Silken Prey

CHAPTER 24

Lucas drove past Grant’s house with the driver’s-side window down, along the street lined with towering pines and blue spruces. He could hear, distantly but clearly, Aretha Franklin singing “Think.”

From the street, he could see that the front door was open, and he could see people inside; and he could see guards along the front lot line. Another dozen people were milling outside the front fence, one of them with a large handwritten sign that said, “Yay for the New Senator.” As Lucas continued down the street, he saw, in his rearview mirror, a TV truck turning the corner.

She won, he thought. The TV people would be looking at exit polls, and would know which way the wind was blowing, even if they wouldn’t say so until the polls closed. He continued around a curve, turned into an intersecting street, followed it down its twisting length to a slightly larger street, took a right, and followed the new street out to an even larger, straight street. Just around the corner, he pulled up behind Del, got out, and walked to the passenger side.

Del popped the door and Lucas got in. Del was eating a cheese and bratwurst sandwich, with onions, and Lucas said, “Maybe we oughta talk outside.”

“Gotta man up,” Del said. “Besides, only two more bites, and it’s cold out there.”

“Nothing’s happening,” Lucas said.

“Well, they’re in there together. I wonder if Carver said anything?”

“I gotta believe he did, ’cause if he didn’t, this is a huge waste of time,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, and it’s your fault,” Del said. He finished the sandwich, dug a napkin out of a brown paper bag, burped, wiped his fingers and chin. “Goddamn, that was good.”

“I thought Cheryl had you off that crap. Had to be ninety percent cholesterol.”

“Ah, we compromised. I can have one a week. Gotta make it count.”

Shrake called on the handset: “You hear the one about the guy walking around with his dog at night, and runs into his old pal with his dog?”

“Big waste of time,” Lucas said. “But, no, I haven’t.”

“I’ll tell it to you sometime,” Shrake said. “Right now, I should probably mention that I went by Grant’s place, and Carver was walking out to his truck. He was talking to Dannon. I think he’s moving.”

Lucas said, “I’m on it,” said good-bye to Del, who was monitoring the main vehicle, the one Dannon had been driving, and walked back to his truck. Carver started moving two minutes later, and Lucas and Shrake and Jenkins and Bradley and Stack followed him downtown, and watched him turn into a parking ramp that fed the Radisson Hotel, where the victory party would be held.

• • •

BRADLEY AND STACK FOLLOWED him in. They were dressed for the party, Bradley with a big pin that said “Taryn” and Stack with a bunch of credentials around her neck that looked like news credentials. They’d both changed their hair a bit and Bradley had gotten a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Neither looked like the real estate ladies from that morning. The three men waited in the street, and five minutes after Carver drove into the garage, Bradley called on her cell phone and said, “He’s in the ballroom, he’s talking to security. Looks like they’re setting up for tonight.”

“Has he looked at you?” Lucas asked.

“No.”

“Good. Stay out of sight,” Lucas said. “You don’t want him to see you more than a couple of times.”

Annoyed, she said, “Yeah, I’ve done this before.”

“I know you have . . . but I worry.”

• • •

IN WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN an expansive family room, if Taryn had had a family, all the white folks and the necessary number of blacks and browns were cuttin’ a rug, if a lot of really stiff heirs and fund managers and entrepreneurs and politicians could, in fact, cut a rug.

Taryn had had a few drinks and was dancing with everyone, lit up like a Christmas tree, feeling the rush. Dannon had tried to catch her eye, but she’d resolutely moved on to the next Important Person.

• • •

KIDD COULD SEE HOW pumped Lauren was, so he didn’t bother to argue any further, though he drove slowly. Eventually, however, they’d arrived at Grant’s house, and there was no way to put it off. He hit the switch that killed the taillights, let the car roll to a stop, said, “Luck,” and Lauren slipped out the door and into the night.

Lauren had always had a taste for cocaine, given up only when pregnancy was a prospect, and not touched since then; but now, as she slipped out of the car, over the curb and into the trees that marked the edge of the neighbor’s lot, she felt as high as she ever had on coke, with the same preternatural awareness, her senses reaching out through the trees to the political party three hundred yards away.

Lauren was in her black suit, with a black nylon backpack. She’d opened a pair of sterile surgical gloves in the SUV, before getting out, and Kidd had helped her get into them as a surgeon would, with no contact on the outer surface that would spread germs . . . or DNA.

Once back in the trees, she pulled on her starlights and moved slowly toward Grant’s place. There was a lot of light from that direction, and none from the house to the other side. The light threw India-ink shadows behind each tree. Ten feet from Grant’s property line, she found a particularly deep shadow and lay down in it for five minutes, without moving; watching and listening.

She saw a guard moving across the yard, away from her; he apparently had been assigned to the backyard. She decided she needed to time him. She took out the cold phone and called Kidd. She said, “I’m at Target. I’ll be a while. Call you when I’m ready to go.”

“Okay. Everything’s fine, here.”

Target was the edge of the yard, where she lay. Cell phones are radios, and hobbyists listen to the calls. . . .

She hung up and lay back in the weeds. Three minutes, four minutes. The backyard guard had disappeared around the corner of the house, where the dog kennel was, and now reappeared, having walked all the way around the house. He was an older guy, hands in his pockets, peering here and there, but not obviously ready to act.

When he’d gone halfway around the house again, Lauren took a breath, punched in Kidd’s number, said, “I’m gone.” She crossed the four-foot-high wrought iron fence that marked the property line, and, keeping a tree trunk between herself and the house, crossed halfway to the house. At the tree, she paused again, watching and listening, and saw nothing.

Ten seconds, and she moved again, paused at another tree, then ran lightly across the yard to the house and lay down in a spreading arborvitae shrub at the house’s foundation. She pushed the starlights up and off, and stowed them in her pack. She smiled at a thought: the thought that the guard would hear her heart pounding in the bush.

A minute passed, then another, and she lay completely covered and unmoving, on her stomach, so she could make a fast dash for the side tree line if she had to, like a sprinter coming out of the blocks. The target window was straight above her head.

She hadn’t felt like this in six years, and she nearly giggled.

A minute later, the guard ambled by, his head turned away from the house. When he was out of sight, she started counting seconds under her breath. At the same time, moving automatically, she stood up, looked through the window into a darkened bathroom. Kidd was watching the security cameras, and hadn’t seen anything, so she stuck a couple of suction cups to the window, pulled a glass cutter from her leg pocket, and putting a lot of weight behind it, scored the first layer of glass. At “forty” she hit the glass with the back end of the cutter, and heard it crack along the score line. She pulled on the suction cups, but the glass was stubborn, and she hit it again. This time, it came free, and she lowered it to the ground. She was at sixty.

At one hundred twenty, she hit the second layer of glass twice, and pulled it free. The noise—a series of sharp but not particularly loud cracks—was unavoidable. The last sheet of the triple-pane glass would have to be done more carefully, because it had a foil alarm strip around the perimeter. Kidd thought all the alarms were off, but it would be best not to break it. She wasn’t sure she had time, so she lay back in the bush, and at the count of two-twenty, the guard came past the house again.

When he was gone, she stood up again, and carefully cutting inside the foil strips, she yanked the last pane of glass off, and lay down again. She dialed Kidd and said, “Let’s get coffee.” He said, “I’ll see you there.”

He knew she was ready to enter; and she knew that there’d been no alarm yet.

Yet. Big word.

• • •

SHE PULLED A SHORT strip of thick, soft plastic tarp out of her pack, and waited again for the guard to pass. When he did, she put the tarp over the edges of the cut window glass and carefully boosted herself through the window. She stepped on a toilet seat, moved quickly to the water-closet door, into the main bathroom and to the bathroom door. She opened it, just a crack.

The bedroom was dark. She could hear the distant vibration of voices and the deeper thump of rock music, but nothing from the bedroom. She dialed Kidd and said, “In.” He made no reply, but he was there, live, and if something broke, he’d start screaming.

She took a moment to remove the tarp from the window, then moved quickly through the bedroom, groped for the button that would open the bookcase panel, found it, opened it, put the phone to her ear. Was the bookcase button booby-trapped? Kidd said nothing, issued no warning. The safe was there, in the dark: she felt for the keypad, found it, tried a combination, turned the lock handle. It didn’t budge. No panic: she had a sequence to run through, one of four possibilities. She hit it on the second one.

There must have been twenty small jewelry cases in the safe. She threw them in the pack, felt deeper into the safe, picked up something heavy and cylindrical . . . a roll of coins. Heavy: gold. She felt around, found a dozen more rolls. And cash: stacks of currency. Christ, this was good. She threw everything into her bag, and then closed the safe, and pushed the bookcase button . . .

And Kidd started screaming: “Hide hide hide . . .”

She punched off the phone and at the same moment, she heard them: somebody coming down the hall, arguing, coming fast. No time, not time even to get to the bathroom . . .

The bookcase was sliding back in place as she bounced once across the bed to the far side, pulling the pack along, hit the floor, then slipped under the bedskirt and pulled the pack with her, under the bed. At the same moment, the bedroom door opened, and a streak of light cut across the carpet.

• • •

DANNON FINALLY GOT TARYN out of the crowd. She was about two-thirds drunk, he thought, as he hustled her along by her arm, all the way to the bedroom, a few curious partiers looking after them. They pushed through the door, but didn’t bother with the light: they needed privacy, not illumination.

“What is it?” Taryn snarled. “This is my night, you can’t—”

“Shut up and listen, goddamnit, this is more important than any of that political bullshit,” Dannon said, shaking her. “Carver got hit by that goddamn Davenport. Davenport found out what Carver did in Afghanistan, and supposedly is going to get the governor to say something about it, on a talk show or something—that Carver massacred some people.”

“Did he?”

“Well, that depends on how you look at it,” Dannon said.

“So he did,” Taryn said.

“Listen. Davenport is trying to get Carver to turn on us. Offering him immunity. Carver’s freaking out. He wants you to give him a million dollars in diamonds and cash, tonight. He’s going to run for it. He thinks he can hide out in Panama.”

“That sounds crazy,” Taryn said.

“It’s not entirely crazy, except that he won’t stop with a million. He’ll spend it in six months. He’ll buy a goddamn fishing trawler or something, something that won’t work out, and he’ll keep coming back. Or he’ll get in trouble and he’ll tell everybody that a U.S. senator is a pal of his, and he’ll be coming to you for a little influence peddling . . . and more money. It’s the same deal as with Tubbs.”

“Is there any chance that Davenport would give him immunity?” Taryn asked.

“Oh, hell, yes. If he could bag you and me? Hell, yes.”

“So . . .”

“I’m gonna take Ron out tonight. I’ll work out some kind of excuse to get him down to his vehicle, and I’ll hit him—”

“The car will be full of blood—”

“No-no. I can do this. There won’t be a speck of blood. We’ve already got the perfect graveyard. I’ll get my pal to carry his passport across the border into Iraq . . . and we’re good. Good forever.”

• • •

A PHONE RANG; for a freaking split second, Lauren thought it was hers and she slid her hand down her leg to the side pocket, but then heard Taryn say, “Wait . . .” and then, as the phone continued to ring, Taryn said, “Damn it, where is it? Okay.”

She’d been rummaging through her purse, Lauren thought. Then Taryn answered the phone and said, “We’re in the back . . . probably pretty soon. Yeah, I’ve stopped, don’t worry about it. Okay, we’re coming out.”

Lauren heard what sounded like a woman dropping a purse on a tabletop, and the door swung open.

Taryn’s voice: “Do it. Do it.”

Then they were gone, still talking, their voices diminishing as they went down the hall. Lauren started breathing again, slipped out from under the bed. The room was no longer entirely dark. She could be seen by the monitors if she stood up. She crawled across the carpet, pulling the pack, to the bathroom, which wasn’t covered by the cameras. At the bathroom, she slipped inside, and as she was closing the door, saw Taryn’s purse on the dresser on the opposite wall.

Thought about it, then went to the window, looked and listened, and satisfied that the guard wasn’t right there, dropped the pack into the arborvitae. Then she went back to the bathroom door, got down on her knees, and then on her stomach, and slipped across the floor, staying close to the wall where the camera wouldn’t see her. It would see her if she stood up at the dresser.

She stayed on the floor to the outer door, reached out and slowly, slowly closed the door. As soon as it was dark, she stood, went straight to the purse, dipped inside, found Taryn’s iPhone, then hurried back across to the bathroom. She peered out the window, then pulled back: the guard was right there, on the lawn, still looking away from the house, toward the trees.

He went on by, slowly, and as soon as he was out of sight, she dropped the tarp across the cut edges of glass, pushed through the window, dropped behind the bush, on top of her pack. She stuffed the tarp into it, took the starlights out and put them on. She wouldn’t wait now: she called Kidd, said, “Running,” and took off, zigzagging between trees, into the tree line, then through the trees toward the street.

At the tree line, she knelt, pulled off her starlights, and stuffed them in her pack, and then the darkened car rolled up. She was inside then, and Kidd did a U-turn and asked, his voice tight, “How’d it go?”

“Pretty routine,” she said. “Hey, slow down. I’ve got to text a guy.”

“What?”

“Give me Lucas’s cell phone number.”

• • •

LUCAS WAS IN HIS LEXUS, alone, waiting for Carver to move again, when his phone burped at him.

Thinking Weather or Letty, he pulled it out and found a message from an unknown number:

Dannon will kill Carver tonight at the hotel and bury him in the perfect graveyard. Best wishes, Taryn.

Lucas said, “What?”