Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  Sailing.

  FOR TWO FRANTIC days after Qatar and Marshall died on the hillside, Lucas had shuttled between grand juries in Goodhue and Hennepin counties. The papers and television stations were wild for the story, and that might yet go on for a while. They all wanted to know why Lucas had gone down to the graveyard. Lucas could only say that it had been a hunch that came to him when he got the call from the 911 Center.

  Why didn’t he call Goodhue? Because he had no real knowledge that Marshall was involved and didn’t want to damage a friend if he was wrong, and had been so disturbed by the possibility that he’d launched himself onto the road without his cell phone, and once on the way, it seemed best to continue . . . blah, blah, blah.

  Cops and lawyers came and went, but as long as Lucas’s story stayed simple, there were no seams to cut onto. On the day after the shooting, he sent a crime-scene crew to St. Patrick’s to talk to the janitor, with instructions to search the overhead on the skeleton floor, and anything else the janitor suggested. The crew found the computer an hour into the search, and the laptop had Qatar’s prints all over it. The computer forensics people did their work, and up popped drawings of Aronson and another woman from the graveyard.

  At the same time, an illegal copy of the tape recording that Marshall made of Qatar found its way to Channel Three, and then to every TV and radio station that wanted it. Lucas didn’t know who leaked it—he suspected Del, but Del professed to be mystified, as did Marcy, Sloan, and Rose Marie. Qatar’s babbling confession, and his naming of names, led to quick IDs on the unidentified bodies from the graveyard, and to a new search in the countryside a few miles east of Columbia, Missouri.

  The usual Minnesotans were shocked by the police misconduct that had led to Qatar’s killing, but Rose Marie had a quiet word with old friends in the Democratic Party’s political-feminist hierarchy; with that, and with the constant playing of the tape across nine-tenths of the electromagnetic spectrum, the controversy withered. There was some expected grumbling from the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union about police-sponsored lynchings, which everybody agreed was the MCLU’s perfect right. Free speech, and all that.

  That cleaned up the case.

  Del had wondered, privately, just how early Lucas had suspected Marshall. Lucas shook his head and walked away from the question. Avoided the lie, but Del knew him well enough to understand the walk.

  Rose Marie also had a few questions that she didn’t ask. She did take Lucas aside and said, “The governor was impressed. I gave him ten minutes on what a great crime-detection bunch we have over here, and you know what he said?”

  “What’d he say?” They were in her office, and she was looking more cheerful than she had in weeks.

  “He said, ‘I don’t care about how good they detected—what I liked was the way they handled it.’ ”

  “So that’s good,” Lucas said.

  “That’s very good.”

  TIDYING UP THE loose ends on the case hadn’t tidied up Lucas’s head. A vague melancholia settled over him, a mood that Weather picked up. She began arranging events and talked to Marcy behind his back; Marcy began arranging events, and suggested that Lucas and Weather and she and Kidd go out to dinner. Lucas said “Sometime,” and kept wandering around town.

  He could have stopped the whole train, he thought. He’d never made up his mind; he’d never gotten clear on what he should do. He could have made a decision, but he hadn’t—a private failing, and a serious one, he thought.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER the sailboat, after a salad of roasted chicken breasts and walnuts and lettuce, after a bowl of wild rice soup, after a beer or two, he was puttering in his study, the whole case still tingling at the back of his brain. After a while, he sighed and walked down to the bathroom. The door was shut and locked.

  “Weather?”

  “Yes. Just a minute.”

  “That’s okay, I can run down—”

  “No, no, just a minute.” He could hear her moving around, and tried the door. Locked.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Okay, I’ll run down to the—”

  “No, no . . . I’m, uh, I’m just, uh, peeing on a stick.”

  “What?”

  “Peeing on a stick.”

  “Weather? What . . . ?”

  “I’m peeing on a stick. Okay?”

  MORTAL PREY

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  The Night Crew

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  Easy Prey

  Chosen Prey

  KIDD NOVELS

  The Fool’s Run

  The Empress File

  The Devil’s Code

  MORTAL PREY

  JOHN SANDFORD

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  a member of

  Penguin Putnam Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2002 by John Sandford

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sandford, John, date.

  Mortal prey / by John Sandford.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-0-7865-6788-1

  1. Davenport, Lucas (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Private investigators—Minnesota—Minneapolis—Fiction.

  3. Minneapolis (Minn.)—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3569.A516 M67 2002 2002019051

  813'.54—dc21

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Neil Nyren

  MORTAL PREY

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  1

  THE THOUGHT POPPED INTO HER HEAD as she lay in the soft-washed yellowed sheets in the hospital bed. The thought popped in between the gas pains and muscle spasms, through the pungent odor of alcohol swabs, and if she’d read the thought in a book, she might have smiled at it.

  She wasn’t smiling at anything now.

  She stared past the IV drip bag at the whitewashed plaster ceiling and tried not to groan when the pains came, knowing that they would end; tried not to look at the hard-eyed Mexicano at the end of the bed, his hand never far from the pistol that lay under the newspaper on the arm of his chair. Tried not to think about Paulo.

  Tried not to think about anything, but sometimes the thoughts popped up: tall, wiry Paulo in his ruffled tuxedo shirt, his jacket on the chair, a glass of red wine in one hand, his other hand, balled in a fist, on his hip, looking at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of his bedroom door, pretending
to be a matador. Paulo with the children’s book Father Christmas, sitting naked at her kitchen table with a glass of milk and a milk mustache, delighted by the grumpy Santa Claus. Paulo asleep next to her, his face pale and trusting in the day’s first light, the soft light that came in over the gulf just before sunrise.

  But the thought that might have made her smile, if it was in a book, was:

  Just like the fuckin’ Godfather.

  LIKE THIS: AN Italian restaurant called Gino’s, with the full Italian-cliché stage setting—sienna orange walls, bottles of Chianti with straw wrappers, red-and-white checked tablecloths, baskets of hot crusty bread as soon as you sat down, the room smelling of sugar and wheat, olives and peppers, and black oily coffee. A few rickety tables outside faced the Plaza de Arboles and the fifties tourist-coordinated stucco church across the way, San Fernando de Something-or-Other. The church belfry contained a loudspeaker that played a full, slow bell version of the Singing Nun’s “Dominique,” more or less at noon, depending on whose turn it was to drop the needle on the aging vinyl bell-record.

  Paulo took her to lunch almost every day, picking her up at the hotel where she worked as a bookkeeper. They’d eat Mexican one day, California or French the next, Italian twice a week. He picked her up about noon, so on most days she could hear, near or far, the recorded bells of San Fernando’s.

  Gino’s was the favored spot. Despite the clichéd Italian stage-setting, there was an actual Gino cooking at Gino’s, and the food was terrific. Paulo would pick her up in a black BMW 740iL, his business car, with his smooth-faced business driver. They’d hook up with friends, eat a long Caribbean lunch and laugh and argue and talk politics and cars and boats and sex, and at two o’clock or so, they’d all head back to work.

  A pattern: not predictable to the minute, but predictable enough.

  ISRAEL COEN SAT up in the choir loft at the back of the church with his rifle, a scoped Remington Model 700 in .30-06. He’d sighted it in along a dirt track west of town, zeroed at exactly sixty yards, the distance he’d be shooting across the Plaza de Arboles. There was no problem making the shot. If all you wanted was that Izzy Coen make a sixty-yard shot with a scoped Remington 700, you could specify which shirt button you wanted the slug to punch through.

  Not that everything was perfect. The moron who’d bought the gun apparently thought that bigger was better, so Izzy would be shooting at sixty yards through an eight-power scope, and about all he could see was a shirt button. He would have preferred no magnification at all, or an adjustable two-to six-power scope, to give him a little room around the crosshairs. But he didn’t have that, and would have to make do.

  The problem with the scope was exacerbated by the humidity in the loft. Not only was the temperature somewhere in the 120s, he thought, but the humidity must have been 95 percent. He’d sweated through his shirt at his armpits and across his chest, and the sweat beaded on his cheeks and forehead and arms. When he put the rifle to his cheek, the scope fogged over in a matter of seconds. He had a bottle of springwater with him, and that helped keep his body cool enough to function, but there was nothing he could do about the fogging eyepiece. The shot would have to be a quick one.

  No matter. He’d scouted the play for three days, he knew what the conditions would be, and he was ready, up high with a rifle, yellow vinyl kitchen gloves protecting against the inadvertent fingerprint, the jeans and thin long-sleeved shirt meant to guard against DNA traces. Izzy was good.

  He’d been in the loft for an hour and ten minutes when he saw the 740iL ease around the corner. He had two identical Motorola walkietalkies sitting next to his feet. Izzy believed in redundancy. He picked up the first walkie-talkie, pushed the transmit button, and asked, “Hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come now.”

  “One minute.”

  TEN OF THEM had been sitting in the back of Gino’s, the talk running down, a friend leaving and then another, with his new girlfriend, who’d been brought around for approval. Then Paulo looked at his watch and said to Rinker, “We better get back.”

  “Just a minute,” she said. “Turn this way.” She turned his chin in her hand, dipped a napkin into a glass of water, and used the wet cloth to wipe a nearly invisible smear of red sauce from his lower lip.

  “I was saving that for later,” he protested.

  “I couldn’t send you back that way,” she said. “Your mother would kill me.”

  “My mother,” he said, rolling his black eyes.

  THEY WALKED OUT of the Italian restaurant—Just like the fuckin’ Godfather—and the black BMW stopped beyond the balustrade that separated the restaurant’s patio from the Plaza. They walked past an American who sat at a circular table in his Hawaiian shirt and wide-brimmed flat hat, peering into a guidebook—all the details as clear and sharp three days later, in the hospital, as the moment when it happened—and the driver started to get out and Paulo called, “I got it, I got it,” and Rinker reached for the door handle, but Paulo beat her to it, stepping in front of her in that last little quarter-second of life….

  The shot sounded like a firecracker, but the driver knew it wasn’t. The driver was in his pocket as Rinker, suddenly feeling ill—not in pain, yet, but just ill, and for some inexplicable reason, falling—went to the ground, Paulo on top of her. She didn’t understand, even as a roaring, ripping sound enveloped her, and she rolled and Paulo looked down at her, but his eyes were already out of control and he opened his mouth and his blood gushed onto her face and into her mouth. She began screaming as the roaring sound resumed.

  She rolled and pushed Paulo down on the cobbles and turned his head to keep him from drowning in his own blood, and began screaming at the driver, “Paulo, Paulo, Paulo…”

  The driver looked at her, everything slow-moving. She saw the boxy black-steel weapon in his hand, a gun like she hadn’t seen before. She saw his mouth open as he shouted something, then he looked back over the car and then back down at Paulo. Then he was standing over them, and he lifted Paulo and put him on the backseat, and lifted her, and put her in the passenger seat, and in seconds they were flying across the Plaza, the hospital three minutes away, no more.

  She looked over the seat, into Paulo’s open eyes; but Paulo wasn’t there anymore.

  Paulo had gone. She could taste his blood in her mouth, crusting around her teeth, but Paulo had left the building.

  IZZY COHEN SAID, “Goddamnit,” and he wasn’t sure it’d gone right. The scope had blocked too much and he ran the bolt and lifted the rifle for a second shot, the bodies right there, and he saw the driver doing something, and then as Izzy lifted the rifle, the driver opened up and the front of the church powdered around him and Izzy thought, Jeez…

  An Uzi, he thought, or a gun just like it. Izzy rolled away from the window as the glass blew inward, picked up the two walkietalkies, and scrambled to the far corner of the loft and the steel spiral stair, the bullets flying around him like bees. He dove down the stair and punched through the back door, where a yellow Volkswagen Beetle was waiting with its engine running. Izzy threw the gun in the back, climbed in, and slammed the door. The driver accelerated away from the church’s back door and shouted, “What was that? What was that gun?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Izzy said. He was pulling off the latex gloves, shaking glass out of his hair. Blood on his hand—he dabbed at his cheek: just a nick. “A fuckin’ Uzi, maybe.”

  “Uzi? What is this Uzi?”

  “Israeli gun, it’s a machine gun…”

  “I know what IS a fuckin’ Uzi,” the driver shouted. “WHY is this fuckin’ Uzi? Why is this?”

  “I don’t know,” Izzy said. “Just get us back to the plane and maybe we can find out.”

  THE AIRSTRIP WAS a one-lane dirt path cut out of a piece of scraggly jungle twenty kilometers west of the city. On the way, the driver got on his cell phone and made a call, shouting in Spanish over the pounding of the Volkswagen.

  “Find out anything?” Izzy
asked when he rang off.

  “I call now, maybe find out something later,” the driver said. He was a little man who wore a plain pink short-sleeved dress shirt with khaki slacks and brown sandals. His English was usually excellent, but deteriorated under stress.

  A couple of kilometers east of the airstrip, they stopped and the driver led the way through a copse of trees to a water-filled hole in the ground. Izzy wiped the Remington and threw it in the hole and tossed the box of shells in after it. “Hope it doesn’t dry up,” he said, looking at the ripples on the black water.

  The driver shook his head. “There’s no bottom,” he said. “The hole goes all the way to hell.” The phone rang on the way back to the car and the driver answered it, spoke for a minute, and then clicked off with a nervous sideways glance at Izzy.

  “What?”

  “Two dead,” the driver said. “One bullet?”

  “One shot,” Izzy said with satisfaction. “What was that machine gun?”

  The driver shrugged. “Bodyguard, maybe. Nobody knows.”

  THE AIRSTRIP TERMINAL was a tin-roofed, concrete block building, surrounded by ragged palmettos, with an incongruous rooster-shaped weather vane perched on top. What might have been a more professional windsock hung limply from a pole beside the building, except that the windsock was shaped like a six-foot-long orange trout, and carried the legend “West Yellowstone, Montana.” A Honda generator chugged away in a locked steel box behind the building, putting out the thin stink of burnt gasoline. Finger-sized lizards climbed over walls, poles, and tree trunks, searching for bugs, of which there were many. Everything about the place looked as tired as the windsock. Even the trees. Even the lizards.