"You could forget," his wife said. "That's why you've been shaving with soap for what, four days now?"

"Yeah, yeah, well, I'm not supposed to do the shopping for this family."

They argued. They always argued. In the heat of the argument, the woman's odd feeling evaporated-when her husband left, she went to get dressed herself, without waiting to see if he closed Mary's garage door.

The man who found White's body showed Lucas the window. "I saw the guy running, and I went right out front."

"So let's walk through it," Lucas said. He looked at his watch. "You're back here, you walk to the door."

They walked through it, out the front, down to the walk, all the way to the point where the man found White's body.

"Did you hear the cop cars moving out before or after the ambulance got here?" Lucas asked.

"Uh, about the same time. There was sirens everywhere. I remember hearing all the sirens, and then the ambulance got here. There was already four cops here, and they sent everybody running around after the guy."

Sloan walked up as Lucas looked at his watch again. "So it was probably five minutes."

The man said, "It didn't seem like it was that long. The cops, they was here in a couple seconds, it seemed like."

"Listen, thanks a lot," Lucas said. He slapped the man on the shoulder.

"That's fine, I hope I helped."

As they walked away from him, Sloan said, "I go on administrative duty starting with the next shift, until the shooting's okayed."

"Yeah."

"Makes me nervous," Sloan said.

"Don't worry about it," Lucas said. "You got witnesses up to your eyeballs."

"Yeah." Sloan was still unhappy. "What's happening here?"

"I'm not sure," Lucas said. "They probably didn't have the new perimeter up for six or seven minutes. The new perimeter is a half-mile out there. He could have run through it-we haven't found any sign of him, If it was me, I would have run through it."

"Sonofabitch could be in somebody's home," Sloan said, looking at the rows of neat, anonymous little houses. "Laying up."

"Yeah. Or he could be out."

Mail found a cut-rate gas station with no customers and no visible television. He pulled in-the shotgun, the hat and cop jacket in the backseat-and pumped ten dollars' worth of gas into the car. A bored kid sat behind the counter eating a packet of beer nuts, and Mail passed him the old woman's ten-dollar bill. Another customer pulled in as he paid for the gas. Mail walked back out, head averted, got in the car, and left. The other customer filled his tank, walked inside, and said, "That guy who just left-he looked like the guy they've got on TV."

"Don't got no TV. Asshole owner won't let me," the kid said dully. He did the credit card, and the other man said, "Sure looked like him, though," and went off to work, where he talked about it most of the morning.

Mail went on down the block, stopped for a red light, turned on the radio. They were talking about him. "… apparently a long-time mental patient who faked his own death. Police have not yet identified the body found in the river."

Good. A break.

But they could be lying. Davenport could be mousetrapping him.

Another voice said, No big difference. There's no way out anyway. Anger cut through him, and he thought: no way out.

Another voice: sure you can…

He was smart. He could get down to the house, pick up what cash he had, take care of Manette and the kid, make it out to the countryside, knock off some rich farmer, somebody whose death wouldn't be noticed right away. If he could get a car for forty-eight hours, he could drive to the West Coast. And from the West Coast… he could go anywhere.

Anywhere. He smiled, visualized himself driving across the west, red buttes on the horizon, cowboys. Hollywood.

As the light changed to green, Mail saw the free-standing phone booth at the side of an Amoco station. He hesitated, but he wanted to talk. And shit, they knew who he was-they just didn't have the LaDoux name. He pulled into the station, dropped a quarter, and dialed Davenport.

The phone rang and Sloan looked at Lucas, and said, "If it's him, give me the high-sign, and I'll tell the Cap."

Lucas took the phone out, flipped it open. "Davenport."

Mail's voice was dark but controlled. "This was not fair. You had a lot more resources on your side."

"John, we're all done," Lucas said, jabbing a finger at Sloan. Sloan ran off to where the uniform captain was talking by radio with the cars on the perimeter. "Come on in. Give us Manette and the kids, huh?"

"Well, I just can't do that. That'd just be losing all the way around, you know? I mean, if they go away, then you've lost, too. You know? You've really lost, completely, in fact, because that's all you really want."

"John, I'm not worried about winning or losing…"

"I gotta go," Mail said, interrupting. "You've got those assholes tracing this."

"Are you trying to protect your friend? The one who's feeding you information on us?"

There was a moment of silence, then Mail laughed. "My friend? Fuck my friend. Fuck her."

And he hung up.

Lucas ran to the uniform captain's car, and the captain was saying, "Are you sure that's it? All right, I'm on the way."

To Lucas, he said, "It's an Amoco station not five miles from here. We didn't have anybody close. He's out."

Lucas said, "Shit," walked in a circle.

The uniform cop screeched out, leaving them, and Sloan said, "What'd he say?"

"He's gonna kill them."

"Aw, shit."

"But it's gonna take him a while to get there," Lucas said. "Patch through to Dispatch. Call Del, get him in. Get Loring from Intelligence and that rape guy, Franklin. Get him. Get them out of bed, anything you have to do, but tell them to meet me downtown in fifteen minutes. Tell them don't shave, don't clean up, just get there. Fifteen minutes."

"What're you gonna do?"

"You know somebody's feeding information to Mail?"

"I know you think that," Sloan said.

"I'm gonna arrest her," Lucas said.

Sloan's eyebrows went up. "Her? Who is it?"

"I don't know," Lucas said. "Get going."

Sloan, puzzled, hurried away. Lucas went back to the telephone, dialed. When the phone at the other end was picked up, he said, "Time to make your humanitarian visit to White."

"Lucas…" Roux was worried.

"Leave there in fifteen minutes."

"Lucas…"

"I just got a call from Mail. He's out, and he's going home to kill them. So go see White and keep your head down. Better keep it down for an hour."

"You gonna get him?"

"Yeah. I'm gonna get him."

"We have to be very fast," Andi said. "If we don't kill him, if we don't blind him, I'll try to hold his legs while you run. Run out and hide in the com field. He won't find you there. Just run out by the road and hide until you see cars. Wait until you see more than one, in case he's in one, then run out."

Andi rambled along, hoping that she was making sense. Sometimes, now, she wasn't sure. She'd see Grace looking at her oddly, and she'd say, "What?" and Grace would say, "You're calling me Gen," or "You were talking to Dad just now."

For a very long time, the sound of Andi scraping the nail had been the only noise in the cell, and then Grace sighed and said, "I think I could get the sole off my shoe. You know, with a piece of the bed-spring."

Andi stopped scraping. "What for?"

"We could put the nail through it. We could use it like a push-handle."

When they were trying to work with the mattress springs, they'd found that the small pieces of metal were impossible to grip. Mail had given Andi some Band-Aids to patch a cut on her forehead, and Andi tried wrapping the wire with a bit of rag and the sticky-tape parts of the Band-Aids, but without much success.