Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “Yes.” But very weak now. “Where are we going?”

  “Carbondale, Illinois. Maybe two hours, I’ve never been there.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five o’clock. . . . The sun is just coming up.”

  And she passed out again.

  Some time later, the man backed into a one-car garage in Carbondale, woke Rinker, who was only fuzzily aware of it, and carried her into a house and put her facedown on a firm bed. A man’s voice said, “I’m going to give you a shot.”

  THE FEDS WOULDN ’T have found the orange pickup for a week if the hotel hadn’t been feuding with a pancake house. The pancake house’s parking lot was too small, so people parked in the hotel lot, and the hotel people got pissed and required guests to put parking tickets behind the windshields of their cars. If a car sat too long without a ticket, it was towed.

  The orange truck didn’t have a ticket, and the hotel security guard had seen it parked in the lot when he came in that morning, so in the middle of the afternoon he finally checked. . . .

  LUCAS WENT OUT with Mallard and they looked at the dead man in the footwell, and at the blood-soaked front seat, and talked to the cop who’d decided that it might be related. “Whoever was driving was shot in the butt, in the left cheek, and it wasn’t the dead guy, and I saw your bolo this morning and thought I’d better have my guys give you a call.”

  “Done good,” Lucas said. He looked around. “The question is, where’d she go from here?”

  “No blood on the ground,” the cop said. The local crime-scene crew had taped off the area and were going over it, looking for anything relevant. “She probably didn’t walk, because she was really pumping it. The seat is soaked with blood.”

  “Somebody else, then? She grabbed another car?” Mallard asked.

  Lucas shook his head. “No. She got help. Why would she grab another car? This one was good enough, and grabbing another car would just be another problem, with no predictable outcome, especially if she’s wounded.”

  “So she’s hiding.”

  “Got more friends than we thought,” Lucas said. “Your report said she didn’t have any, and now we know of two who were willing to risk their lives on her.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I’ll write a memo.”

  THEY WALKED AROUND ,watching the crime-scene people for a while, but Mallard’s attention was drifting and finally he asked, “You getting out of town?”

  Lucas nodded. “I have no more ideas. I mean, I do, but none are relevant at the moment.”

  “Coming to Malone’s funeral?”

  “Nope. Wouldn’t help her, and would bum me out worse than I already am. I liked her.”

  “So’d I,” Mallard said. He slapped Lucas on the back. “Let’s go.”

  WHEN RINKER WOKE UP ,she was lying facedown on a white sheet. Her legs were spread a bit, as were her arms. And her cheek was wet. Drool, she realized. She tried to move but found her arms and legs restrained. Near panic, she pulled her head up and saw a piece of paper a few inches from her eyes. It said, in large block letters, “Call out.”

  “Hey,” she called, her voice weak. “Hey!”

  And a woman’s voice from somewhere else said, “Coming . . . ,” and a second later, a brown-faced woman with a red dot in the middle of her forehead squatted up beside the bed, her face a few inches from Rinker’s.

  “You’re taped down so you couldn’t roll over and pull the saline out,” the woman said. “We didn’t have anything better. Let me get the tape.” There was a stripping-tape sound, and one hand came free, then her left foot, then her right foot and her right hand. She started to turn, saw the saline bottle on a hook over her head, and the woman put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t move too much,” she said. “You’re all taped up and you’ve had some analgesics, but it’s going to hurt. Do you have to urinate?”

  Rinker thought about it and shook her head. “No, but I could use a drink of water. How long have I been here?”

  “You got here this morning. This is the afternoon, about four o’clock. My husband is a doctor at the university, and this is our house.”

  “How bad?”

  The woman smiled sympathetically. “It’s never good, but the wound was confined to your buttock.” She enunciated buttock perfectly, with a bit of a British accent, and Rinker nearly smiled: It reminded her of a favorite Monty Python. “So it will hurt, and even when you are healed, you might not be able to run as fast or climb as quickly as you once did. And of course there is cosmetic damage, there will be a scar . . . but you are in no danger. Now.”

  “Thank you very much,” Rinker said. The woman nodded but said nothing more, and after a minute Rinker asked, “So what do I do? Just lie here with my butt in the air until it heals?”

  “You’ll have to, uh, lie there for a while, certainly. We have been told to purchase a television set and some video games if you wish to have them.”

  “A TV would be good,” Rinker said. “I don’t need the games. Can I prop myself up?”

  “You can, but I promise you, it’s better to lie flat,” the woman said. Then she said, “My name is Rayla. My husband is Geoffrey. He will be back soon, and we’ll go to Best Buy for the television.”

  “Could I get water?”

  “Oh, my goodness, yes, I forgot,” Rayla said, jumping up. “Would you like juice? We have papaya, mango . . . Would you like a fish sandwich?”

  “Do you have an Internet connection?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  GEOFFREY WAS A charming man, but she could never quite figure out how old he was: something between twenty-five and forty-five, she thought. He had a smooth brown oval face and a soft manner that fit well with a doctor, but not so well as an accomplice to major crime. They never talked about crime, though he knew who she was, and called her “Clara” rather than Cassie. He said that the costs of her care had been “fully funded.”

  He brought in a television with a DVD player, and for three days she watched TV and thought about things. On the fourth day, she made her first trip away from the bedpan, to the toilet, where she learned how hard it was for a woman to pee while sitting on one buttock and holding the other one carefully clear. Everything got squished together.

  On the sixth day, she started a rehab program that featured five colors of rubber tubing that Geoffrey brought home from the hospital. She had to stretch against the rubber tubes, and could barely move the thinnest size. After a week, when she was feeling stronger and the thinnest tube wasn’t stiff enough, he moved her to the next size, and again, he could barely move her leg. . . .

  As she waited to heal, and practiced walking, she watched TV and roamed the Internet and thought about things some more.

  She thought about Paulo and the baby. The recovery process was quicker, easier than the recovery in Mexico, but the smells and the pain brought Paulo back, and the baby . . .

  She thought about those bad years, the years she’d always tried to blank out, when her brother and her stepfather were abusing her. Abusing her and comparing notes on how well she’d done.

  She’d run away, and she’d tried dancing nude, and she’d been raped by a fat man and she’d killed that man with a T-ball bat, and then she’d been picked up by John Ross, who’d taught her to kill for money, and she’d saved her money and had bought a bar and had been successful and had gone to college to try to understand herself. . . .

  She’d learned about herself in school. She might have avoided all this, if the killing hadn’t been so easy and profitable. She never thought about the dead people, she only thought about the money. It had seemed like her right to kill, after all that had happened to her.

  Then Davenport.

  She’d feared the federal people, in a theoretical way, like you fear dying in a plane accident. Ross and his friends had heard rumors that there was a file on her, but that the file was almost empty.

  Then Davenport had come along, and somehow had screwed everything. She’d lost her bar, lost
a friend, almost lost her life. She’d been driven to Mexico and the disaster that followed. Nothing theoretical about Davenport.

  She didn’t cry about it. She might have, but she didn’t.

  She set her jaw, and she thought about Davenport.

  She knew something about him. One solid fact.

  She’d have to heal before she did anything. But she had time—five and a half weeks, to be exact. A Saturday in October.

  Davenport was the devil, and had to be dealt with.

  26

  THE BRIDE WAS BLUSHING IN WHITE AND big as a house, and finally said she had to go off to the bathroom to get the goddamn leg strap right. Sloan, Lucas’s oldest friend on the police force, leered at her and said, “So you show a little leg. You’re among friends.”

  She said, “Don’t hold your breath, pervert-boy,” and went off into the back, shouting over her shoulder, “And don’t start without me.”

  Lucas, waiting at the back of the church, pulled at the collar of his dress shirt, plucked at his tie. Del had been in the—What’d he call it? The nave? The main part of the church—drinking what Lucas hoped was a cream soda. Now he came up and asked, “Nervous?”

  “Of course I’m fuckin’ nervous, what’d you think?” Lucas snapped. Then, quickly, “Sorry. I’m not sure this is gonna work out. I thought about it all night. I was one inch from canceling the whole thing.” He looked at his watch and said, “One minute. Where’s that fuckin’ Marcy?”

  Sloan said, “She just went down to the can,” and Lucas said to Del, “I met this guy down in St. Louis who told me about this time he had to wear a tux and it kept dragging his Jockey shorts up the crack of his ass, and I swear to God, right now . . .”

  Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police, went by and said, “I think I’m more nervous than you are.”

  Lucas grinned at her, a tight grin. “If I was losing my job next week, I’d be nervous too. What if something happens and queers the deal with the state?”

  “One big lawsuit, that’s what would happen.”

  Del prompted him, “The guy’s shorts kept dragging up his ass. . . .”

  Lucas tried to pick it up, and said, “Yeah, and he said . . .”

  Swanson, an old homicide dick, came by and said, “This is the most fucked-up wedding I’ve ever been to, and my wife’s family is a bunch of Polacks.”

  “Thank God your wife isn’t,” Sloan said.

  “Where in the fuck is the bride?” Lucas snarled.

  Tom Black, a semicloseted gay homicide detective, came out of the nave and said, “Look at the women in there. They’re having a great time. They’re gonna be breaking out in fistfights.”

  “If you couldn’t get laid at this wedding, you couldn’t get laid,” Del said. Then he glanced sideways at Rose Marie and said, “No offense.”

  “No problem,” the chief said, taking a drag on a fresh Marlboro. “Cuts both ways.”

  “Where’s that fuckin’ Sherrill?” Lucas barked. “Christ . . . what?”

  “Your earpiece is hanging down your neck,” Sloan said.

  “Thing is covered with somebody else’s ear wax,” Lucas said, looking at the earpiece. He plugged it in, and saw Marcy Sherrill coming.

  “Where in the hell . . . ?”

  “Gun wasn’t working out. I thought I’d hold it like this, like a little black clutch purse,” she said, holding her revolver in both hands.

  “Like you’re gonna need that,” Lucas said. Then he turned, and shouted into the nave. “All right, people, we’re gonna do this. Everybody sit tight, unless you’re part of the porch group.”

  Then, to the people gathered around him: “Everybody ready, porch people? Porch people? Let’s do it. Reverend, lead the way.”

  Del put down the bottle of what Lucas hoped was cream soda, adjusted his choir robe, picked up a cigar box, which everybody agreed looked a lot like a Bible—the prayer books had been locked up by some mistake—and led the way through the church’s double doors. Marcy, all in bridal white, her revolver clutched like a purse, put her arm through Lucas’s arm, pulled it tight, and said, “I always dreamed of this day,” and Lucas said, “Enjoy it while it lasts. Man, you look like fuckin’ Moby Dick.”

  “You look a little like Shamu the killer whale, yourself,” she said. “I think it’s the black and white that does it.”

  THE TROUBLE IN St. Louis seemed almost like a dream. Treena Ross had been indicted for her husband’s murder, and the local cops had chased down every story of an injured woman that they could find. Three days after Ross went down, Lucas returned to the Twin Cities, and the whole episode drifted off into the past, another complicated memory, mostly bad.

  Weather had been happy to get him back. The wedding planning had been completed, the invitations ordered, and the house had taken a big step toward completion. Getting through daily life pushed aside any speculation about Clara Rinker, though Lucas was careful not to pattern himself.

  Clara, he thought, would come, sooner or later. He’d half expected her to call, as she had after their last collision, but she hadn’t. The silence intensified his apprehension.

  RINKER SAT BEHIND the wheel of the red Jeep Cherokee and looked across the valley at the front of the church, a half-mile away. A beautiful view, she thought, in the brilliant sunlight, with the pale blue skies: the white, New England–style village church sitting on the edge of the valley, surrounded by maple trees in blazing orange fall foliage, with strips of yellow aspen above and below the clutch of maple around the church.

  A place to get married, she thought. They’d been in there for a while. She looked at her watch. Forty minutes, now. What were they doing? Maybe they’d written long vows or something.

  As she was thinking that, the church doors popped open and a man stepped out into the sunshine, and then two more, a woman in white . . .

  “Go,” she grunted. She pulled the Cherokee out of the notch in the trees and turned down the narrow blacktopped street. There was another notch a hundred and fifty yards out from the front of the church, but on a busier street. She wouldn’t have been able to wait. As it was, she was taking a risk. She’d wrapped the rifle in a blanket, and she’d simply pull over to the side of the road as if she were having a problem, and then she’d walk back into the line of bushes and take her shot and drop the rifle and go.

  HER BACKUP CAR was a half-mile away. She’d be in the second car and traveling in a few seconds more than one minute after she fired the shot. She’d timed it. She’d done all her research. She’d monitored the Star-Tribune on the Net, had found Davenport’s wedding announcement, along with a couple of pieces in the local gossip columns. She’d confirmed it with the church, and then had scouted the church. And above the church, she found a sniper’s nest, as though it had been created for that specific purpose.

  The only little piece of dissonance was that she thought she remembered Davenport saying that the wedding would be in an Episcopalian church, and this one was a Lutheran. But maybe she mis-remembered. Besides, it had all been confirmed.

  Now it was all coming together. The shooting point was just up ahead, a stand of oaks next to the guardrail over the valley. She jerked the car to the curb, hopped out, grabbed the blanket, and carried it past a bush to the steel barrier that overlooked the creek at the bottom of the slope. She could still be seen from the road, but again, she’d have to be unlucky. . . .

  She was moving fast now, looking at the penguins on the porch step, the guys in black and white, standing stiffly beside the woman in white at the center, and the priest.

  She lifted the rifle and slipped the safety and pulled down on the porch.

  RINKER NEVER FELT death coming for her.

  She never felt pain, never saw a shining light leading her away.

  Death came without a whisper, and she was gone.

  27

  MARCY REACHED UP AND TAPPED HER earpiece and Lucas looked at her, irritated, and said, “It’s not . . .” and then other radio people
began shouting a weird mishmash of language. Everybody with an earpiece looked up at the valley wall into the notch and saw a green coat and then heard the shot, a hard, sharp WHAP.

  Then silence, and then a lone man’s voice in the earpiece, harsh but steady: “She’s down. Rinker’s down.”

  LUCAS COULD HARDLY believe it. He gaped at the hole in the trees, the sniper’s nest so carefully cultivated, and saw people running toward it, people with guns. Then Black began yelling something, and they all ran for their cars—or waddled, in the case of Lucas, Sherrill, and Del, who were wrapped in body armor.

  Sloan drove Lucas’s Tahoe, and Lucas, in the backseat, pulled off his jacket and shirt and struggled out of the armor. Marcy was saying, “Goddamnit, undo me, undo me.”