Rules of Prey

CHAPTER 33

"Has he gone to bed?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah," said the first watcher, the tall one.

"Shit." Lucas looked at the ceiling, brooding. Maybe he'd spotted them. "He's got to move soon. He's got to."

"My stomach's moving now," said the second surveillance cop. "I need something to eat."

"Three more hours," said the first one.

"Christ." The second cop looked at Lucas. "So. What're you doing?"

Lucas had been lying on the surveillance mattress, reading the copy of Powder.

"Uh…"

"I don't suppose you'd be interested in a pizza?"

"Sure. I guess." Lucas rolled to his feet.

"There's a place over by the university. Pretty good," said the hungry cop. "I'll call, they'll have it ready when you get there."

"You got your handset?" asked the first cop.

"Yeah."

"I'll holler if anything happens."

The pizza wasn't ready when he got there, but it was ready five minutes later. He took it out to the car and headed back, letting the Porsche run a bit, cutting dangerously close to an oncoming car as he turned into the street that led to the surveillance house. Can't do this, he thought as the other car's lights raked over him. The last thing he needed was a fistfight with some outstate redneck who didn't like being cut off.

He hustled the hot pizza up three flights of steps to the surveillance post on the top floor.

"Nothing," said the first cop.

"Quiet as a fuckin' bunny rabbit," said the hungry one. He pried the top off the pizza box. "If this thing has anchovies on it, you're a dead man."

Lucas took a piece of the pizza and went back to the magazine.

"Night-light must have burned out," the first cop said after a while.

"Hmmph?"

"No night-light tonight."

Lucas crawled to the window and looked out. The maddog's bedroom window was a flat black rectangle. Not a glimmer of light. That was odd, Lucas thought. If a guy slept with a night-light, he usually needed it…

"Dammit," he said, pivoting and sitting with his back against the wall, his knees bent in front of him.

"What?"

"I don't know." He turned his head and stared over the windowsill. "That freaks me out. That's not right."

"Just a fuckin' night-light," the hungry cop said as he finished the last of the pizza and licked his fingers.

"It's not right," Lucas said. He smelled the wrongness. Watching him now for almost two weeks, a night-light every night. But there was no other way out of the house. Not unless he poked a hole in the walls.

The attic, he thought. That fuckin' attic.

Lucas crawled to the telephone. "What's his number?" he asked the first surveillance cop, snapping his fingers.

"Jesus, are you gonna-?"

"Give me the goddamn number," Lucas said, his voice cold.

The first cop glanced at his no-longer-hungry companion, who shrugged and took a small notebook from his pocket and read the number. Lucas punched it in.

"If he answers, it's just a wrong number," he said, glancing at the others. "I'll ask for Louise." The maddog's phone rang. Fifteen times. Thirty. Fifty. No light in the window. Nothing.

"Son of a gun," said the first cop.

"Give me the number again. Maybe I misdialed," Lucas said. The cop read him the number and he punched it in again. "You sure it's the right number?"

"It's right," said the cop. The phone rang. And rang. No answer.

"Let it ring," Lucas said, running for the door. "I'm going over there."

"Jesus…"

Lucas banged out the front door of the surveillance house, ran across the street to the maddog's porch. He could hear the phone ringing and he pushed the doorbell and kept it down. Five seconds, ten. No light. He wrenched open the storm door and tried the interior door. Locked. No time for subtlety. He backed off a step and kicked the door at the lock with all of his strength, smashing it open.

Inside, he ran to the base of the stairs.

"Vullion?" He was carrying the Heckler amp; Koch P7, and had it in his fist as he went up the stairs. "Vullion?"

A light went on in the living room, and Lucas' head snapped back and he saw the first surveillance cop following him with his pistol drawn. Lucas went the rest of the way up the stairs and saw the steps from the attic. They had been pulled down into the hallway.

"Motherfucker's gone," he yelled at the cop behind him. "Kill that phone, will you?" Lucas checked the bedroom, then climbed the steps into the attic. The partitions separating the attic quadrants were loose. The phone stopped ringing as Lucas backed down the steps.

"He went through the attic into one of the other apartments and out that way," he shouted to the cop. "Get everybody on the street, look for a guy on foot. Bust him. We got him for housebreaking, if nothing else."

The surveillance cop ran out the front door. Lucas moved through the front room, turned once, and looked at it. Nothing. Not a thing. His eyes narrowed and he went back up to the bedroom, slid his hand under the mattress. Then swept it around. The pictures were gone.

He went back down and headed for the telephone. Call Daniel, he thought. Get some help out here. As he picked up the phone, his eye caught the tiny rectangular red light on the VCR. Vullion had been watching a tape. Lucas dropped the phone, turned on the television, ran the tape back a few numbers, and punched the On button. Carla. Lucas looked up, his eyes gone blank. The interview. Carla.

He ran, his mind sifting the possibilities, his body already doing what his mind would eventually decide. Vullion was going after Carla. He wouldn't take a bus, so he must, somehow, have gotten wheels. Lucas had a handset. He could call the St. Paul cops and have somebody at Carla's apartment in three or four minutes. That's what it would take for the cops to understand what he was saying, to get together, and get over to Carla's warehouse.

But he was only six miles away. All of it Interstate. The Porsche could be there in five minutes, six at the outside. Would the extra minutes kill her? If they would not, he might make the coup.

Lucas dove into the Porsche, cranked it, and hammered the accelerator, slid through the first turn, hit the second at forty-five, braked to fifty to get onto the Interstate ramp. A Honda Civic was ahead of him on the ramp and Lucas put two wheels on the grass and blew past the Honda at seventy, the other driver's frightened face a half-moon on the periphery of his vision. He was doing eighty-five coming off the ramp, and floored it, the speedometer climbing without hesitation through the hundred mark, one ten, one twenty. He left it there, sweeping past the cars on the highway, the exits clicking past like heartbeats.

Two minutes. Lexington Avenue. Three minutes. Dale. Three minutes, twenty seconds, sweeping into the Tenth Street exit, downshifting, the machine clawing through the first intersection, the warehouse looming in front of him. He wrenched the car to the side of the street, took the gym bag with the silenced pistol from behind the seat, and ran toward the building's side door.

As he approached, the janitor appeared with keys in his hands.

"No," Lucas shouted, and the janitor paused. Lucas groped in his shirt pocket, found his identification, and flashed it as he pushed through the door.

"You stay right here," he told the janitor, who stood with his mouth hanging open. "Some St. Paul cops are going to come here, and you take them up in the elevator. You wait right here, you got it?"

The janitor nodded. "Wait right here," he said.

"Right." Lucas patted him on the shoulder and dashed up the stairs.

Carla's door had better locks, he thought breathlessly as he came up the last few steps, but it was still a crappy door. No time to think about it really. Christ, if the maddog wasn't here, this was going to be embarrassing. He hurried down to the doorway, saw the light coming from beneath it. He dropped the gym bag, took a step back, and kicked the door in. Lucas exploded into the room, his pistol in a two-handed grip.

The studio was empty.