Mortal Prey

20

Malone had been hit between the shoulder blades, Mallard said. The ambulance had been there in three or four minutes, but she was gone by then. She'd never opened her eyes after she'd gone down, had never made a sound. They put her in the ambulance and rushed her to a critical care unit, but Mallard had been a Marine lieutenant in the last days of Vietnam and had seen people shot, had picked up people hit in the back, and knew she was gone.

"But you're not right a hundred percent of the time. Let's get over there," Lucas said harshly. He was running a little out of control, he knew, but that had happened before, and he recognized it. "Let's get a car."

His reaction pumped a gram of hope back into Mallard, and Mallard was suddenly waving his arms at the red-haired agent, and in less than a minute, they were out of the parking lot heading west. Mallard was hoping again, but shaking his head. "I don't think, I don't think," he said over and over again. "I don't think…"

Lucas let him ramble: Mallard was in shock.

Rinker would call him again, Lucas thought. He had to talk to somebody about that-maybe Sally Epaulets. Rinker wouldn't be calling to crow about the shooting, but she'd call to talk: to make the point that this was tit-for-tat, Malone for Gene Rinker. Lucas couldn't imagine that she'd let her guard down, but he couldn't take the chance. As Mallard continued to press against the dashboard, leaning toward the hospital, Lucas took out his phone and called Sally.

She answered, and asked, "Is it true? It can't be true."

"She was shot. She's bad, and Louis thinks she's dead. We'll be at the hospital in a minute."

"Oh, my God. Her parents…"

"Listen. Sally. Listen. Are you listening?"

She was crying, Lucas realized, and he really didn't have time for that. "Stop that shit," he snapped. "Stop crying. Shut the fuck up."

That shocked her out of it, and she said, "What?"

"Rinker's gonna call me. You've got to be ready to track her. You've got to coordinate with St. Louis and everybody else. Everybody's got to be ready to roll, as soon as you have a location. Do you understand? You're monitoring me, just like we did before."

"But what about Louis…?"

Lucas glanced at Mallard, then said, "Louis is out of it for now. So you're carrying it, okay? Get this set up. She's gonna call tonight. And I gotta stay off this phone."

They were at the hospital two minutes later, Mallard hopping out of the truck while it was still rolling into a parking space. There were two agents already there, outside the emergency room doors, but he bulled on past them through the doors and inside. Lucas followed, but stopped and looked at the agents.

"She's…"

"Gone," said one of the agents. "She was gone when she got here. They put her on a respirator, but there's nothing to work with, they say."

"Ah, Jesus."

"There's one of the paramedics."

A paramedic had come out of the building, a black man with a shaved head. He wore a small gold earring and had a cigarette dangling from his lip. Lucas walked over and said, "I'm… with the FBI guys. I understand you brought Malone in?"

"Yeah. There was nothing we could do. We couldn't help her."

"Where was she hit?"

"In the spine, right between the shoulder blades. The doc could maybe tell you better. I'm not a doctor."

"Tell me what you think," Lucas said.

The paramedic took a long drag on the cigarette, blew smoke, then said, "It looked to me like a small-caliber bullet, a. 22 probably. Very small entry wound, almost like the end of a pencil. We turned her over to see if she was pumping blood out of her chest, but there were hardly any exit wounds, a couple of little cuts, like. Like shrapnel, or something. I think the bullet clipped through her spine and just exploded, like one of those… you know, those guys who shoot prairie dogs."

"A varmint bullet."

"Yeah. Varmint bullet. Like it hit her and exploded everything, just pulped her heart and lungs."

They stood silently for a minute or so, and then the guy said, "I'm sorry."

Lucas rubbed his nose. "Goddamnit."

"She a nice lady?"

"Ohhh… yeah, in a lot of ways," Lucas said, not ready for that kind of question. The paramedic looked at him oddly, and Lucas realized that he had been asking a pro-forma question and had expected a pro-forma answer. Lucas nodded his head and said, "Yeah, she was, really. A nice lady."

Lucas went inside and found Mallard slumped in a chair, while an uncertain doctor stood a couple of feet away, looking down at him, then at Lucas. "Are you a friend?"

"Yeah."

"We might want to keep this gentleman around for a little while-he's got a shock problem."

"All right. I'll have somebody sit with him."

Lucas sat down and looked at Mallard, who had suddenly shriveled. He wasn't saying anything, wasn't looking at anything except the tiled floor. Lucas patted him on the shoulder and said, "Just sit for a while."

Mallard nodded dumbly, and Lucas got up, found the red-haired agent, and told him to stick with Mallard.

The red-haired guy nodded and said, "I jerked the AIC out of bed. He's on his way to the scene, so that's covered."

"All right. I'm going back to the hotel."

"Wait for the call?"

"If it comes."

The agent shook his head. "Gotta get the bitch now. Before it was a sport. Now it's a war."

Lucas took a step toward the emergency room door, then turned back. "When you take Mallard out of here, use some other door. She set up this last shooting-it just occurred to me that she could be setting up outside here." He nodded toward the doors. "She knows we'll all be here."

The agent looked at the doors and then said, "I'll get some guys to make a quiet sweep."

"Do it."

Lucas went back to the hotel to wait; took off his shirt, got into some jeans, tried not to think about Malone. Couldn't help thinking about her: wanted to get her back, but couldn't. Finally used the hotel phone to call Weather, and told her.

"Oh, my God, Lucas. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I mean, I'm fucked up, but I'm not hurt. When I left, they were talking about getting somebody to do the formal identification and sign-off, and I just cleared out of there. I couldn't stand to go look at her. Jesus, we walked out of here a couple of hours ago. We went down the elevator together, and she was sure we had Rinker in a box."

"Maybe you ought to come home."

"Can't now. I'm going to get her."

"Unless she gets you."

"She's not mad enough at me. She wouldn't have gone after Malone if Malone hadn't been the one talking about her brother, in the paper."

"You don't know that for sure. She might've gone over the edge."

"I gotta give it some more time. But I'm feeling really… bummed."

"But not medically bummed."

He knew what she meant. A little problem with clinical depression. "Not like that."

"Then I'd say you're pretty healthy. You should be bummed when a friend is killed. Just wait until Rinker calls. Track her down. Get her."

"I'm going to," he said. "Sooner or later."

Rinker called a half hour later. The cell phone rang, and he let it ring once more, then picked it up.

"Yes."

"I'm all done with the FBI," Rinker said. Her whiskey voice sounded blue, depressed.

"Too late for you, Clara," Lucas said. "They'll never quit now. The guy that gets you is gonna be a hero, and his career will be made for life. People are going to make you into their hobby."

"Well, good luck to them," Rinker said. "This never would have happened if they hadn't killed my brother."

"Nobody wanted your brother to die. Malone took a lot of shit after it happened. There was gonna be an inquiry."

"Yeah, right, a cop inquiry. Were they planning to raise him up, like Lazarus?"

"No, but…"

"So what you're saying is that a memo would get written."

"Nobody wanted him to die. Nobody deliberately pulled a trigger on him."

"Might as well have. I told you myself, he wasn't right." Lucas couldn't think of anything to say, and after a moment of silence, Rinker continued. "I'm thinking about getting out. You think they would chase me to Chile?"

"I think they'd chase you to fuckin' Mongolia. And I'll tell you what, if I were you… when they catch me, I wouldn't give up. I'd put a gun in my mouth. They'll pen you up for ten years in a concrete box the size of a phone booth, and then they'll stick a needle in your arm and kill you. Better to go quick."

"I don't suppose you're thinking of going home."

"No. I'll be here as long as you are."

"My problem with you is, you're lucky." Again, a moment of silence. Then: "This fiancйe of yours, is she pretty good-looking?"

"Pretty good," Lucas said. "We're gonna do the whole thing, except not a Catholic wedding because she'll be a little heavy by then, and besides, she doesn't care for the Church. But we got a wild-hair Episcopalian place, which is almost like Catholic, and we're gonna tie the knot up with a priest and flower girls and the whole thing."

"That was gonna be me, a few months ago."

"If you'd just stuck with killing the Mafia assholes, you would have pissed off the FBI, but you still could have pulled a disappearing act and found a guy somewhere and still had the kid. Not now. That's all gone."

"I don't want to talk to you anymore," Rinker said. "You're being a jerk."

"A good friend of mine was killed," Lucas said. "I'm gonna get you for it. Me and my good luck."

"Yeah, don't press it," Rinker said. She laughed, abruptly, a little crazily, and said, "I'm gone. I guess you're tracking this call. Tell your friends that the next sound they hear is the telephone hitting the highway."

He heard it hit. And, in a bizarre tribute to Finnish technology, the phone neither broke nor turned off, and Lucas could hear trucks rushing by.

Wherever it was; wherever she was.

They didn 't get her. They came close, one of the chopper pilots said. Their tracking gear put them on her; they were only a half-mile out when she tossed the phone out the window. But that was five thousand cars, rolling along the highway, getting off and on. A lot of What ifs and If I'd justs. A highway patrol cop was vectored into the area within five minutes of the first phone ring, but had no idea what he should be looking for. Another cop spotted the phone under a guardrail, picked it up, said, "Hello?" and then turned it off.

The next morning, Lucas and the FBI Special Studies Group, minus Mallard, listened to the tape of the phone conversation twenty times, picking it apart word by word. When she said she was gone, did she mean gone as in Gone to Paraguay? Or did she just mean that she was gone from the conversation? Why did she throw the phone out the window? She could have used it again. Was she cutting them off? Was she done talking to anyone? Had she just been pissed off? What?

During the discussion, it seemed that Sally Epaulets-Bryce was her real last name-stepped into a coordinating role, and the rest of the FBI group accepted that, at least until Mallard or somebody else in authority showed up.

Lucas spent the morning reading through the FBI paper, reading everything, until he was sick of it. Somewhere, in that mass of names and numbers, Rinker was hiding; but he couldn't find her.

Was she gone?

Andreno called at eleven, and they agreed to meet at Andy's for lunch. Lucas arrived a little after noon. Loftus was there, and they walked to the back and ordered cheeseburgers and Andreno said, "Jesus Christ. I couldn't believe it. I got up late and turned on the TV and that's all they were talking about. It was like when Reagan got shot or something. So bizarre. Like something in a novel."

"She called me, Clara did," Lucas said. He told them about the call, and then about the shooting itself, and they were both shaking their heads.

"Got more than one screw loose, that girl," Loftus said.

"She's toast," Andreno said. "She better stay in the States. If she goes to Bolivia, the feds'll find her, talk to one of their little helpers down there, and they'll put her in a basement with an electric outlet and connect some wires to her tits and there won't be any habeas fuckin' corpus."

Lucas asked them about the botanical gardens. "John Ross is going over there for an orchestra fundraiser."

"Probably not a good idea. Lots of trees and bushes," Loftus said. "Hedges and shit."

"It's about two minutes from here," Andreno said. "We could drive over."

Lucas nodded. "It's not like I'm doing anything else."

The gardens, Lucas thought, were pretty neat. If Minneapolis had an arboretum that close to downtown, he'd probably go once a week just to look at the flowers.

To get into the place, a visitor would park in a blacktopped parking lot, walk into a ticket desk on the bottom level of a two-story building, then climb a set of stairs and walk out the back into the gardens. That was ideal from a security point of view. Anybody coming in had to climb the stairs, or take an elevator, which made handy choke-points.

"Or she could come over the fence. The place is huge, and there are trees all the way around," Andreno said.

"Maybe get some guys looking down the fence line?"

"If you had enough of them. It's pretty big. It's like trying to protect a farm. Or a forest."

Andreno ran into a food-service supervisor that he knew, and asked about the chamber orchestra event. The food guy pointed them at the Rose Garden, and they went that way. The Rose Garden was laid out in a square, surrounded by a hedge, with a long rectangular building at the entrance and a reflecting pool at the exit. Lucas strolled up and down between the flowers, looking for shooting lanes, and decided that as long as Ross stayed inside the garden, the hedge would protect him from any long-range rifle shots.

Unless she climbed a tree, he thought. As he stood at the garden entrance, he could see that the ground rose off to the left, and they went that way.

"Put a guy right here. Or two or three guys," Andreno said, as they walked up the higher ground. "There're so many trees that she'd have to get close or she couldn't see through them to shoot. And if she got that close, and then tried to climb, she'd be easy to spot."

They walked around for a while, looking at flowers and trees, until the humidity started to get to them. "That place over there," Andreno said, nodding at a dome-shaped building, "is like a tropical jungle. All bamboo and palm trees and shit. Neat place in the winter."

"This whole place is like a jungle. I didn't know St. Louis was so hot."

"We used to have a saying, "It's not the heat…"

"… it's the humidity."

"We'd never say anything that stupid," Andreno said. "We used to say, it's not the heat, it's the assholes. Goddamn hot nights, no air-conditioning, what are you gonna do? You're gonna whack the old lady around, that's what. You get nights like this one's gonna be, there'll be people smacking people all over town."

"Maybe you oughta provide air-conditioning as a public service," Lucas suggested.

"It'd be a plan," Andreno said, seriously. "It'd stop more bullshit than a lot of other plans."

On the way back to Andy's, where Andreno had left his car, Sally called and said, "The guys on Dallaglio say that he's leaving. He's going into hiding. He says they can follow along, but he won't tell anybody where he's going until he's started."

"That's a little dumb-if we knew where he was going, we could sterilize it in advance. Did you tell him that?"

"Yes. But he said there was no point in trying, and they were safer if nobody knew. They're not leaving until the kids get home from school, they're gonna get them packed up. They're going out tonight."

"Call around. You've got the weight. Check the major airlines, see where the tickets are. If they're going to Italy or somewhere, there aren't many options."

"We're doing that-I just wanted you to know."

"Is Mallard back?"

"No. They finished the postmortem, and they're flying the body out this afternoon. There'll be a memorial service in Washington, and most of us are going."

"You're just shutting down here?"

"Won't be for a couple of days, and there'll still be a crew here. We won't need the Dallaglio crew anymore, and most of the rest of us have just been walking in circles anyway."