Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  The interior of the house was a match for the exterior.The carpets were twenty years old, with paths worn through the thin pile. The walls were a dingy yellow, the furniture a crappy collection of plastic-veneered plywood, chipped along the edges of the

  tabletops and down the legs. There were no pictures on the walls, no decoration of any kind. Nailheads poked from picture-hanging spots, where previous tenants had tried a little harder. Everything smelled like nicotine and tar.

  The kitchen was improbably bright. There were no shades or curtains on the two windows that flanked the kitchen table, and only two chairs, one tucked tight to the table, another pulled out. Rolo, looking smaller than he had five years ago, was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that said, enigmatically, Jesus. He had both hands in the kitchen sink.

  'Just cleaning up for the occasion,' he said. He wasn't embarrassed at being caught at house-cleaning, and a thought flicked through Carmel's lawyer-head: he should be embarrassed.

  'Sit down,' he said, nodding at the pulled-out chair. 'I got some coffee going.'

  'I'm sort of in a rush,' she started. 'You don't have time for coffee with Rolando?' He was flicking water off his hands, and he ripped a paper towel off a roll that sat on the kitchen counter, wiped his hands dry, and tossed the balled-up towel toward a waste basket in the corner. It hit the wall and ricocheted into the basket. 'Two,' he said.

  She glanced at her watch, and reversed herself on the coffee. 'Sure, I've got a few minutes.' 'I've come a long way down, huh?' She glanced once around the kitchen, shrugged and said, 'You'll be back.'

  'I don't know,' he said. 'I got my nose pretty deep in the shit.'

  'So take a program.'

  'Yeah, a program,' he said, and laughed. 'Twelve steps to Jesus.' Then, apologetically, 'I only got caffeinated.'

  'Only kind I drink,' she said. And then, 'So you made the call.' Not a question.

  Rolo was pouring coffee into two yellow ceramic mugs, the kind Carmel associated with lake resorts in the north woods. 'Yes. And she's still working, and she'll take the job.'

  'She? It's a woman?'

  'Yeah. I was surprised myself. I never asked, you know, I only knew who to call. But when I asked, my friend said, "She." '

  'She's gotta be good,' Carmel said.

  'She's good. She has a reputation. Never misses. Very efficient, very fast. Always from very close range, so there's no mistake.' Rolo put a mug of coffee in front of her, and she turned it with her fingertips, and picked it up.

  'That's what I need,' she said, and took a sip. Good coffee, very hot.

  'You're sure about this?' Rolo said. He leaned back against the kitchen counter, and gestured with his coffee mug. 'Once I tell them "Yes," it'll be hard to stop. This woman, the way she moves, nobody knows where she is, or what name she's using. If you say, "Yes," she kills Barbara Allen.'

  Carmel frowned at the sound of Barbara Allen's name. She hadn't really thought of the process as murder. She had considered it more abstractly, as the solution to an otherwise intractable problem. Of course, she had known it would be murder, she just hadn't contemplated the fact. 'I'm sure,' she said.

  'You've got the money?'

  'At the house. I brought your ten.'

  She put the mug down, dug in her purse, pulled out a thin deck of currency and laid it on the table. Rolo picked it up, riffled it expertly with a thumb. 'I'll tell you this,' he said. 'When they come and ask for it, pay every penny. Every penny. Don't argue, just pay. If you don't, they won't try to collect. They'll make an example out of you.'

  'I know how it works,' Carmel said, with an edge of impatience. 'They'll get it. And nobody'll be able to trace it, because I've had it stashed. It's absolutely clean.'

  Rolo shrugged: 'Then if you say "Yes," I'll call them tonight. And they'll kill Barbara Allen.'

  This time, she didn't flinch when Rolo spoke the name. Carmel stood up: 'Yes,' she said. 'Do it.'

  Rinker came to town three weeks later. She had driven her own car from Wichita, then rented two different-colored, different-make cars from Hertz and Avis, under two different names, using authentic Missouri driver's licenses and perfectly good, paid-up credit cards.

  She stalked Barbara Allen for a week, and finally decided to kill her on the interior steps of a downtown parking garage. In the week that Rinker trailed her, Allen had used the garage four times, and all four times had used the stairs to get to the skyway level. Once in the skyway, she'd gone straight to an office with the name 'Star of the North Charities' on the door. When Rinker knew that Allen was not at Star of the North, she'd called and asked for her.

  'I'm sorry, she's not here...'

  'Do you expect her?'

  'She's usually here for an hour or two in the morning, just before lunch...'

  'Thanks, I'll try again tomorrow.'

  Barbara Allen.

  On the last of the three unluckiest days of her life, she got out of bed, showered, and ate a light breakfast of Raisin Bran and strawberries - with Hale for a husband, it paid to watch her figure. As the housekeeper cleared away the breakfast dishes, Allen turned on the television to check the Dow Jones opening numbers, sat at her desk and reviewed proposed charitable allocations from the Star of the North Charities trust, then, at nine-thirty, gathered her papers, pushed them into a tan Coach briefcase, and headed downtown.

  Rinker, in a red Jeep Cherokee, followed her until she was sure that Allen was heading downtown, then passed her and hurried ahead. Allen was a slow,

  careful driver, but traffic and traffic lights were unpredictable, and Rinker wanted to be at least five minutes ahead of her by the time they got downtown.

  Rinker had picked out another parking garage, also on the skyway system, a little less than a two-minute fast walk from the killing ground. She wheeled into the garage, parked, walked to her own car, which she'd parked in the garage earlier that morning, and climbed into the back seat. She glanced up and down the ramp, saw one man leaving, heading toward the doors. She reached down, grabbed the carpeting behind the passenger seat, and popped open a shallow steel box, which held two Remington.22 semiautomatic pistols, silencers already attached, on a bed of Styrofoam peanuts.

  Rinker was wearing a loose shift, with a homemade elastic girdle beneath it. She pushed the.22s into the wide pockets of the shift, through another slit cut through the insides of the pockets, and into the girdle. The.22s were held tight against her body, but she could get them out in a half-second. With the guns tucked away, Rinker hopped out of the car and headed for the skyway.

  Barbara Allen, a sturdy, German blonde with short, expensively cut hair, a dab of lipstick, a crisp white cotton blouse, a navy skirt and matching navy low-heels, went into the stairwell of the Sixth Street Parking Garage at 9:58 a.m. Halfway down, she met a small woman coming up, a redhead. As she passed

  her, looking down, the other woman smiled, and Allen, who knew about such things, looked at the top of her head and thought, 'Wig.'

  That was the last thing she thought on the unluck-iest day of her life.

  Rinker, climbing the stairs, had mistimed it. She knew the lower ramp was clear, and wanted to take Allen low. But Allen came down the narrow steps slowly, and Rinker, now in plain sight, didn't feel she should stop and wait for her. So she continued climbing. Allen smiled and nodded at her as they passed and, as they passed, Rinker pulled the right-hand.22, pivoted, and fired it into the back of Allen's head from a range of two inches. Allen's hair puffed out, as though somebody had blown on it, and she started to fall.

  The silencers were good. The loudest noise in the stairwell was the cycling of the pistol's action. Rinker got off a second shot before Allen fell too far; then stepped down to the sprawled body and fired five more shots into Allen's temple.

  As she stepped away from the body, ready to head down the stairs, a cop came through the door in the stairwell above them. He was in uniform, a heavy guy carrying a manila folder.

  Rinker had thought about this possibilit
y, a surprise from a cop, though she'd never experienced anything like it. Still, she'd rehearsed it in her mind.

  'Hey,' the cop said. He put up a hand, and Rinker shot him.

  Chapter Two

  Baily Dobbs' first day on patrol had taught him that police work was more complicated than he'd thought - and more dangerous than he'd expected. Baily had seen police work as a way to achieve a certain authority, a status. He hadn't thought about fighting people bigger than he was, about drunks vomiting in the back seat of the squad, about freezing his ass off outside the Target Center when the Wolves were playing. So Baily resolved to keep his head down, to volunteer for nothing, to show up late for trouble calls, and to get off the street as fast as he could.

  He was inside in less than two years.

  One Halloween, responding - late Eto a domestic, he'd walked up a dark sidewalk, stepped on the back axle of a tricycle, flipped into the air, and twisted his knee. He was never exactly disabled, but it became clear that if he couldn't run, he couldn't work the streets. His hobbling progress around a gymnasium track baffled the docs and amused his former partners. The phrase, 'I'm gonna baily on that,' came into the vocabulary of the Minneapolis Police Department.

  Baily went inside and stayed there. He still wore a uniform, carried a gun and got paid for being a cop,

  but he was a clerk and happy with it. Which is why he didn't respond as quickly as he might have, when he saw Rinker execute Barbara Allen. His cop reflexes were gone.

  Baily's lunch started at eleven o'clock, but on this day he'd taken some under-time. He snuck out through the basement of City Hall, into the country government building, carrying a manila folder that contained a few sheets of paper addressed to a court bailiff- his cover-your-ass file, if he was spotted by his supervisor.

  Once in the government building, he took a quick look around, then dodged into the skyway that went over to the Sixth Street parking garage. From there, he planned to take the stairs to the street level, cross over to the Hennepin Country Medical Center, which had a nice discreet cafeteria rarely visited by cops. He'd eat a cheeseburger and fries, enjoy a few cups of coffee, read the newspapers, then amble back to City Hall, just in time for lunch.

  That perfectly good plan fell apart when he stepped into the stairwell.

  Two women were in the stairwell below him, and one of them, a redhead, appeared to be sticking something in the ear of the other, who was lying on the stairs.

  'Hey,' he said.

  The redhead looked up at him, and in the next quarter-second, Baily realized that what she had in her hand was a pistol. The pistol came up and Baily

  put a hand out, and the redhead shot him. There wasn't much noise, but he felt something hit his chest, and he fell down backwards.

  He fell in the doorway, which saved his life: Rinker, standing below him on the stairs, looking over the sights of her pistol, couldn't see anything but the bottoms of his feet. Baily groaned as he fell, and he dimly heard a man's voice call, 'Are you all right?'

  Rinker had taken two quick steps toward him, to finish him, when she heard the new voice. Complications were increasing. Quick as a blink, she decided: down was safe. She went down, not running, but moving fast.

  Baily struggled to sit upright, to crawl away from the stairwell; and heard a door bang closed in the stairwell below. His chest hurt, and so did his hand. He looked at his hand, and it was all scuffed up, apparently from the fall. Then he discovered the growing blood stain on the pocket of his white uniform shirt.

  'Oh, man,' he said.

  The other voice called again, 'Hey, you okay?'

  'Oh, Jesus, oh, God, Jesus God,' said Baily, who was not a religious man. He tried to push himself up again, noticed his hand was slippery with blood, and started to cry. 'Oh, Jesus...' He looked up the ramp, where a man carrying a briefcase was looking down at him. A woman was beyond him, also coming toward them; he could sense her reluctance.

  'Help me...' Baily cried. 'Help me, I've been shot...'

  Sloan banged into Lucas Davenport's office and said, 'Baily Dobbs's been shot.' He looked at his watch. 'Twelve minutes ago.'

  Lucas was peering glumly into a six-hundred-page report with a blue cover and white label, which said, 'Mayor's Select Commission on Cultural Diversity, Alternative Lifestyles and Other-Abledness in the Minneapolis Police Department: A Preliminary Approach to Divergent Modalities [Executive Summary],' which he'd been marking with a fluorescent-yellow high-lighter. He was on page seven.

  He put down the report and said, incredulously, 'Our Baily Dobbs?'

  'How many Baily Dobbs are there?' Sloan asked.

  Lucas stood up and reached for a navy-blue silk jacket which hung from a government-issue coat tree. 'Is he dead?'

  'No.'

  'An accident? He shoot himself?'

  Sloan shook his head. Sloan was a thin man, hatchet-faced, dressed in shades of brown and tan. A homicide investigator, the best interrogator on the force, an old friend. 'Looks like he walked in on a shooting, over in the Sixth Street parking garage,' he told Lucas. 'The shooter killed a woman, and then shot Baily. I figured since Rose Marie and Lester are

  out of town, and nobody can find Thorn, you better haul your ass over to the hospital.'

  Lucas grunted and he pulled on the jacket. Rose Marie Roux was the chief of police; Lester, Thorn and Lucas were deputy chiefs. 'Anything on the shooter?'

  'No. Well, Baily said something about it being a woman. The shooter was. The woman she shot is dead, and Baily took two rounds in the right tit.'

  'Last goddamn guy in the world,' Lucas said.

  Lucas was tall, lean but not thin, broad-shouldered and dark-complected. A scar sliced across one eyebrow onto his cheek, and showed as a pale line through his summer tan, like a vagrant strand of white thread. Another scar showed on the front of his neck, over his windpipe, just above the V of his royal-blue golf shirt. He took a.45 in a clip-rig out of his desk drawer, and clipped it inside his pants, under the jacket. He did it unconsciously, as another man might put a wallet in his back pocket. 'How bad is he?'

  'He's going into surgery,' Sloan said. 'Swanson's over there, but that's all I know'

  'Let's go,' Lucas said. 'Does anybody know what Dobbs was doing in the stairwell?'

  'The other people in the office say he was probably sneaking over to Hennepin Medical for a cheeseburger. He'd pretend he was going to the government center, then he'd sneak over to the hospital and drink coffee and read the papers.'

  'That's the Baily we know and love,' Lucas said.

  The emergency room was a warm four-minute fast walk from City Hall. A cop was shot, hurt bad, but life went on. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers, the streets clogged with cars, and Sloan, intent on making it to the hospital, nearly got hit in an intersection - Lucas had to hook his arm and pull him back. 'You're too ugly to be a hood ornament,' Lucas grunted.

  The emergency room was oddly quiet, Lucas thought. Usually, after a cop-shooting, thirty people would be milling around, no matter who the cop was. Here, there were three other cops, a couple of nurses and a doc, all standing around in the alcohol-scented reception area. Nobody seemed to be doing much.

  'Place is empty,' Sloan said, picking up the thought.

  'Word hasn't got out yet,' Lucas said. One of the three other cops was talking on the phone, while a second, a uniform sergeant, talked into his ear. Swanson, a bland-faced, overweight homicide detective in a grey suit, was leaning on a fluids-proof counter-top talking to a nurse, a notebook open on the counter. He saw Lucas, with Sloan a step behind, and lifted a hand.

  'Where's Baily?' Lucas asked.

  'He's about to go in,' Swanson said, meaning surgery. 'They already got the sedative going, so they can plug in the airway shit. He won't be talking. The surgeon's down the hall scrubbing up, if you wanna talk to him.'

  'Anybody tell Baily's wife?'

  'We're looking for the chaplain,' Swanson said. 'He's at a church thing up on the north side,
some kind of yard sale. Dick's on hold for him now.' He nodded at the cop on the phone. 'We'll get him in the next couple of minutes.'

  Lucas turned to Sloan: 'Get the chaplain going, send a car. Lights and sirens.'

  Sloan nodded and headed for the cop on the phone. Lucas turned back to Swanson. 'What's going on at the scene?'

  'Goddamndest thing. Woman was executed, I think.'

  'Executed?'

  'She took at least four or five in the head with a small-caliber pistol, short range: you can see the tattooing on her scalp,' Swanson said. 'Nobody heard a thing, which might mean a silencer. Everything in that stairwell echoes like crazy, off that concrete, and Baily told me he couldn't remember hearing the gun. Baily saw the shooter, but all he remembered was that it was a woman, and she was a redhead. Nothing else. No age, no weight, nothing. We figure the shooter was white, if she was a redhead, but shit, there're probably five thousand redheads downtown everyday.'