The Night Monster_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [89]
Linderman considered what I was saying. I rose from my chair.
“So now what?” Linderman asked.
“I’m going to rescue Sara Long. Are you coming or not?”
Linderman’s eyes flashed. He put down his drink and gave me a harsh stare.
“You’re a goddamn loose cannon,” he said.
“Funny, that didn’t bother you before.”
The look on his face made me wonder if I’d lost another friend. At that moment, I didn’t care. I was going to handle this my way.
“All right, Jack. Just give me a minute.”
Linderman opened the slider and went inside. Muriel was standing at the sink in the kitchen washing dishes. Linderman put his arms around his wife’s waist and whispered in her ear. Her knees sagged at the news of his leaving.
I felt bad for her, and for him—only there was nothing I could do about it. I had a job to do, and that job wasn’t finished. They could celebrate later, when Sara was safe.
I turned and stared at the bay. The moon had cast a creamy patina over the water’s mirrorlike surface. It was a beautiful night, whatever the hell that meant.
CHAPTER 44
inderman wanted to take his 4Runner to Chatham. I objected. Although his car was in better shape than my Legend, it still had Virginia license plates, and would stand out like a sore thumb when we reached our destination.
“Can your car make the drive?” Linderman asked.
“It hasn’t failed me yet,” I said.
I pulled my Legend into the condo’s covered parking garage, and parked it beside his 4Runner. Linderman opened the 4Runner’s trunk, and unlocked the stainless-steel footlocker in the backseat. From the footlocker he removed two Mossberg shotguns, two high-powered rifles with sniper scopes, a pair of Kevlar vests, and several boxes of ammunition, all of which got loaded into the trunk of my Legend.
“That should cover it,” Linderman said.
“We also need a pair of fishing poles.”
Linderman went inside the building to talk to one of his neighbors. He emerged with a pair of fishing poles covered with cobwebs.
“This was the best I could do,” he explained.
I put the poles in the backseat of my Legend so they stuck out the open window. It made us look like a pair of rubes, which was exactly the image I wanted to create.
“Are these fishing poles our cover?” Linderman asked.
“Yes,” I said. “When we get to Chatham, we’re going to pretend we’re a pair of college buddies spending a long weekend together fishing and drinking beer.”
“I don’t know anything about fishing.”
“Then I guess you’ll be buying the beer.”
I drove across Biscayne Bay, and headed north on the elevated stretch of I-95 through downtown Miami. Traffic had thinned out, and I stared at the towering office buildings that defined the Miami skyline.
The interstate split at the Broward County line. I went left, and entered the tollbooth that would put us on the Florida Turnpike. Linderman turned in his seat to face me.
“Tell me why you think the sheriff of Chatham is involved in these women’s abductions,” Linderman said.
The turnpike was quiet, and I flipped on my car’s cruise control.
“Because it solves the puzzle of how Lonnie and Mouse have been abducting young women—and keeping them—without anyone knowing about it,” I said.
“How does it solve it?”
“I have a theory about serial killers and serial abductors. Despite what people want to believe, these people don’t work in a vacuum. Their friends and neighbors know they’re doing something wrong, but choose not to get involved. I call it the ‘He was such a quiet man’ theory, because that’s what people usually say when a reporter tells them their next-door neighbor has a basement filled with rotting corpses.”
“Why would the sheriff of Chatham be looking the other way?”
“That’s a good question. Mouse boasted to a worker at the mental institution where he was living that if he ever