Mortal Prey ld-13

by John Sandford

  Then: "Here it is." Martin did a U-turn and dropped down a slanting concrete ramp to the emergency entrance at the hospital. A cop at the entrance tried to wave them away, but Martin put the truck astride the main door's entrance ramp, hopped out, and showed the cop a card. The cop stepped back, and Mejia said something that Lucas thought might mean, "Park the truck," and they all went inside.

  Three doctors were standing in a hallway, smoking. They saw Martin coming, the Americans trailing behind, and the tallest of the three stepped toward them, shaking his head.

  "Muerto,"he said.

  "Shit," Martin said. They spoke for a minute in Spanish, then Martin turned to Mallard, Malone, and Lucas. "He's dead. He died five minutes after they got here. We will do an autopsy, because the doctors aren't quite sure why he died-possibly shock. Possibly a stroke. Possibly something else."

  "Like what?"

  "They don't know."

  "Can we see him?"

  "I'm going to. You may if you wish, but you may not want to."

  The three Americans all looked at each other, and Malone said, "Let's go."

  The man called Octavio Diaz was lying faceup, nude, on a stainless-steel medical cart. His face was covered with blood-his eyes had been poked out-and his arms and legs were black. Lucas took a look and said, "Jesus Christ, what happened to his mouth? And he's black…"

  "Snipped his tongue off, looks like with a pair of wire cutters," the tall doctor said. "Put his eyes out with a knife, and it appears they did something to burn his ears… So he couldn't see, hear, or speak. He was dying when he arrived. You can't see it so much, but when we tried to get him out of his car… Look." He picked up one of Diaz's feet and lifted it above the cart. The leg hung in an almost perfect catenary arch down to his hip. "The bones have been minutely crushed in both legs and both arms. That must have taken a while, and they were very thorough. Picking him up, getting him out of the car, was like trying to pick up an oyster."

  Malone made a sour face at the comparison and said, "Why didn't they just dump him out in the jungle?"

  "Sending a message," Lucas said.

  Martin nodded. "To anyone else who thinks the Mejias have gone soft. They wanted people to see this-to see him alive. The nurses and the doctors. There will be stories everywhere in Cancun in an hour."

  "Wonder if they got anything out of him?" Mallard asked, looking down at the body.

  "What do you think?" Malone asked. She still had the sour face. "Don't you think you might have answered the questions if they were doing… that?"

  "So if they're looking for Rinker, or the assholes behind the shooting, they've probably got a jump on us," Lucas said. He turned to the doctor. "Can you tell from the wounds when this was all done?"

  "The autopsy will give a good approximation."

  "How about between, say, eleven o'clock and noon, today?"

  The doctor nodded. "From the way the blood is crusted around the eyes, from the extent of the bruising and discoloration… I'm no pathologist, but that might be a reasonable guess."

  "Nice old man for a ganglord," Lucas said to Malone. To Martin: "He may also have been sending a message to us. With the timing, I mean."

  Martin nodded. "Not too much curiosity about this particular killing or the Mejias will be forced to prove their innocence by naming two high FBI officials and an American police officer as their alibis. And perhaps provide some details of what could be portrayed as an exceedingly cynical deal."

  "Your English is really good," Lucas said.

  "They didn't have to do this," Mallard said, moving his hand toward the ruins of Octavio Diaz.

  "The killing wasn't done for you," Martin said. "The timing of the killing, possibly-but that would be a minor aspect of it. Perhaps we are even reading too much into that. Mejia needed to send a message to the… population. I knew that. I knew that Diaz was a walking dead man. But I hoped to find him before he died." He looked at the body again, reluctantly. "I was late."

  5

  Tom and Michelle Lawton lived in a stucco house surrounded by rubber trees, with one overhanging tangerine, in Atwater Village off Los Feliz, behind a concrete ditch that everyone in Los Angeles called a river.

  Down the river, if there'd been water in it, and you'd been allowed to boat it, and if you'd followed it far enough, you'd come to the Port of Long Beach-which is where the Lawtons berthed their sailboat. They got to the boat in a red '96 Jeep Cherokee with a surfboard rack on top, down I-5 and the 710, rather than down the river.

  The Lawtons grew a little weed under lights, kept a couple of red-striped cats, and Michelle read mystery stories and made tangerine marmalade and worked part-time in a chain bookstore, while Tom took meetings on his screenplay. The screenplay involved the shadowy world of flesh smugglers, who ran human cargo into the States against the best efforts of outmanned and outgunned American law-enforcement officers, played by one or both of the Sheen brothers, although Tom'd take Jean-Claude Van Damme and a chick named Heather if he had to.

  The few people who'd read the screenplay suggested that it wasn't realistic enough. Not enough violence, they said. Not enough brutality. A mailroom guy from ICM told Tom around a Garden Veggie sandwich in a bagel joint that it could use a little sexual and racial schtick. Maybe the human cargoes should be Chinese sex slaves, and he could try to sell the product to Jackie Chan.

  What pissed Tom off was that he and Michelle were smugglers of human flesh. Neither one had ever owned a gun or had more than the briefest encounters with officers of the law, for the good reason that they smuggled only one person at a time, never anything but Americans, and those persons always had good documents, which they brought themselves or Tom supplied through a Persian guy from Pasadena who made really good Texas driver's licenses.

  The Lawtons weren't overwhelmingly busy as smugglers, but their rates were high and a body a month pretty much covered their nut.

  This particular body was a woman, who would come across on Wednesday evening. She had her own ID, and it was good, Tom's man-in-Mexico said.

  At Wednesday noon, the Lawtons took their boat, the Star of Omaha, out the Long Beach channel. A six- or eight-knot breeze was blowing across the Islands, and they cut the diesel, put up the sails and headed south, taking their time. They weren't going to Mexico. They were going to a spot fifteen miles off San Diego. Crossing the border was the job of their Mexican contact, a guy named Juan Duarte.

  Duarte owned a twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler Guardian, with a haze-gray hull, just like the American Coast Guard, but without the Coast Guard's bow-mounted fifty-caliber machine gun. The hull color, which was standard, was the closest thing on earth to the Romulans' cloaking device-from twenty feet, on a dark night, it was invisible. Juan put the body in the boat, waited for dark, then idled up the coast to a spot distinguished only by its GPS coordinates. He found the Lawtons with their sails backed, quietly waiting, a couple of cigarette coals glowing in the dark. Though the Star of Omaha 's hull was white, they were very nearly as invisible as the Whaler.

  "Dude," Duarte called, using the international sailboat hailing sign.

  "Juan, how are you?"

  Juan tossed a bowline over the sailboat's foredeck and Tom used it to pull the two boats together; the Lawtons had dropped foam fenders over the side to keep them from knocking too hard. The body threw a bag into the sailboat, then clambered up and over the side into the sailboat's cockpit.

  "Nice to see you," Tom said, nodding at her in the dark. The body nodded back; she could smell tobacco on him, a pleasant odor. Michelle passed a small package to Juan: "It's an olive-wood rosary from Jerusalem, for your mom. It was blessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Mt. Calvary is. Jimmy brought it back," she said.

  "Thank him for me," Juan said.

  "You good?" Tom called down to Juan.

  Juan held up a hand, meaning that he'd been paid, and said, "Cast me off, there." Tom tossed the bowline back in the Whaler, and they drifted apart again. "See
you," Juan called. "Maybe got something week after next."

  "Call me," Tom said.

  That was pretty much all there was to it. The Lawtons gave the body a peanut-butter-and-tangerine-marmalade sandwich, which she'd ordered in advance, through Duarte. They talked in a desultory way, as they loafed through the night. The body had a nice husky whiskey voice, and Tom thought if she kept talking he might get a little wood on the sound alone, though he'd never tell Michelle that. Tom turned on the running lights a few miles north of the rendezvous. They saw boats coming and going; nothing came close.

  By morning, they were off Long Beach again, and they took their time going in. There was always a chance that they'd be stopped by the Coasties, but the passenger's documents were good and the boat was clean. Tom had no idea who the body was-his one really salient criminal characteristic was a determined lack of curiosity about his cargoes.

  He was not even interested in why an American wanted to be smuggled back into the country. There were any number of people who preferred to come and go without unnecessary time-wasting bureaucratic entanglements, and Tom really didn't blame them. We were the home of the free, were we not?

  A few minutes after eight o'clock in the morning, the body walked down the dock, a cheap TWA flight bag on her shoulder. The Lawtons were still on the boat, stowing equipment. The $3,000 that the body left behind was taped to Michelle's butt, just in case. Michelle last saw the other woman walking toward the corner of the ship's store. When she looked back again, a moment later, the body was gone.

  Rinker caught a cab to LAX, and from LAX, another to Venice, and from Venice, after getting a quick lunch on the beach and walking along some narrow, canal-lined streets for a while, watching her back, she caught another one out to the industrial flats in Downey. The driver didn't much want to go there, but when Rinker showed him a fifty, he took the money and dropped her in front of Jackie Burke's store. Burke ran a full-time custom hotrod shop on the front side of his warehouse, and a part-time stolen-car chop shop in the back. Rinker had once solved a desperate problem for him.

  Burke was a chunky man, strong, dark-complected, balding, tough as a lug nut; his store smelled of spray paint and welding fumes. He was standing beside the cash register, sweating and talking over a hardboard counter to a young Japanese-American kid about putting a nitrox tank in the kid's Honda.

  He didn't recognize Rinker for a moment. Women didn't often come into the shop, and he sort of nodded and said, "Be with you in a minute," and went back to the kid and then suddenly looked back. Rinker lifted her sunglasses and smiled. Burke said, "Holy shit," and then to the kid, "Let me put you with one of my guys. I gotta talk to this lady."

  He held up a finger, stuck his head through a door in the back, yelled, "Hey Chuck, c'mere." Chuck came, Burke put him with the kid, then led Rinker into the back and to a ten-by-twenty-foot plywood-enclosed office in the back. He shut the door behind them and said, again, "Holy shit. Clara. I hope, uh…"

  "I need a clean car that'll run good, with good papers. Something dull like a Taurus or some kind of Buick. Sort of in a hurry," she said. "I was hoping you could help me."

  His eyes drifted toward the doors, as though they might suddenly splinter. "Are the cops…?"

  "No." She smiled again. "No cops. I just got back in the country, and I need a car. Not that you should mention it, if you happen to bump into a cop."

  "No problem there," Burke said. He relaxed a couple of degrees. He liked Clara all right, but she was not a woman he would choose to hang out with. "I can get you something off a used-car lot. The guy'll have to file the papers on it, but he can push the date back-for a while, anyway."

  "Not forever?"

  "No, he'll have to put them through sooner or later, 'cause of bank inventories. If you only needed it for a month or so, he could fake it out that far. Then, if somebody inquired, the papers would show the transfer to the dealer, and he'd show the transfer to you, but there wouldn't be any license or insurance checks or anything. I can guarantee you that it'd be in perfect condition."

  "That'd work. I won't need it for more than a month anyway," she said. "Where do I find the used-car guy?"

  "I'll drive you over," Burke said. "You paying cash?"

  "You think he'd take a check?" she asked.

  Burke grinned, not bothering to answer the mildly sarcastic question, and said, "You're looking pretty good."

  She smiled back and said, "Thank you. I've been down in Mexico for a while. Got the tan."

  "Look like you've been working out. You've lost a little weight since… you know."

  "Cut off a couple pounds, maybe," she said. "Got a little sick down there."

  "Montezuma's revenge."

  "More or less," she said; but her eyes were melancholy, and Burke had the feeling that the sickness had been more serious than that. He didn't ask, and after a pause, Rinker asked, "So where's your used-car guy?"

  Much later that afternoon, as they were parting, she tossed her new Rand McNally road atlas onto the passenger seat and said, "If anybody from St. Louis calls, you never saw me."

  "I never saw you ever," Burke said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you make me nervous."

  "No reason for it," she said. "Not unless you cross me."

  Burke looked at her for a long three seconds and said, finally, "Tell you what, honey. If there was enough money in it, I might mess with the guys in St. Louis. But I'm nowhere stupid enough to mess with you."

  "Good," she said. She stepped closer, stood on her tiptoes, and pecked him on the cheek. "Jackie, I owe you. I will get back to you someday and we will work something out that will make you happy."

  She waved, got into the beet-red Olds she'd bought for $13,200, and drove away, carefully, like a little old lady from Iowa, down toward the freeway entrance. Burke went back inside his shop, dug behind a stack of old phone books, got his stash, got his papers, rolled a joint, and walked out back to smoke it. Cool his nerves.

  Clara fuckin' Rinker, Burke thought. She was pissed about something. God help somebody; and thank God it wasn't him.

  Rinker was headed east to St. Louis-but not that minute. Instead she drove north on I-5, taking her time, watching her speed. She spent a bad night in Coalinga, rolling around in a king-sized bed, thinking about old friends and Paulo and wishing she still smoked. In the morning, tired, her stomach scar aching, she cut west toward the coast and took the 101 into San Francisco.

  Jimmy Cricket was a golf pro with a closet-sized downtown shop called Jimmy Cricket's Pro-Line Golf. He was folding Claiborne golf shirts when Rinker walked in, and he smiled and said, "Can I help you?" He was wearing a royal-blue V-necked sweater that nearly matched his eyes, and dark khaki golf slacks that nearly matched his tan. He had the too-friendly attitude of a man who would give you a half-stroke a hole without asking to see your handicap card.

  The store was empty, other than Rinker, so she saw no reason to beat around the bush. "I'd like to buy a couple of guns," she said, her voice casual, holding his eyes. "Semiauto nines, if you've got them. Gotta be cold. I'd take a Ruger. 22 if you got it."

  "Excuse me?" Jimmy's smile vanished. He was taken aback. This was a golf shop-there must be some mistake.

  "I'm Rose-Anne, Jimmy," Rinker said. "You left me that gun I used to kill Gerald McKinley. You put it in a tree up in Golden Gate Park and picked up two thousand dollars in twenties. You remember that."

  "Jesus," Jimmy said. His Adam's apple bobbed. "McKinley." He hadn't known what happened with the gun, what it would be used for. The McKinley killing had been in the papers for weeks, as had the somewhat (but not too) bereaved young wife and the very bereaved older ex-wife.

  "It was a sad thing," Rinker said. "A man in his prime, cut down like that."

  "Well, jeez, Rose-Anne, I don't know."

  "Cut the crap, Jimmy. I'll give you two thousand bucks apiece for either two or three guns."

  Jimmy processed this for a minute, and she could see it all trickling d
own through his brain, like raindrops of thought on a windowpane. Okay, he'd been offered money, in the face of his denials. If she was a cop, it'd be entrapment. And if she was a cop, and knew about the tree in the park, he was probably fucked anyway. And if she were Rose-Anne and he didn't sell her the guns, then he might be truly and ultimately fucked. Therefore, he would sell her the guns.

  "Uh… maybe you should step into the back." The back was behind a green cloth curtain, smelled of bubble wrap and cardboard, and was full of golf-club shipping boxes and club racks. At the far end was a workbench with a vise. Jimmy pushed a couple of boxes aside and pulled out a tan gym bag, unzipped it, and said, "This is what I got."

  Rinker, watching his eyes, decided he was okay, took the bag, stepped back, and looked inside. Three revolvers and three semiautos. All three semiautos were military-style 9mm Berettas. She took one out, popped the magazine-the magazine was empty-cycled the action a couple of times, did the same with the other two, and said, "I'll take them." She looked at the revolvers: One was a. 22, and she put it with the automatics. "You got any long guns?"

  "No. I know where you might be able to pick some up, if you want to run down to Bakersfield."

  She shook her head. "Naw. I can get my own. How about ammo?"

  "I can give you a couple of boxes of Federal hollowpoint for the nines, but I don't have any. 22 on hand."

  "Give me the nine," she said. "Silencer?"

  "Um, I usually charge two thousand. Good ones are hard to get."

  "Can you get it quick?"

  "Yes."

  "Another two thousand, if it's a good one."

  "It's a Coeur d'Alene."

  "I'll take it."

  He fished around in another box and came up with a purple velvet bag that had once contained a bottle of Scotch. He handed it to her and said, "Quick enough?"

  She took the bag, slipped the silencer out. It was a Coeur d'Alene, all right; the absolutely faultless blued finish was the signature. Somewhere, a master machinist was doing artwork. She screwed the silencer onto one of the nines and flipped it out to arm's length, to test the balance. "Good. I'll take the whole bunch."