Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "Figure out some way to start him toward the airport? Maybe snipe him?" Lucas suggested.

  She looked at Lester. "Where's that Iowa kid?" The Iowa kid was the department sniper.

  "He's on his way."

  "So let's set him up. If he gets a clear shot…" She looked at the negotiator. "We need some more time. Ask him how he wants to get to the airport, what will keep him safe."

  "Aw, man," Lucas said.

  "What?"

  "I don't know. Look at this bullshit." He waved at the TV trucks; there were eight or nine of them. Four helicopters orbited overhead.

  "Well, that's what it is," Rose Marie said. She looked at the negotiator. "Ask him how he wants to do it."

  As the negotiator was talking, the mayor arrived. He looked at the gas station, then at Lucas. "How're you gonna get him outa there?"

  An armored car.

  "Aw, man," Lucas said.

  "Will you shut up?" Rose Marie said.

  "Can I talk to that guy? For just a minute?"

  The negotiator looked at Lucas and said, "We have established an element of trust between us."

  "Oh, bullshit, he sounds like he's making the moves before we are," Lucas said. "You trust him, he doesn't trust you. Let me talk to him."

  Rose Marie looked at the mayor, who shrugged. "I'm no expert," he said.

  "Go ahead," said Rose Marie.

  Lucas took the phone. "This is Lucas Davenport. I'm the guy who chased you with the Porsche, and I want you to know you messed up a perfectly good paint job."

  "Tough shit. What do you want?"

  "I want to come up to the gas station door and talk to you, away from this crowd. You're up there in a bulletproof booth, I can't hurt you, you can't hurt me, and you got the hostages. I just want to talk to you away from this crowd."

  "About what?"

  "About TV."

  "What?"

  "About all this TV. Give me two minutes. I won't come inside, I'll just stick my head in the door."

  After a moment: "If this is a trick, I'll kill this lady."

  "This is no trick. I'm just tired of all the bullshit," Lucas said.

  He walked up to the station with his hands open, held at armpit level, stopped at the door, pushed it slowly open, then leaned inside.

  "How are ya?"

  "What, you're doing a Henry Fonda impression?"

  "No. I just don't want anybody to get killed. Especially me."

  "What do you want?"

  "To work a couple of things out with you. First of all, you don't want to go to Cuba. You know what they do to you in Cuba? They put you in prison. Forever. The last guy who hijacked a plane down there hasn't been seen since 1972. They might be Commies, but they don't like criminals. They'll stick you into a wet drippy dungeon with a bunch of rats, and you'll wind up looking like the Count of Monte Cristo. Stillwater prison is a goddamned garden spot next to anything you'll get in Cuba."

  "Maybe I'll take that chance," Scott said. Being the hard man, Lucas thought. Lucas could see him clearly through the glass: a thatch of straw-colored hair, a heavy, ruddy face, plastic-framed glasses, and the Coke coveralls.

  "Look, you see all those cameras out there? What if I walk one of those cameras up here and let you make a statement to the world about what you were doing for Alie'e. Then we cut out all this Cuba bullshit and killing innocent people in front of TV cameras so everybody'll know you're an asshole—and you just come in and tell us what happened to you. You'll have lawyers and everything. You'll be treated well."

  "What channel?" Scott asked.

  Lucas thought, Gotcha, and said, "Any channel you want. I'd recommend Channel Twenty-nine, because they play right into Fox, which has the best news department, as I'm sure you know."

  "No, no. None of that Fox bullshit. Channel Three: that's CBS down here?" Scott asked.

  "Yup."

  "Lets talk to somebody from Channel Three, see what they say," Scott said.

  Lucas walked back to the line.

  "What's going on?" Rose Marie asked.

  "We're talking," Lucas said. "I gotta go get some movie people."

  He felt like he was plodding through knee-deep mud. He spotted Ginger House from Channel Three, with her cameraman, pointed at her, and gestured. She tapped herself on the chest, and Lucas nodded and shouted, "Bring your cameraman."

  She trotted across the police line with the cameraman in tow, and other reporters began screaming in the background. Lucas said, "You will now owe me more than you can ever possibly repay."

  "What?" She was a nice-looking redhead with freckles on her narrow nose.

  "We're gonna walk up there, and the guy's gonna give us a statement, and then maybe something good'll happen."

  "Is it dangerous?" she asked. She sounded reluctant.

  "No, I don't think—"

  "You know what's dangerous, Ginger?" the cameraman asked. "What's dangerous is, if you turn this down, I swear to God I'll go back to the truck, get out my gun, and shoot you in the forehead. Every goddamn person in the world is gonna see us do this. We do this, we're gonna be movie stars."

  "Or I'll be dead," she said.

  "Hell, you're a second-string reporter in Minneapolis. That's the same thing as being dead anyway," the cameraman said.

  She thought about it for a second, then said, "Okay." As they walked up to the gas station, she said to Lucas, "I don't have to blow you or anything for doing this?"

  "Well, yeah, that is part of the deal," Lucas said.

  "Maybe I'll just describe what I would have done, and you can handle it yourself," she said, trying for a sweet smile; but she was shaking. "What do I say to him?"

  "Fall back on your clichés," Lucas said.

  Lucas pushed the door open, said, "This is Ginger House, from Channel Three." The cameraman focused on Scott. Ginger said, "I'll have to come in there to do the introduction. I don't have a gun or anything."

  "Better not be a trick," Scott said. "We got a TV, and it's tuned to Channel Three." He nodded at a small four-inch television sitting on a shelf inside the booth.

  "I'm too nervous for any tricks," Ginger said, and her voice carried conviction. She stepped through the door, and then turned to face the camera, with Scott looming behind her through the bulletproof glass. The cameraman refocused on her; he whispered, "You're live."

  Ginger said, "This is Ginger House. We're standing in an Amoco station off I-35W in Minneapolis, where Mr. Martin Scott is holding two hostages. Mr. Scott is suspected by Minneapolis police of involvement in the murders done in revenge for the Alie'e Maison killing last week. Mr. Scott has agreed to be interviewed exclusively for the Channel Three Good Morning show. How are you, Mr. Scott?" Smiling, she pivoted toward Scott, who smiled and said, "Well, Ginger, I'm pretty busy this morning, as you can see…"

  "Aw, Jesus," Lucas muttered to himself. He turned and looked back toward the growing crowd. He could hear the howling of the other TV people from where he was standing. "Jesus H. Christ."

  They talked for ten minutes; and Scott wasn't bad, Lucas thought. He explained the killings cogently, and justified them. Plain had exploited her death by selling pictures of her naked the same night she was murdered; her parents had gotten her involved in dope and deviant sexuality in the first place; Spooner, of course, had actually killed Alie'e.

  At the end of the interview, Ginger asked, "Could we just ask a question or two of the hostages?"

  "Sure, go ahead."

  The woman was named Melody. "We've been treated very well, better than I expected. Mr. Scott has been a gentleman," she said, with a slight unidentifiable accent. Then she did a little finger wave at the camera. The other hostage, a dark-haired young man named Ralph, said, "I just want to get out of here. I've got classes this morning—we've got a quiz."

  As Ginger and the cameraman walked back across the gas pad to the police lines, the howling of the press seemed to swell again. Lucas leaned in the door. "So now you've had your airtime. Now if you ki
ll anyone, they'll figure everything else was bullshit, and you were a phony all the time."

  "I'm thinking," Scott said.

  And the woman, Melody, said to Lucas, "Please, please get me out of here." And to Scott: "Please, let me go."

  "I can't yet," Scott said. He looked at Lucas. "There oughta be more than this."

  "There is no more than this, Martin," Lucas said. He gestured at the crowd, at the cameras. "You just spoke to the entire world."

  "I don't know," he said. "There oughta be more."

  Lucas sighed, looked around, then said, "All right. Maybe there is."

  "What?"

  "I'll be back."

  He trudged back across the parking lot. Rose Marie said, "What?"

  "We're getting there. It's like pulling a goddamn snail out of a shell." He spotted Jael and walked over to her. "I gotta ask you a favor."

  They walked together toward the gas station, and Jael said, "I'm gonna wet my pants."

  "That's good," Lucas said. "For six billion viewers, you're gonna wet your pants."

  "Sort of a trip, isn't it?"

  Lucas leaned in the door again. "Mr. Scott, I'm sure you know this young woman. You've been trying to kill her. She wants to apologize to you for any wrong she might have done to Alie'e, and in turn, she wants you to apologize for killing her brother, who she deeply loved."

  Jael stepped just inside the door. Lucas had warned her to stay close so she could back off if Scott did anything crazy. "As long as he's inside the booth, you should be okay."

  She began, "Mr. Scott, I am truly sorry…"

  She did it almost perfectly, Lucas thought, fixing him with her eyes, letting him take in her torn-paper face. "I had a hard childhood. Look at my scars," she said. She touched her face. "I was in a car accident…"

  They talked for a few minutes, then Scott shook his head as though dazed. "So what's the deal?" he asked Lucas.

  Lucas said, "The deal is this: We go back to the lines, we get another camera of your choice. We come back here. You shuck all the shells out of your rifle—uh, where's the shotgun?"

  "In the car. I couldn't reach it after the crash."

  "All right. Anyway you shuck all the shells out of the rifle, lay the rifle to the side. Then you open the booth, and you surrender to Jael—we're talking the worlds biggest TV audience here—and then we all walk across the gas pad and you'll be taken into custody. With a lawyer right there."

  "What channel?"

  "Three? You want Ginger back?" Lucas asked.

  "No. She was okay, but she was a little too… smooth. She didn't have that good jagged quality. How about… uh, what do you think?"

  "Six. There's a woman with Six, sort of an understated beauty, if you know what I mean."

  "Not Ellen?"

  "Exactly. Ellen. She's out there, Martin."

  He thought about it for a long beat. Then: "All right. Ellen."

  Lucas went back, pointed at Ellen Goodrich, who raced out of the crowd, towing her camera. "Lucas… what can I say? And what're we doing?"

  "We're gonna do the surrender."

  "Aw, jeez, that's just… that's just…" He thought she might weep with gratitude, but she didn't.

  "Let's go," Lucas said.

  The surrender went well, to a point, Lucas thought.

  Jael made a statement, a formal apology for any wrongs that had been done to Alie'e. Scott apologized for the killings, said he still felt that they were necessary—but that Jael through her gracious actions had made up for some of it.

  Then, with the TV camera focusing on him, Scott jacked the slide on the Ruger until shells stopped popping out. He said, "I hereby surrender to Jael Corbeau, a brave woman."

  He reached out and popped the lock on the door. As it opened, the dark-haired hostage, Ralph, screamed, "YOU COCKSUCKER." He snatched the small portable TV off the shelf, and as Scott turned, startled, Ralph hit him in the face with it.

  Scott went down as though he'd been struck by a meteorite, and Lucas shouted, "Hey," and tried to get the door open, but the woman, Melody, began kicking at Scott, screaming "SONABEECH" in an unexpected Mexican accent. Then she snatched a can of Pyroil starting fluid off the shelf and began hitting Scott in the back of the head, slicing off swaths of scalp.

  Scott pushed up, tried to crawl through the rain of blows. Jael was there. Lucas tried to push past her, but she screamed, "You killed my brother, you motherfucker." Scott, stunned and bleeding, looked up, and she kicked him in the eye and he went down again.

  The camera was crowding in, and Lucas swatted Jael to one side and tried to get at the dark-haired man, who was beating Scott with the remnants of the portable TV. Lucas grabbed him by the shirt, pulled him across Scott's body, and threw him into the cameraman; the cameraman, Ralph, and Ellen Goodrich all went down in a heap. Melody screamed, suddenly panic-stricken, and ran past. For a moment, Lucas and the stunned, bleeding Scott were behind the counter in a little pool of peace and privacy. Scott tried to push himself up, and Lucas whispered, "This is for Marcy, asshole," and hit him in the nose as hard as he could.

  There was a satisfying crunch of bone, and Scott went down for the count.

  An hour later, the mayor said, "I thought it went pretty well. You know, all things considered."

  Chapter 30

  « ^

  The media attention was intense through the morning, until football started. By nine that night, most of the out-of-towners were gone.

  On Monday, Lucas, Rose Marie, Frank Lester, and the mayor met in Rose Marie's office. Rose Marie said, "We're getting a ton of stuff on Spooner. He was in it up to his neck. And the Ramsey ME's office is saying they're not so sure that Rodriguez was a suicide. They found residue of wood preservative in his hair."

  "Told you," Lucas said comfortably. "He was hit with a goddamn two-by-four and dropped over the banister. By Spooner. Spooner not only killed Rodriguez, I bet he's the guy who leaked Rodriguez's name to Spittle. Set him up, made him the bad guy, killed him."

  "Spooner had a safe-deposit box over in Hudson," Lester said. "There were some documents that say he made a personal loan to Rodriguez's company in Miami for half a million dollars. Then, the feebs say, there was a lien registered on the company's property with Dade County, Rodriguez couldn't sell the company without the lien being settled, which meant that Spooner had an alarm if Rodriguez tried to get out. Spooner had another hook, too. If Rodriguez tried to sell, he'd have to settle the mortgages, and as the loan officer at Atheneum, Spooner would have known."

  "Where'd Spooner get the half-million for the personal loan?" the mayor asked.

  "There was no half-million. It was a fictitious loan. That was Spooner's cut in the business," Lester said. "They put it on paper, and hid the paper. In fifteen years, with interest, Spooner's cut is maybe two million. And that way, Spooner always had a hold on the business, if he and Rodriguez had a personal falling-out. He could file suit down in Dade County, and nobody up here would ever know… and Rodriguez would have to settle."

  "Still would have worked even after Rodriguez died," Lucas said. "If anybody even found out about the loan, they might have thought Spooner's investment was a little questionable—but hell, it'd be a minor thing. Especially if he trotted out all that bullshit about helping minorities and so on."

  "Is anybody going to sue us?" the mayor asked.

  "I don't know," Rose Marie said. "Spooner's wife might. She knows that Spooner's name was mentioned in our briefing of Olson, and that led indirectly to his death."

  "That won't get her anywhere," the mayor said. "I've done those kinds of suits, and she'd be lucky to get a buck and a half. We didn't kill her husband, his own greed killed him. Along with a nutcase."

  "And then there's Al-Balah," Rose Marie said.

  "He might not be around long enough to sue," Lucas said. "The guys from Narcotics said he went back on the street, but all of his old territory was under new ownership. The new owners don't want to give it back. There's gonna be
trouble."

  "That would clean things up nicely," the mayor said.

  "What, a cocaine war?"

  "Hey, dopers die. There's not a lot you can do about it," the mayor said. "It's a tragedy, of course. No man is an island, et cetera." They all nodded.

  When the mayor was gone, Rose Marie looked at Lester and Lucas and said, "We're good."

  "I don't believe he bought the whole thing," Lucas said, meaning the mayor.

  "He didn't. He knew there was some bullshit going on. But he was a very good lawyer. He knows there are times when you don't ask the obvious question."

  "So we're good," Lucas said.

  "By the skin of our teeth," Lester said.

  "But we're still good," Rose Marie said. She stood up and did a heavy little hop-and-skip over to her window, not quite a jig. "Ail these other cities, all these big crimes, the media goes in, the controversy lasts for months. We have a big crime and bang, one killer's dead, and bang, the other guy confesses to a national audience. One week. The goddamn movie people think the sun shines out of our asses."

  Lester seemed embarrassed. He said, "Yeah, but you know…"

  "Don't say it," Rose Marie said. "Don't even think it."

  "Can't help it," Lucas said. "A. lot of things got fucked up this time around, and I personally fucked up most of them. I jumped all over Rodriguez. I bought Olson. I didn't think that the shooter could be using a rifle, because it was a .44. Dirty Harry's pistol. I didn't think about the way the word gets around in a small town…"

  "We've all got a little hubris in us," Rose Marie said.

  "Yeah, yeah," Lucas said.

  "You more than most," she added.

  Tom Black said, "They took her up to a regular room." "She's better," Lucas said. "She's gonna make it," Black said. "You gotta go get some sleep," Del told Black.

  Marcy was awake.

  "Don't do that pneumonia shit anymore," Lucas said.

  She didn't smile. She whispered, "Hurts."

  "I know, goddamnit."