John Sandford - Prey 04 - Silent Prey

by Silent Prey

  A few miles after blowing off the SHO, he passed the first of the exurban ramblers, outriders for the 'burbs. He groped in the glove box, found the radar detector, clipped it to the visor and plugged it into the cigarette-lighter socket as the Porsche screamed down the cracked pavement. He let his foot settle further; punched up the radio, Cities-97. Little Feat was playing hard hot boogie, "Shake Me Up," the perfect sound to accompany a gross violation of the speed limit.

  The interstate overpass flicked past and the traffic got thicker. A hundred and eighteen. Hundred and nineteen. A stoplight he'd forgotten about, looming suddenly, with a blue sedan edging into a right-on-red turn. Lucas went left, right, left, heel-and-toe, blowing past the sedan; and past a station wagon, for a split second catching at the periphery of his vision the surprised and frightened face of a blond matron with a car full of blond kids.

  The image fixed in his mind. Scared. He sighed and eased off the gas pedal, coasting. Dropped through a hundred, ninety, eighty. Across the northern suburbs of St. Paul, onto the exit to Highway 280. When he'd been a cop, he'd always been sneaking off to the lake. Now that he wasn't, now that he had time sitting on him like an endless pile of computer printout, he found the solace of the lake less compelling....

  The day was warm, sunshine dappling the roadway, playing games with cloud-shadows on the glass towers of Minneapolis to the west. And then the cop car.

  He caught it in the rearview mirror, nosing out of Broadway. No siren. His eyes dropped to the speedometer again. Sixty. The limit was fifty-five, so sixty should be fine. Still, cops picked on Porsches. He eased off a bit more. The cop car closed until it was on his bumper, and in the rearview mirror he could see the cop talking into his microphone: running the Porsche's tags. Then the light bar came up and the cop tapped his siren.

  Lucas groaned and rolled to the side, the cop fifteen feet off his bumper. He recognized him, a St. Paul cop, once worked with the Southwest Team. He used to come into the deli near Lucas' house. What was his name? Lucas dug through his memory. Kelly... Larsen? Larsen was out of the car, heavy face, sunglasses, empty-handed. No ticket, then. And he was jogging....

  Lucas shifted into neutral, pulled the brake, popped the door and swiveled in the seat, letting his feet fall on the shoulder of the road.

  "Davenport, God damn it, I thought this was your piece of shit," Larsen said, thumping the Porsche's roof. "Everybody's looking for your ass...."

  "What... ?"

  "Fuckin' Bekker blew out of the government center. He's knocked down two people so far."

  "What?" Lucas Davenport: deep summer tan, jagged white scar crossing his eyebrow, khaki short-sleeved shirt, jeans, gym shoes. A surge of adrenaline almost took his breath away.

  "Two of your buddies are laying up at your place. They think he might be coming for you," Larsen said. He was a large man who kept hitching up his belt, and peering around, as though he might spot Bekker sneaking through a roadside ditch.

  Lucas: "I better get my ass down there...."

  "Go." Larsen thumped the top of the car again.

  Back on the highway, Lucas picked up the car phone and poked in the direct-dial number for the Minneapolis cops. He was vaguely pleased with himself: he didn't need the phone, rarely used it. He'd installed it the week after he'd bought the gold-and-steel Rolex that circled his wrist-two useless symbols of his freedom from the Minneapolis Police Department. Symbols that he was doing what every cop supposedly wanted to do, to go out on his own, to make it. And now the business was snaking off in new directions, away from games, into computer simulations of police tactical problems. Davenport Games & Simulations. With the growing sales, he might have to rent an office.

  The switchboard operator said, "Minneapolis."

  "Gimme Harmon Anderson," Lucas said.

  "Is that you, Lucas?" the operator asked. Melissa Yellow Bear.

  "Yeah." He grinned. Somebody remembered.

  "Harmon's been waiting. Are you at home?"

  "No, I'm in my car."

  "You heard what happened?" Yellow Bear was breathless.

  "Yes."

  "You take care, honey. I'll switch you over...."

  A moment later, Anderson came on, and said without preamble, "Del and Sloan are at your place. Sloan got the key from your neighbor, but they're wasting their time. He won't be coming after this long. It's been three hours."

  "How about Del's place? He and Bekker are relatives of some kind."

  "We've got a couple of guys there, too, but he's hiding somewhere. He won't be out, not now."

  "How did he-"

  "Go on home and Sloan can fill you in," Anderson said, interrupting. "I gotta go. This goddamn place is a madhouse."

  And he was gone. Police work to do, no time for civilians. Lucas got off at University Avenue, took it to Vandalia, across I-94 and down Cretin, then over to the tree-shaded river road. Brooding. No time for Davenport.

  Feeling sorry for himself, knowing it.

  Two blocks before he got to the house, he slowed, watching, then turned a block early. The neighborhood offered few places to hide, other than inside the houses. The yards were open, tree-filled, burning with color: crabapple blossoms and lines of tulips, banks of iris, pink peonies and brilliant yellow daffodils, and the odd patch of buttery dandelions that had somehow escaped the yard-service sprayers. The day was warm, and people were working in their yards or on their houses; a couple of kids in shorts shot baskets at a garage-mounted hoop. Bekker couldn't hide in the open yards, and breaking into a house would be tough. Too many people around. He turned a corner and idled down toward his house.

  Lucas lived in what a real estate woman had once called a soft rambler: stone and clapboard, a fireplace, big trees, two-car garage. At the end of the asphalt drive, he slowed, punched the garage-door opener, and waited at the end of the driveway until the door was all the way up. A curtain moved in the front room.

  When Lucas pulled into the garage, Sloan was waiting in the door between the house and the garage, hand in his jacket pocket. He was a thin man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. As Lucas got out of the car, Del drifted up behind Sloan, the butt of a compact 9mm pistol sticking out of his waistband. Del was older, with a face like sandpaper, a street burnout.

  "What the hell happened?" Lucas asked as the garage door rolled down.

  "An old-fuck deputy uncuffed him so he could take a shit," Sloan said. "Bekker'd been telling everybody that he had hemorrhoids and he always went to the can at the noon recess."

  "Setting them up," Lucas said.

  Del nodded. "Looks like it."

  "Anyway, the jury went out and the deputy took him to the bathroom before hauling him down to the holding cell," Sloan continued. "Bekker unscrewed a steel toilet-paper holder from the wall of the stall. Came out of the stall and beat the shit out of the old guy."

  "Dead?"

  "Not yet, but he's leaking brains. He's probably paralyzed."

  "I heard he hit two guys?"

  "Yeah, but the other was later..." Del said, and explained. Witnesses waiting outside a courtroom had seen Bekker leave, without knowing until later who he was. Others saw him cross the government-center plaza, running past the lunchtime brown-baggers, through the rafts of pigeons, heading down the street in his shorts. "He went about ten blocks, to a warehouse by the tracks, picked up a piece of concrete-reinforcement rod, went in the warehouse and whacked a guy working at the dispatch desk. A clerk. Took his clothes and his wallet. That's where we lost him."

  "The clerk?"

  "He's fucked up."

  "I'm surprised Bekker didn't kill him."

  "I don't think he had time," Del said. "He's in a hurry, like he knows where he's going. That's why we came here. But it don't feel right anymore, the longer I think about it. You scare the shit out of him. I don't think he'd take you on."

  "He's nuts," said Lucas. "Maybe he would."

  "Whatever, you got a carry permit?" asked Sloan.

  "No." />
  "We'll have to fix you up if we don't get him...."

  They didn't get him.

  Lucas spent the next forty-eight hours checking old sources, but nobody seemed much inclined to talk to him, not even the cops. Too busy.

  He brought a Colt Gold Cup.45 up from the basement gun safe, cleaned it, loaded it, kept it under the bed on a book. During the day, he carried it hidden in the Porsche. He enjoyed the weight of the gun in his hand and the headache-making smell of the gun-cleaning solvent. He spent an hour in a Wisconsin gravel pit, shooting two boxes of semi-wadcutters into man-sized silhouettes.

  Then, two days after Bekker broke out of the courthouse, neighbors found the body of Katherine McCain. She'd been an antiques dealer and a friend of Bekker's wife, and she'd had the Bekkers to a party six or eight weeks before Bekker's wife had been murdered. Bekker knew the house and knew she lived alone. He'd been waiting when she came home, and killed her with a hammer. Before he left in her car, he'd used a knife to slash her eyes, so her ghost couldn't watch him from the other world.

  And then he disappeared.

  McCain's car was eventually found in an airport parking lot in Cleveland, Bekker long gone. On the day the car was found, Lucas put the.45 back in the gun safe. He never got the carry permit. Sloan forgot, and then after a while, it didn't seem important.

  Lucas had temporarily gone off women, and found it hard to focus on the idea of a date. He tried fishing, played golf every day for a week. No good. His life, he thought with little amusement, was like his refrigerator-and his refrigerator contained a six-pack of light beer, three cans of diet caffeine-free Coke, and a slowly fossilizing jar of mustard.

  At night, unable to sleep, he couldn't get Bekker out of his head. Couldn't forget the taste of the hunt, of closing in, of cornering him...

  He missed it. He didn't miss the police department, with its meetings and its brutal politics. Just the hunt. And the pressure.

  Sloan called twice from Minneapolis, said it looked like Bekker was gone. Del called once, said they'd have to get a beer sometime.

  Lucas said yeah.

  And waited.

  Bekker was a bad penny.

  Bekker would turn up.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Louis Cortese was dying.

  A brilliant floodlight lit his waxy face and the blood on his cheeks, and emphasized the yellow tint in his eyes. His lips were twisted, like those of an imp in a medieval painting.

  Bekker watched. Touched a switch, heard the camera shutter fire. He could feel death swooping down on them, in the little room, in the lights, as Louis Cortese's life drained into a plastic jug.

  Bekker's brain was a calculator, an empty vessel, a tangle of energy, a word processor, and an expert anatomist. But never more than one thing at a time.

  Three months in the Hennepin County Jail had changed him forever. The jailers had taken away his chemicals, boiled his brain, and broken forever the thin electrochemical bonds that held his mind together.

  In jail, lying in his cell in his rational-planner mode, he'd visualized his brain as an old-fashioned Lions Club gumball machine. When he put in a penny, he got back a gumball-but he never knew in advance what color he'd get.

  The memory of Ray Shaltie, of the escape, was one color, a favorite flavor, rattling down the payoff chute of his psyche. When he got it, it was like a wide-screen movie with overpowering stereo sound, a movie that froze him in his tracks, wherever he was. He was back there with Ray Shaltie, with the steel fist, smashing....

  Bekker, real time.

  He sat in a chromed-steel chair and watched Cortese's death throes, his eyes moving between the monitor screens and the dying subject's face. A clear plastic tube was sewn into Cortese's neck, piping the blood from his carotid artery to an oversized water jug on the floor. The blood was purple, the color of cooked beets, and Bekker could smell it, his fine nostrils twitching with the scent. On the EKG, Cortese's heart rate soared. Bekker trembled. Cortese's consciousness was moving outward, expanding, joining with... what?

  Well. Nothing, maybe.

  Cortese's... essence... might be nothing more than a bubble reaching the top of a cosmic glass of soda water, expanding only to burst into oblivion. The pressure of the thought made Bekker's eyebrow jump uncontrollably, twitching, until he put a hand to his forehead to stop it.

  There had to be something beyond. That he himself might just blink out... No. The thought was insupportable.

  Cortese convulsed, a full-body rictus throwing him against the nylon restraining straps, his head cranking forward, his eyes bulging. Air squeezed from his lungs, past the elaborate gag, a hoarse bubbling release. He was looking at nothing: nothing at all. He was beyond vision....

  The alarm tone sounded on the blood-pressure monitor, then on the EKG, twin tones merging into one. With his left hand still clapped to his forehead, restraining the unruly eyebrow, Bekker turned toward the monitors. Cortese's heart had stopped, blood pressure was plummeting toward zero. Bekker felt the large muscles of his own back and buttocks tighten with the anticipation.

  He looked at the EEG, the brain-wave monitor. A jagged, jangled line just seconds before, it began flattening, flattening...

  He felt Cortese go: could feel the essence go. He couldn't measure it-not yet-but he could feel it. He bathed in the feeling, clutched at it; fired a half-dozen photos, the motor drives going bzz-whit, bzz-whit behind his head. And finally the magic something slipped away. Bekker jumped to his feet, frantic to hold on. He leaned over Cortese, his eyes four inches from the other's. There was something about death and the eyes....

  And then Cortese was gone, beyond Bekker's reach. His body, the shell of his personality, went slack beneath Bekker's hands.

  The power of the moment spun Bekker around. Breathing hard, he stared at a reflection of himself in a polished stainless-steel cabinet. He saw himself there a dozen times a day, as he worked: the raw face, the sin face, he called it, the cornrows of reddened flesh where the gunsights had ripped through him. He said in a small, high voice: "Gone."

  But not quite. Bekker felt the pressure on his back; his spine stiffened, and a finger of fear touched him. He turned, and the dead man's eyes caught him and held him. They were open, of course. Bekker had carefully trimmed away the eyelids to ensure they would remain that way.

  "Don't," he said sharply. Cortese was mute, but the eyes were watching.

  "Don't," Bekker said again, louder, his voice cracking. Cortese was watching him.

  Bekker snatched a scalpel from a stainless-steel tray, stepped to the head of the table, leaned over the body and slashed at the eyes. He was expert: it only took a second. He carved the eyes like boiled eggs, and the vitreous aqua leaked down Cortese's dead cheeks like jellied tears.

  "Good-bye," Bekker said dreamily. The ruined eyes were no longer threatening. A gumball dropped, and Bekker went away....

  Thick stopped at the curb, rocking on his heels, waiting patiently for the light. Thin snapped a cigarette into the street, where it exploded in a shower of sparks. The cars went by in a torrent, battered Toyotas and clunking Fords, fender-bent Dodges, pickups and vans blocking the view ahead, trucks covered with graffiti, buses stinking up the streets with noxious diesel fumes, all rolling past like iron salmon headed upstream to spawn. Through all of it, the taxis jockeyed for position, signaling their moves with quick taps on their horns, an amber warp to the woof of the street. New York was noise: an underground rumble of trains and steam pipes, a street-level clash of gears and motors and bad mufflers, a million people talking at once, uncounted air conditioners buzzing above it all.

  All of it congealed in the heat.

  "Too fuckin' hot," Thick said. And it was; he could feel it on his neck, in his armpits, on the soles of his feet. He glanced at Thin, who'd stopped at the curb beside him. Thin nodded but didn't answer. They were both wearing long-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled down to their wrists. Thin was a problem, and Thick didn't quit
e know what to do about it. Hadn't really known, he thought wryly, for almost forty years now....

  The walk sign flashed on and he and Thin crossed the street. A traffic-light pole, splattered with pigeon shit and encrusted with the grime of decades, sat on the corner. At the bottom, and up as high as a hand could reach, it was covered with fading posters. Above that, two street signs were mounted at right angles to each other, a bus-stop sign faced the street, and a temporary traffic-diversion sign pointed an arrow to the left. Above all that, a spar went out to the traffic signal, and another supported a streetlight.

  Oughta put one in a fuckin' museum someplace, just like that. Our own fuckin' totem poles...

  "Dollar..." The woman on the sidewalk reached up at him, holding a dirty hand-lettered card: "Help me feed my children." Thick walked past, thinking that it was impossible that the woman had children. In her forties, perhaps, she was withered as a week-old carrot, her emaciated legs sprawled beneath her, her bare feet covered with open sores. Her eyes had a foggy-white glaze, not cataracts, but something else. She had no teeth at all, only dimples in gray gums, like the vacant spots left by corn kernels popped from a cob.