Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'All right. So we sit.'

  They rode in silence for a while, then Rinker asked, 'What if this car is bugged?'

  'They're not that smart,' Carmel said. 'This is Mom's car. She even uses it, when I don't need it, and she wants to haul something - bulbs or plants or something. But I need a car that nobody really knows about, especially when I've got a hot case. Sometimes, you don't want people looking at you.'

  'Your folks get divorced?'

  'No, my dad killed himself,' Carmel said. 'He was an endodontist, did root canals all day. He got tired of it, sat down in his chair one afternoon when he'd finished with a patient, wrote a short note to the world and strapped on a nitrous oxide mask.'

  'Jesus.'

  'Yup. A good way to go, I guess, but he had to work at it, a little. Had to override some safety things, pinch off an oxygen tank and so on. When I go, I don't want to have to think about it. I just wanna go.'

  'I don't wanna go. Not for a while,' Rinker said.

  'What about your folks?' Carmel asked.

  'My dad took off when I was a baby,' Rinker said. 'And my good old step-dad used to fuck me once or twice a week until / took off.'

  'Your step-dad still around?'

  'No.' Rinker looked out the window. 'He went away one day. He hasn't been seen since.'

  'Like your dad,' Carmel said.

  'Not exactly, no,' said Rinker.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sherrill came back from St. Louis with blue circles under her eyes. 'Didn't get any sleep?' Lucas asked. He tried to keep his voice flat, but there might have been a tone to it, he thought.

  'I had to fuck all the guys on their organized crime squad. That kept me up nights/ Sherrill said. They were alone in his office.

  'Hey...' He was offended.

  'Hey, yourself... the way you asked the question,' she said.

  'I was just trying to...'

  'Forget it. Anyway, I didn't get any sleep. Every night I'd roll around in the bed and the blankets were too heavy and the pillow was too thick and the room smelled bad. And I'd think about you and me.'

  'Uh-oh.'

  'I tried not to,' she said. 'I just couldn't help myself. I was wondering if we did the right thing. I was wondering if I ought to get you someplace and screw you blind, just one more time. Or two or three more times, but not forever. Just sort of good-bye.'

  'I had the feeling you'd already done that,' Lucas said.

  'Yeah, I did,' Sherrill said. 'Besides, sex wasn't really our problem, was it?'

  'Nah. The sex was pretty wonderful. At least, from my point of view.'

  'So what was it?'

  'I think, uh, you might be a natural upper, and I'm a natural downer...'

  'Yeah...'

  'That's what you concluded?'

  'I concluded that I oughta get a new boyfriend, and you oughta get a girlfriend, then we'd be done with it.'

  'I'm too tired to look,' Lucas said. 'You get one.'

  'Yeah.' Sherrill said. She nibbled on her bottom lip. 'Maybe.'

  Lucas said, 'We're dead in the water, here. The feds are still sitting on their wire tap, on Tennex, but nobody's calling.'

  'Are they tapping Carmel?'

  'Maybe.They say they're not - yet - but they could be lying about it.'

  'The FBI? Lying?'

  'Yeah, yeah... you get anything?'

  'I got about twenty names,' Sherrill said.

  'Lot of names.'

  'Yeah. But if there's a Mafia-connected guy in St. Louis who can order these hits, his name is almost for-sure on the list.'

  'So what?'

  'I'm getting to that,' she said. 'You know how you guys were looking at where all those checks came from? And you figured the person sending them must come from southwest Missouri or eastern Kansas or those other places?'

  'Northern Arkansas or northern Oklahoma...'

  'So if we do an analysis of these, Mafia guys, who are all like these uptown dudes wearing loafers with no socks and driving Cadillacs... and if we find one of them has a lot of calls going out to some farm in East Jesus, Oklahoma...'

  Lucas looked at her for a second and said, 'That's good.'

  'You like it?'

  'First decent idea anybody's had in a week.' He pulled open his desk drawer and found Mallard's card. 'Even better, it involves dealing with bureaucrats from the phone company: I mean, this is Mallard's life.'

  Mallard liked it: he had three agents working on it overnight, and called Lucas back in the middle of the afternoon, the next day. He was, Lucas thought, a teeny bit breathless.

  'Have you ever heard of Allen Kent?'

  'No...'

  'He's this Italian guy - his father's name was Kent, he was nobody, but his mother's family was tied right to the top of the St. Louis and the Chicago Mafia families, back when Sam Giancana was running the world.'

  'Who's he been calling?'

  'Well, he calls all over the place, he's a booze distributor. He calls every little goddamn bar in the Midwest. But he's got an AT&T calling card which he uses when he's out-of-town, and we analyzed all those calls for the past ten years and guess what?'

  'He's actually Lee Harvey Oswald and he's holding JFK in a cave.'

  'No. But you know we have all these Mafia-related hits attributed to this woman. In each case,-Kent was making calls from Wichita, Kansas, between twenty-four and thirty days before each hit. He'd spend two days there, each time, every time. Now, you figure he goes out to Wichita to meet the shooter and give her the assignment, and maybe talk about information she needs. Then she needs time to do some recon -we know she's careful, we know she's watching the target for a while before she moves. And maybe she needs some time to get oriented in each new city... and time to drive there, if she drives like we think she does.'

  'You think she's from Wichita,' Lucas said.

  'We think it's a possibility. We even think we might have a name.'

  'Yeah?Whatisit?'

  'John Lopez.'

  Lucas grappled with the name for a moment. 'John?'

  'Yeah. A guy, disguised as a woman, which makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. A woman hitman

  for the Mafia? Come on. Never happen. We found him in our data base: he's Puerto Rican, five-five, one hundred and thirty pounds, so he could be a woman. He's a mean little bastard, too. Back a few years ago, there was a massive amount of cocaine coming in through the south coast of Puerto Rico, and then it was transhipped by plane to the states, because there's no customs on Puerto Rican flights - it's an internal flight. He was one of the mules, hauling it up to Chicago, taking the money back. When he was busted, he gave up all the Puerto Rican links in return for immunity and protection, but claimed he didn't know who he was dealing with in Chicago...We now think it might have been the Mafia, and that's where he hooked up with Allen Kent.'

  'How'd he get to Wichita?'

  'Witness protection. God help us, but we might have been protecting the biggest professional killer in the states.'

  Lucas felt slightly deflated: the Feebs were gonna make the bust. 'Are you going out there?'

  'Absolutely. I'm taking everything I got with me. Lopez supposedly runs a flower shop out there, like a longtime hood is gonna run a flower shop.' Mallard laughed, and Lucas looked at the phone: Mallard seemed to be running a little hot.

  'Mind if I watch?'

  'Hell, no. I'm going out this afternoon, I'm leaving here in five minutes. We're staying at the Holiday Inn, uh, the Holiday Inn East. We got a warrant going on a

  wire tap, and we're getting all of his phone records now... Listen, I gotta run.'

  'All right,' Lucas said. 'I'll see you down there, probably tonight, if nothing comes up. I'm driving down.'

  'You could fly in a couple of hours...'

  'Yeah, yeah, I'm driving,' Lucas said.

  Lucas was a longtime Porsche driver. He enjoyed driving the car up to a couple of hundred miles, but it was not a long-distance cruiser. Six hundred and fifty miles w
ould leave him both shaken and stirred. Besides, the Porsche needed servicing.

  'Look,' he told his Porsche dealer on the telephone, 'You're gonna charge me an arm and a leg, so I oughta get something decent for a loaner. I know damn well that you've got that BMW on the lot, because I saw Larry showing it to a guy... yeah, yeah, I don't want aVolkswagen Passat. How about this: I'll pay mileage. I'll pay you fifteen cents a mile, and I buy all the gas. I'm driving to Wichita, which is six hundred and fifty miles, more or less, so that's thirteen hundred miles, you'll get a couple of hundred bucks for three or four days, and then I won't be hassling you about your slow work on the Porsche... Come on, goddamnit. Whattaya mean, fifty cents? The government doesn't pay fifty cents, and that's supposed to cover gasoline...'

  He got the 740IL, a long black four-door with a cockpit like an F-16's, grey leather seats, a CD-player

  in the trunk and sixty-one thousand miles on the clock, for twenty-five cents a mile. He was two miles out of the dealership when he tripped the ill-placed hood-cover latch with his left foot, without knowing what he'd done, and the hood began rattling up and down. Fearing that the hood was about to blow back his face, he swerved to the edge of the highway and risked his neck to re-latch it. He tripped the hood lever again, five minutes later, and again took the car to the shoulder. This time, he called the Porsche dealer, who said, 'You're tripping the hood with your left foot. Stop doing that.'

  Lucas found the hood latch and said, 'That's a good place for it.'

  Thirty miles out of town, a yellow light popped on the left dash that said, Check Engine, and he took it to the side again, fearing that he was about to blow a rod. He was still within cell phone distance, and he called the dealer again, who said the light meant that the emission system wasn't working quite right. 'Don't worry about it; it doesn't mean anything.'

  'On any other car, "check engine" means all your oil just ran out on the road,' Lucas said.

  'That's not any car,' the Porsche guy said. 'When the oil runs out on the road, that one says STOP! In big red letters.'

  'So the light's gonna be on all trip?'

  'That's right, pal. You wanted it, you got it,' the dealer said, without a shred of sympathy.

  'There's this whistling noise...'

  'The windshield's not quite right. We're gonna try to reseal it when you get back.'

  'I'm beginning to think this thing's a piece of shit,' Lucas grumbled.

  'What do you want for sixty-five thousand?' the Porsche guy asked. 'You shoulda took the Volkswagen.'

  But the car was comfortable, and certainly looked good. He made the six hundred and fifty miles to Wichita in nine hours, whipping through Des Moines and Kansas City, pausing only for gas and a sack of hard-shell Taco Supremes at a Taco Bell. He got a room at a Best Western, called Mallard's office in Washington, where an after-hours secretary said she'd relay his number to Mallard. Mallard called five minutes later: 'We're downtown at a place called Joseph's. Let me read the menu to you...'

  Lucas ordered a steak, medium, baked potato without sour cream, and a Diet Coke. He found Joseph's fifteen minutes later, just as the waiter was delivering the food to Mallard and an angular grey-haired woman named Malone. She was just about his age, Lucas thought, somewhere in the murky forties.

  'Malone is our legal specialist,' Mallard said, as he went to work on the steak. 'She keeps track of the taps and the warrants and all that, and talks to the judge when we need to talk to him.'

  'Are you an agent?' Lucas asked.

  Malone had just pushed a tiny square of beef into her mouth, and instead of answering, opened the left

  side of her pin-stripe jacket so Lucas could see the butt of a black automatic pistol.

  'Nice accessories,' Lucas said. Trying a little bit.

  'Cop charm works really well on me,' Malone said, after she swallowed. 'I get all a-twitter.'

  'You wanna stop that?' Mallard asked. 'I hate middle-aged courtship rituals.'

  'What's his problem?' Lucas asked Malone.

  'Recently divorced,' Malone said, tipping her head at Mallard. 'Still loves her.'

  'Sorry,' Lucas said.

  'Not true, anyway. I'm all done with that,' Mallard said, and for one small second he looked so miserable that Lucas wanted to pat him on the back and tell him it'd be okay; but Lucas didn't believe it would be, and Mallard wouldn't either. 'Besides,' Mallard added, 'I'm not all alone in that condition.'

  'If you're talking to me, you're talking to the wrong person,' Malone said. 'I don't like any of them.'

  'Them?' Lucas asked.

  'Four-time loser,' Mallard said, jabbing his fork at Malone.

  'Jesus,' Lucas said. 'In the FBI?'

  'If it hadn't been for the second one, I'd be a deputy director by now,' Malone said.

  'What'd he do?' Lucas asked.

  'He was an actor.'

  'Bad actor,' Mallard said.

  'No, he was a good actor; he just couldn't stay away from the nude scenes,' Malone said. 'The killer

  was when the Washington Post interviewed him, nude, and he mentioned he was married to an FBI agent.'

  'Not the best career move,' Mallard said. 'We were all still wearing white shirts.'

  'You got number five figured out yet?' Lucas asked.

  'Not yet,' Malone said. 'But I'm looking around.'

  'This is what it is,' Mallard said, breaking into the dialogue, 'Is that we've got nine guys here, and we're watching Lopez twenty-four hours a day. He's got diree phones, we're listening to all of them, and we've already gotten a couple of ambiguous calls. I mean, people talking in circles about something besides flowers. Nothing that would implicate him, but something's going on...'

  'Could I hear them? Your tapes?'

  'Sure. I've got an edited tape you can listen to tonight. Tomorrow, when he moves, we'll hook you up with him.'

  'Good enough,' Lucas said. 'I don't want him to see me, though, not if he's been in and out of the Cities. I've been on TV a couple of times with this stuff... he might've caught it.'

  'You must be sort of a celebrity, then,' Malone said. 'A local hero.'

  'Come on, guys,' Mallard said. 'Please? Malone?'

  Mallard sprawled on the bed in his motel room while Lucas sat in the single easy chair and Malone perched against a credenza. They listened while voices said, 'I

  thought I'd stop by today... Not much point... Really? Then when do you think would be a good time?... Gotta be by tomorrow, unless something happened on the way down. I haven't heard anything - I could give you a ring if you want... That'd be good, I'm getting, you know...'

  Lucas said, 'He's peddling dope.'

  'I already suggested that,' Malone said. 'It sorta made people unhappy.'

  'Can't be sure that it's dope,' Mallard said defensively.

  'Sure it is,' Lucas said. 'I can even tell you what kind.'

  'Heroin?' suggested Malone.

  'Yup.' Lucas nodded.

  'Maybe that's the old Chicago system working,' Mallard said.

  'I don't see a murder contractor trusting a junkie to kill people,' Lucas said.

  'Maybe he's not a junkie...'

  'That was a small retail sale you were listening to,' Lucas said. 'If he's a small retail dealer, chances are, he's a junkie.'

  'On the other hand, since he had somebody coming in from a long way off... maybe not,' Malone said. 'He seems to be buying wholesale.'

  Lucas shrugged. 'Could be - but it's strange behavior for a guy who's supposed to be a paranoid superkiller. I could see a killer buying cocaine or maybe speed from a good, tight retail connection, but

  I can't see one actually selling the stuff. That means he's dealing with all kind of craphead junkies who'd sell him out for a dime.'

  When they finished with the tapes, they all sat around for a minute and then Mallard said, 'The Yankees are on cable.'

  'I gotta get outside,' Lucas said. 'I've been sitting in a car all day.'

  'Where're you going?' asked Mal
one.

  'Maybe find a bar,' Lucas said. 'Have a couple beers.'

  'I could do that,' Malone said. 'I'd like to change into something a little more relaxed.'

  Mallard sighed and said, 'All right. I guess it's better than staring at a TV.'