Mr. Murder

Department. They discovered that a convenience store had been held up by persons unknown at approximately four o'clock Sunday morning, the clerk had been shot once in the head, fatally, and from the ejected cartridge found at the scene, it had been ascertained that the murder weapon fired 9mm ammunition. The gun with which Alfie had been supplied for the Kansas City job was a Heckler & Koch P7 9mm Parabellum pistol.
        The clincher was the nature of the last sale the clerk had made minutes before being killed, which the police had ascertained from an examination of the computerized cash register records. It was an inordinately large purchase for a convenience store, multiple units of Slim Jims, cheese crackers, peanuts, miniature doughnuts, candy bars, and other high-calorie items. With his racing metabolism, Alfie would have stocked up on items like those if he had been on the run with the intention of forgoing sleep for a while.
        And at that point they had lost him for too long.
        From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Any where.
        Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him down, and bring him home within a few hours.
        But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of the iceberg.
        Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel shaved to expose the electronics.
        Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe.
        By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car, Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he didn't scream was because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well scream at the moon.
        In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of People magazine.
        Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that said VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA-NOW CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the gazillionth Star Trek novelization.
        Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and sixty-seven.
        IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.
        The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds.
        Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.
        The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be happy to dress up in Agatha Christie's old clothes if it would sell his books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereal, Martin Stillwater's Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products, a free action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in "Day-Glo" red, start your collection today and, at the same time, let our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.
        Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn't see why the article had put the New York contact's blood pressure in the stroke-risk zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be "Mr. Tedium." If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it wouldn't need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore the crap out of you.
        Drew Oslett disliked