Certain prey

Chapter Seventeen

Lucas stayed in Wichita for two days, tracking 'Lopez and listening to the FBI taps. The longer he listened, the more convinced he became that Lopez was a small-time dealer, supplementing the flower shop take with a little side money.

The side money, Lucas decided, was going straight into his arm.

A woman named Nancy Holme, carried on Lopez' state tax forms as an employee, did virtually all the work, showing up early to take deliveries of fresh-cut flowers, staying late over a hot computer. Lopez would arrive sleepy, nod off at midday, and leave sleepy. The Feebs couldn't decide whether Holme was in on the game or not. She never took delivery of drugs. Lucas suggested that they look at her as the killer. They did, and rapidly concluded that she wasn't.

The night before he left for Minneapolis, Lucas, Malone and Mallard went back to the Rink. The woman he'd danced with, the owner, wasn't working, he was told.

'She's got to travel on business a couple of times a year, and this is one of those times. Too bad, she liked you,' a waitress told them, her over-active eyebrows semaphoring a tale of two ships passing in the night.

'A tragedy,' Malone said, when the waitress left with their orders. 'Davenport leaves another broken heart in a dusty western town.'

Rinker was in the Twin Cities. Carmel met her at the hotel, and at Rinker's direction, had ridden up three extra floors on the elevator, and had taken the stairs down to Rinker's floor. Rinker, when she let Carmel in, was wearing a black wig.

'How do I look? Mexican?' Rinker asked as she closed the door.

'You're too pale,' Carmel said. 'You could maybe make Italian.'

'I'll go back to the redhead, then,' Rinker said.

Carmel had been thinking about Davenport: 'Somehow, they're tracking you. And for some reason, they're pushing on me. I thought about your car, and the possibility that they're tracking it, but that doesn't seem likely. That would mean that they had to have two pieces of luck: to get onto Tennex, and to get the tag number. I don't believe it. What I'm wondering is, could they have found a connection with your St. Louis friends? Could they be squeezing somebody?'

'Only one guy in St. Louis knows exactly who I am and what I do, and there are maybe two more who suspect – a couple brothers who run a bar down there. And the brothers wouldn't know who you are. The one guy would… he knows your name.

He's the guy Rolo called.'

'My contact in the PD says that another detective, a woman named Sherrill, went down to St. Louis for a couple of days last week, and the word around the department is that she was talking to the St. Louis organized-crime guys,'

Carmel said.

'I don't know why my guy would be dealing me,' Rinker said, thinking about it for a moment. 'He takes a lot of power off me: you know, he's the guy who knows the finger of God, as you put it. The guy who can hook you up. And if I go down, he goes down.'

Carmel took a short turn around the hotel room, checked herself in a bureau mirror, turned back and said, 'Let me tell you something I learned as a lawyer: everybody will deal. Everybody. Have you ever heard of this new federal lockup in the Rockies?'

'No…'

'You gotta cement cell about half the size of this hotel room. It has a concrete bed platform and stainless steel sink and toilet fixtures in concrete stands. No bars, just a steel door and an unbreakable window that shows nothing but a rectangle of sky -you can't even see the sun. There's a black-and-white TV bolted in a corner. That's it. You're in there twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day, and you're monitored every minute. I've had a couple of clients try to commit suicide in there, and neither one made it -although one made it when they put him in a hospital after his second try. He tried to kill himself by standing against one wall and running full speed into the wall across the room, with his head down. He cracked his skull. He finally managed to kill himself in the hospital – this was his third try – rather than go back. You hear what I'm saying?'

'I'm not sure,' Rinker said.

'What I'm saying is, torture is alive and well in the United States of America,'

Carmel said. 'It just doesn't involve physical pain. It involves isolation, year after year of solitary… They could take your Mafia friend out there, show him through the place, let him talk to a couple of inmates, and he'd give you up.'

'But he hasn't,' Rinker said. 'Because if he had, they'd be on me like a hot sweat. But they're not. I swear to God, Davenport didn't have any idea who I was, and neither did the other cops. We danced, for God's sake.'

'That wasn't too great a move,' Carmel said.

'I had to find out if they were there for me – I couldn't stand it,' Rinker said. 'To tell you the truth…'

'What?'

'What if he's fated to find me? That's what scares me. I've got this guy I can't shake because it's my time.'

'Jesus, Pam, you gotta take a couple aspirins or something,' Carmel said. 'Lay down for a while. 'Cause, believe me, it's nothing like that.'

Rinker sighed, and let her shoulders slump. Carmel actually did make her feel better. She was so sure of herself. 'Okay.'

'So we still have the question, What do we do?' Carmel said. 'Davenport knows something. He's working off something. What could they have given him atTennex that put him in Wichita? Why is he pushing on me?'

'I don't know how he got to Wichita. I was a fanatic about being careful.'

'What about your Mafia friend? Even if he's not deliberately giving you up, is there any way he could have pointed them at Wichita?'

'Hmph.' Rinker had to think about it for a minute. 'I didn't let him call me there. He always came out to deliver the messages. But he's always on the telephone. If somehow they managed to sort out his calls while he was there…

I don't know. It sounds weak. I mean, he goes everywhere. Why would they focus on Wichita?'

'They've got all kinds of ways of doing those things – statistics,' Carmel said.

'I'd be willing to bet it's something like that, especially if Davenport didn't know who you were.'

'He didn't. I'm sure of that.'

They went over it several times, and finally Carmel said, 'You know, we're coming to the crunch, here. If Davenport's mining some kind of line of information, it might lead to you, or it might lead to me, or it might not. It's hard to put a case together. I'd say it's about fifty-fifty whether we should sit tight, or move somehow.'

'What move?'

'One possibility is, we could go talk to the kid, and the kid's mother. We could find out what they told the cops. Then we'd know about that angle.'

'What if it's a trap?'

'I don't think it is. I don't think any cop would put a kid in play, not when you're talking about professional killers,' Carmel said. 'If any cop would, it'd be Davenport – but I don't think even he would.'

'And you're saying that after we talk to them, we kill them? The kid and her mom?'

Carmel shrugged: 'If we have to.'

'We'd have to find some other way to do it. I'm not going to kill the kid – I've been thinking about it,' Rinker said. For the first time since they started meeting face-to-face, Carmel picked up the warning edge in Rinker's voice that she'd heard when they talked on the phone, when the problems began developing.

'Okay. But if you really think you're the finger of God… what's the problem?'

'I'm just not gonna kill that kid. Fuck the finger,' Rinker said.

'So we find a way not to kill them – not unless we absolutely have to,' Carmel said. 'You didn't kill that Marker woman in Washington. We should be able to figure something out.'

'You said going after the kid was one possibility. What's the other?'

'We could do something that would make it impossible for them to prosecute us, even if they figured out who we are,' Carmel said.

'How would we do that?' Rinker asked.

'I've been thinking about it, ever since you called,' Carmel said. 'I call it

Plan B.'

Plan B took a while to explain; Rinker was not so much appalled as amazed.

Lucas got back to Minneapolis late the next afternoon, dropped the BMW at the

Porsche dealership, sank into his own car with a sigh of relief, and headed downtown. He'd told Sherrill and Black when to expect him, and they were waiting in the Homicide office.

'Not so good?' Sherrill asked.

Lucas shook his head: 'He's not the guy. He's a small-time dope dealer.'

'But they still think he's the guy?'

'Mallard still thinks there's a chance. He's got a smart assistant named Malone, and Malone was ready to go back to Washington and start over,' Lucas said.

'Goddamnit,' Black said. 'Did you hear about the sniper?'

Lucas shook his head: 'What sniper?'

'Car got hit by rifle fire last night during rush hour. One car, one windshield, nobody hurt. Couldn't find a shooter, and we thought maybe it was an accident.

Then this afternoon, right at the start of the rush hour, a little after three, the guy came back. Two cars hit, a woman hit in the neck, she's in surgery. Some guy coming down the road behind her stuffed a wad of newspaper in the hole in her neck, probably saved her life. But the media's going batshit – the radio stations, all the drive-time guys. I mean, this is their audience being shot at…'

'So everybody's out?'

'Well, you know Sloan's working the Hmong thing and Swanson is still chasing down stuff on the Parker case; so people are making noises like taking us off

Allen. They say just a few days, but you know what that might mean

…'

'I'll talk to Rose Marie,' Lucas said. 'But the question is, what've we got to do? What's left that we haven't done?'

They all looked at each other, and finally, Sherrill shrugged. 'We were waiting for you to tell us.'

Lucas said, 'What're you doing tonight?'

'Nothing,' Sherrill said.

'Why don't you hang around and see if Carmel's going anywhere?' Lucas suggested.

'If we're gonna start tailing her, we're gonna need more than two guys,' Black said. 'They're gonna be hard to come by. Given the sniper and all that.'

'So we don't have a fulltime tail – just somebody hanging around. Maybe we get lucky.'

'Ah, Christ,' Sherrill said. 'I'll do it, but I have a feeling I'm gonna be pulling my weenie.'

Rinker brought a wig with her: she'd have big hair, Texas hair, when she went in. She'd wear jeans, gym shoes, rubber kitchen gloves, two pistols under a black sport jacket, a handkerchief and a nylon rolled up tight as a watch cap.

Carmel would be wearing a slinky bloody-red dress with spangles, matching red shoes and lipstick. 'How do I look?' she asked.

'You look terrific,' Rinker said, admiration riding in her voice. 'God, if I could look like that…'

'You're beautiful,' Carmel said.

'No, I'm not,' Rinker said. 'I'm cute. I look like I should be in the Playboy college issue, Duke University's Miss Perky Nipples.'

'Does Miss Perky Nipples carry. 22 Colt Woods-mans… would it be Woodsmans, or Woodsmen?'

'No, she probably wouldn't. I don't know the correct grammar, but I got two of them, and they were stolen fourteen years ago from a gunstore in Butte, Montana, and haven't seen the light of day since. I'm cool,'

Carmel nodded, 'You are cool.' She took a last look at herself in a full-length mirror, twirled and said, 'When I get that boy home tonight, I am going to fuck him rudely. Rudely.'

'Good luck,' Rinker said. 'I sorta wish I was… involved with somebody. It's been a while.'

'Is it hard to meet guys in Wichita?' Carmel asked, screwing on an earring clasp.

'It's hard for me,' Rinker said. 'You know, a gal who runs a bar? What kind of guys am I going to attract?' She answered her own question: 'Most of them have got a bottle of Jim Beam in the trunk…'

'Too bad you couldn't hook up with Davenport,' Carmel said, jokingly.

'He'd be a possibility,' Rinker admitted. 'He could be fun, in a big-galoot way.'

'Mean big-galoot,' said Carmel.

'I could see that,' Rinker said. 'I could feel it.' After a second, 'But he sorta… handles you. Moves you around. Touches you. Not feeling you up, or anything, but he's just… I don't know. All over the place.'

'If he sees you here, we're fucked,' Carmel said.

'Unlike when I saw him in Wichita,' Rinker said. Then: 'I thought about coming on to him a little, but that would've been… too much. Anyway, I don't expect to see him again the rest of my life.'

She picked up the first of the pistols, jacked a shell into the chamber, set the safety and slipped it into her gun girdle, under the jacket. Rinker looked at

Carmel. 'You ready?'