Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'We got a FedEx upstairs for you, the guys did. They forgot to bring it down, so I did.' Rinker said cheerfully. She bounced the box in her hand. The woman didn't hesitate, said, 'Oh, thanks. Just the minute,' and pushed the door shut and began to work the chain. Rinker quickly stooped and put the box on the floor, then reached up and pulled the nylon down over her face, pulling it down like a condom.

  The woman opened the door and the pistol was

  there, pointing at her head, and Rinker whispered, harshly, 'Step back or I'll kill you.'

  Jan Davis, stricken, hand at her face, eyes wide, stepped back. 'Please don't hurt us.'

  Rinker kicked the box into the apartment, pushed the door shut, and rasped, 'If a cop comes in now, I'll start shooting and we'll all be dead. Are the cops watching this place?'

  Davis's head was wagging back and forth, a no, and a little girl called out, 'Mom? Who's that?'

  'Get her out here,' Rinker said, flicking the tip of the pistol toward the bedroom door.

  'You're the...'

  'Yeah. I've never killed a kid in my life, and I hope I never have to. But you gotta get her out here. Then I'm gonna ask you two questions, and I'm gonna tell you something - if you answer the questions right -and then I'm gonna leave.'

  'You're going to kill us..."

  'Mom?'

  'If I were gonna kill you, I wouldn't be wearing a mask,' Rinker said. 'Now get her out here.'

  Davis stared for another moment, then said, 'Heather, honey? C'mere, honey.'

  The girl stuck her head out of a bedroom a minute later. She was wearing yellow underpants and a yellow shirt, and was carrying a Curious George monkey doll. 'Mom?'

  'C'mere, honey.' Davis backed toward her daughter, groping for her hand. The girl looked at

  Rinker and said, 'Did you kill those people?' Her eyes were as wide as her mother's had been.

  Her mother said, 'Shhh,' and Rinker said, 'Here's the first question. What did you tell the police about the people you saw in the hallway?'

  Davis glanced down at the girl and then back at Rinker: 'They had pictures. We didn't tell them anything, because Heather didn't see anything. She couldn't even make one of those drawing pictures.'

  'Did the police talk to anybody upstairs?'

  "They talked to everybody in the house, but nobody saw anything. Everybody's been talking to everybody, but nobody even saw you and... the other person... leaving. Nobody saw...'

  'Nobody.'

  'No.' Davis shook her head, and Rinker was struck with the straightforwardness of it. She looked at the little girl.

  'And what did you do, little girl?'

  Heather told her: how she went to the police station, how she tried to make a drawing, but she didn't know any faces. They showed her pictures, but she didn't know them. As she spoke, she stood up tall, with her feet together, as if she were a Marine standing at attention. And Rinker suddenly knew that the child understood what was happening. That she was talking for her life. Rinker suddenly teared up, and said to Davis, 'Send her back to the bedroom.'

  'Go, honey.'

  'You come too, Mom,' Heather said, pulling at her mother's hand.

  'I've got to talk to this lady,' Davis said, and the fear lay right on the surface of her eyes. Heather saw it as clearly as did Rinker.

  'Don't worry, kid, I'm not going to hurt anybody,' Rinker said. 'We've just got to have some grownup talk.'

  'I've heard grownup talk before,' the girl said.

  Rinker looked down at her. All right; she probably had. She looked back at the mother: 'You don't tell anybody I was here. You could actually provide them with a little more information about me -how tall I am, what my voice sounds like. I couldn't tolerate that. If you do that, if you tell anyone I was here, I'll come back and kill you. And if they kill me first, then one of my associates will come here and kill you, because they'll feel like they've got to make the point. And they won't let you go. They don't give a shit about people like you. Do you understand?'

  The vulgarity, the shit, hung in the air between them, and lent Rinker's speech authority - a killer's authority - and Mom nodded dumbly. 'We'll never tell. Honest to god, we'll never tell,' Jan Davis said.

  'Go sit on the couch,' Rinker said. 'Don't get up for five minutes, no matter how much you want to. I'm going to walk out of the house, and I don't want you to see my car.'

  Mom nodded again, and pulled the child across

  the living room to the couch, and they sat down.

  Rinker stepped back to the door, stopped, brought the pistol up, and fired a single shot. A photograph of Davis, in earlier years, with two other women, fell off the wall, a perfect pencil thick hole punched through the glass and Davis' eyeball, in the photo.

  'Absolute and complete silence,' Rinker whispered.

  And she was gone.

  Out the door, down the stoop, up the street, in the car. And she breathed out.

  'Let's go home,' Black said. 'They're gonna be here all night.'

  'Best time to pull something is about five o'clock in the morning,' Sherrill said, but she yawned.

  'Yeah, and if we really think that, we should put a twenty-four-hour watch on them. But we can't do twenty-four hours ourselves. I'm so fuckin' bored, I can't think, and the back of my boxer shorts is about five inches up my ass because I've been sitting here too long.'

  'Take a walk,' Sherrill said.

  'I'd get mugged.'

  'Not in this neighborhood...'

  'By the goddamn security patrol. You see those guys? Would you give those guys a gun?'

  'All right.' Sherrill sighed and turned the key, cranked the car. 'There's gotta be something else we can do. I can't believe we sat in this car for eight hours and never came up with a decent idea.'

  'There's nothing left. If Carmel did it, and I'm not giving you that... she's gonna walk.'

  Jan Davis lay in bed, all night, barely closing her eyes. She fought down an impulse to flee to her parents' home in Missouri - she wouldn't be completely welcome, since the divorce. Her parents had liked Howard better than they liked her, she thought, feeling alone and isolated. Besides, she'd seen the Godfather movies, and she knew about these people, the Mafia. Running wouldn't help: they'd get you anywhere. She decided to stick to routine.

  Heather had been going to day school all summer, getting a head start on first grade. Davis had hoped against hope that somehow, in the morning, Heather would have forgotten what happened the night before. But she hadn't - she looked like she'd gotten as little sleep as her mother.

  'Should I go to school?' she asked, first thing.

  'Yes. We are going to forget what happened last night.That was a bad dream.' Davis tried to be cheery; but it wasn't working.

  'Is she going to come back and hurt us?'

  'No, no, no, nothing is going to happen. Let's just pretend that nothing happened, nobody came.'

  'But the lady came.'

  Davis wanted to shake her. Wanted to scream at her, wanted to impress her with the danger, but didn't know how. 'Heather, listen: that was a very bad lady. Very bad. We have to pretend that she wasn't here. We

  have to pretend that she was a bad dream. Remember the bad dream you had about Mrs. Gartin chasing you? We have to forget it, just like we forgot the dream about Mrs. Gartin.'

  'I didn't forget that dream,' Heather said solemnly. 'I just told you I did.'

  'But you don't have it any more.'

  'No...' She ate cornflakes.

  And before she could bring the subject back to Rinker, Davis said, 'I'm supposed to see your father this afternoon.'

  Heather looked up from the cornflakes. 'Is he going to come to see me?'

  'Not this afternoon, I don't think. This is business. But I'll tell him you'd like it if he came over.'

  'Okay. Do you think he'll come...'

  And the talk went that way. All the way to school, Davis looked for trailing cars, looked for short women with red hair, looked for those small competent hands,
but she didn't see anybody exactly like that. And Heather never mentioned the bad lady, not once, all the way to school.

  Mrs. Gartin's School took children from three to six, and taught them letters and numbers and shapes and colors, music, and phonics for the older children. Mrs. Gartin and her two associates tried to keep the little boys from beating each other and victimizing the little girls, and encourage the little girls to socialize.

  At the back of the big kids' room - Mrs. Gartin never even saw it any more, just another blob in the background - was Officer Friendly's full-size, standup cut-out, sponsored by Logan's Rendering Co. Officer Friendly's telephone number was on the front of the poster. Officer Friendly had visited the school, and talked to them about being careful, about bad men and women, and how the police were there to help children. He left behind the cutout.

  Heather saw his picture every day, and this day, summoning all her intentness of purpose, she went into Mrs. Roman's cubbyhole when the rest of the class followed Mrs. Roman out to recess, and called the number. She'd called her Mom several times, and knew about dialing nine.

  Officer Friendly, whose real name was Dick Ennis, was something of a drunk ('Not an alcoholic,' he said. 'Alcoholics go to meetings.'), and was late to work more than half the time; not that anybody cared. And mostly, when he was sober, he was a pretty good Officer Friendly. For one thing, he liked kids, and had several of his own by two ex-wives. For another, he'd been a decent street cop. In any case, he'd just arrived at his office, put his sack lunch in his desk drawer, and had turned to go for coffee when the phone rang. He dropped into his chair and picked it up.

  Heather said, 'Is this Officer Friendly?'

  And Ennis said, 'Yes, it is. Can I help you?' He thought the little girl on the other end of the line might be five years old.

  'Yes. A bad lady came to my house and scared my Mom and me.'

  'Uh-huh. Who is this? What is your name?'

  'This is Heather Davis. My phone number is...'

  Smart kid, Ennis thought, as he scribbled down the number. 'Okay, Heather, how did the bad lady scare your Mom and you?'

  'She had a gun and she had a mask that she pulled down over her face, and she said if we told anybody, she would come and kill us. And she shooted a picture of my mom. And now my Mom is scared to tell anybody.'

  Ennis sat up, his forehead wrinkled. 'When did this happen?'

  'Last night when it was dark.'

  'Nobody called a policeman?'

  'No. Some policeman came to see us, but they went away. Then this lady came and told us not to talk to any more policeman. Ever.'

  'Some policemen came to see you? Do you remember who they were?'

  'One was a man and one was a woman,' the girl said.

  'Do you remember their names? Either one?'

  'Yes.'

  'Could you tell me what they were?' His own small children had taught him patience.

  'One was named Mr. Davenport, and one was named Miss Sherrill.'

  'Jesus Christ,' Officer Friendly said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sherrill was still asleep when Lucas called. 'We maybe got a break,' he said.

  She picked up the intensity in his voice, heard the traffic in the background. He was on a cell phone. She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes with the heel of her hand. 'What happened?'

  'That little kid called in, Heather Davis - she called Officer Friendly, you know the guy, what's-his-name...'

  'Ennis.'

  'Yeah. She says the shooter was at their apartment last night, and warned her mother not to talk to us. She told them if they did talk to us, she'd come back and kill them both.'

  Sherrill hopped out of bed and started for the bathroom, trailed by a twenty-foot coil of white phone wire. 'What time was that?'

  'Nine, or a little after. Just dark.'

  'Then it wasn't Carmel,' Sherrill said. 'We got her coming out of her building around eight-thirty, followed her to the Swan, and watched her dance the night away.'

  'You did that? Tracked her?'

  'Yeah, me and Tom. You sound surprised...' She lifted the toilet seat and sat down.

  'I wasn't sure you were going to, the way we left it yesterday,' Lucas said. 'Seemed like a long shot...'

  Sherrill lost the rest of what Lucas was saying, suddenly falling off into a mental movie of the previous night. She came back when Lucas asked, 'Marcy? Are you still there?'

  'Lucas... Goddamnit, I think we might have seen the shooter. Last night. Coming out of Carmel's building.'

  'What?' He didn't believe it. 'Honest to God.' She told him about the redhead who'd left as Hale Allen was going in. In her mind's eye, she could see the woman brushing past Hale, giving him the once-over, then stepping outside on the walk and looking up and down the street. 'Could you identify her?'

  She thought about it for less than a second: 'I don't think so. I wasn't paying attention to her. I mean, there's a good chance it's not even her... but still, she was a shorter woman, a small woman, but in pretty good shape, like a gymnast; like Baily said. And she had big red hair.'

  'That was her - I'd bet you a hundred bucks it was her,' Lucas said. 'We've gotta throw a net around the building. And we've got to get something on Carmel's phones. Find somebody who'll sign a warrant to tap them.'

  'Where are you? Are you at Davis's house?'

  'No, I'm in my car, heading for the kid's school. She's still there - I'll be there in five.' 'I'll get dressed and head out...'

  The inside cop, the tipster, called Carmel just as Lucas and Sherrill were breaking off their conversation:

  'You're in the clear,' he said. He didn't bother to identify himself.

  'What happened?'

  'I'm not sure exactly, but the rumor is, this little kid called in, and said that the shooter was back at her house last night and her mother was afraid to talk about it. And the rumor is, you were being tracked, and they know it can't be you because you were out dancing at some fancy place. I'll tell you what, Davenport went running out of here like a fullback. I mean, he was runnin'.'

  'Jesus, they were following me?' She was shocked. She hadn't felt it. She'd always thought she'd be able to feel it. Maybe because of Hale, his closeness...

  'All over you, I guess,' the cop said. 'A good thing, because you're in the clear.'

  'Why didn't you call me before? When you heard they were putting the tail on me?'

  After a pause, the cop said, 'You know I can't do that.'

  Carmel promised another payment, rang off and dialed Rinker.

  'And it was the kid who called the cops,' Carmel

  said, as she finished relating the cop's tip.

  'Jesus, I never thought about that,' Rinker said. 'She's so small.'

  'But it works out,' Carmel said, excitedly. 'You found out that there really was nothing coming out of them, and even if the cops force the mother to talk this time, what can she give them? And now, the cops know I wasn't there. They just stepped all over their own case. All you have to do is disappear, and we're cool.'

  'Bout time,' Rinker said.

  'Although,' Carmel said pensively, 'we still don't know why they were messing with me to begin with.'

  'Let it go,' Rinker said. 'I'm getting out of here. If I move now, I can be through KC before the rush hour.'

  'Don't go yet,' Carmel said. 'Hang around for a day or two. If they're following me, you can't come around here, but... just hang around.'

  'You think?'

  'Yeah. Just overnight, to see what happens - to see if we need to settle anything else. See if the kid and her mom keep their mouths shut. See if anything comes of that.'

  'All right,' Rinker said reluctantly. Minneapolis seemed more and more like a tar-baby. She was anxious to get out. 'One more night.'

  Lucas arrived at Mrs. Gartin's School a little after ten o'clock in the morning. He parked on the street down

  the block, and walked back under low-hanging maple trees. A light summer breeze had popped up
, and a patch of yellow coneflowers bobbed their bright heads and brown eyes at him from the school garden. Behind the garden, and behind a low wooden fence, he could see a playground for small kids, with tractor-tire sandboxes and a gentle tube-slide.

  Mrs. Gartin was a heavy woman in a print dress, with small jowls and smile lines. She was surprised to see him.