Silent Prey

by John Sandford

  She had a gun in her purse, Bekker thought, a gun or tear gas. He thought about that, thought about that... got caught in a loop, thinking about thinking about it... and when he came back, groping in his collection bag for the stun gun, they were already at six.

  He glanced sideways at the woman, caught her staring at him; he looked away. Eye contact might tell her too much.... He glanced again, and the woman seemed to be shrinking away, had her hand in her purse again. A tone sounded, a sharp bing, and the doors slid open. For a moment, neither of them moved, then the woman was out. Bekker followed a few feet behind, turned toward her, slipping his shoes off, expecting to pad after her, catch her unexpectedly....

  But the woman suddenly stepped out of her own shoes and began running, and at the same time, looking back at him, screaming, a long, shrill, piercing cry.

  She knew....

  Bekker, frozen for an instant by the scream, went after her, the woman screaming, her purse skidding across the floor, spilling out lipsticks and date books and a bottle of some kind, rolling on the rough concrete.... She dodged between two cars, backing toward the outer wall, a can in her hand, screaming....

  Tear gas.

  Bekker was right behind her, losing his bag, going after her bare-handed, the urgency gripping him, the need to shut her up: She knows knows knows...

  The woman had braced herself between the cars, her hand extended with the tear gas, her mouth open, her nostrils flexing. No way to get her but straight ahead...

  Bekker charged, stooping at the last moment, one hand up to block the tear-gas spray. She pressed the can toward him, but nothing happened, just a hiss and the faint smell of apple blossoms....

  She'd backed all the way to the ramp wall, the lights of the city behind her, the wall waist-high, her shrill scream in his ears, piercing, wailing.

  He went straight in, hit her in the throat with one hand, caught her between the legs with the other, heaved, flipped...

  And the woman went over the waist-high wall.

  Simply went over, as though he'd flipped a sack of fertilizer over the wall.

  She dropped, without a sound.

  Bekker, astonished at what he'd done, panting like a dog, looked down over the wall as she went. She fell faceup, arms reaching up, and hit on the back of her head and neck.

  And she died, like that: like a match going out. From six floors up, Bekker could see she was dead. He turned, looking for someone coming after her, a response to the scream.

  Heard nothing but a faraway police siren. Panicked, he ran back to the stairs, up two flights, climbed in the Volkswagen, started it, and rolled down through the ramp. Where were they? On the stairs?

  Nobody.

  At the exit booth, the woman ticket-taker was standing on the street, looking down at the corner. She came back and entered the booth. She was chewing gum, a frown on her face.

  "One-fifty," she said.

  He paid. "What's going on?"

  "Fight, maybe," she said laconically. "A couple of guys were running..."

  Twelve hours later, Bekker hunched over an IBM typewriter, a dark figure, intent, humming to himself "You Light Up My Life," poking the keys with rigid fingers. Overhead, a flock of his spiders floated through the air, dangling from black thread attached to a wire grill. A mobile of spiders...

  The PCP made the world perfectly clear, and he marveled over the crystal quality of the prose as it poured forth from the machine onto the white paper.

  ... refuted claims that cerebral-spinal pressure obfuscated reliable intercranial measurements during terminal brain activity as per Delano in TRS Notes [Sept. 86]; Delano overlooked the manifest and indisputable evidence of...

  It simply sang-and that cockroach Delano would undoubtedly lose his job at Stanford when the world saw his professional negligence....

  Bekker leaned back, looking up at his spiders, and cackled at the thought. A gumball dropped, and he leaned forward, thoughtful now, Bekker the Thinker. He'd made a mistake this night. The worst he'd made yet. His time was probably coming to an end: he needed more work, he needed another specimen, but he had to be very, very careful.

  Mmmm. He turned off the typewriter and laid his manuscript aside, carefully squaring the corners of the paper. Went to the bathroom, washed his face again, stared at the scars. The drugs were still with him, but he was also running down. Might even catch some sleep. When had he last slept? Couldn't remember.

  He dropped his clothing on the floor, looked at the clock. Midmorning. Maybe a couple of hours, though...

  He lay down, listened to his heart.

  Closed his eyes.

  Almost slept.

  But then, just on the edge of oblivion, something stirred. Bekker knew what it was. He felt his heart accelerate, felt the adrenaline spurting into his blood.

  He hadn't done her eyes. It had been impossible, of course, but that made no difference. She could see him, the dark-haired woman.

  She was coming.

  Bekker stuffed a handful of sheet in his mouth, and screamed.

  CHAPTER

  9

  The car slowed and the window between the front seat and the backseat dropped an inch. The early-morning traffic was light, and they were moving quickly, but O'Dell was grumpy about the early hour. Lily hadn't slept at all.

  "You want a Times ?" Copland asked over his shoulder.

  "Yes." O'Dell nodded, and Copland eased the car toward the curb, where a vendor waved newspapers at passing cars. A talk show babbled from the front-seat radio: Bekker and more Bekker. When Copland rolled his window down, they could hear the same show from the vendor's radio. The vendor handed Copland a paper, took a five-dollar bill, and dug for change.

  "I'm worried," Lily said. "They could try again."

  "Won't happen. They didn't mean to kill him, and coming after him again, that way, would be too risky. Especially if he's this tough guy you keep telling me about...."

  "We thought they wouldn't go after him the first time...."

  "We never thought they'd try to mug him...."

  Copland handed a copy of the Times into the backseat. A headline just below the fold said, "Army Suspects Bekker of Vietnam Murders."

  "This has gotta be bullshit," O'Dell grumbled, scanning the story. "Anything from Minneapolis?"

  "No."

  "Dammit. Why don't these assholes check on him? For all they know, the Minneapolis story could be a cover for an Internal Affairs geek."

  "Not a thing, so far. And the people in Minneapolis are looking for it."

  Silence, the car rolling like an armored ghost through Manhattan.

  Then: "It must be Fell. It has to be."

  Lily shook her head: "Nothing on her line. She got one call, from an automated computer place saying that she'd won a prize if she'd go out to some Jersey condominium complex to pick it up. Nothing on the office phone."

  "Dammit. She must be calling from a public phone. We might need some surveillance here."

  "I'd wait on that. She's been on the street for a while. She'd pick it up, sooner or later."

  "Had to be Fell, though. Unless it really was muggers."

  "It wasn't muggers. Lucas thinks they were cops. He says one of them was carrying a black leather-wrapped keychain sap; about the only place you can buy them is a commercial police-supply house. And he says they never went for his billfold."

  "But they weren't trying to kill him."

  "No. But he thinks they were trying to put him out of commission. Maybe break a few bones..."

  "Huh." O'Dell grunted through a thin smile. "You know, there was once a gang on the Lower East Side, they'd contract to bite a guy's ear off for ten bucks?"

  "I didn't know that," said Lily.

  "It's true, though.... All right. Well. With Davenport. String him along...."

  "I still feel like I'm betraying him," Lily said, looking away from O'Dell, out the window. A kid was pushing a bike with a flat tire down the sidewalk. He turned as the big black car pass
ed, and looked straight at Lily with the flat gray serpent's eyes of a ten-year-old psychopath.

  "He knew what he was getting into."

  "Not really," she said, turning away from the kid's trailing eyes. She looked at O'Dell. "He thought he did, but he's basically from a small town. He's not from here. He really doesn't know, not the way we do...."

  "What'd you tell Kennett, about why Davenport was at your place?"

  "I... prevaricated," Lily said. "And I could use a little backup from you."

  "Ah."

  Lucas hadn't been badly hurt, so Lily flagged a cab, took him to Beth Israel, then reported the attack. Because she'd fired her weapon, there had been forms to fill out. She'd started that night, and called Kennett to tell him about it.

  "Should I ask why he was at your place at two in the morning?" Kennett had asked. He'd sounded amused, but he wasn't.

  "Um, you don't want to know," Lily had said. "But it was strictly business, not pleasure."

  "And I don't want to know."

  "That's right."

  After a moment: "Okay. Are you all right? I mean, really all right."

  "Sure. I've got a busted window I've gotta get fixed...."

  "Good. Get some sleep. I'll talk to you tonight."

  "That's all? I mean... ?"

  "Do I trust you? Of course. See you tonight."

  Lily looked out the car window, at the city rolling past. Maybe she was betraying Lucas. Maybe she was betraying Kennett. She wasn't sure anymore.

  O'Dell said, "Cretins," and his paper shook with anger.

  CHAPTER

  10

  The reporters came and went, the naive ones swallowing Lucas' story that he had been mugged, others not so sure. A reporter from Newsday said flatly that something else was going on: that Bekker had a gang, or that somebody else was trying to stop Lucas' investigation.

  "I don't know about muggers in Minneapolis, but in New York they don't work in professional tag teams. Unless you're lying, you were done by professionals...."

  After they were gone, Lucas took a few more Tylenol, wandered down to the bathroom and got back in time to see Lily coming down the hall.

  "You look... pretty rough," she said.

  "It's my cheek. My cheek hurts like hell," he said. He touched a swollen magenta bruise with his middle finger. "At least the headache's going away. They're letting me out after lunch."

  "I heard," Lily said.

  "Thanks for sending the jeans over. The other pants..."

  "Are shot." Lily said.

  "Yeah."

  "O'Dell's fixed the Mengele speech-there'll be a notice in all the papers this afternoon, the Times tomorrow morning, and we're asking everybody to do a note about it. TV, too. We found a guy, a legit guy, who already lectures on Mengele."

  "Terrific," Lucas said. "When?"

  "Monday."

  "Jesus, that quick?"

  "We gotta do everything quick. Maybe we can get him before he does another one...." Lily backed into a hospital chair, dropped her purse by her foot. "Listen, about last night. Are you absolutely sure they were cops?"

  "Fairly sure. They could have been professional bone-breakers, but it didn't feel that way. They felt like cops. Why?"

  "I was thinking about another possibility."

  "Smith?"

  "Yeah. After you chopped up his putting green..."

  Lucas pulled his lip. "Maybe," he said. "But I doubt it. One thing you learn as a sleazoid businessman is to roll with the punches."

  "Have you talked to Fell this morning?"

  "She's on her way over. We have a line on a couple of people who might know something about Bellevue. She's been talking to Kennett, to make sure we don't step on any toes...."

  "Okay. I've got Bobby Rich coming over. He's the guy who took the tip about the witness."

  "The witness Petty found..."

  "Yeah, the day he got killed. And there's still some more paper to look at."

  "That's pointless, I think," Lucas said. "With these guys, the dead guys, we won't find anything in their lives that'll point to the killers. It has to be bureaucratic: who pulled their files, and when..."

  "That's impossible."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "So we're stuck?"

  "Not quite, but it's getting sparse. Maybe Rich'll have something. We've still got Fell. I want to take a look at Petty's apartment, his personal stuff. And I wouldn't mind seeing the place where he was shot."

  "That's about a half-mile from my apartment-we could walk. His apartment's sealed. I'll get some new seals and take you over. When?"

  "Tonight? After we talk to Rich?"

  "Fine."

  "What'd you tell Kennett... ?"

  "About you being at my apartment? I said you came over to visit. I told him that sex was not a consideration, last night or in the future. I told him that you weren't making any moves on me and I wasn't making any moves on you, but that we had things to talk about."

  "Sounds pretty awful," Lucas said, grinning.

  "It could have been, but I just came out with it. I also told him O'Dell was there part of the time. John will back that up."

  A few minutes later, Kennett and Fell arrived together, and Lily blew up: "For Christ's sakes, Dick, what're you doing here? Did you walk all the way in?" Hands on hips, she turned to Fell, angry. "Barbara, did you let him... ?"

  "Shut up, Lily," Kennett said. He touched her cheek with an index finger. To Lucas, he said, "Well, you look like shit."

  "What do you think, Barb?" Lucas asked.

  Fell had taken cover behind Kennett, and she peered out and said, "He's right. You look like shit."

  "Then it's unanimous," Lucas said. "That's what Lily said when she came in. The only one who didn't was a twenty-four-year-old Times reporter with a great ass, who thought I looked pretty good and would probably like to hear more about this case from the hero of it...."

  "Gotta be a concussion," Fell said to Lily.

  "He's always been like this," Lily said. "I think it's native stupidity."

  Kennett, shaking his head, said, "Goddamn women, they're always impressed by a beat-up face. I used to get beat up whenever I needed to get laid. Worked like a charm..." He stopped, and frowned at Lucas: "Are you trying to get laid?" and his eyes flicked sideways at Lily.

  Fell said, "Not very hard."

  Lucas and Kennett laughed; Lily didn't.

  Kennett said, "Listen, I wanted to tell you. Go ahead with those names you got. Barb's run them down...."

  "One good address and one probable," Fell said.

  "Junkies?"

  "Nope. Neither one of them. Not the last anybody heard, anyway."

  "All right." Lucas eased down from the hospital bed. "Let's go down to the nursing station. Maybe I can talk my way out before lunch."

  The charge nurse said the attending physician wanted another look at him: she'd send him down as soon as he arrived, which should be within the next few minutes. "We'll see you first," she said.

  "All right, but pretty quick?"

  "Soon as he gets here."

  Lily said, "I've gotta go. Take it easy today."

  "Yeah."

  He walked gingerly back to the room with Fell, trying not to move his head too quickly. At the door, he looked back toward the elevators. Kennett and Lily were waiting, looking up at the numbers above the door, then Kennett leaned toward Lily, and she went up on her toes, a kiss that wasn't taken lightly by either of them. Lucas turned away, and caught Fell watching him watch Lily and Kennett.

  "True love," he said wryly.

  The hot, hazy sun left him feeling faintly nauseous, and the headache lurked at the back of his skull.

  "You look pale and wan," Fell said.

  "I'm all right." He looked up at the storefront: Arnold's TV and Appliance, Parts & Repair. "C'mon, let's do her."

  A bell tingled when they went through the door; a heavyset woman looked up from a ledger, slapped it shut, and moved ponderously to the cou
nter. "Can I help ya?" She had a cheerfully yellow smile and an improbable West Virginia hills accent. To Lucas: "Whoa, you look like you've been in a dustup."