Mortal Prey

24

As Sally said, the run to Lambert with flashers, and an occasional burst of siren for the recalcitrant, took a little more than fifteen minutes, plus another two or three to make it down the frontage road to the helicopter facility. They had three choppers, none of them turning a blade yet. Mallard climbed out of the lead truck and ran inside the chopper hut, and they could hear him screaming. Nine men, pilots, copilots and technicians, hurried out the side, heading toward their aircraft, pulling on helmets. "Two people per chopper," Mallard yelled. "Who wants to go with who?"

Sally said, "I'll ride with Lucas. He's lucky."

"Go, go…"

They were airborne over St. Louis twenty-five minutes after they left the botanical gardens, and spread themselves, under instructions from Mallard, along I-64. Mallard himself hovered over downtown with Andreno, while Lucas and Sally waited west of Forest Park, where they could see the lights of the inner belt, Highway 170, and the third chopper waited out beyond the outer belt, way west.

"We're good east-west, but if she goes north-south, it'll take a while to get there," Lucas shouted at Sally.

"Not long," Sally said, shaking her head. "And if she's along the main stem, here, we'll be on her in a minute. One of us will-" Her phone rang, and she put it to her ear, listened, shouted a few words, clicked it off, and said, "Treena's phone is listed to some guy from a place called Crestwood. The phone doesn't answer, just an answering machine, and the cops are on the way. If the place has been broken into, we're good."

"We're good," Lucas said. "Believe it."

The technician riding behind the pilots was looking at a computer screen that seemed to combine a local map and a radio receiver. He spoke occasionally into a radio.

And that's the way it was for thirty minutes. Sitting up in the sky, watching the cars below, not talking much because of the noise. Sally said once, "It's pretty, when you can see everything from the Missouri back to the arch."

"Where's the Missouri?"

"The line out there to the north, and over to the west, you can see the curve-looks like it really should have come into the Mississippi way to the south, but made this big jog at the last minute."

"Makes a peninsula out of St. Louis, almost."

"Yeah… You seem pretty calm for a guy who's famous for hating airplanes."

Lucas said, "Helicopters don't bother me, for some reason. None of it has anything to do with logic, it's…"

Then the phone rang and the computer screen lit up, and the technician started talking fast to the pilots and the chopper dove for speed and took off east, Lucas shouting, "What? What?"

"Somebody's talking cell phone to cell phone. Mrs. Ross's phone is downtown, but the second one is just east of us, it's moving, we've got the cell, I'm tuning her in, I'm tuning her… Got her."

"Where is she?"

"She's moving, she's moving…" Then he was talking to the pilots on a mouthpiece, and the pilots were talking back, and the chopper made a big cut left, coming around, coming around, dropping, heading back west, slowing…

"We got some cops coming in… See that group of cars, that group right there? She's in there, I think, four or five cars, the cops are a mile out, we got her, we got her…"

Rinker was in the Benz, had been talking with Treena Ross, who was weeping, grieving for her late husband, when she heard the chopper. Rinker had lived in bad parts of St. Louis long enough, in her younger years, to know what it was: a kind of strange flapping sound, as if somebody were beating his chest with open palms. She said, "Cops!" and hung up and rolled along for a moment, despair creeping into her heart, hoping that Treena knew enough to get rid of the phone, thinking quickly of Davenport… and then she saw the lights of a shopping center up ahead, a thin glimmer, just a possibility, of hope, and she suddenly floored the accelerator and cut through traffic and let it run out, the car gaining momentum at a ferocious rate toward the gaping mouth of what Rinker hoped was a parking ramp. Had to be a parking ramp, or a tunnel, or something; she said, aloud, "Parking ramp, please God, parking ramp."

She was no more than a minute away…

Lucas saw her take off, moving through traffic like a broken-field runner, shouted, "She's onto us. Get on top of her, get on top of her."

A pilot gave him a thumbs-up and took the chopper into a screaming drive, but they gained ground only slowly and then actually seemed to lose some, and Lucas realized that Rinker must be pushing the black car into the hundreds, like a black comet surging along the street as though to catch the dead-white light of its high beams.

The tech was talking into his microphone, describing the car, describing the action, giving updates on the map as they finally started closing. Then they saw the tunnel, or whatever it was, up ahead, and Lucas said, "She's heading for that tunnel thing."

"Parking structure," the copilot shouted. "It's the parking structure for the shopping center."

"Get us down, get us down, right in the mouth of it, she's gonna beat us there, get me out and then get back up and look for her running."

And to Sally, as they dropped: "Annie, get your gun."

Rinker saw the chopper at the last minute, right above her, almost ahead of her, at the entrance to the tunnel, but she squirted past it, jammed on the brakes, was thrown into the steering wheel, got the speed down enough that she could cut right into a parking bay and saw, at the far end, three people walking along with shopping bags, one of them a man, jingling his car keys. She went that way, laying on the gas again.

The family had seen her coming and knew she was moving too fast and instinctively flattened themselves against a minivan and she jammed the brakes again and hopped out and started toward them and then something hit her in the butt. Something like a baseball bat, and she went down.

Lucas was out and running into the tunnel, saw the Benz cut right and ran harder, Sally dropping behind, came around a pillar into a parking bay and saw the Benz down at the end and Rinker climbing out. Without thinking, he tracked her with the. 45 and fired a single shot and amazed himself when she went down, rolled, and then she was crawling and back up and she was standing next to three civilians, two adults and what seemed to be a child, a ten-year-old girl, maybe, and Rinker was screaming at him, "Go the other way. Run the other way."

Lucas shouted, "Give it up, give it up."

Rinker shouted back, "Run the other way, Davenport, run back down the tunnel or I swear to God I'll kill these people, I'll kill all three of them right in front of your eyes."

Lucas slowed, still moving up, and shouted, "Clara, you're hurt, give it up, Clara…"

And Sally closed up and shouted, "Rinker…"

Then, horrified, they saw Rinker point a pistol at the head of the largest of the adults and pull the trigger, the man twisting and bouncing off a car, going down, as the shot echoed through the parking garage, and Rinker pointed the gun at the woman, and she screamed, "Mom goes next, Davenport, and then the kid. Mom goes next, run now or I'll pop her."

She pointed the gun at the mother, who lifted her arms to her face and shrank away, screaming herself; she backed up and tripped over her fallen husband and half fell, and Rinker screamed, "Here she goes…"

Lucas shouted, "We're going," and he grabbed Sally's arm and Rinker screamed, "Run, or I'll kill her, I'll kill her, run out the tunnel, run…"

They ran.

When she'd shot the man, he'd dropped his keys and Rinker pointed the gun at the mother and said, "Where's the car, where's the fuckin' car?" And the woman pointed at the Dodge minivan and Rinker dragged her leg to it, her leg wasn't working, but she hopped and dragged and popped the door on the van, and screamed. "Get in, get in or I'll kill you. Get in."

The mother and kid got in and Rinker screamed at them to lie in the footwell on the passenger side and they crawled into it and she cranked the engine and eased out of the parking slot and accelerated away, then slowed, took a corner, took another, and was on the street, driving out.

A helicopter hung overhead, but it stayed behind her, and then another one came in, and then she was on the next street and she saw a man behind her, running, and realized that it was Davenport and accelerated, turned a corner, accelerated again, two blocks, turned again, and again, Davenport long gone now, said to the woman in the footwell, her voice like a chain saw, as ugly and vicious as she could make it, "You stay on the fuckin' floor or I'll blow your motherfuckin' brains out. You stay there, you hear? I'm gonna stop, and I'll be right outside the car."

The woman whimpered as she pulled the car off the street. She probably wasn't more than ten blocks from the shopping center, but Davenport had seen the van, she thought, and she had to get out of it.

There was a bar off to the left, and a man was walking out, toward a lonely orange pickup truck that appeared to have been hand-painted. She pulled in beside it, said, "You stay down, hear? Or I'll fuckin' kill you."

She pulled herself out of the truck, felt her feet mushing as though she were wading in pudding, realized that one shoe was full of blood, that her butt was wet with it, and dragged her leg around the back of the truck to the driver's-side door, where the man was just getting in.

She came up, and he said, a little startled, "Hello," and she pointed the gun at him and said, "Get in."

"Oh, hell… Yes."

He got in, and she said, "Crawl across. Make it fuckin' snappy."

He crawled across, and she said, "Drop the keys on the driver's seat." He did, and she shot him in the head, and he fell back dead against the window.

She shouted at the minivan, "I told you to fuckin' stay down," and fired another silenced shot through the van's window, shattering glass but hitting nothing else, and as the mother cried out, Rinker crawled into the truck, fired it up, backed it out, and started away.

Three blocks out, watching the mirrors, she hadn't seen any sign of Davenport. She took a corner and stayed on back streets, driving a checkerboard pattern away from the shopping center. Once, down a larger street, she saw the lights of a squad car flashing back toward the shopping center, and she crawled on. She thought about trying to make it back to Honus Johnson's, but then realized that they had the Benz, and they'd be over there. She had to do something… A wave of nausea crawled through her on the front edge of a bigger wave of pain, and she thought, I'm shot. Jesus, I'm shot.

She didn't remember hearing a shot, but she remembered falling down, and then seeing Davenport…

A stop sign came up and she stepped on the brakes a little too firmly, and the dead man beside her slumped forward into the footwell. Another wave of nausea. She realized that even if she wanted to go to Johnson's, she wouldn't make it.

Had to find a place. Had to think…

Lucas ran until the van turned out of sight, then ran some more, pulling his phone from his pocket as he ran, called Sally to tell her about the van, but Sally didn't answer the phone, and he ran some more and called Mallard, who did answer, and told him about the van and he heard the choppers lifting higher and then one moved over him and hit him with the spotlight, and he waved it off and it held him for another ten seconds as he waved frantically, and then it drifted away…

Nothing was working. He never saw the van after it turned, and finally a cop car caught up with him and he flagged it down and the cop had no idea that anything was going on, but got on his radio, and nobody he called knew what was going on, but Lucas got a lift back to the shopping center, where an ambulance was screaming out of sight and Sally, covered with blood, said, "The guy in the garage was shot in the ear and was squirting blood and I, and I, and I…"

"Okay, okay," Lucas said. "She's in a Dodge van, a dark van, maybe dark blue…"

Mallard came up and said, "A woman in a van… There's a woman in a van at a bar who said her husband was shot."

"Let's go," Lucas said. "That's her…"

And they went roaring off in two more cop cars, a night for roaring off, Lucas thought, and on the way, Sally said, "You hit Rinker hard. I saw her go down and there's blood all over the place, she's gonna bleed to death if she doesn't get to a hospital."

"What color was the blood?"

"What?"

"What color was the blood? Dark or bright red, or was there any green stuff in it?"

"Just… purple. Why?"

"Real bright red is lungs, but I don't think I hit her that high. Green is guts. If it's nothing but purple, it may just be meat. If it's just meat, she could stay out. If I hit her anyplace in the body cavity, though, she'll need a hospital. I'm shooting Speer Lawman JHPs."

At the bar, the mother had collapsed, and the young girl seemed to be drifting toward a trance state.

Lucas said, "We gotta get these people to a hospital," and the bartender said, "Ambulance on the way," and Sally told the woman, "Your husband's not dead. He's on the way to the hospital, but he's not hurt bad, he was only shot in the ear, and he's gonna be okay."

The woman shook her head and curled into a tighter ball.

Lucas stepped away and looked down the street and said, "We're losing her. We had her. We're losing her right now."