Certain prey

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 amp;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 would 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 Malone.

'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.'

Malone glanced at him, a thin line forming between her eyes; it disappeared in a half-second, and she said, 'So why don't we meet back here in a half hour?'

Lucas got back to Mallard's room a few minutes before Malone; when she got back she was wearing black slacks and a soft black jacket over a sheer blouse.

Beneath the blouse, Lucas thought, she was wearing a frilly black bra; and to the left, under the jacket, he could still pick out the slightly lumpy form of the semi-auto. Going out the door, Malone went first, and Lucas got the finest possible whiff of something exotic; something cool and icy.

Malone got to the front passenger door first;

Mallard got in the back. Malone looked at all the lights on the dashboard and doors and steering wheel and asked, 'How come small-town cops get cars like these, and we get Tauruses?'

'Because we fight government corruption at every turn,' Mallard said.

'Minneapolis is bigger than D.C.,' Lucas said.

Malone made a rude noise, and Mallard said, 'Stop it.' On the way downtown,

Lucas spotted a Wichita cop car sitting at a corner and pulled in ahead of it.

Mallard asked, 'What're you doing?' and Lucas answered, 'Research.'

He got out of the car carrying his badge case and when the cop in the driver's seat rolled down the window, Lucas flipped open the case and said, 'Hey guys -

I'm a cop from up in Minneapolis going through with a couple of friends. We're looking for a bar or cocktail lounge, you know, something decent?'

The driver took Lucas' badge case and studied the ID for a minute, grunted,

'Deputy chief, huh?' then handed it back and looked at his partner. 'Really aren't many places to talk… What do you think? The Rink?'

'Be about the best,' the partner said. 'Four blocks straight ahead to the second light, take a right, about four or five more blocks down. The Rink.'

'Great,' Lucas said, straightening up. 'Buy you guys one, if we're still there when you get off.'

'Thanks, but we're working the overnight,' the driver said. 'Say, let me ask you this. What's your base pay up there, in Minneapolis?'

They talked about salary, vacation and sick-leave policy for a couple of minutes, then Lucas walked back to the 740, climbed inside, tripped the hood latch, got out, slammed the hood, got back in and they drove to the Rink.

Rinker was standing behind the bar, reading a register tape, when Lucas walked in. She was so utterly astonished that she showed nothing at all, as though she'd been hit in the forehead with a hammer. When she recovered, after a full five seconds, she noticed that he was with a woman who looked like a lawyer and a dry-faced, thick-necked man who might be an academic; or maybe a college wrestling coach.

She turned away from them and walked down the bar and into the back, where she could stand behind a pane of one-way glass.

'Something going on?' one of the kitchen boys asked, picking up her rapt attention.

'Guy walked in, I thought he might be an old boyfriend from a very long time ago,' Rinker said.

'Which guy?'

'Finish the freezer,' she said.

'Just askin'.'

She watched Lucas for ten minutes, and finally decided that he wasn't interested in the bar: if he'd come here for her – and what other reason could he have for being here? – he certainly wasn't looking for her. He was putting a little light bullshit on the lawyer woman, Rinker decided, and the lawyer liked it.

Rinker wondered what would happen if she simply walked out into the bar. Would he jump up and bust her? Were there other cops closing in on the bar, or stationed outside? If he was here on business, why was he drinking beer and bullshitting the woman? Was he that good?

She broke away from the glass and walked rapidly back through the kitchen to the flight of stairs that went up to her small office. The office had been built under the roof of what had originally been a one-story building, so the ceiling slanted and it had windows going out only one end of the building. Looking out, she couldn't see anything unusual -nobody in the streets, no cars with men lurking inside.

But it wouldn't be that way, anyway, she thought. If they were coming for her, they'd probably wait until they could get her on the sidewalk, alone, or at her home. They wouldn't walk into a bar and risk a Shootout in a place full of bystanders…

Rinker had a long couch at the end of the office, and she sometimes napped on it. Now she lay down, closed her eyes, and tried to work it out. She could only find one answer: that somebody had given her up. Somebody who knew where she lived. She'd told Carmel that she went to Wichita State, so Carmel knew where she lived, but not her name, or about the bar. But if Carmel had given her up, then they'd know almost everything, and they would have come in hard.

She had to call Carmel, she thought. But not from here…

And right now, maybe she'd walk out on the floor, talk to some people. If they were planning to jump her, she was dead meat anyway. And if they weren't, maybe she could learn something.

Rinker's bar had two major rooms, one for drinking and talking, and the second for drinking and dancing. The dance floor was polished maple, taken from a bankrupt karate studio, and probably the best dance floor in any bar in Wichita; all surrounded by deep-backed booths upholstered in naugahyde. When Davenport and his friends arrived, the band – live music on weekends – had been taking a break. They were setting up for their third and final set when Rinker cruised through.

She worked all the booths around the dance floor, talking with people she knew or had often seen in the bar, mostly under-40s white-collar; the band played soft rock and cross over country. She bought a beer for a guy who'd walked away from a car wreck earlier in the day, and for a couple who were out for the first time since a kid was born. She listened to a guy-walks-into-a-bar joke:

Guy walks into a bar, and the bartender says, 'Boy, I didn't expect to see you today, after last night – you were really bummed out'And the guy says, 'I was so bummed out that I went home and looked in my medicine cabinet. I had a big bottle of a thousand aspirins in there, and I decided to kill myself by taking them all at once.' The bartender says, 'So what happened?'And the guy says,

'Well, after the first two, I didn't feel so bad.'

She laughed and tracked Davenport between the heads of the dancers, who were just moving out on the dance floor again as the band cranked into a country dance piece. Davenport was in a front-room booth, facing her through the smoky atmosphere. He was paying no attention to her at all, or to anybody else in the bar, as far as she could tell. He was a good-looking guy, in a hard way, just starting to get a little grey around the temples. She drifted toward him.

Lucas was laying a very mild hustle on Malone, while Mallard tried to steer the conversation back to police work. Malone didn't want to know about police work, but when Lucas suggested that they dance, she said, 'I don't dance like that.'

'Is that a philosophical position?'

'I just don't dance to rock or country. I never learned. I can foxtrot; I can waltz. I can't do that kind of boppity… you know.'

'Too self-conscious,' Lucas said. He was about to go on when a woman stopped at the table and said, 'You all doing all right here?'

'All right,' Lucas said, looking up at her. She wasn't a waitress. 'Who're you?'

'I'm the owner, Clara. Making sure that everybody's being treated right.'

'Good bar,' Lucas said. 'You oughta open another one like it, up in

Minneapolis.'

'You're from Minneapolis?'

'I am,' Lucas said. 'These folks are from back east.'

'Glad to have you in Wichita/ Rinker said. She started to step away, but Malone, who'd perhaps had one more beer than she was accustomed to, said, 'Your band doesn't play waltzes, does it?'

Rinker grinned and said, 'Why, no, I don't believe they do, honey. You wanna waltz?'

'This guy's got the urge to dance,' Malone said, pointing at Lucas with her long-neck, 'And I can't dance to rock. Never learned.'

'Well, you oughta,' Rinker said. She looked quickly around the bar and then said to Lucas, 'I'm not doing anything at the minute, and I like dancing. You want to?'

They were dancing for five seconds and Lucas realized he was out of his depth.

'You're a dancer, a professional,' he said, and Rinker laughed and said, 'I used to be, kinda.'

'Well, slow down, you're making me look bad. And I'm a lot older than you are.'

'Ah, you dance fine,' Rinker said, 'For a Minneapolis white guy.'

Lucas laughed and turned her around; she was good-looking, he thought, one of those tough-cookie smart blondes who'd been around a bit, liked a good time, and could run a spreadsheet like an accountant. Maybe was an accountant.

'Are you an accountant?' he asked.

'An accountant?'They were shouting at each other over the music. 'Why would you think that?' 'I don't. Just making up a story in my head.' 'A story? You're not a reporter, are you?' 'Nah, I'm a cop. Just going through. I stopped to talk to some friends.'

'You don't look like a cop. You look like a… movie guy, or something.'

'Flattery will get you everywhere,' Lucas shouted back.

She laughed, and they danced.

But late that night, an hour after the bar closed, Rinker climbed in her car and headed for Kansas City. She would not break the routine: she would not make a business call from Wichita. She arrived in KC in the early morning hours, pulled into a convenience store and started dropping coins in a pay phone. When she had enough, she dialed Carmel; and Carmel, sleep in her voice, answered on the second ring. The cell phone, Rinker thought, must have been on the bed stand.

'We've got another problem,' Rinker said.

'What's that?'

'I just gaily danced the night away with your friend and mine.. .' She let it hang.

'Who?'

'Lucas Davenport. Right here in River City.'

'Goddamnit,' Carmel said. She ripped off a piece of thumbnail, snapped at it; she could hear her own teeth grinding in the telephone earpiece. 'He's working on some kind of information. I don't know enough about you or your friends to know where it might be coming from…'

'It's more complicated than that,' Rinker said. 'He had no idea who I was. He must be there for something – I mean, what are the chances of a coincidence?

Zero? Less than zero, I'd say…'

'So would I.'

'He had no idea who I was,' Rinker repeated. 'I was hoping you might get something from your sources in the police department.'

'Not much chance,' Carmel said. 'My guy thinks of himself as a kind of harmless leaker of information that's gonna get out anyway. He really wouldn't tell me anything that he thought might get somebody hurt…'

'So maybe we need to put some pressure on him.'

'Listen to this: he did tell me that they keep coming back to me. Even my source is getting a little strange with me. He thinks Davenport's got something, and I think it has to do with that kid.'

'Damnit. Even if the kid told him something… oh, shit.'

'What?'

'Just had a thought. If the kid for some reason got the tag number on that rental car… I told you that I use fake credit cards and IDs to rent them. I told you about that?'

'Yeah. You keep the cards good by using them…'

'I've paid them from Wichita. I've been careful, but I've gotten bank drafts here to pay those bills.'

'You think?'

'I don't see how the kid could have gotten the number. It was dark, and she was back inside when we left, and we were way down the block.'

'Maybe it wasn't the kid. Maybe… wasn't there a guy on a bike?'

'From upstairs? Why would he take our tag number?' Rinker asked.

'I don't know. But that would explain a few things. Can you come up here?'

'Yeah. I'm in KC now. I'll be up there tomorrow.'

'Bring your… tools,' Carmel said. 'We may have to talk to somebody. And I gotta think about this. Maybe by the time you get here, I'll have some ideas.'