. It started to rain. So much for the bloody grass, Rusty thought. He smiled to himself and shook his head.
After sixteen years of living on Shit Street, Rusty Wheeler had finally drawn a monster hand.
22.
Outside Jericho
Thom lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, and counted the minutes. He hadn’t wanted to know exactly when it was coming, lest his reaction seem anything less than credible and surprised, but now that he was lying awake at 3:35 a.m., he realized a window would have been nice.
He rolled over on his side. Ann-Sophie’s cascade of white-blond hair lay across the pillow, visible in the soft blue glow coming from the night-vision light in the bathroom. Thom hated stumbling around in the night; it went back to a fear of sleeping in the dark that he’d developed when he was a teenager, after the accident. For at least a year after it happened, he couldn’t close his eyes at night without seeing Kyle Luedtke’s face, upside-down, laughing at him. Sleeping with a light on seemed to make it better, if only because when he opened his eyes the light chased the images away. So, at the age of eighteen, a grown-ass man, he’d started going to bed with a night-light again.
Ann-Sophie had been the only one of his girlfriends over the years who’d never questioned it. In the middle of his fumbling cover story the first time she’d spent the night, she’d interrupted him with a shrug and a smile. “It’s better that way for some people,” she said, and never brought it up again. Sometimes Thom wondered if that was when he fell in love with her. The lust part was easy to pin down; it had come before he’d even met her. He’d seen her picture in a magazine ad and asked to meet her, so obviously the visual portion of his attraction was clear. But the love part, the tenderness, the gratitude, the feeling of being understood by another human being without being questioned—it might have come in that very moment. At the top of his consciousness, he told himself Ann-Sophie understood his aversion to darkness because she was Scandinavian, and light was precious there. But lower down, in the places he didn’t go very often, he imagined she probably knew.