Certain prey

Chapter Eighteen

Black canceled a date and climbed into the back of Sherrill's Mazda with a pepperoni pizza and a bag of hot nacho cheese crackers.

Sherrill said, 'You're a cruel fuck. If I ate any of that stuff, it'd go right straight to my thighs.'

'So don't eat it. Concentrate on other things. Flowers. Small children,' Black said.

'I'm having a hard time concentrating. With my future husband on his way up to. ..'

'… slip a little English bacon to Carmel Loan.'

'You're so crude. And whatever he's got in there, I doubt that it resembles bacon.'

'You mean, in stripes, or in flatness?'

She giggled: 'God, I love talking dirty with you. It's so jock-like, so…'

She couldn't think of a word; through the plate glass doors of Carmel Loan's building, they could see Hale Allen's back as he signed into the building. Then a short redhead came around the corner from the elevators, into the lobby, and

Sherrill said, 'Here comes… nope.'

The redhead walked past Allen, giving him the once-over, pushed through the glass doors, looked left and right, put her hands deep in the pockets of her black sport coat, and headed down the block. Inside, Allen walked away from the security desk and around the corner to the elevators.

As they watched them, a patrol car pulled in behind the Mazda and the red lights began to flash. 'Ah, man,' Sherrill said, looking in her rear-view mirror. The loudspeaker on the cop car blared, 'Drop your car keys out the passenger window.

Now.'

Instead of dropping her keys out of the window, Sherrill held her badge case out. After a minute, the flashing lights stopped, and the driver of the cop car approached from the back, shining a flashlight on the badge case. Sherrill pushed the door open, dropped her feet to the street, looked at the cop and said, 'What the fuck are you doing?'

'What are you doing?'

'I'm on a goddamn stakeout. I was on a goddamn stakeout,' Sherrill said. 'Now

I'm in a goddamn comedy routine.' People had stopped up and down the street, to watch.

'Well, jeez, we're sorry.' The cop looked around at the audience and flapped his arms helplessly. 'You shoulda told somebody, instead of just lurking around here. The doorman called. He said you'd been here for hours.'

Sherrill could see the doorman in Carmel's building peering at them through the lobby window. 'Yeah, well: now I'm gonna drive around the block and park again,' she said. 'And I'm telling you. Stay away from me or I swear to Christ, I'll shoot you.'

The cop peered in the back window and said, 'Hi, Tom.'

'Hi. Want some nachos?'

'Nah. Give me heartburn… so you're gonna go around the block?'

'Yeah.'

'Well. Be cool.'

Sherrill started the car, and they rolled away, Black laughing in the back. Then

Sherrill started: 'God, I love police work.'

Two minutes later, they were back on watch, Black still relaxed in the back and even deeper into the nachos. 'How you been?' he asked through a mouthful of chips and cheese. 'Since you and Davenport?'

'I miss him. A lot,' she said.

'He's an asshole. Sorta.'

'I miss him anyway,' she said. 'Besides, while I agree he's an asshole, he's not an asshole like you think he is.'

'Oh, I think I know.'

'Just 'cause you're queer doesn't mean you know. You're still a guy.'

Black contemplated the statement, formulated a reply, ate the chips as he worked at it: carefully formulated replies were necessary in the stakeout business. You could sit for hours, and you didn't want to run out of stuff to talk about – or piss off your partner – too soon.

'Let me tell you my theory of queerness as relates to the straight male,' Black said. And he did, and after a while – ten minutes – Sherrill said, 'I never would have thought of any of that.'

'You're not gay.'

'It's not that. It's just that I couldn't have come up with such an utter crock of shit.'

Black put a final three nachos in his mouth and settled back to formulate another reply. Before he got a good paragraph together, Sherrill said, 'Here they come – and Jesus Christ. Look at that dress.'

Black peered over the sill of the back window. Allen and Carmel stepped out through the glass doors, Allen wore a dark jacket that Black suspected was lightweight cashmere; tan, expensive-looking slacks; and loafers. Carmel was in a shocking, low-cut red party dress and red shoes.

'Nice dress,' Black said.

'Nice? A little gaudy, don't you think? And her tits are about coming out.'

'I don't know,' he said. 'Color is always good in clothing. And skin display is nice, in the summer.'

'Don't give me the fag act. Look at her. She's like a billboard.'

'All right. She's obviously a tart,' Black said.

'Thank you. Not nearly fine enough to aspire after the lovely Hale.'

'And she certainly doesn't have your tits.'

'You don't think?'

'Marcy, you've probably got the third-best tits in

Minneapolis. Davenport says sixth best, and of course, he would know from first hand observation, while Sloan says second best – I don't know about Sloan's qualifications…'

'He has none, and shut up, we're going.'

'Let me get my Big Gulp off the floor… Ah, shit.'

Rinker missed the foul-up with the squad car; she'd already turned the corner, and was headed back to her hotel to pick up her car. She felt heavy as she went.

She might have to kill the two of them, the mother and daughter. Might have to.

And that felt wrong. These were people who'd never had a chance; they weren't people who'd screwed up somehow, had gotten too stubbornly close to something that was bad for them… It was like all that gang-banger talk years ago, of mushrooms popping up in the line-of-fire. This mother and daughter were essentially mushrooms, and Rinker had always thought of herself more as a surgeon than as a gang-banger… She'd have to do this right.

Carmel and Hale Allen went to a club called The Swan, which had a twelve-piece orchestra and a blonde chick singer with a voice like buttermilk, and danced.

Old-style dances, cheek to cheek, hand in the middle of the back. Carmel could reach Hale's earlobe with her tongue, which she did every few minutes, and which had a profound effect on him. After the third dance, he growled, 'Let's get out of here.'

'No,' she said, in her best cat voice. 'You've got to be patient.'

Sherrill and Black watched from a balcony seat as Allen and Carmel moved around the dance floor, stopping now and then to talk with friends; all of the friends,

Sherrill decided, had a certain slickness that she disliked. She mentioned it to

Black.

'I think they teach you that in law school,' Black said.

'Hey, I know some pretty nice lawyers.'

'So now we're gonna be sincere?'

'No, I was just wondering. There's this subset of people who look slick. See?

Look at the guy in the white coat, and the woman he's with. Slick.'

'They spend too much time looking at themselves, without being professionals,'

Black said. 'Professionals – actors – can look perfect, and look right at the same time. These guys try to look perfect, and they just look slick.'

'Much more of this surveillance chit-chat and I'll throw up.'

Rinker scouted the Davis' neighborhood, saw nothing at all. Of course, if it were a trap of some kind, the cops might be in an apartment across the street or up the stairs and she'd never know until they were kicking down the doors.

But it didn't feel that way; it didn't have the creepy close feeling of movies, when a guy was in hiding. And somehow, she thought, it would feel that way.

There'd be that peculiar stillness of the moment when you hide in somebody else's house, and they walk in… and they know. She didn't feel that here.

Rinker had taken two FedEx boxes from a FedEx stand, and taped them together.

She left the car a block from the Davis apartment – she noted the lights under the window shades, so somebody was home -and walked back, carrying the box. A guy was following his dog down the other side of the street, paying no attention to her.

Rinker turned in at the house, jogged up the stoop, and stepped inside the entry and stopped. She could hear a stereo from up the stairs, nothing from the back, from the Davis apartment. She moved closer to the Davis door, listened. The rhythm of voices – or one voice, a woman's voice. She glanced around, took the pistol out of her belt and stuck it under her left arm, pinned to her side. She knocked once.

The rhythm of the voices stopped, and she heard footsteps. The door opened on a chain, and a woman peeked out. 'Yes?'

'We got a FedEx upstairs for you, the guys did. They forgot to bring it down, so

I did.' Rinker said cheerfully. She bounced the box in her hand. The woman didn't hesitate, said, 'Oh, thanks. Just the minute,' and pushed the door shut and began to work the chain. Rinker quickly stooped and put the box on the floor, then reached up and pulled the nylon down over her face, pulling it down like a condom.

The woman opened the door and the pistol was there, pointing at her head, and Rinker whispered, harshly, 'Step back or I'll kill you.'

Jan Davis, stricken, hand at her face, eyes wide, stepped back. 'Please don't hurt us.'

Rinker kicked the box into the apartment, pushed the door shut, and rasped, 'If a cop comes in now, I'll start shooting and we'll all be dead. Are the cops watching this place?'

Davis's head was wagging back and forth, a no, and a little girl called out,

'Mom? Who's that?'

'Get her out here,' Rinker said, flicking the tip of the pistol toward the bedroom door.

'You're the…'

'Yeah. I've never killed a kid in my life, and I hope I never have to. But you gotta get her out here. Then I'm gonna ask you two questions, and I'm gonna tell you something – if you answer the questions right -and then I'm gonna leave.'

'You're going to kill us…"

'Mom?'

'If I were gonna kill you, I wouldn't be wearing a mask,' Rinker said. 'Now get her out here.'

Davis stared for another moment, then said, 'Heather, honey? C'mere, honey.'

The girl stuck her head out of a bedroom a minute later. She was wearing yellow underpants and a yellow shirt, and was carrying a Curious George monkey doll.

'Mom?'

'C'mere, honey.' Davis backed toward her daughter, groping for her hand. The girl looked at

Rinker and said, 'Did you kill those people?' Her eyes were as wide as her mother's had been.

Her mother said, 'Shhh,' and Rinker said, 'Here's the first question. What did you tell the police about the people you saw in the hallway?'

Davis glanced down at the girl and then back at Rinker: 'They had pictures. We didn't tell them anything, because Heather didn't see anything. She couldn't even make one of those drawing pictures.'

'Did the police talk to anybody upstairs?'

"They talked to everybody in the house, but nobody saw anything. Everybody's been talking to everybody, but nobody even saw you and… the other person.. . leaving. Nobody saw…'

'Nobody.'

'No.' Davis shook her head, and Rinker was struck with the straightforwardness of it. She looked at the little girl.

'And what did you do, little girl?'

Heather told her: how she went to the police station, how she tried to make a drawing, but she didn't know any faces. They showed her pictures, but she didn't know them. As she spoke, she stood up tall, with her feet together, as if she were a Marine standing at attention. And Rinker suddenly knew that the child understood what was happening. That she was talking for her life. Rinker suddenly teared up, and said to Davis, 'Send her back to the bedroom.'

'Go, honey.'

'You come too, Mom,' Heather said, pulling at her mother's hand.

'I've got to talk to this lady,' Davis said, and the fear lay right on the surface of her eyes. Heather saw it as clearly as did Rinker.

'Don't worry, kid, I'm not going to hurt anybody,' Rinker said. 'We've just got to have some grownup talk.'

'I've heard grownup talk before,' the girl said.

Rinker looked down at her. All right; she probably had. She looked back at the mother: 'You don't tell anybody I was here. You could actually provide them with a little more information about me -how tall I am, what my voice sounds like. I couldn't tolerate that. If you do that, if you tell anyone I was here, I'll come back and kill you. And if they kill me first, then one of my associates will come here and kill you, because they'll feel like they've got to make the point.

And they won't let you go. They don't give a shit about people like you. Do you understand?'

The vulgarity, the shit, hung in the air between them, and lent Rinker's speech authority – a killer's authority – and Mom nodded dumbly. 'We'll never tell.

Honest to god, we'll never tell,' Jan Davis said.

'Go sit on the couch,' Rinker said. 'Don't get up for five minutes, no matter how much you want to. I'm going to walk out of the house, and I don't want you to see my car.'

Mom nodded again, and pulled the child across the living room to the couch, and they sat down.

Rinker stepped back to the door, stopped, brought the pistol up, and fired a single shot. A photograph of Davis, in earlier years, with two other women, fell off the wall, a perfect pencil thick hole punched through the glass and Davis' eyeball, in the photo.

'Absolute and complete silence,' Rinker whispered.

And she was gone.

Out the door, down the stoop, up the street, in the car. And she breathed out.

'Let's go home,' Black said. 'They're gonna be here all night.'

'Best time to pull something is about five o'clock in the morning,' Sherrill said, but she yawned.

'Yeah, and if we really think that, we should put a twenty-four-hour watch on them. But we can't do twenty-four hours ourselves. I'm so fuckin' bored, I can't think, and the back of my boxer shorts is about five inches up my ass because

I've been sitting here too long.'

'Take a walk,' Sherrill said.

'I'd get mugged.'

'Not in this neighborhood…'

'By the goddamn security patrol. You see those guys? Would you give those guys a gun?'

'All right.' Sherrill sighed and turned the key, cranked the car. 'There's gotta be something else we can do. I can't believe we sat in this car for eight hours and never came up with a decent idea.'

'There's nothing left. If Carmel did it, and I'm not giving you that… she's gonna walk.'

Jan Davis lay in bed, all night, barely closing her eyes. She fought down an impulse to flee to her parents' home in Missouri – she wouldn't be completely welcome, since the divorce. Her parents had liked Howard better than they liked her, she thought, feeling alone and isolated. Besides, she'd seen the Godfather movies, and she knew about these people, the Mafia. Running wouldn't help: they'd get you anywhere. She decided to stick to routine.

Heather had been going to day school all summer, getting a head start on first grade. Davis had hoped against hope that somehow, in the morning, Heather would have forgotten what happened the night before. But she hadn't – she looked like she'd gotten as little sleep as her mother.

'Should I go to school?' she asked, first thing.

'Yes. We are going to forget what happened last night. That was a bad dream.'

Davis tried to be cheery; but it wasn't working.

'Is she going to come back and hurt us?'

'No, no, no, nothing is going to happen. Let's just pretend that nothing happened, nobody came.'

'But the lady came.'

Davis wanted to shake her. Wanted to scream at her, wanted to impress her with the danger, but didn't know how. 'Heather, listen: that was a very bad lady.

Very bad. We have to pretend that she wasn't here. We have to pretend that she was a bad dream. Remember the bad dream you had about

Mrs. Gartin chasing you? We have to forget it, just like we forgot the dream about Mrs. Gartin.'

'I didn't forget that dream,' Heather said solemnly. 'I just told you I did.'

'But you don't have it any more.'

'No…' She ate cornflakes.

And before she could bring the subject back to Rinker, Davis said, 'I'm supposed to see your father this afternoon.'

Heather looked up from the cornflakes. 'Is he going to come to see me?'

'Not this afternoon, I don't think. This is business. But I'll tell him you'd like it if he came over.'

'Okay. Do you think he'll come…'

And the talk went that way. All the way to school, Davis looked for trailing cars, looked for short women with red hair, looked for those small competent hands, but she didn't see anybody exactly like that. And Heather never mentioned the bad lady, not once, all the way to school.

Mrs. Gartin's School took children from three to six, and taught them letters and numbers and shapes and colors, music, and phonics for the older children.

Mrs. Gartin and her two associates tried to keep the little boys from beating each other and victimizing the little girls, and encourage the little girls to socialize.

At the back of the big kids' room – Mrs. Gartin never even saw it any more, just another blob in the background – was Officer Friendly's full-size, standup cut out, sponsored by Logan's Rendering Co. Officer Friendly's telephone number was on the front of the poster. Officer Friendly had visited the school, and talked to them about being careful, about bad men and women, and how the police were there to help children. He left behind the cutout.

Heather saw his picture every day, and this day, summoning all her intentness of purpose, she went into Mrs. Roman's cubbyhole when the rest of the class followed Mrs. Roman out to recess, and called the number. She'd called her Mom several times, and knew about dialing nine.

Officer Friendly, whose real name was Dick Ennis, was something of a drunk ('Not an alcoholic,' he said. 'Alcoholics go to meetings.'), and was late to work more than half the time; not that anybody cared. And mostly, when he was sober, he was a pretty good Officer Friendly. For one thing, he liked kids, and had several of his own by two ex-wives. For another, he'd been a decent street cop.

In any case, he'd just arrived at his office, put his sack lunch in his desk drawer, and had turned to go for coffee when the phone rang. He dropped into his chair and picked it up.

Heather said, 'Is this Officer Friendly?'

And Ennis said, 'Yes, it is. Can I help you?' He thought the little girl on the other end of the line might be five years old.

'Yes. A bad lady came to my house and scared my Mom and me.'

'Uh-huh. Who is this? What is your name?'

'This is Heather Davis. My phone number is…'

Smart kid, Ennis thought, as he scribbled down the number. 'Okay, Heather, how did the bad lady scare your Mom and you?'

'She had a gun and she had a mask that she pulled down over her face, and she said if we told anybody, she would come and kill us. And she shooted a picture of my mom. And now my Mom is scared to tell anybody.'

Ennis sat up, his forehead wrinkled. 'When did this happen?'

'Last night when it was dark.'

'Nobody called a policeman?'

'No. Some policeman came to see us, but they went away. Then this lady came and told us not to talk to any more policeman. Ever.'

'Some policemen came to see you? Do you remember who they were?'

'One was a man and one was a woman,' the girl said.

'Do you remember their names? Either one?'

'Yes.'

'Could you tell me what they were?' His own small children had taught him patience.

'One was named Mr. Davenport, and one was named Miss Sherrill.'

'Jesus Christ,' Officer Friendly said.