Arn drove past the Hobby Shop. It had closed hours ago, and he expected it to be darked out, expected Frank to be waiting for him somewhere in the shadows. But it appeared as if every light in the business was burning.
He parked a block down the street. He walked the opposite side of Lincolnway, keeping the front of the shop in sight. Cars parked at the curb offered him concealment as he kept the Hobby Shop in his vision. A city maintenance truck idled beside an exposed manhole cover while two city workers passed tools between them. One looked askance at Arn as he walked by, the worker’s breath frosting from his ski mask stuck inside his orange hard hat, snot frozen to the outside of the wool.
When Arn arrived parallel to the Hobby Shop, he leaned over the hood of a parked pickup and studied the storefront window overlooking the street. He detected no movement inside, nothing to indicate where Danny and Ana Maria were being held. If they were still held there. If they were still alive.
He recalled the back door from the crime scene sketches Butch had made when investigating Delbert Urban’s murder. Butch noted that Delbert’s killer had gained access to the building via the back door, but had left by the front door. At rush hour. With no one spotting him cloaked in blood. Arn had never been to a knifing where copious amounts of the victim’s blood covered the suspect, and that part in particular had puzzled him. Until this moment.
“It was the damned mask and gloves.” Arn startled himself with the words. That day at the hospital, waiting for word on Johnny’s condition, the surgeon who’d tried saving an accident victim had been covered in blood. Moments later, the doctor strolled out of the room, clean. Bloodless. Delbert’s murderer had done the same thing, he realized: murdered him wearing a gown and mask and booties. The killer must have stripped off his garb—probably stuffed them in a garbage bag he carried—and just waltzed out of the business. No wonder no one had reported a man walking downtown covered with blood.
Other things were coming together, those pieces of the puzzle he just couldn’t quite fit but that now were becoming perfectly clear. Of course the killer used a mask. He had access to hospital supplies. Just like he had the day of Johnny’s murder.
Arn squatted by a car and punched in Oblanski’s number. When it went to voicemail, he outlined as quickly as time would allow what he had just now realized. And how everything fit together. Not with what Butch reported in his investigation. Just the opposite. And the real reason, Arn suspected, that Butch had committed suicide.
He took his pen knife from his front pocket and stuffed it into his back pocket beside his bandana. He slipped his gun out of his pocket and concealed it beside his leg as he crossed the street to the alley. Arn had had some of his most interesting police experiences in alleys like this one: lonely, dark, and dank, with an overriding atmosphere of foreboding. An alley where sometimes he’d stumble over a sleeping form. Or a dead one, which is what the man in front of him appeared to be, huddled under a blanket covered with a tattered blue tarp. The homeless man yelled and sat upright when Arn accidentally stepped on his leg. His hoodie was pulled tight around his face like a dirty condom, and what few teeth he had chattered in the frigid night air. “Hey pal, you could show some decorum—”
“Sorry, friend,” Arn whispered. He kept his gun beside his leg and away from the man’s eyes as he walked past him toward the Hobby Shop.
Arn arrived at the back door. He’d been here many times in his mind, studying the photos and sketches tacked to the white wall. Would he confront Delbert and Joey Bent’s killer on the other side of the door? In his own twisted way, he hoped so. He was tired of being hunted. Now all he wanted was to find and destroy the man who had kept the city hostage a decade ago. Who had abducted Ana Maria and Danny and perhaps killed them. The son-of-a-bitch had crossed the line in taking them. Now it was personal.
Arn turned the knob, not surprised it was unlocked, and paused. His training officer, Rolf, screamed in his memory: “Don’t ever make the hunt personal. That’s the way you make mistakes, dummy.” Arn took a moment to think about his entry into the building. The killer would have anticipated his coming in through the back door. He wanted him to come through the back door, and Arn knew he had no choice if he wanted to save Ana Maria and Danny.
He opened the door and slipped inside, keeping his gun tucked close to his body. “Don’t lead with your gun, dummy.” Rolf Vincent’s words echoed in his mind, and he pulled his gun in tighter to his side.
He slowly made his way to the office area, careful not to brush against the wall and make noise, careful to avoid Hobby Shop inventory parked in the aisle. But he was certain the man he hunted would have known he’d arrived at the shop. He just might not know exactly where.
When he reached the waist-high windows overlooking the office area, Arn squatted and peeked over, careful that no one on the other side could see him. Ana Maria sat tied to a chair. Her head rested on her chest, and Arn strained to see her take a shallow breath. She was alive, but had been worked over. Her nose appeared to have been broken. Blood dripped onto her white sweatpants, and one eye had swollen shut.
Danny sat across from her. Duct tape had been plastered across his face, and he thrashed around trying to free himself from plastic ties that anchored him to a metal chair. One of his eyes was quickly closing and blackening, and the skin under that eye was split to the cheek bone.
Arn ducked back behind the safety of the wall. They were alone, in the next room, and he had heard no one. Yet he knew Erv’s killer lurked close by, waiting for him to step into the trap. He had no choice. Ana Maria may not have long, by the sounds of her agonizing, labored breaths.
He chanced a last look over the office window and opened the door. Danny turned his head, and Arn flinched. Danny had taken more of a beating that Arn realized. His blood-crusted eyelid hung by a flap over his split cheek, and a red impression the size of a man’s boot had crushed his nose. A wave of recognition overcame Danny along with something else: a warning, his eyes darting between Arn and the closet. Arn and the partially opened closet. Arn and …
Too late, Arn realized Danny’s warning, and a strong hand came crashing down on his hand. His gun skidded across the floor, a moment before something hit him squarely in the back of the head. Arn’s last thought before he lost consciousness was of his attacker, and how everything fit together at last.