Certain prey

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.

The woman was small, dark-haired, olive-complected. She had a mole by the corner of her mouth, a notable mole, nearly black, and another one beside her nose. And she wore over-sized glasses, the kind that are supposed to turn dark in sunlight, but always made your eyes look yellow when you were indoors. She handed him a key and he took it, ran it through the file machine, found her card, and brought it to the counter for her to sign.

But she was no longer looking at him: she was looking at the television that the bank had screwed to the ceiling of the lounge area, where visitors waited while their spouses or friends went into the vault. The TV was permanently tuned to

CNN Headline News, which at that moment was showing the wreck of a bloody-red

Jaguar that had plowed halfway through a cement-block wall.

'Ma'am?' Ross said. 'Ma'am, can I help you?'

The woman apparently didn't hear him as she drifted closer to the TV, listening, looking up at it, her mouth half-open.

'Happened last night,' Ross said helpfully. He'd already seen the loop a dozen times. The ugly duckling watched until another story started, this one involving a dog getting oxygen from a fireman, then turned back to the counter. He dropped her from six ducklings to four: she had a really nice ass, like a gymnast's. She seemed dazed.

'Hope it wasn't somebody you knew,' Ross said.

'No, no. I just wish they wouldn't show so much violence on TV,' Rinker said.

She signed the card and pushed it across the desk at him. He noticed that her hand was trembling, and he hoped it wasn't some weird foreign disease.

Lucas had been patched up in the emergency room and sent home. The patching had been messy. A slug had burned through the skin on the side of his neck, leaving a groove, which was sewn closed. A fragment of lead – he'd been hit by a storm of ricochet fragments

– had pierced the skin on his skull, behind his right ear, but hadn't reached the bone; the fragment was removed with tweezers, and two stitches used to close the wound.

'Just like that Wooden Head guy,' Sherrill said happily. She'd cheered up a lot when the doctors said that he wasn't badly injured.

Another fragment had struck his hip, which also made Sherrill happy.

'Hit in the butt,' she said. 'Hip.'

'Looks like a big butt to me,' she said. 'Your hip is over here, on the side.'

More fragments were taken from his side and legs. To get at one, just over his kidney, the doc had to make an additional small cut. The wounds in his legs were all superficial, but nasty; three got stitches. When it was done, they gave him a sample pack of ibuprofen and told him not to play basketball that weekend.

'That's it?' he grumped. 'Don't play basketball?' 'Well, we also extend our deepest sympathy,' the doctor said.

Lucas got down from the examining table, put on his pants, tottered to the door.

'You know what hurts the most?' he asked Sherrill. 'I really dove into her apartment. She was blasting away and I really racked up my elbow and ribs. I'm gonna be sore for a week.' 'Better than the alternative,' she said.

He was sore for a week, and hobbled by the feeling that all the stitches were about to unravel. But the stitches came out on Thursday, and by Friday, when

Malone came to town with her FBI team, he was beginning to loosen up.

'No sign of Rinker,' Malone said. She was sitting in his visitor's chair, wearing a somber blue suit with a red necktie. 'But we'll get her.'

'I don't know,' Lucas said. 'She's smart, and she had nine or ten years to figure out how to hide. She could be here in the U.S., up in Canada, Australia,

India, the Caribbean, and with her Spanish, anywhere in South America. God only knows how much money she had by the end.'

'We put her out of business, anyway. I just wish I'd been here for the shootout with Carmel.'

'Really? Why?'

'I mean, if I coulda gotten wounded like you did… you know, not too bad, but go to the hospital…'

'Excuse me, but I think you left your brain out in the hall,' Lucas said.

'You're just an ignorant local cop,' Malone said. 'You know what it's worth to be an FBI agent wounded in the line of duty? And if you're a woman? My God, I'd be up there.'

'Like an under-assistant deputy director, or something.'

'At least,' she said. 'So… how're you feeling?' 'Not bad. I could probably manage a foxtrot, if somebody pressed me on it.'

'Consider yourself pressed,' she said.

On Monday, Sherrill went to the FBI office to make a statement. When she came back, she dropped into Lucas' visitor's chair and said, 'I just talked to

Malone.'

'Yeah?' He was peering into the thick black volume of the Equality Report. He was on page five-twenty-nine, less than a hundred to go. Pushing a boulder up a hill would have been a snap compared to the Report. 'Does she still think she's gonna catch Rinker?'

'I don't know exactly what she thinks,' Sherrill said. 'When I talked to her

Friday afternoon, she was like really quick, incisive. Executive – maybe that's the word I was looking for. Really tightly wound, you know?'

Lucas turned the page, kept reading.

'But this morning, I mean, she was a lot looser. Hair was a little messed up, you know – she actually giggled once. Lipstick wasn't quite straight.'

Now Lucas looked up. 'What?'

'Giggled. Like, girly-giggled. In fact, she looked like somebody who'd had her brains foxtrotted loose.'

'Detective Sherrill, aren't you in the middle of a case? I mean, I've got to read this report.'

'That's what I thought,' Sherrill said.

The commission had nine members: the chairman, a desperately fading politician named Bob, once known in the State House for his fine ethics, and viciously ridiculed in the same institution after he lost his seat to a twenty-six-year old spitballer; seven members of affected constituencies; and Lucas. After the routine Roberts Rules of Order opening, the meeting devolved into a nasty fight about whether adding to the list of minority or disability statuses would dilute the authority of prior assertions of those statuses… or that's what Lucas thought somebody said.

He wasn't sure. Passing through a bookstore earlier in the day, he'd discovered that Donald Westlake had revived the 'Richard Stark' Parker novels, and Lucas had Backflash buried in the pages of the Report. By the end of the meeting, he was more than halfway through, just finishing a chapter that ended with the word

Asshole. He agreed.

The night was straight out of a country-and-western song, one of those smooth warm evenings made for rolling around in a hay mow with a farm girl. Even the traffic seemed subdued, as though people had abandoned their cars to walk.

Lucas' neighborhood was quiet, with only occasional cars rolling along the boulevard between his house and the bluff that dropped to the Mississippi. As he pulled into the driveway, he realized that he needed milk and cereal, if he wanted to eat at home the next morning; and he'd noticed a slight puffiness around the waist that needed to be trimmed away, and eating in a diner wouldn't help that. He thought about it, and decided to leave the car in the driveway. He popped the door, swivelled, reached back to pick up the copy of the Report and the novel, started to climb out of the car…

And saw her coming.

She was coming fast, from the corner of the garage. And though it was dark and late, he knew exactly who she was. He could just make out her height, and the smooth way she moved, a small woman, like a dancer. She was handicapped by the car: she had to clear around it. She had expected him to drive inside, and then she would have had him trapped between the Porsche and the big Chevy Tahoe parked on the other side of the garage. But she was ready and he could see her hand up with her gun and he reached desperately for his. 45 and at the same time threw up the Report in front of his face and the explosions started, the night flashes.

He was going down as the Report came up, and the Report flew out of his hand of its own will and he concentrated on clearing his holster, which wasn't made for fast draws, concentrated on jacking the slide, and he triggered the first shot blindly. The shot went into the car at an upward angle and punched through the windshield. He hit the ground and rolled, fired again, still half-blindly, just trying to slow her down, to shake her, saw another flash, felt a slug pluck at his suit, fired at the flash, rolled back toward the car and fired under it at where he thought she was, sensed that she was moving, fired again…

She was running.

He could feel it, maybe hear it – later doubted that he could hear it; the gun blasts, which he hadn't heard at the time, must have been deafening – and he fired in the general direction she was running, the slug going through the front of the house.

Then he was after her, running through the wonderful warm night. She was dressed all in black, but he could see her, in the lights of the house windows and the porches, running crazily across his back yard, crashing through bushes, over a chain-link fence. He was running as hard as he could, handicapped by his loafers; one of them came off as he cleared the fence. She swivelled as she ran and fired two more quick shots at him, wildly, but he ducked away, purely by instinct, lifted the pistol but saw window lights behind it and held off, still running… She crossed another fence, a higher one, and now he was only a hundred feet back, and then…

She ran up a ladder that was leaning against the back of a low rambler, kicked the ladder sideways and ran up the roof. He risked the shot this time – it should hit the Mississippi or the far river bank – but it was a bad shot and then she was over the ridge of the roof and out of sight. He tried to run around the side of the house, but hit a garbage pail and went down, got up, ran another few feet and hit a lawn mower and went down again, got up and ran out onto the lawn…

She was gone.

The homeowner was at the door yelling, and Lucas screamed, 'Call the cops.

There's been a shooting, call 911.'

He had to pick a direction and he picked north, since that had been her tendency. He ran hard for a hundred feet, kicked off the second shoe, stopped at the street corner, looked wildly up and down, started to run west, turned back. ..

Nobody there.

She was gone.

The St. Paul cops arrived three minutes later.

Malone, looking businesslike again, in a light tweed jacket and carefully ironed, pleated-front blouse, said, '… valuable information. We know she's still in the States, which suggests to me that she wasn't planning to leave.

We'll get her.'

'Maybe,' Lucas said. He was fiddling with a yellow No. 2 pencil; since the crime lab had taken the Report away, he didn't have anything to fiddle with.

'Have some faith,' Malone said. 'After all, you're the only guy who ever survived her.'

'Ah, it was a complete fuck-up,' Lucas said. 'I fired five shots, and never hit her. She fired more than that, and never hit me. We must've been five feet apart for a couple of seconds..'

'You're complaining about her bad shooting?'

'Well…'

'She would have put a couple right through your brain if you hadn't had that

Report, and hadn't managed to throw it up in time.'

'Fuckin' Report,' Lucas grumbled. 'Now I miss the goddamn thing. Took two in the heart for me.'

Malone pushed up out of her chair. 'Listen, I'm heading back to