Predator

43

The air is thick and wavy like water and slaps hard, but the V-Rod doesn’t wobble or seem stressed as Lucy grips the leather seat with her thighs and pushes the speed up to one hundred and twenty miles an hour. She keeps her head low, her elbows tucked in like a jockey as she tests her latest acquisition around the track.

The morning is bright and unseasonably hot, any vestige of yesterday’s storms gone. She eases back the throttle at a hundred and thirty-nine thousand rpms, satisfied that the Harley with its larger cams, pistons and rear sprocket, and souped-up Engine Control Module can scorch the pavement when needed, but she doesn’t want to push her luck for long. At even a hundred and ten, she is going faster than she can see, and that isn’t a good habit. Outside her pristinely maintained track are public roads, and at such high speeds, the slightest surface damage or debris can prove deadly.

“What’s it doing?” Marino’s voice sounds inside her full face helmet.

“What it should,” she replies, dropping back to eighty, lightly pushing the handlebars, swerving around small, bright-orange cones.

“Damn it’s quiet. Can hardly hear it up here,” Marino says from the control tower.

It’s supposed to be quiet, she thinks. The V-Rod is a Harley that’s quiet, a race bike that looks like a road bike and doesn’t draw attention to itself. Leaning back in the seat, she eases her speed to sixty and with her thumb tightens the friction screw to hold the throttle in a loose version of cruise control. She leans into a curve and pulls a forty-caliber Glock pistol out of a holster built into the right thigh of her black ballistic pants.

“Nobody down range,” she transmits.

“You’re clear.”

“Okay. Pop ’em.”

From the control tower, Marino watches Lucy sweep around the tight curve at the north end of the mile-long track.

He scans the high earthworks, scans the blue sky, the grassy firing ranges, the road that cuts through the middle of the grounds, then the hangar and runway about half a mile away. He makes sure no personnel, vehicles or aircraft are in the area. When the track is hot, nothing is allowed within a mile of it. Even the airspace is restricted.

He experiences a mixture of emotions when he watches Lucy. Her fearlessness and abundant skills impress him. He loves her and resents her, and a part of him would prefer not to care about her at all. In one important way, she’s like her aunt, makes him feel unacceptable to the sort of women he secretly likes but doesn’t have the courage to pursue. He watches Lucy speed around the track, maneuvering her new hot-rod bike as if it is part of her and he thinks about Scarpetta on her way to the airport, on her way to seeBenton.

“Going hot in five,” he says into the mic.

Beyond the glass, Lucy’s black figure on the sleek, black bike speeds smoothly, almost silently. Marino detects her right arm move as she holds the pistol close in, her elbow tucked in to her waist so the wind doesn’t rip the weapon out of her hand. He watches seconds tick off on the digital clock built into the console and at the count of five presses the button for Zone Two. On the east side of the track, small, round, metal targets pop up and quickly fall back in loud, flat clanks as forty-caliber rounds bite into them. Lucy doesn’t miss. She makes it look easy.

“Long range on base,” her voice fills his headset.

“Downwind?”

“Roger.”

His footsteps are loud and excited as he walks quickly down the hallways. He can hear what he feels in the way his booted feet move over the scarred old wood, and he carries the shotgun. He carries the shoebox that holds the airbrush, the red paint and the stencil.

He is prepared.

“Now you’ll say you’re sorry,” he says to the open doorway at the end of the hall. “Now you get what you deserve,” he says as he walks quickly and loudly.

He walks into the stench. It is like a wall when he walks through the doorway, worse than out by the pit. Inside the room, the air doesn’t stir and the dead stench has nowhere to go and he stares, shocked.

This can’t have happened.

How could God let this happen!

He hears God in the hallway and she flows into the doorway, shaking her head at him.

“I prepared!” he yells.

God looks at her, the one hanged who went unpunished and shakes her head. It is Hog’s fault, he is stupid, he didn’t foresee it, should have made sure it couldn’t happen.

She didn’t say she was sorry, they all do in the end when the barrel is in their mouth, talk around it, try to,I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry.

God disappears from the doorway, leaves him with his error and the girl’s pink sneaker on the stained mattress and he begins to shake inside, shake with a rage so powerful he doesn’t know what to do with it.

He screams as he strides across the floor, the filthy floor, sticky and foul with her piss and shit, and he kicks her lifeless, disgusting, naked body as hard as he can. She jerks with each kick. She sways from the rope around her neck, angled up to her left ear, and her tongue protrudes as if she is mocking him, her face bluish deep red as if she is yelling at him. Her weight rests on her knees on the mattress, and her head is bent, as if she is praying to her God, her bound arms straight up, her hands together, as if she is celebrating victory.

Yes! Yes! She sways from her rope, victorious, the little pink shoe next to her.

“Shut up!” he screams.

He kicks and kicks with his big boots until his legs are too tired to kick anymore.

He slams and slams her with the stock of the shotgun until his arms are too tired to slam anymore.