Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'Yeah, yeah...' And she was gone, too, and Lucas and Carmel were left alone in the fabulous apartment.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Carmel asked, 'Are you wearing a wire?' They were still standing in the living room, by the open door to the hallway.

  'No. Should I be?' Lucas stepped over to the door and pushed it shut.

  'When I think about it, I don't really care,' Carmel said. 'I'm gonna get you for this, Davenport, I swear to God. I'm gonna dedicate my life to it.'

  'Gonna take a lot of dedication, if you're out at the women's prison for thirty years,' Lucas said.

  She flushed, and he could see her eye-teeth, bared, as she spoke: 'There's not gonna be any prison. Not for me. Could be for you, when we're done with you. You've got nothing.'

  Lucas shook his head and said, 'They're arguing about that over at the courthouse. Some of the guys think we've got enough, some of them don't. Gonna be close.' He drifted across the living room as he talked, poked his head into the guestroom, then continued to her bedroom, Carmel following him down the hall. 'What do you want in here?' she demanded.

  'I'm just closing the place down, making sure

  nobody left anything behind,' he said. The shell was between two shoes in the open part of the closet. 'I'll tell you something, Carmel. Just between you and me - and I don't care if you're wearing a wire. I know you were involved in these killings. I know it. I know you were involved in the first one, Barbara Allen, and I think you did it because you wanted Hale. You were screwing him before the body was in the ground.'

  'You don't know that.'

  'I do know that. Hale told me that.'

  'Hale?' Her hand went to her throat.

  'Yeah. We had a long talk about you. I know all about you, about your sexual preferences, about what you like to talk about in bed. And you know what? You scared the shit out of Hale. He didn't have the courage to stop you, but he did have the courage to come in and talk to me, and I taped it. Hale telling me about how you hated Barbara, about how she was holding him back, about how he was lucky to be rid of her.' Lucas was adding that last bit on, but he bet it was true.

  'That sonofabitch,' she said.

  'Naw. He was just a dummy. Worked hard, liked women, not too much upstairs. Not a lot of guts, either - but he was just trying to get through life. He felt guilty about Louise Clark, but a lot of guys who love their wives have affairs. And Louise was something else in bed. He couldn't stop talking about her. He said she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch: that's the way he put it. He said that compared to

  Clark, you were like the Roman Army, just grinding him down.'

  'He never said that,' Carmel shouted. But there were tears streaking her face now, and she hated it, and screamed louder, 'Hale never said that.'

  'Yeah, he did, and I think you know it, because it rings right,' Lucas said. He felt odd, standing in the cool, professionally-feminine bedroom, alone with this tear-streaked woman, hands in his pants pocket, almost abashed: he felt cruel. He pushed on. 'He said you were like some kind of machine, marching all over him. But he was afraid to dump you, because he was... afraid. Because he thought you may have killed his wife.'

  'Louise Clark killed her... and him.'

  'Oh, please,' Lucas said, sounding in his own ears like a character in a New York TV comedy. 'Louise Clark had him. He was going to marry her, as soon as he could get rid of you. And Louise Clark, to tell you the truth, was a good match for him. Smart enough, but not exactly the wizard of the western world. But a nice woman. And good in bed. And as far as we can tell from talking to all of her friends, Louise Clark had never fired a gun in her life, right up to the day when we found her in the middle of that phony suicide tableau in her bedroom.'

  'Fuck you, Davenport,' Carmel said, crossing her arms over her chest. 'Get out of my house.'

  Lucas said, 'Yeah, I'm going: I'll scout the...' It seemed a little faked, he didn't do it quite right, the

  frown, the near double-take, but Carmel was tired, stretched out of shape. 'What is that?'

  'What?' Carmel was confused.

  'Here,' Lucas said. He brushed past her, pushed the sliding door back so he could get a better look at the shoe. 'Goddamnit.'

  He stood up, took Carmel by the arm and said, 'Come out here,' tugging her toward the living room.

  'Let go of me...' She tried to pull away.

  'I just want you out in the living room with me...' And in the living room he shouted, 'Hello? Hey, anybody here? Goddamnit...'

  Carmel took a step back toward the bedroom and Lucas said, 'No.' And he said it with bite, and she stopped. He looked around, stepped into the kitchen, got a roll of SaranWrap from the kitchen counter and carried it back toward the bedroom. She followed behind him and he knelt by the closet door and pushed the shoe away and, wrapping his thumb and forefinger with Saran Wrap, picked up the cartridge.

  'A.22,' he said. He looked at her. 'A fuckin'.22.'

  'You put that there,' she said.

  'Bullshit. You know I didn't put it there. And I'll tell you what - I bet it's got your fingerprints on it. I bet it'll check out when they do the metallurgy, won't it? What'd you do, drop a box of.22s in the closet? Shuck out a clip or something? How'd the cartridge get into your closet, Carmel?'

  Davenport seemed to recede from her. He loomed

  over her in real space, but the pressure on her was so great that he seemed to squeeze down, until he looked like a little man seen through the glass peephole on an apartment door. Carmel's brain stopped: she couldn't bear this. She said something to him, but she didn't know what, and walked stiff-legged out of the bedroom. He was talking to her, at her, reached out to her, but she batted his arm away.

  She was screaming back at him, but a broken, isolated part of her brain seemed to be in control, now. She walked straight across the living room, picked up a fistful of car keys from the entry table, and went out the door, leaving the door open, Davenport staring after her, saying something incomprehensible at her back...

  Out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, pushing blindly at the buttons, out the door at Five, into the parking ramp, down the ramp to the blue Volvo, into the trunk, into the gym bag, out with the gun.

  Because this is where she'd put the gun she got from Rinker: the car, with her mother's registration under her mother's new married name, nobody to know, nobody even to look at such an out-of-character non-Carmel-like motor vehicle.

  She marched back through the door, propelled by the rage, got the elevator where it waited, the gun solid in her hand.

  Lucas watched her go out the bedroom door, thought,

  'Whoa.' He followed after her, holding the shell. He had to tell her that he was taking the shell with him: she had to see the shell go in his pocket. But something about the way she was walking, robotlike, across the front room. And suddenly he feared she'd had some kind of a stroke, and he said, 'Carmel? Carmel? Are you all right?'

  Then she was gone down the hall. He stood uncertainly in the bedroom door for a moment, expecting her to come back, then flipped out his cell phone, punched a speed dial button and said, when Sherrill answered, 'This is me. I think something's happened to Carmel. She just went out of here, acting weird.'

  'Want us to come back up?'

  'No. I'll... Well, maybe. Yeah. Come on back. Think of some reason to come back, I'm gonna check on her.'

  Lucas walked across the living room, out into the hall - and she was gone. Either through the door into the stairway, or the elevators. Lucas walked down to the elevators and pushed the button. He bounced on his toes for a moment, thought about going down to look at the stairway door, then thought about the apartment door and hurried back, checked that it wasn't locked and started to pull it shut. At that precise moment, an elevator dinged, and Lucas stepped toward it. 'Carmel?'

  She stepped out of the elevator: Lucas didn't see it as it was coming up, didn't instantly recognize it in the context, but then...

  Carmel fired
at him as the sights crossed the line of his face and saw the surprise and the gun jumped and Davenport was moving sideways and down and she felt the rush of a kill and tracked him with the barrel and fired again and again and then...

  Lucas felt the first shot sting his neck and then he was moving, diving back into the apartment, felt another shot across his shoulders, and then, back in the living room he was rolling across the fabulous carpet, as a hornet's nest of bullet fragments ricocheted off the door a few feet away. As he fought to get upright and oriented, his cheek stung, then something hit him in the thigh, and his own gun was coming out and Carmel was in the doorway...

  Lucas fired one shot and Carmel felt as though she'd been hit by a baseball bat. The.45 took away a fist-sized chunk of skin just below her rib cage, and she staggered back. Hurt. Bad hurt. Hospital. She still had the keys to the cars in her left hand, and she turned and lurched down toward the elevators. The doors were just closing, and she slapped at the button and they started to open and she looked back and saw Lucas peek from behind her doors and she fired again, and let herself fall into the elevator.

  Lucas fired twice more, but had a bad angle at the closing doors; one slug hit the doors, the other might

  have slipped inside... He crawled toward them and pushed the down button.

  'Fuckin' gun,' Sherrill said to Sloan, in the lobby, their guns coming out. 'That was a fuckin' gun. A big fuckin' gun.'

  'Wait for the elevator, it's coming down,' Sloan said, 'I'm taking the stairs.'

  'Too far, too far,' Sherrill said, but Sloan was moving: 'Gotta block them, gotta block the parking ramp.'

  'Careful,' she shouted after him.

  'Call in,' he shouted back, and Sherrill got her cell phone out and pushed the speed-dial for dispatch and began shouting into it as the numbers came down to five. Then it stopped, and Sherrill ran to the stairway and yelled up, 'Elevator stopped at five, watch the ramp.'

  'Got it,' Sloan called.

  The other elevator was going up again and Sherrill, without thinking, punched the Up button, trying to get Up. The first one, the elevator that stopped at five, started down. But the other rose inexorably to twenty-seven before it stopped. She ran back to the stairway access and shouted after Sloan, 'The elevator's on twenty-seven...'

  At that moment, the second elevator dinged in the lobby. She shouted at the frightened security guard, 'Turn off that elevator, Stop it. Can you stop it on this floor? Stop it!'

  He ran to the elevator as the door opened, but then almost slumped, stopping outside of it: 'My, God, there's blood...'

  Sherrill pushed him aside, saw a puddle of blood in the middle of the carpet. 'How do you stop it?' she asked.

  'Pull the red emergency-stop button.'

  She saw it, a red knob the size of her thumb, and pulled it out. 'That'll do it?'

  'Yeah, that...'The security guard looked up at the numbers above the elevator doors. 'The other one's coming down.'

  'Oh, fuck. Get out of the way.' She stood back from the elevator doors, her pistol level at gut level: remember the chant, two in the belly and one in the head, knocks a man down and kills him dead...

  Then the elevator doors opened and she saw Lucas on the floor with his gun pointing at her chest and blood streaming into his eyes and Sherrill screamed, 'Lucas, Lucas, Jesus...'

  The elevator seemed to move at a deliberate and insolent crawl; Carmel pushed herself up, realized that her arm was burning; looked, and saw more blood. Her body was on fire. She staggered into the hallway at five, out to the parking ramp. The stairwell came up just inside the parking ramp door, and somebody was on the stairs, coming up. 'Fuck you,' Carmel screamed down at the man. She could see his arm, still three flights down. He stopped and looked

  up at her, and she fired the gun, once, twice.

  Sloan braced himself. He was only on three-and a-half, confused. Carmel? Two shots sailed past, and he aimed blindly up, and fired once.

  Carmel, fearless now, the pain tightening her, fired another shot, then another, and then got a click. She'd used up the clip. 'Fuck you,' she screamed again, and lurched out into the ramp. A dozen steps, and she was at the bloody-murder-red Jag, which was right there. Fumbling with her keys. On fire, she was on fire.

  She backed out, aimed the Jag down the ramp, and stepped on it.

  Sloan heard the parking-ramp door bang shut. He took another quick peek, then another, then ran up to the next landing. He heard the Jag start, screech away. He was on four-and-a-half now. He ran back down, through the fourth-floor door, heard her coming all the way. Lifted the.38, and as she turned the corner, fired a shot at the windshield. No effect, and the car's back end twitched out as Carmel gunned it again, and he fired another shot at the driver's side window as she passed him; but he was slow and the shot smashed through the back window and then she was down the ramp and around the corner.

  Sloan ran back through the door and down to three, but at three, Carmel was already going by, and he ran

  down to two, and she was coming and he knew he was too late, so he kept going, and at one he burst into the lobby and screamed at Sherrill, 'She's coming down the ramp...'

  As he ran toward the front door, he registered Lucas on his knees, the blood, Sherrill with the gun, and then the red Jag blasting through the wooden guard arms at the exit and out into the street, wheels screaming, car sliding, going away from him and Sloan ran out into a street full of people and couldn't fire his gun...

  Lucas had done an inventory and was shouting 'Not bad, not bad,' and was trying to get up, while Sherrill screamed, 'Lay down, you're hurt, lay down,' and Lucas finally pushed her roughly out of the way and hobbled toward the front of the building and saw Sloan running away down the street and Carmel's Jag just turning the corner at the far end...

  'Didn't think of this,' he said, trying to grin at Sherrill. Blood trickled down at the corner of his mouth. 'That she'd do this. She cracked.'

  'Lucas, ya gotta sit down, the ambulance...'

  'Fuck a bunch of ambulances...' And they saw people at the other end of the block, turning to stare, and Sherrill shouted, 'She's coming back, she went around the block.'

  Lucas started to run, half-hobbled, toward the end of the block, Sherrill finally leaving him to run on ahead, her pistol out, shouting at people, 'Police, get away, police...'

  Lucas saw her stop at the curb, then raise her gun... and the Jag came from behind the building and Sherrill pointed her pistol at the sky as the Jag hurtled by and Lucas came up and said 'Jesus Christ, she's doing a hundred and twenty...'

  Carmel wasn't feeling much: a kind of mute stubbornness, a will to do what she pleased. She turned the last corner, realized that she was going the wrong way on a one-way street: and the wrong way in any case - the hospital was behind her. Instead of trying to turn, she focused her eyes on the Target Center, the auditorium where the Minnesota Timberwolves played basketball. Focused on the building and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

  She was going seventy at the end of the first block, a hundred when Davenport saw her, at the end of the second. The car topped out at the end of the fifth block, at about a hundred and thirty. She drove straight down the white line between two lanes, cars dodging away from her, white faces going by like faces on postage stamps, half-seen, half-realized, frozen in expression. She hit a stout black man carrying a grocery sack, in which he had milk and cookies and a dozen oranges. He never saw her as he crossed at a crosswalk, looking into the grocery bag, thinking about opening the cookies. He was too heavy, he shouldn't have bought them, his wife would kill him... He never saw Carmel coming and she hit him with the very center of the Jag and he flew over

  the car as though lifted by angels.

  At a hundred and thirty miles an hour, Carmel hit the curb outside the Target Center and the Jag went airborne, turning, tumbling...

  Lucas and Sherrill watched, appalled, as the car hit first the black man and then the concrete wall.

  The black man was de
ad in a tenth of a second; he'd felt nothing but a sudden apprehension. As for Carmel, the transition from life to death was so sudden that she never felt it.

  In the silence following the shattering impact, an even dozen oranges bounced and rolled in the dirt along the street, bright and promising like the best parts of a broken life.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Charlie Ross and his yuppie flip-fone pals at the Merchants Bank in Portland, Oregon, had invented a new classification system for women. One that went down, not up. One duckling was a woman who bordered on the acceptable. Ten ducklings was a truly ugly duckling.

  Ross was hacking his way through the billing entries for that month's box rentals, and incidentally keeping his eye on the safety-deposit counter while the regular clerk was at lunch, when a six-duckling came to the counter. She was bad news. If you were even tempted to throw her a mercy fuck, you'd want to put a rug over her head first. All of that went through Ross's bottlecap-sized brain as he pushed himself up from the desk and dragged his lard-ass over to the counter.