Shadow Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas’ friend, a nurse, said, “She woke up a while ago, and I told her you were coming, so she knows. Don’t stay long, and be as quiet as you can.”

  Lucas nodded and tiptoed to Lily’s bedside.

  “Lily?”

  After a moment, she turned her head, as if the sound of his voice had taken a few seconds to penetrate. Her eyes, when she opened them, were clear and calm.

  “Water?” she croaked. There was a bottle of water on the bedstand with a plastic straw. He held it to her mouth and she sucked once. “Damn breathing tube dries out my throat.”

  “You feel pretty bad?”

  “Doesn’t . . . hurt much. I feel like I’m . . . really sick. Like I had a terrible flu.”

  “You look okay,” Lucas lied. Except for her eyes, she looked terrible.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Davenport,” she said with a small grin. “I know what I look like. Good for the diet, though.”

  “Jesus, it freaked me out.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Thanks for the rose.”

  “What?”

  “The rose . . .” She turned her head away, then back and forth, as though trying to loosen up her neck muscle. “Very . . . romantic.”

  Lucas had no idea what she was talking about, and then she said, “I got through the first fifteen minutes . . . with David. I hurt so bad I wasn’t thinking of you or anything, I was just happy to be here. And we were talking and when I thought of you, the first fifteen minutes were gone . . . and it was okay.”

  “Jesus, Lily, I feel so bad.”

  “Nothing you could do: but you be careful,” she said in her rusty voice. Her eyelids drooped. “Are you getting anywhere?”

  Lucas shook his head. “We’ve got a screen of people around Clay—I still think it’s him. I just haven’t figured out how. We’re watching the dumbwaiter, but that’s not it.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes closed and she took two deep breaths. “I’m so damn sleepy all the time . . . . Can’t think . . .”

  And she was gone, sleeping, her face going slack. Lucas sat by her bed for five minutes, watching her face and the slow rise and fall of her chest. He was lucky, he thought, that he wasn’t walking beside her coffin across another cemetery, just as with Larry . . . .

  Larry.

  It came back in a flash, as real as the shotgun behind his ear. He’d been walking across the cemetery grass with Lily and Anderson, after leaving Rose Love’s well-tended grave. Anderson was talking about the cost of grave maintenance and the perpetual-care contract he and his wife had bought . . . .

  And the question popped into his head: Who paid to take care of Rose Love’s grave? Neither Shadow Love nor the Crows had enough money to endow a perpetual-care fund, so they must pay it annually or semiannually. But if they were on the road all the time, where would the bill be sent? Lucas stood, looked down at Lily’s sleeping face, paced out of the ICU, past a patient who looked as though he were dying, and then back in, until he was standing by her bed again.

  The Crows or Shadow Love, whoever paid for maintenance, might simply remember to write a check once or twice a year and mail it, without ever getting a bill. But that didn’t feel right; there must be a bill. Maybe they had a postal box; but if they had their mail sent to a box, and didn’t get back into town for a while, important messages might sit there for weeks. Lucas didn’t know what the Crows had done, but he knew what he would do in their circumstances. He’d have a mail drop. He’d have the cemetery bill and other important stuff sent to an old, trustworthy friend. Somebody he could rely on to send the mail on to him. He half ran from the ICU to the nurses’ station.

  “I gotta have a phone,” Lucas snapped at his friend. She stepped back and pointed at a desk phone. He picked it up and called Homicide. Anderson was just getting ready to leave.

  “Harmon? I’m heading out to Riverwood Cemetery in a hurry. You get on the line, find out where Riverwood does its paperwork and call me. I’ve got a handset. If the office is closed, run down somebody who can open it up, somebody who does the bills. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “What have you got?” Anderson asked.

  “Probably nothing,” Lucas said. “But I’ve got just the smallest fuckin’ hangnail of an idea . . . .”

  Clay and a security man stood in the parking garage and argued.

  “It’s a fuckin’ terrible idea,” the security man said intently.

  “No, it’s not. When you get a little higher in management, you’ll recognize that,” Lawrence Duberville Clay replied. An undertone in his voice hinted that it was unlikely the security man would ever rise higher in management.

  “Look: one car. Just one. You wouldn’t even see it.”

  “Absolutely not. You put a car on me and you better warn the people inside that I’ll fire their asses. And you with them. No. The only way for me to do this is to go out on my own. And I’ll probably be safer than if I was here. Nobody’ll expect me to be out on the street.”

  “Jesus, boss . . .”

  “Look, we’ve been through this before,” Clay said. “The fact is, when you’re surrounded by a screen of security, you don’t have any feel for anything. I need to get away, to be effective.”

  They had a car for him, a nondescript rental that one of the agents had picked up at the airport. Clay took the wheel, slammed the door and looked out at the unhappy security man.

  “Don’t worry, Dan. I’ll be back in a couple, three hours, no worse for the wear.”

  Lucas had to wait ten minutes at the cemetery office, watching the moon ghost across the sky behind dead oak leaves. He shivered and paced impatiently, and finally a Buick rolled up and a woman got out.

  “Are you Davenport?” she asked in a sour voice, jingling her keys.

  “Yes.”

  “I was at a dinner,” she said. She was a hard woman in her early thirties, with a beehive hairdo from the late fifties.

  “Sorry.”

  “We really should have some kind of papers,” she said frostily as she unlocked the door.

  “No time,” Lucas said.

  “It’s not right. I should call our chairman.”

  “Look, I’m trying to be fuckin’ nice,” Lucas said, his voice rising as he spoke. “I’m trying as hard as I can to be a nice guy because you seem like an okay woman. But if you drag your feet on this, I’ll call downtown for a warrant. It’ll be here in five minutes and we’ll seize your whole goddamn billing system. If you get lucky, you’ll get it back sometime next year. You can explain that to your chairman.”

  The woman stepped away from him and a spark of fear touched her eyes. “Please wait,” she said. She went into a back room, and soon Lucas could hear her typing on a computer keyboard.

  It was all bullshit, Lucas told himself. Not a chance in a fucking million. A moment later a printer started, and then the woman came out of the back room.

  “The bills have always been sent to the same place, every six months, forty-five dollars and sixty-five cents. Sometimes they’re slow-pay, but they always pay.”

  “Who?” asked Lucas. “Where’d you send the bill?”

  The woman handed Lucas a sheet of computer paper, with one short line pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “It’s right here,” she said. “A Miss Barbara Gow. That’s her address under her name. Does that help?”

  Corky Drake had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, only to have it rudely snatched away in his teens. His father had for some years neglected to report his full income to the Internal Revenue Service. When the heathens had learned of Corky Senior’s oversight . . . well, the capital barely covered what was owed, much less the fines.

  His father had removed himself from the scene with a garden hose that led from the tailpipe of a friend’s Mercedes into the sealed car. The friend had refused to forgive him, even in death, for what he had done to the upholstery.

  Corky, who was seventeen, was already a person of refined tast
e. A life of poverty and struggle simply was not on the menu. He did the only thing he was qualified to do: he became a pimp.

  Certain friends of his father’s had exceptional interests in women. Corky could satisfy those, for a price. Not only were the women very beautiful, they were very young. They were, in fact, girls. The youngest in his current stable was six. The oldest was eleven, although, Corky assured the wits among his clientele, she still had the body of an eight-year-old . . . .

  Corky Drake met Lawrence Duberville Clay at a club in Washington. If they hadn’t become friends, they had at least become friendly. Clay appreciated the services offered by Drake.

  “My little perversion,” Clay called it, with a charming grin.

  “No. It’s not a perversion, it’s perfectly natural,” Drake said, swirling two ounces of Courvoisier in a crystal snifter. “You’re a connoisseur, is what you are. In many countries of the world . . .”

  Drake would serve his clients in Washington or New York, if they required it, but his home base was in Minneapolis, and his resources were strongest there. Clay, in town on business, visited Corky’s home. After that, the visits became a regular part of his life . . . .

  Drake was talking to the current queen of his stable when he heard the car in the driveway.

  “Here he is now,” he said to the girl. “Remember, this could be the most important night of your life, so I want you to be good.”

  Leo Clark sat in a clump of brush thirty yards from Drake’s elaborate Kenwood townhouse. He was worried about the cops. Barbara Gow’s car was parked up the street. It didn’t fit in the neighborhood. If they checked it and had it towed, he’d be fucked.

  He sat in the leaves and waited, looking at his watch every few minutes and studying the face of the Old Man in the Moon. It was a clear night for the Cities, and you could see him staring back at you, but it was nothing like the nights on the prairie, when the Old Man was so close you could almost touch his face . . . .

  At ten minutes after nine, a gray Dodge entered Corky’s circular driveway. Leo put up a pair of cheap binoculars and hoped there’d be more light when Corky opened the door. There was, and just enough: the elegant gray hair of Lawrence Duberville Clay was unmistakable. Leo waited until Clay was inside the house, then picked his way through the wood to Barbara’s car, quickly started it and headed back to her house. He stopped only once, at a pay phone.

  The message was simple: “Clay’s at the house.”

  Anderson was waiting in his office when Lucas hurried in.

  “What you got?”

  “A name,” Lucas said. “Let’s run it through the machine.”

  They put Barbara Gow’s name into the computer and got back three quick hits.

  “She’s Indian, and she’s a rad, or used to be,” Anderson said, scanning down the monitor. “Look at this. Organizing for the union, busted in a march . . . Christ, this was way back in the fifties, she was ahead of her time . . . . Civil rights and then antiwar stuff there in the sixties . . .”

  “She’d of known the Crows,” Lucas said. “There weren’t that many activist Indians back in the fifties, not in Minneapolis . . . .”

  Anderson was scanning through one of his notebooks; he found a page and held it up to the screen. “Look at this,” he said. He tapped an address in the notebook and touched an address on the screen. “She lived just a couple blocks from Rose E. Love, and at the same time.”

  “All right, I’m going down there,” Lucas said. “Get onto Del and some of his narcs, tell them I might need surveillance help. I’ll look the place over now. It’s too much to hope that they’ll be there.”

  “You want me to start some squads that way, just in case?”

  “Yeah, you could start a couple, but keep them off the block unless I holler.”

  Leo pulled into Barbara Gow’s driveway and Aaron lifted the garage door. Leo rolled the car inside but left the engine running. Sam stepped out of the house carrying a chopped-down shotgun. Leo had cut the gun down himself. What had been a conventional Winchester Super-X, a four-shot semiauto, wound up as an ugly illegal killing machine that looked as much like a war club as a shotgun. Sam opened the car door and slipped the shotgun under the passenger seat, and then helped Aaron load a six-foot chunk of railroad tie into the cargo space. They’d sharpened one end with an ax and screwed handles to the top. When it was in, Aaron slammed the tailgate and he and Sam got in.

  “You want to leave the garage door up?” Leo asked.

  “Yeah. If we gotta get off the street in a hurry when we come back, it’ll get us an extra minute.”

  Lucas cruised by the side of the Gow house, moving as slowly as he could without being conspicuous. There were lights on in both front and back, probably the living room and the kitchen or a bedroom. The upper floor was dark. He turned the corner to pass in front of the house and saw that the garage door was up, the garage empty. As he passed, a shadow crossed the living room blind. Someone inside. Since the car was gone, that meant more than one person was living in the house . . . .

  He picked up the handset and put in a call to Anderson.

  “Get me the description of the woman who was seen with Shadow Love,” he said.

  “Just a second,” Anderson said. “I’ve got the notebook right here. Can’t get Del, he’s on the street, but one of his guys has gone after him. There are a couple of squads waiting out on Chicago.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a moment of silence. Lucas took another corner and went around the block. “Uh, there’s not much. Very small, barely see over the steering wheel. Indian. Maybe an older woman. She didn’t seem young. Green car, older, a wagon, with white sidewall tires.”

  “Thanks. I’ll get back to you.”

  He took another corner, then another, and came back up along the side of Gow’s house. As he did, a man walked out of the house across the street from Gow’s, leading a dog. Lucas stopped at the curb as the man strolled out to the sidewalk, looked both ways, then headed around the side of his house, the dog straining at the leash. Lucas thought about it, let the man get a full lot down the opposite block, then called Anderson.

  “I need Del or a couple of narcs in plain cars.”

  “I got a guy looking for Del; we should have him in a minute.”

  “Soon as you can. I want them up the block from Gow’s place, watching the front.”

  “I’ll pass the word.”

  “And keep those squads on Chicago.”

  The dog was peeing on a telephone pole when Lucas pulled up next to the night walker. He got out of the car, his badge case in hand.

  “Excuse me. I’m Lucas Davenport, a lieutenant with the Minneapolis Police Department. I need a little help.”

  “What d’you want?” the man asked curiously.

  “Your neighbor across the street. Mrs. Gow. Does she live alone?”

  “What’d she do?” the man asked.

  “Maybe nothing at all . . .”

  The man shrugged. “She usually does, but the last few days, there’s been other people around. I never seen them, really. But people are coming and going.”

  “What kind of car does she drive?”

  “Old Dodge wagon. Must be fifteen years old.”

  “What color?”

  “Apple green. Ugly color. Never seen anything like it, except in those Dodges.”

  “Huh.” Lucas could feel his heart pounding harder. “White sidewalls?”

  “Yep. You don’t see them like that anymore. Bet she don’t drive a couple thousand miles a year. The tires are probably originals. What’s she done?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Lucas said. “Thanks for your help. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this to yourself.”

  As Lucas started back to the car, the man said, “Those other people . . . they left about five minutes ago. Somebody drove up in her car and somebody else opened the garage door, and one minute later, they left.”

  Lucas called Anderson: “I got something,”
he said. “I’m not sure what, but the Crows may be on the street.”

  “Sonofabitch. You think they’re hitting somebody?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t let those squads get away, though. I don’t care what happens. And get me Del’s man.”

  “I got Del. He was maybe a mile away, he oughta be there anytime.”

  “All right. Tell him I’ll wait at Twenty-fourth and Bloomington, right by Deaconess Hospital.”

  Del was waiting when Lucas arrived. The street was empty, and Lucas crossed into the left lane until their cars were door to door. Both men rolled their windows down.

  “Got something?”

  “Could be heavy,” Lucas said. “I think I got the Crows’ hideout, but they’re on the street.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I was gonna ask for some surveillance help, but if the Crows are on the street . . . I’m going in. I need some backup.”

  Del nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  “Let me introduce you to Lucy,” Drake said. He turned toward the back and called, “Lucy? Darling?”

  They were standing in front of the fireplace, glasses in their hands. A moment after he called, Lucy appeared from the back. She was tiny, blonde, shy, and wore a pink kimono.

  “Come over here, darling, and meet a friend of mine,” Drake said.

  • • •

  “Cop,” Leo said.

  “Shit. He’s going in,” Sam said.

  Drake’s house was on a long loop road, to the left. The cop had just turned into the loop, then stayed to the right. If he continued along the loop, he’d pass Drake’s house on the way back out.

  “We gotta wait,” Sam said. He pointed at a supermarket parking lot. “Pull in there. We can watch for him to come out.”

  “What if Clay leaves?”

  Aaron looked at his watch. “He’s only been there a half-hour. He usually stays two or three. This is not something you do quick. Not if you can help it.”

  Lucas and Del left their cars just down the block, and Lucas led the way to the porch. Del took a short black automatic out of a hip holster and stood to one side of the door as Lucas knocked.