[2001] Public Enemy Zero Page 9

  Should he have just stayed there in the food court? If he had known then what he knew now, would he have just sat there and let them get him? Part of him thought that would have been the moral thing to do. Sacrifice himself so that other people wouldn’t be hurt.

  He thought about the bloodshot eyes looking at him in the food court. The horrific way people stretched their hands out at him and bared their teeth. The shrill screams. The rage.

  Could he have sat still for that? It was one thing to put on a blindfold and take a bullet or to have a doctor administer a lethal dose. Those things were quick. What would it be like to be scratched and bitten until you lost so much blood your heart gave out? He knew the crowd wouldn’t have wasted any time killing him, but it would have been an agonizing death.

  No matter the moral calculation of his pain versus those of others, nothing could make him want to go down like that. He’d die for someone else but not like that. Not that way.

  The newsreader was still talking.

  “Police have told us that they’ll be making a statement in approximately a half hour from now. We’re hearing now that they may have a person of interest they’d like to speak to.”

  Fuck.

  “In other news an area man is wanted for questioning in the assault of a parking enforcement official and two other people.”

  Double fuck.

  “Police would like to speak to Mitchell Roberts, who was last seen on foot near the scene of the altercation.”

  Trifecta fuck. They had his name. Of course they had his name from what happened with the parking officer. They had his damn car and they had Rachel and Rick. They had everything about him at that point.

  Everything except that he was also the person of interest at the mall. Person of interest. It was such a silly way to say “guilty” without saying it. Nobody had any doubt what made this person so interesting.

  At this point it was reasonable to assume that there was some kind of low-level manhunt and APB put out for him for what happened that morning. If it hadn’t been for the mall, he bet that would have been the story of the day. Unfortunately for his pursuers, he’d created one horrific distraction. From the news, it was a distraction they were still trying to pull bodies from.

  Once they connected him to that, everything would escalate. He’d become a really fucking interesting person at that point. It wasn’t just cops waiting for him at his apartment or workplace. It’d be people looking for him at train stations and airports. When they talked to the old lady whose car he took, they’d throw the license plate and car makeup on every electronic sign on the highway. Every cop would have his face on the computer screen in their cars.

  “Unofficial reports from Park Square Mall are coming in that Department of Homeland Security officials are on the scene. Officials are downplaying that this was a terrorism-related incident but haven’t ruled it out just yet. As we pointed out earlier, police are expected to give us an update in 30 minutes ....”

  Terrorism? Holy Christ. Had he just gone from fugitive of the day to Unabomber and DC Sniper status? Was he in Osama bin Laden’s league now?

  Mitch shut off the radio. He’d check back in later to find out what they knew. For the moment he needed to get proactive. He looked around the empty house. He couldn’t stay. He also needed to figure out how exactly he was going to go into hiding. Right now he was on the run. Full-on hiding out meant being able to spend days or weeks without getting caught. That meant survival. Food, shelter and ways to protect himself.

  In the house, it was only a matter of time before either the police found it through Mike at the radio station or someone else came to check up on it. It was also totally empty of food. He could make it a day or two without eating after that he knew he would get weak and make stupid decisions.

  He looked at his backpack. He had his iPad, radio, comics, some notebooks, a charger and another shirt. Was there anything else in the house?

  He remembered the door to the attic in the garage. He went back in and pulled the ladder down and climbed up. He found the light switch and turned it on. There were boxes of Christmas decorations, luggage and a box of old clothes. He took the box down from the attic to rummage through it.

  He pulled out all the men’s clothing and went back to the master bathroom. He didn’t have to try on the pants to know that they were too small. There was a golf shirt and a pair of shorts that fit. He also found a blazer and a golf cap. A pair of cleated shoes were going to be useless unless he wanted to hide out on a golf course and play the back nine, thought Mitch.

  Mitch put on the blue golf shirt. He decided to wear it instead of the T-shirt he had in his bag. It made him look slightly less like a person of interest in his mind. The more upper-middle class he could look, the better.

  He decided to shove the blazer and shorts into his bag. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a manhunt from a helicopter where the bad guy ran away in a suit jacket. In a pinch, he could throw the jacket on and look slightly different. That might be the difference between getting stopped and making a clean getaway.

  To make a getaway, he needed to know where to get. He wanted to turn on his iPad and just pull up Google Maps and see if anything came to mind. The risk of having it give up his position was too great.

  The car in the garage. Old people still used maps. Mitchell ran back to the car and opened the glove compartment. It was filled with pill bottles. He started to throw them on the floor but decided he should see what was in them. If he got an infection or some other injury, he wasn’t going to be visiting a pharmacy any time soon.

  Most of the bottles were for various old-age conditions. He did find a bottle of painkillers. Those could be helpful. He didn’t want to take them with him and add “junky medication thief” to his growing rap sheet, but he knew survival could mean the difference between being able to keep moving despite pain and being crippled by it.

  The pill bottle was mostly full. He looked back at the label. “Beatrice Stein.” Mitchell stared at it for a moment. Beatrice, with her bright red hair and gnashing teeth, was the first person he consciously did something wrong to unprovoked. It was one thing to try to stop people from chasing you. It was another to take an innocent person’s car. Mitch put the bottle in his pocket. If roles were reversed and he’d pulled into that parking lot and seen her running, he’d given her his car if he knew she was seconds away from being torn apart.

  Under the bottles he found three maps. One was of South Florida, the others were for the entire state and Georgia. He put the other bottles back and then put the boxes back into the attic. The less it looked like he had been there, the better.

  Mitchell walked back into the living room and gathered all his stuff into the backpack. He needed to be ready to go in an instant. He opened up the map of South Florida and laid it on the floor. He sat down over it and looked at it in the sunlight filtering through the venetian blinds. It was just a piece of paper, but looking down at it like he was god looking down at Earth gave him a sense of control. He could imagine a miniature Mitch and miniature pursuers trying to capture him. As long as he knew where he was going, he could be a step ahead of them. It was a fucking board game.

  Rather than be some loser who tried to rob a cashier and was shocked by how fast the cops caught up with him and had to make a pathetic attempt to run, he could be a mastermind and plot this out like a heist. He looked around the floor and noticed a dime near the impression of where a couch had been. He traced the map and located where the house he was in was at and placed the dime there.

  Mitchell looked around the map. How could he get that dime as far away as possible, as safely as he could?

  19

  Simmons and Rios bandaged up people who needed less immediate attention while paramedics worked on the more seriously injured. They moved through the crowd and helped out wherever the fire captain pointed them. Mostly they were there to reassure people. Rios watched as Simmons went from person to person and gently prodded them for i
nformation as she sprayed disinfectant on scratches and found pillows for sprains and bruises. It wasn’t an official questioning, just her way of getting some facts and trying to understand what happened.

  Rios sat down and leaned against a checkout counter next to where Simmons was wrapping a woman’s ankle. He hadn’t trusted himself to ask questions in that situation outside of an official capacity. Sooner or later his supervisor would come to them and tell them what to look for. Until then he just told people they were working on it and did what he could.

  Simmons finished taping the woman’s ankle and leaned back against the counter next to him. The entire second floor was a mixture of the wounded lying on mattresses pulled from displays and storerooms, stretchers and emergency personnel trying to make sure the living were being taken care of.

  She brushed a lock of dark hair out of her eye and readjusted the band holding her ponytail. “Every situation is different. I know that. But this is just really odd.” She shifted a little closer to Rios. “This many people, I get that they are still in shock, but with this many people, you’d expect a lot of different stories. People should be begging to tell you something. Not here. They seem just as baffled as we do.”

  “What are they saying? Do they know how they got up here?”

  “Some of them say they were trying to catch up with ‘him.’ When I ask who ‘he’ is, they don’t know. They just say that they felt threatened and they felt attacked.”

  Rios looked at the turned-over displays and wrecked merchandise. “Well, I don’t think ‘he’ did this by himself.”

  Simmons shook her head. “No. No, he didn’t.”

  She pointed toward a middle-age Hispanic woman leaning against a bed frame. She was wearing jeans and a blue blouse. She was looking at something in her hand that wasn’t taped up. From where Rios was sitting it looked like the chain to a crucifix.

  “A few people like her, mostly religious, say that they weren’t chasing after a man. They say they were chasing after the devil.”

  “The devil?” repeated Rios.

  Simmons pointed out a heavy-set girl with too much eye makeup crying next to a shelf full of towels. “She said the same thing.” She pointed out an elderly man in slacks and dress shirt leaning against a mirror. “He said Satan. Crazy, I know.”

  Rios remembered something at the back of his mind. “My grandmother was from Chile. Before she died she told me a story. I guess because she was too afraid to tell her priest but thought a cop was second best. I know, it’s a stretch.

  “She was from a real small town. They were very poor. To get to the market, they had to rely on the one man who had a truck. Mr. Carlos. Anyway, she said Mr. Carlos was a mean man and used to take advantage of the fact that he was the only one in the village that had a truck.

  “He’d make them pay more money than they could afford. He once refused to take an old woman to the hospital because she didn’t have any money for gasoline. The town hated him, but they needed him. He was more important than the mayor who only had a horse.

  “One day a young girl was coming back from visiting her cousins in the next town. She was a pretty girl and sang very beautifully in the church choir. My grandmother said they wished they could be that girl because they knew some rich man would come marry her and move her away to a big house with an automobile.

  “Mr. Carlos sees the girl walking on the road. He offers her a ride but she refuses because she has no money to pay for it. He says that was OK. It would be a free ride. So she got in.

  “Nothing with that man was free. He drove her a little farther and then forced himself on her. He then left her on the side of the road and drove back to town. He went to the one bar in town, my grandmother says it was just two tables and a man with a bottle of whiskey, and he sits there gloating.

  “When the girl got home, she told her mother. Her mother ran out to the bar and confronted the man. He just sat there and laughed and waved the key to his truck.

  “Soon the whole town gathered to see what was going on. When the girl came out to get her mother, they saw her ripped clothes and her tears. They knew.

  “Mr. Carlos held up the key to his truck and laughed at them all. What are you going to do about it? He asked them.

  “A woman threw a rock. It hit his glass of whiskey. He laughed at them all. Then without a word all of the women and then the men ran to him. They attacked him with their fists, their teeth. My grandmother said they tore the man to pieces. There was nothing left that looked like a man to bury.

  “She was just a little girl, but she said she was part of it. I asked her how she could have been a part of it? This was the one woman in my family that never hit me. She said it was easy. Mr. Carlos was the devil. To her and the rest of the town, they weren’t killing a man who had raped a little girl. They were sending the devil back to hell. This was what god wanted.

  “When I asked her if she wanted to talk to the priest for forgiveness, she told me no. She didn’t need forgiveness for putting the devil back in his place in hell. She just wanted to know that like me, the policeman, she’d seen evil, she’d seen the face of the devil.”

  Rios looked across the room at the dead and confused injured covered in the blood of the people around them.

  “Between you and me, does this look like the work of a man or the work of the devil?” he asked.

  Simmons shook her head. “It looks like the work of a lot of angry, scared people, Rios.” She looked at their faces. “People more scared by what they saw inside themselves.”

  Simmons’ cell phone began to vibrate. She answered it and then hung up. She stood up and dusted off her slacks. “Brooks in the security office. They got someone to pull up the mall security footage. He wants us downstairs.”

  The security office had a wall of 20 screens showing different parts of the mall centered around one large screen. When Rios and Simmons got there, the office already had a dozen people inside and a dozen more outside looking in through the glass. Rios didn’t recognize most of them. He looked around and saw state and federal ID badges from various departments.

  A detective from the police department, Jeff Oliver, was operating the control board. On the largest screen they were looking at footage of people running down the main corridors of the mall. Although he couldn’t make out individual expressions, the first thing Rios noticed was the posture of the people. This wasn’t a crowd running away from something. This was a crowd chasing someone. Their hands were outstretched and their fingers curled into claws.

  Detective Oliver spoke up. “The department store footage is in its own system. Someone is bringing those drives here. This is the sequence for now. I can show you different camera angles for some of the shots.” He pressed a button.

  On the large screen they saw an overhead shot of the food court. Toward the lower right they could see the back of a man’s head. He was seated at the farthest point away from the main area. From out of frame on the upper right side of the screen they saw a woman running in the direction of the man. The tables and chairs prevented her from making a straight line but they only slowed her down a little bit. Rios thought she looked angry as hell.

  “Watch this,” said Oliver. He pointed to a spot in front of the seated man. A chair came skidding out and toward the woman. She tripped over it. The man jumped to his feet.

  “Now you can see the crowd react to what happens.” All of the people in the food court turned to the man and began running toward him. The detective changed to another view. From that angle Rios could see the man running from the crowd and push an older man over as he tried to block his exit. He clicked another button.

  A wide shot of the atrium showed the man running toward a group of women in the department store and then changing direction. A kiosk got knocked over. The man ran out of frame.

  In the next shot the man was running down the main corridor as more people started chasing him. The next camera, looking toward the atrium, showed him knocking over displays a
nd throwing things in the path of the people behind him.

  “If assaulting a woman and the elderly isn’t enough, check out this one.” He clicked another button. The screen showed the man running toward a group of teenagers and knocking down a young girl to get through them. On the last camera angle, the man ran into the department store and the entire mall followed him in.

  “So what caused this panic?” Oliver had a rhetorical tone to his voice. He pressed another button. “How about mob justice?”

  On screen they saw video of a furious child screaming at the man and rocking its high chair back and forth.

  Oliver turned to the people watching the screens. “Some asshole starts yelling at a kid. The mother comes running and he knocks her down with a chair. He takes off and the rest of the mall decides to catch him. The guy keeps knocking people down and the crowd only gets more angry.” The detective leaned back in the chair with a smug look.

  “There’s your devil,” whispered Rios.

  Simmons wasn’t convinced. Technically everything the detective said was true, but it just didn’t feel that way. That wasn’t a crowd that wanted to catch somebody. They had blood lust.

  She spoke up. “Can you show us the part right before he kicked the chair at the woman?”

  Oliver nodded and then pressed a button. Rios looked at the screen and tried to see what Simmons was looking for. All he saw was the man kick the chair at the woman.

  “Do you want another angle?” asked Oliver.

  Simmons shook her head. “Forget the chair and the woman. Roll it back before she ran. Now look at the screen and tell me at what point the crowd turns on the guy?”

  Rios saw it, too. The crowd was already beginning to move toward the man. Throwing the chair at the woman may have tipped them over, but they were already focused on him.