The guard, an older man with expansive nostril hair, said, “Oh.” He hitched up his pants and said, “Okay,” and walked to the other side of the driveway.
Lucas got back to the AIC and said, “Sell the Visa card.”
“Doing it now.”
Dead air for fifteen seconds, then the AIC said, “No answer on the phone, but we hooked up to it and we’ve got a close location but not exact. It’s a little shopping mall not more than a mile or so from where you’re at, off Goldenrod Road. Here’s the address...”
Lucas wrote the address in a notebook and said, “I hope he’s not just shopping...”
“Well, you said it was a burner. You think he’d be carrying it all the time?”
“Don’t know. Could you keep the plane around until I get there? In case he moves.”
“Sure. Call me when you get there,” the AIC said.
—
LUCAS RANG OFFand waved the security guard over and asked, “What’s the fastest way to Goldenrod Road?”
The guard rubbed his chin and then said, “Jeez, I know where it is, but I don’t think you can get there from here. It’s complicated.”
Lucas pulled up the high school location on the iPad, and the guard traced out a route that went west, north, east, and finally south on Goldenrod to the mall.
When they’d worked it out, the guard asked, “What’s going down?”
“Fugitive.”
“Am I gonna see it on TV?” the guard asked.
“Hope not,” Lucas said.
“I’ll look for it anyway,” he said. He took a step back, spread his arms, and said, “Nice ride, by the way.”
Lucas said, “Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, huh?”
“What?”
—
TWENTY MINUTES LATER,Lucas sat across the street looking at the Lakeview Mall, a collection of what appeared to be dying small businesses. He got back on the line to the AIC and asked, “That plane still up there?”
“Yes. Let me make another call...”
He was back a minute later and said, “Still no answer, but the phone’s in the same location. I bet it’s in a drawer or something and he uses it like an answering machine.”
“All right. I’m gonna go look.”
“Easy does it.”
The entry drive had a permanent sign that said “Space Available,” with a paint-peeling picture of a lake with a palm tree. A mostly empty parking lot fronted the mall and a driveway ran around to the back, to the stores’ loading docks.
Lucas drove around to the back, to see where a runner might go, if he found Stiner, and if Stiner decided to run. Running would betough, though: a seven-foot-high splintering board fence separated the mall from what appeared to be a junkyard, or maybe somebody’s private collection of rusting shipping containers, no lake in view.
Lucas drove back to the front of the mall and parked. A third of the storefronts were vacant, and at the far end, a teenager sat on a tilted-back chair on the sidewalk outside a vacuum-cleaner store, peering at his cell phone. Lucas picked out a dusty-looking coffee shop called the Koffee Korner, which wasn’t on a corner. With any luck, the barista would know everybody in the mall.
Lucas made sure the Jeep was locked, patted his pocket for the enlarged mug shot of John Stiner, and walked over to the coffee shop. Inside, he found a man behind the counter peering at a computer screen that he hastily blanked when Lucas pushed through the door. He was a middle-sized man with a poorly trimmed black beard and long black hair tied back into a ponytail with blue ribbon.
He said, “He’p you?” with the kind of accent Lucas had just left in Nashville. Lucas took the mug shot out of his pocket, looked at it, looked at the man behind the desk, mentally subtracted the beard, and realized that he was looking at John Stiner.
