Mortal Prey

21

Lucas was watching an Atlanta game when Sally called at eight o'clock and said, "Dallaglio's about to roll. Me and Carl and Derik are heading out, if you want to ride along."

"It's either that or hang myself. I'm down to watching Atlanta."

"You got two minutes."

Lucas got a jacket, clipped a. 45 onto his hip, took a half-finished beer along, hid it from a prim-looking saleslady in the elevator, and caught up with the feds in the lobby. They were already moving, out the doors, into a heat-soaked night-Lucas dropped the beer bottle into a trash can-and across the parking lot where Malone had been shot and into the Suburban.

A block away, Lucas could see a Mazda MPV van, sitting on the street, looking into the back of the buildings where Rinker had set up with the rifle. Inside the van was a bored FBI surveillance crew, hoping against hope that she'd be back. She hadn't been, although they had netted an attractive forty-five-ish commercial real-estate agent who'd come over later for drinks with one of the surveillance guys.

"Glad I'm not in that van," Sally said, picking up on Lucas's thought. "I've done that. Down in Baltimore, working with Jack Hand?"

The red-haired agent was driving again. He nodded and said, "Onions."

"You better believe it. He ate them like apples. He said they prevented prostate cancer. His father died from it."

"Onions, or prostate?" Lucas asked.

"I almost died from the onions once," the red-haired man said.

He put them on an interstate heading west, and Lucas frowned. "Where're we going?"

Sally looked at him and then said, "Oh-we're not going to Lambert. There's another airport out west. Called, um, Spirit of St. Louis. Dallaglio's signed up for a private jet, a place called Executive Air. He's flying out of there to Newark, and then from Newark to Rome to Naples on commercial flights. First class, of course. The whole family."

"Napoli," said the nearly silent Derik. Derik had a buzz cut and high, dry cheekbones and looked like a member of the Wehrmacht. "Roma."

Sally was looking at a map now and said to the red-haired agent, "We're on Sixty-four, right? Because if we're on Forty-four, we'll wind up down in Bumfuck, Missouri, and there's no way back."

"The language," Lucas said.

"We're on Sixty-four," the red-haired guy said. "There's a sign."

Sally checked the sign and then turned to Lucas. "Malone was, like, ten years in service before I signed up. She was appointed to mentor some of the younger women agents, and one time she told me that I should carefully use a few words. You know, nothing really nasty, none of the gynecological stuff, but the occasional fuck or shit, just to let them know that you weren't a sissy. She said getting treated ladylike or if you were expected to be ladylike, it was the end of you. She said you had to be a lady, but not ladylike."

"A point," Lucas said.

"Back then, it was," Sally said. "Ten years ago. I don't think it matters so much anymore."

"Yeah, you've pretty well taken over now," the red-haired man said.

"Better believe," Sally said. Derik said nothing, just bobbed his skinhead to some unseen music with a jerky beat. Sally got on a radio and talked to the crew with Dallaglio. "They're just getting out to the cars," she said. "We ought to get there about the same time."

Rinker had an unfamiliar weight on her shoulders, the weight of death. Not the killing of Dichter, or Levy, or Malone, or even of all of them together, but rather the killing of Honus Johnson. She'd thought about it, as she waited for Johnson to come lurching out of the basement like a frozen Frankenstein, to stand over the couch while she was half asleep… waited for the sound of the freezer lid opening, was sure she'd heard it a half-dozen times.

One of the few literary experiences of her young life had come with a Stephen King novel, Carrie, which had scared the shit out of her, as she sprawled across the bed in her apartment, alone, reading. The feeling now was the same, but even more intense: There really was a frozen dead man in the basement, and he really had been a torturer, who would come back from hell with a bloody machete…

She analyzed it, as she'd been taught in her college psych classes back in Wichita-and she decided that her problem was not so much the dead man in the basement as the fact that she hadn't left him behind. In all her other killings, she'd almost instantly walked away from the bodies. In a couple of cases, she'd had to move them, but she'd been done with them in a few hours at most. She'd been able to escape what she'd done, put it behind her and out of mind.

This one, she was stuck with, at least for a few more days. He was riding on her shoulders as she drove west into the setting sun.

She looked a little like a fashionable female Johnny Cash, she thought-thin black long-sleeve shirt, black jeans, dark blue running shoes from which she'd carefully torn the reflective patches. In the backseat she had a black silk scarf and a black baseball cap. When she had it all on, she thought, she'd be invisible in the dark.

They 'd been in the car for fifteen minutes when Sally took a radio call, then looked at her map. "They're ahead of us, about three miles," she said, after a minute. "Four vehicles-two of ours and two of theirs. They're staying on the speed limit, so if we can step on it a bit, we'll catch them."

They caught them a couple of miles east of the airport, rolling off the interstate and down onto a country highway. "When Dallaglio gets out of here, everything will come back to Ross, unless she's really after Ferignetti, too-but Ferignetti's so sure that she isn't, that I kind of believe him," Sally said. "So it's Ross."

"If she's really after Ross," Lucas said, as they came up behind the trailing federal Suburban.

They were all slowing down, and a quarter mile ahead, Lucas saw another Suburban take a left turn off the highway into the airport. He could see the control tower, like a lighted diamond in the dusk, atop a black cylinder, and all around it, low brick light-industrial, warehouse, and office buildings. A boulevard led into the airport, with the tower off to the right, but nothing that Lucas could identify as a terminal until they drove past a mounted military plane, which Lucas thought might have been a Phantom, and reached a T-intersection at the end of the boulevard. The red-haired agent said, "That's the terminal," pointing at a building at the top of theT, in the headlights. All the other trucks had taken a left, following signs to Executive Air.

Two hundred yards up the road, a brilliantly lighted hangar stood off to the right, with an executive jet inside; another jet, with a fold-down stairway leading to an open door, sat on the pad outside the hangar. Derik, who'd said virtually nothing during the trip, muttered, "Looks like a TV stage, a soundstage. They oughta kill the lights."

Lucas said, "Man… this looks like… this looks bad."

The lead truck had already stopped next to the jet, and a couple of agents hopped out. Then the second car pulled up, a Lincoln, and Lucas said to Sally, urgently, "Tell them to keep Dallaglio in the car. Keep him in the car."

She lifted the radio to her mouth, as they stopped at the end of the lines of vehicles and Lucas popped his door and climbed out and shouted at the agents, "Keep him in the car," and then he said to Derik, who'd scrambled across to get out with him, "Aw, shit…"

The Dallaglios were all getting out: father, mother, daughters, wandering around in the brilliant light, like so many lost mice. Lucas said to Derik, "C'mon," and hurried forward. The red-haired agent was coming around the front of the truck, to go with them, and a couple of agents from the trailing truck were getting out…

And for a few seconds, it was a very pretty Missouri evening, too hot and humid, but not a bad night to sit around a backyard swimming pool with friends and a few fruit-rum drinks with little brightly colored paper umbrellas-a night like that.

Then Paul Dallaglio stepped into the space between his car and the lead FBI truck, the agents coming up from behind him.

He stood there for a couple of seconds, then turned to say something to his wife, did a little dance, and fell down. An instant later, they heard the BANG, and then a ripping sound as Rinker opened up with the AR-15 and everybody went to the ground and bullets cracked through glass and metal and tires and ricocheted off the sides of the hangar and the jet.

Dallaglio, on the ground, made a humping motion and Lucas, in a tiny corner of his mind as he pushed himself behind a wheel and dug for his weapon, wondered why the hell he was making the humping move, and then realized that bullets were tearing through Dallaglio's body.

Lucas could smell gas and oil and dirt and could hear people screaming, the girlish screams of a child, and then one of the agents was up and behind the Suburban and was banging away with what sounded like a. 40, and Lucas pushed up and picked up a muzzle flash and thought that unless the agent was holding about four feet above the flash, at that distance, he'd be wasting his ammunition. He didn't think anything more about it, but simply lifted his. 45 and started banging away, holding very high. Rinker was shooting from the side of a single-story warehouse or office building to their left, little sparkles of flame followed by the sounds of bullets tearing through sheet metal, and in the dark it was hard to figure the range. A hundred yards, maybe a hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred, he thought. He held four feet high and banged away, with no hope of hitting her, hoping simply to dislodge her.

Then the bolt of the. 45 banged back and open and Lucas dropped the magazine and slapped in another, his only spare, and another gust of bullets spattered across the parking area and he could hear more people screaming, but couldn't tell what they were saying. Someplace in there, he felt the tires go on the other side of the Suburban and yelled at Derik, "She's taking out the tires, so we can't chase her. She must be driving, we gotta block the road."

Derik scrambled back to the Suburban that they'd arrived in and screamed something Lucas didn't understand to the red-haired agent, who was behind another vehicle. The red-haired man looked back wildly, shouted something, then dug in his pocket, found some keys, and threw them at Derik. Derik crawled into the Suburban, and Lucas, on hands and toes, scooted over to that vehicle. Derik was lying across the front seats, and when Lucas heard the engine turn over, he climbed through the back door and said, "What are we doing?"

"Gonna back it up," Derik grunted. "Can't see shit. Hold on."

Lucas peeked over the top of the backseat. He couldn't see any more muzzle flashes from Rinker, but the agents were still pouring fire into the dark. Derik, kneeling on the passenger seat, locked the steering wheel in place with one hand, and with the other shifted the truck into reverse, then reached down and pressed on the accelerator. They started backing, fast, wobbling, and Lucas risked another peek and said, "You're doing fine, doing fine-faster, though, faster. Hold it straight…"

They backed up a hundred feet, running on two flats, lurched twice into the curb, and then cut an angle with the building where they'd seen the muzzle flashes, and were out of her line of sight. Lucas shouted, "Whoa, stop!" and the Suburban lurched to a stop, and Derik shouted, "What?" but Lucas was already out of the truck. He jerked open the driver's-side door and shouted, "Let me in."

Derik pulled back and Lucas gunned the truck in a circle, climbed the far curb, onto the grass, bounced around, cut back into the street and headed back toward the entrance boulevard, the flats slap-slap-slap-slap outside the open passenger door, then Derik managed to get up and he pulled the door shut and Lucas pushed the truck up to forty and they bounced down to the exit and Lucas cut across it.

Nothing happened.

The gunfire was dwindling, and Lucas realized that he hadn't heard the stuttering bursts from the automatic weapon.

"She's running," he said. "Where is she? There must be another way out. You hang here, I'm gonna try to get back."

"Hang on a minute, they'll freak out and shoot you if you just come running up," Derik said. He slipped a radio from his pocket and got Sally. "Davenport's coming back on the road-tell everybody he's running up the road." She acknowledged, and Derik nodded at him. "Go."

Lucas, gun in hand, ran back up the road toward the terminal, then to the left toward Executive Air. Nobody had touched the lights, and the whole place still looked like a soundstage. And more than that, they had music: Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was bleeding out into the night, through speakers in the open hangar, Lucas thought, as he ran toward the island of light.

Most of the agents and the Dallaglios were still huddled behind the four vehicles of the original convoy. Three people were flat on the ground, and somebody had dragged Dallaglio's body behind one of the Suburbans. Sally and the red-haired agent were both missing, and when Lucas came up, he shouted, "Where's Sally?" and somebody shouted back, "They went after her," and pointed into the dark.

Lucas said, "Ah, man," and ran that way. As he came up to the first building, he shouted, "Sally…"

She called back, "This way, this way."

He went that way and found Sally and the red-haired agent, both armed with long guns, working their way between the buildings. "Anything?"

"No. We think… I think… she ran."

"Not in a car," Lucas said. "We had the road blocked, and we didn't see anyone going out ahead of us. She must be on foot. She must have a car ditched outside somewhere."

"Dallaglio's dead," said the red-haired agent.

"No shit," Lucas said. "Anybody else?"

"Two guys wounded, leg wounds. She was taking out tires."

"Goddamnit," Lucas said.

"Maybe…"

"What?"

The red-haired agent laughed ruefully and said, "I was gonna say, maybe we could get dogs." He looked off into the dark and said, "Fuck me. Dogs."

Sirens. Ambulances and cop cars. They started back between the buildings toward the road, walking at first, then breaking into a trot. The two wounded agents were still on the ground, each with an agent sitting next to him. Another agent and two bodyguards sat next to Dallaglio's body, and Jesse Dallaglio sat on the ground a few feet away, making a keening cry that Lucas thought might have been romantic to read about, but in practice sounded like a broken dental drill. The girls were out of sight, and Lucas thought they were probably back in the Lincoln, where they wouldn't be able to see their father.

The first of the ambulances arrived, and the paramedics looked at Dallaglio and then went straight to the two wounded agents, who were loaded into the first ambulance and sent on their way. Another ambulance came up and they also looked at Dallaglio, and then one of the paramedics lifted Jesse Dallaglio to her feet and led her back toward the Lincoln and the girls.

Lucas had nothing to do but stand around. He wouldn't be working with the crime-scene people, except perhaps to identify the spray of. 45 shells as coming from his gun. Sally was walking around, saying a few words to each of the agents, then came back to Lucas and said, "She had a machine gun."

"Probably got it from Baker," Lucas said. "He neglected to mention it. Probably an illegal conversion."

"What were we supposed to do? What could we have done?"

"Nothing. You may get some shit, but there's nothing you could have done except lock Dallaglio in his basement."

They were looking at Jesse Dallaglio, who stood next to the Lincoln, talking through the now-open back door. The paramedic was still supporting her. "Poor kids," Sally said.

Lucas was staring at the dark sky past the lighted diamond of the control tower. He didn't respond, and after a minute, Sally asked, "What?"

"Huh. Something… I think Clara just screwed up."

"Yeah? Tell me."

"Well," Lucas said, "think about what just happened…"

Rinker had never had any intention of driving out of the airport. She'd seen too many car chases on television, the kind where the guy never escapes from the helicopter. She'd walked in, found a spot behind a low concrete drainage wall, where she could prop the gun. She'd dug up a square of sod to use as a rest, and it worked perfectly.

When the convoy arrived, she waited patiently until Dallaglio got out in the open, then nailed him with a single shot, a round of. 223 hollowpoint.

Then, flipping the selector switch, she sent the rest of the thirty-round magazine into the body and at the row of vehicles, concentrating on the tires. The agents and bodyguards scattered like dust, and when the magazine ran out, she slapped in another and fired carefully spaced bursts at each of the trucks and cars.

Halfway through, she became aware of return fire, but never heard or felt anything passing close by. Never felt threatened, as she was showing nothing but three inches of forehead and rifle. Then one of the trucks began backing away, and out of sight. Time to go. She hastily hosed the rest of the magazine into the line of trucks, then turned and ran.

She ran down the length of the airport, invulnerable in the darkness. She ran across a beanfield, down the rows of thigh-high plants, letting the rows guide her back toward her car, feeling the kind of excitement she'd felt as a kid, playing war in the fields around Tisdale. She ran almost a mile, in all, the last part of it across a golf course, and took, she thought, about seven minutes to do it.

When she got to the car, she tossed the AR-15 into the backseat and eased the car out of its parking spot and up a narrow lane through a residential area. Just before she lost sight of the airport, she stopped for a last look-there were ambulances coming in now, and she could see tiny dark figures dancing in the splash of light.

"Paulo," she said aloud. "That's another one for you."