Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'Well, she really can't be,' Rinker said. 'She's almost exactly like me, but her head is a little larger, maybe.

  We measured and it's about a quarter-inch bigger round, and also, she's still got a lot of hair, though it's starting to come out. She'd like to get something big enough to fit over what hair she's still got. She hopes she won't lose it all.'

  'Does she have a color preference?'

  'We talked about that, and she wants her natural color, which is grey,' Rinker said. 'It doesn't have to be a great wig, just to get her back and forth from the house to the hospital. And then if she loses all of it, we can come back and get another one.'

  'Let me show you our Autumn Sparkle series...'

  Rinker took an Autumn Sparkle, thanked the kindly saleswoman, moved on to a walk-in hair salon, and walked in. An hour later, with her hair in a skull-tight punk cut, and wearing plain-glass tortoise-shell glasses, she climbed back in her car and headed up I-35 toward Minneapolis.

  Mallard called Lucas that afternoon and gave him the bad news. The fingerprint search was coming up dry.

  'We're gonna change some things around on the computer search, but it doesn't look good,' Mallard said. 'Tell you the truth, I'd be willing to bet she was never printed.'

  'Damnit,' Lucas said. 'We never quite get her. I swear to God, we didn't miss her by more than a half-hour at the airport, maybe fifteen minutes.'

  'But we're knocking on the door,' Mallard said.

  'We've got more on her than we ever hoped for. Now it's just a matter of time.'

  Late that evening, Hale Allen sat naked on the edge of the bed, his damp hair still tousled from the lovemaking and the shower that came afterwards. He was examining his toes in the light from the night-stand, and clipping his toenails. He hummed as he did it, and every time the clippers snapped, Carmel flinched, and Allen would say something about the clipping, aloud, but mindlessly, to himself: 'Got that one,' he said, as a clipping fell on the magazine he was using to catch them. 'There's a good one.'

  Carmel tried putting her fingers in her ears, but it was no use. She was about to roll out of bed when the magic cell phone went off in her purse. She crawled to the end of the bed, reached over the end-board for her purse, dug the phone out, lay back and punched the talk button.

  'I'm back,' Rinker said.

  'Where at?' Allen looked at her from his side of the bed, and she mouthed, sorry-business at him. He grinned and rolled over toward her, pushed her legs apart; she let him do it.

  'Hotel down by the airport.'

  'Dangerous,' Carmel said. Allen put his head down and nibbled.

  'I look different. A lot different,' Rinker said. 'Not a problem. But the question is, do we do Plan B?'

  'I've been thinking about that,' Carmel said. She

  ran her hands through Allen's hair. 'I guess it really wouldn't mean much to you, but it'd get me off the hook. For good.'

  'But that's good for me,' Rinker said. 'The question is, how do I do this by myself? I don't know the details of...'

  'You don't do it by yourself,' Carmel said. She pulled gently on Allen's ear, guiding him a little to the left. 'I'll help.'

  'Can you get out?'

  'Yeah. But I'm in the middle of something right now, I can't really get into the details... Call me tomorrow morning about ten o'clock.'

  'You with somebody?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Hale Allen?'

  'You got that right,' Carmel said.

  'Talk to you tomorrow,' Rinker said.

  Carmel said to Hale, 'Come up here, you.'

  'I like it down here. It smells like bread.'

  She whacked him on the side of the head and he said, 'Ow, what was that for?'

  'Not very romantic, like a loaf of Wonder Bread, or something.'

  'I was just joking.' He held his hand to his ear; she had hit him a little harder than she'd intended.

  She smiled and said, 'Okay. I'm sorry. Come up here and I'll make it better.'

  Sherrill was sitting in her own car, alone, a block

  from Allen's house. A radio beeped, and she picked it up: 'Yeah?'

  'Another light just went on in the living room.'

  'Thank God. There might be something left of Allen after all.'

  The guy on the other end chuckled: 'We'll take her back home, if you want to join the parade.'

  'I'll be two blocks back.'

  She dropped the radio, picked up her cell phone and dialed Lucas' number from memory. He picked it up on the first ring.

  'You up reading?' she asked, without identifying herself.

  'Yeah.'

  'I think we're about to take Carmel home,' Sherrill said. 'This is obscene.'

  'Not a flicker out of her, huh? Not a move?'

  'Nothing. Damnit, Lucas, we might have lost the chance.'

  'I know, but we've got to hang on for a while,' Lucas said.

  'And I'm getting kind of lonely.'

  'So am I,' Lucas said. 'But I'm not going to invite you over.'

  'I wouldn't come anyway,' Sherrill said.

  'Good for both of us.'

  After a pause, Sherrill said, 'Yeah, I guess. See you tomorrow.'

  Ten minutes later, Carmel came out of the house and walked briskly to her car. A little too briskly, on a

  nice night like this, a little too head-down, Sherrill thought. Of course, everything Carmel did was slightly theatrical; there was no way she could know she was in the net...

  The next day was brutal: Lucas talked to Mallard, who had nothing new, and checked on the Carmel net a half-dozen times, and got cranky with everyone.

  Carmel talked with Rinker twice on the magic cell phone. 'See you at ten-fifteen,' she said.

  Carmel went home at six, as she usually did; called Hale Allen at six-thirty, and told him that she'd have to work on the Al-Balah case that night: 'I've got to go back to the office. Jenkins ruled that the cops can have the tire as evidence, and I'm trying to put together an instant appeal.'

  'Well, all right,' Allen said. She thought she might have detected just a hair of relief in his voice. 'See you when? Thursday?'

  'Maybe we could catch lunch tomorrow... and I'll give you a call tonight.'

  'Talk to you,' he said.

  Carmel got out of her business dress, put on a short-sleeved white shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, and a light red jacket. She pushed a black sweatshirt into her briefcase. This was July, but it was also Minnesota. She didn't feel like eating, but she did, and carried the microwave chicken dinner to the window and looked out over the city. If they were actually watching

  her, from one of the nearby buildings, they should see her.

  When she finished, she tossed the tray from the chicken dinner in the garbage, went back to her home office, disconnected the small digital answering machine from her private line, and stuck it in her briefcase with the sweater. A little after seven o'clock, she rode the elevator down and walked out of the front of the building, looking at her watch, carrying her briefcase. She wasn't absolutely sure the cops were there, but she thought they were: not looking around, trying to spot them, nearly killed her. She walked to her office building, enjoying the night, used her key to get in the front door, signed in with the security guard, and rode the elevators up to her office.

  The entire suite was silent, with only a few security lights to cut the gloom. She turned the lights on in the library and in her office, turned on the computer, and went to work. Jenkins, the judge in the case she was working, had ruled the cops could have a spare tire owned by Rashid Al-Balah, and, unfortunately, there was blood on the tire. The only good aspect of it was that the cops had had the car and tire for almost a month before the blood was found, that they'd often taken it out for test drives - once to a strip joint - and, Carmel argued, the blood could have been anybody's, given the general unreliability of DNA tests. Or even if it did belong to Trick Bentoin, Bentoin could have cut himself before he disappeared, and simply was not available to testify to the
fact...

  She got caught up in the argument, moving back and forth from the library to her office, and nearly jumped out of her skin when the security guard said, 'Hi, Miz Loan.'

  'Oh, Jesus, Phil, you almost gave me a heart attack,' she said.

  'Just making the rounds... you gonna be late tonight?' She could already smell the booze: Phil was an old geezer, but he could drink with the youngest of them.

  'Probably. Got a tough one tomorrow.'

  'Well, good luck,' he said, and shuffled away toward the entry. She heard the door close, and the latch snap, and looked at her watch: twenty minutes. Time to start moving.

  She got the answering machine out of her briefcase, carried it into the library and plugged it into the phone there. Back in her office, she pulled the black sweater over her head. She left the computer on, and turned on the small Optimus stereo system. The system played three disks in rotation, and would play them until she turned it off. She left the red jacket draped over her chair.

  Ready.

  The building had a five-story parking garage. Carmel stepped out of the suite, checked to make sure that the security guard had moved on, and then trotted briskly down to the stairwell at the far end of the hall, and down seven flights of steps. The cops might be watching every entrance and exit to the

  parking garage, but, she thought, they couldn't be watching all of it. Of course, if they were, she was screwed...

  But it was a good bet, she thought. She poked her head through the door on the fourth floor, saw nobody. A single empty car, a red Pontiac, sat halfway down the ramp, but she'd seen it before. Not a cop. She glanced again at her watch: one minute. She waited it out, hearing nothing at all along the concrete corridors of the building, and then opened the door again.

  Here was the only spot that she'd be in the open: she walked quickly across the top of the floor, and stepped into the corkscrew exit-ramp. She heard a car moving up the entrance ramp: had to be Pam, she thought. She listened, heard the car turn into the exit spiral, and nodded. The car started down, made the turn toward her... A grey-haired old lady was looking through the windshield. Carmel recoiled, then saw the hand waving her forward: 'Get in.'

  'That's you?' The car stopped, just for a half second, and Carmel jerked open the back door and flopped on the seat, pulling the door shut without slamming it. 'Get under the blanket,' Rinker said.

  Carmel was already doing that, rolling onto the floor, her head on the driver's side. She pulled the blanket over her legs and lower body, and lay quietly beneath it. The entrances and exits from the building were on opposites sides: and even at this time of night, there were always a few cars coming and going.

  With any luck at all, the cops on the entrance side - if there were any - wouldn't be calling out the cars coming and going, so the cops on the exit side wouldn't notice the odd fact that a grey-haired old lady in a Japanese car had gone in one side and come right back out the other...

  She heard Rinker lower the driver's side window; heard the cashier mutter something, and a minute later, they were rolling out of the building.

  'You can get up on the seat,' Rinker said a minute later, 'But I wouldn't sit up, yet. Let me take a few side streets, see if there's anybody back there.'

  'If there are, there's nothing to do but run for it,' Carmel said cheerfully.

  'Yeah, well, just stay down for a few minutes anyway.'

  Rinker didn't know anything about throwing off a following car, but she'd watched enough cop shows on television to know that they might be both in front of, parallel to, and behind her. She took the car across the Washington Avenue bridge to eliminate the parallel cars, a block the wrong way down an empty one-way street to eliminate the forward cars, and then quickly along a one-way frontage road in the warehouse district, looking for followers. She didn't see anybody, and that was the best she could do.

  'Best I can do,' she told Carmel.

  'I can't think of anything else,' Carmel said. 'Pull over; let me get in the front.'

  Max Butry came from a short line of mean cops; his father was one, and so was Max, the meanness beaten into him from a tender age. 'You don't stay alive long on the streets unless...' his father would say, following with a lecture about a specific point of manhood in which Max was faltering: 'You don't stay alive long on the streets if you hide behind your hands. What if some greaser's got a shiv, huh? He'll cut your hands right off. You gotta come down on those boys...'

  And his father would come down on him, show you how you beat a guy right into the ground by getting in close and on top of him, and fuck all your cherry greaser knives.

  Butry carried the attitude onto the force; and on this night carried it into the bus station. A desk clerk had called to say that two guys were smoking dope in the John, and the smog was getting so thick nobody could get in to take a leak. By the time Butry arrived, though, the smokers had gone, and he turned around and banged back through the door.

  Outside, three skaters were practicing slides off a planter onto a curb. There was nothing illegal about this, but Butry considered skateboards one symptom of the decline of American civilization, and himself, by virtue of the badge in his pocket, one of the pillars of that civilization. 'They don't gotta respect the man - hell, they probably don't even know you - but they goddamn well gotta respect the badge,' his father said. 'If they don't respect the badge, the country starts caving in. Look what they got with the niggers

  down in Chicago. There are places in Chicago where you can't even show the badge or the niggers'll carve you up like the Christmas turkey. And you know how that started? It started when the first fuckin' nigger saw the badge and didn't show respect and nobody called him on it. And from there, the word got around, and the next thing you know, the world caves in. You got that? Huh?'

  Niggers, skateboarders, trans-gender migrants, yuppie scum, all the same stuff. People without respect. Butry swerved out of line to cross with the skaters. One of them, the toughest-looking kid, maybe sixteen with the baggy pants and the chain billfold and a ball-point pen tattoo on his forearm, saw Butry coming and there was no respect at all in the way he looked at him.

  'Hey, dickhead: get them boards outa here. This is a bus station, not a playground,' Butry said.

  And the oldest kid said, 'Fuck you, asshole.'

  Butry pulled his badge with one hand and his gun with the other; which would have gotten him fired if anybody else had been around to see how early it came out. 'I'm a fuckin' cop, wiseass. See the badge? Now sit on the fuckin' ground and put your hands over your heads, all three of you...'

  The smallest of the kids, who looked like he might be fourteen, and had the bony look of a boy who hadn't eaten right for a month or maybe a few months, that lonely, hollow-cheeked glow of hunger like a personal portrait, said 'Fuck you, fat boy' He

  pulled up his t-shirt to bare his belly, and to show off a half-dozen steel rings that pierced the skin around his belly button. 'Here: you want to shoot me? Here, shoot me, asshole.'

  Butry was fast, faster than the kid, who may have been slowed by hunger: Butry's hand lashed out, open but heavy as a ham, a slap that knocked the boy off his feet.

  'On your goddamn knees,' he screamed. 'On your goddamn...'

  At the very last second, he began to realize that he was over his head, but that very last second was too late. The young kid had come back up, on the toes of his ragged black tennies, and in his hand that pointed toward Butry's nose was a piece-of-shit two-barrel Crow derringer; you couldn't, as one of the gun magazines noted, expect to hit your target at six feet. But the gun was only nine inches from Butry's face when the kid pulled the trigger, and the.45 slug went through the bridge of Butry's nose and out the back of his skull.

  His father had forgotten to tell Butry that you don't fuck with people who have nothing to lose...

  The three skaters froze in the impact of the blast, in the sight of the falling cop; then the oldest said, 'Run,' in the harsh semi-whisper of panic, and the three sc
ooped their boards and were running across the street through the moving cars like a pack of starving terriers.

  Sherrill and Black were slumped in her car, and Sherrill was talking to Lucas on her cell phone: 'I'm starting to feel like a country song,' she said. 'There's something wrong about not feeling right...'

  Then their radio burped and and Black picked it up and Sherrill said to Lucas, 'Just a minute,' and then a dispatcher was screaming something about a cop down, shot at the bus station, three men running away, everybody available get to the bus station, looking for three youths possibly carrying skateboards and last seen running toward Loring Park...