Certain Prey (21 page)

“Yeah, just a minute.” Rinker heard her put the phone down. The hall was still empty, and she took the pistol out from her shirt just as the door popped open. Marker opened her mouth to ask a question and Rinker brought the gun up to her forehead and said, “Step back.”

Marker, the good Mafia kid, said, “Oh, no,” and stepped back. Rinker stepped inside, then whispered, “I am going to speak very softly: I am going to put my gun in my shirt, and we are going for a walk outside. But first, finish your phone call.”

“What?”

“Finish the phone call.”

Marker nodded, mystified, went back to the phone.

“Hello?”

“This is Mary,” Rinker said into the cell phone. “You left your car keys down here this morning, they’re at the main desk.”

“Oh, thanks,” Marker said, shakily. “Uh, I’ll be right down.”

“See you,” Rinker said, and she punched off the phone. Then she pointed her index finger at Marker, crooked it and stepped back into the hallway. Marker followed like an automaton.

“You’re going to kill me,” Marker said when they were in the hall, the door closed behind them. “I should scream.”

“If you scream, I’ll kill you. Otherwise, I’ve got good reasons not to. But I’ve got to ask you some questions.”

“What was that about the telephone?”

“The feds may be listening in.”

“Probably are,” Marker said. Then, “You’re Tennex.”

Rinker nodded. “Walk down the hall.”

“I did just like you told me . . .”

Rinker started her rap: “I don’t want to hurt you, because if I do, then they’ll know for sure that Tennex is
what they’re after. Do you understand that? Right now, they don’t know for sure.”

“Uh, yes.”

“But I’ll kill you if I have to. If I ever have any hint that you talked to them about this visit, that you’re looking at photographs, then I’ll come back for you. And if I’m caught, the people who run me will worry that other connections would be made, and they’ll come looking for both of us. In other words, if you talk to anybody about this visit, you’re dead. Do you understand?”

Marker swallowed hard and nodded.

Marker told her all of it: starting with the first phone call, the call that seemed uncertain about Tennex—a guy’s voice, baritone, educated, cool—to the raid by the FBI.

“Not a cop? The guy who called?”

“High-class cop, maybe.” She told Rinker about the FBI, about Mallard, about going down to the FBI building.

“Was one of the guys named Lucas Davenport?”

“I don’t think so, but they didn’t introduce everybody. There was one guy who kept wandering away. Big guy, tough guy. Didn’t look FBI, he had this really nice suit. Didn’t look government. Looked like, you know, a hoodlum.”

Rinker dipped in her pocket and came up with the folded page she’d taken from
BizWiz,
a computer magazine that covered Twin Cities business. “Is this the guy?”

Marker took it, looked at it for a half-second and said, “That’s him. Yeah. He looks better in real life, though.”

“Did you hear his voice? Could he have been the guy who called that first time, the confused call?”

Marker thought about it for a second. “Yeah, you know, he could have been,” she said slowly. “Yeah, you know . . .”

After a few more questions, Rinker said, “I just want to reiterate: I was very careful coming here, very careful about wiretaps and even bugs in your apartment. So nobody
knows. If anybody
ever
knows, you’re dead.”

Marker nodded rapidly. “Okay. Good. That’s good.”

“I learned a trick in a previous business of mine, when I was much younger,” Rinker said. “And that was, how to forget. You’d just say, ‘Okay, that never happened. I just dreamed it.’ And pretty soon, whatever happened becomes like a dream, and you start to forget it.”

“You’re forgot,” Marker said fervently. “Honest to God, you’re forgot.”

Before she left town, Rinker stopped at a bank and rented a safe-deposit box. She paid a year in advance, wiped the gun and left it in the box. Next time she was through the area in her car, she’d pick it up.
F
ROM
THE AIRPORT,
Rinker dialed Carmel’s magic cell phone, and Carmel answered on the second buzz: “Yes.”

“You know that guy we saw on TV?” Rinker asked.

“Yes.”

“He was here. For sure.”

“Shit. I wonder how he knew?”

“Don’t know,” Rinker said. “I’ll be back tonight at ten-fifteen on Northwest.”

“I’ll pick you up. I think we’re cool for this very moment, but we can talk when you get back.”
O
N
THE PLANE,
eyes covered with a black sleeping mask, Rinker dozed, and between small patches of sleep she thought about Carmel. She could solve quite a few problems by simply killing the other woman. But there were problems with that. Carmel wasn’t stupid, and she might already have taken out some kind of insurance: a note written in a checkbook, or left in a safe-deposit box, with what she knew about Rinker. A note that would be found only after she was dead. Another problem: this Davenport guy was as close to Rinker as he was to Carmel. How had he
gotten there? Did he know even more? Was he digging around the bar in Wichita? Carmel was a source of information about Davenport, which could be important . . .

A final reason not to kill Carmel: Rinker actually liked her. Like some kind of sister, something Rinker had never had. Rinker smiled when she thought of Carmel’s invitation to do Mexico. She’d been planning to go, by God, and if they got out of this, she would. Get a couple of thong bikinis and a nice close bikini wax, some of those drinks with little paper umbrellas and lots of pineapple, and maybe do a couple of those Mexican dudes.

As to Davenport himself, Rinker had read the
BizWiz
report, and Davenport sounded like a smart guy. And mean: he was a stone killer, no doubt about it. He was like one of those Mafia guys she’d known, a guy running a big coin-op company or garbage-hauler, a businessman who kept a gun in his pocket.

Of course, she’d killed three or four of those. Not even geniuses were bulletproof.
I
N
M
INNEAPOLIS,
sitting in front of a muted television, Carmel considered the possibilities. Maybe, if she had a chance, she should kill Pamela, or whatever her name was. It would only make sense, from a criminal-defense point of view. There really was only one perfect witness against Carmel, and if Pamela were gone, then Davenport could go shit in his hat.

She sighed, got up and wandered into the kitchen, got a glass of orange juice. She’d really hate to kill the other woman: she actually liked her. Pamela could become a friend, for God’s sake, the first real one Carmel would ever have had.

She sipped the juice and wandered back past all of her perfect black-and-white photos, barely seeing them. If she was thinking about killing Pamela, then it was probable
that the other woman was thinking about killing
her
. And maybe was equally reluctant to do it, for some of the same reasons.

If things should change, Carmel thought, if it became really necessary to get rid of
Pamela,
she damn well better move first and fast. She wouldn’t have a second chance. She glanced at her watch. Time to go get her at the airport.
R
INKER
TOSSED
her light bag in the back seat of the Volvo, and Carmel said, “I can think of three possibilities.”

“Which are?”

“We do nothing. I sat down with a legal pad tonight and tried to work out the worst possible scenario. I can’t see how they could ever, ever have come up with enough against us to arrest either one of us. If they did, I don’t see how they could convict either one of us, unless you’ve left fingerprints behind or dropped your billfold or something.”

“Nothing like that,” Rinker said. “What are the other two possibilities?”

“Our major problem is Davenport. Forget the FBI, forget these other cops who are digging around. If we get rid of Davenport, they’ll never figure out who we are. On the other hand, getting rid of him would be more than risky, it’d be dangerous. He’s not only violent, he’s lucky. One time he was shot in the throat and would have died, except a surgeon was standing right there with a jackknife and did an emergency tracheotomy and they made it to the hospital.”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Ah, man, that’s the most scary thing you’ve said about him: that he’s lucky.”

“The third possibility is that we set up and run a little play—a little pageant—that would somehow make all these killings make sense. The alternative theory: it’s one way
you can beat what seems like an open-and-shut case against a client. Give the jury something that makes more sense, or seems to . . . If we created exactly the right pageant, even if Davenport knew there was something wrong with it, they couldn’t get out of it.”

“What are you recommending?” Rinker asked.

“Number one. Do nothing. Sit and wait. I don’t think anything more will happen. We know the cops are on the phone in Washington, so we never use it again. I’d love to see their file on the case, but that won’t happen unless they make a move on Hale.”

“All right. So we sit.”

They rode in silence for a while, then Rinker asked, “What if this car is bugged?”

“They’re not
that
smart,” Carmel said. “This is Mom’s car. She even uses it, when I don’t need it, and she wants to haul something—bulbs or plants or something. But I need a car that nobody really knows about, especially when I’ve got a hot case. Sometimes, you don’t want people looking at you.”

“Your folks get divorced?”

“No, my dad killed himself,” Carmel said. “He was an endodontist, did root canals all day. He got tired of it, sat down in his chair one afternoon when he’d finished with a patient, wrote a short note to the world and strapped on a nitrous oxide mask.”

“Jesus.”

“Yup. A good way to go, I guess, but he had to work at it a little. Had to override some safety things, pinch off an oxygen tank and so on. When I go, I don’t want to have to think about it. I just wanna
go.
”

“I don’t wanna go. Not for a while,” Rinker said.

“What about your folks?” Carmel asked.

“My dad took off when I was a baby,” Rinker said. “And my good old step-dad used to fuck me once or twice a week
until
I
took off.”

“Your step-dad still around?”

“No.” Rinker looked out the window. “He went away one day. He hasn’t been seen since.”

“Like your dad,” Carmel said.

“Not exactly, no,” said Rinker.

SIXTEEN

Sherrill came back from St. Louis with blue circles under her eyes. “Didn’t get any sleep?” Lucas asked. He tried to keep his voice flat, but there might have been a
tone
to it, he thought.

“I had to fuck all the guys on their organized crime squad. That kept me up nights,” Sherrill said. They were alone in his office.

“Hey . . .” He was offended.

“Hey, yourself . . . the way you asked the question,” she said.

“I was just trying to . . .”

“Forget it. Anyway, I didn’t get any sleep. Every night I’d roll around in the bed and the blankets were too heavy and the pillow was too thick and the room smelled bad. And I’d think about you and me.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I tried not to,” she said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I was wondering if we did the right thing. I was wondering if I ought to get you someplace and screw you blind, just one
more time. Or two or three more times, but not forever. Just sort of good-bye.”

“I had the feeling you’d already done that,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, I did,” Sherrill said. “Besides, sex wasn’t really our problem, was it?”

“Nah. The sex was pretty wonderful. At least, from my point of view.”

“So what was it?”

“I think, uh, you might be a natural upper, and I’m a natural downer . . .”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what you concluded?”

“I concluded that I oughta get a new boyfriend, and you oughta get a girlfriend, then we’d be done with it.”

“I’m too tired to look,” Lucas said. “You get one.”

“Yeah,” Sherrill said. She nibbled on her bottom lip. “Maybe.”
L
UCAS
SAID,
“We’re dead in the water here. The feds are still sitting on their wiretap on Tennex, but nobody’s calling.”

“Are they tapping Carmel?” “Maybe. They say they’re not—yet—but they could be lying about it.”

“The FBI? Lying?”

“Yeah, yeah . . . you get anything?”

“I got about twenty names,” Sherrill said.

“Lot of names.”

“Yeah. But if there’s a Mafia-connected guy in St. Louis who can order these hits, his name is almost for sure on the list.”

“So what?”

“I’m getting to that,” she said. “You know how you guys were looking at where all those checks came from? And you figured the person sending them must come from southwest Missouri or eastern Kansas or those other places?”

“Northern Arkansas or northern Oklahoma . . .”

“So if we do an analysis of these Mafia guys, who are all like these uptown dudes wearing loafers with no socks and driving Cadillacs . . . and if we find one of them has a lot of calls going out to some farm in East Jesus, Oklahoma . . .”

Lucas looked at her for a second and said, “That’s good.”

“You like it?”

“First decent idea anybody’s had in a week.” He pulled open his desk drawer and found Mallard’s card. “Even better, it involves dealing with bureaucrats from the phone company: I mean, this is Mallard’s
life.
”
M
ALLARD
LIKED IT:
he had three agents working on it overnight, and called Lucas back in the middle of the afternoon the next day. He was, Lucas thought, a teeny bit breathless.

“Have you ever heard of Allen Kent?”

“No . . .”

“He’s this Italian guy—his father’s name was Kent, he was nobody, but his mother’s family was tied right to the top of the St. Louis
and
the Chicago Mafia families, back when Sam Giancana was running the world.”

“Who’s he been calling?”

“Well, he calls all over the place, he’s a booze distributor. He calls every little goddamn bar in the Midwest. But he’s got an AT&T calling card which he uses when he’s out of town, and we analyzed all those calls for the past ten years and guess what?”

“He’s actually Lee Harvey Oswald and he’s holding JFK in a cave.”

“No. But you know we have all these Mafia-related hits attributed to this woman. In each case, Kent was making calls from Wichita, Kansas, between twenty-four and thirty days before each hit. He’d spend two days there, each time, every time. Now, you figure he goes out to Wichita to meet
the shooter and give her the assignment, and maybe talk about information she needs. Then she needs time to do some recon—we know she’s careful, we know she’s watching the target for a while before she moves. And maybe she needs some time to get oriented in each new city . . . and time to drive there, if she drives like we think she does.”

“You think she’s from Wichita,” Lucas said.

“We think it’s a possibility. We even think we might have a name.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“John Lopez.”

Lucas grappled with the name for a moment. “John?”

“Yeah. A guy, disguised as a woman, which makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. A woman hit man for the Mafia? Come on. Never happen. We found him in our database: he’s Puerto Rican, five-five, one hundred and thirty pounds, so he could be a woman. He’s a mean little bastard, too. Back a few years ago, there was a massive amount of cocaine coming in through the south coast of Puerto Rico, and then it was transshipped by plane to the States, because there’s no customs on Puerto Rican flights—it’s an internal flight. He was one of the mules, hauling it up to Chicago, taking the money back. When he was busted, he gave up all the Puerto Rican links in return for immunity and protection, but claimed he didn’t know who he was dealing with in Chicago. We now think it might have been the Mafia, and that’s where he hooked up with Allen Kent.”

“How’d he get to Wichita?”

“Witness protection. God help us, but we might have been protecting the biggest professional killer in the States.”

Lucas felt slightly deflated: the Feebs were gonna make the bust. “Are you going out there?”

“Absolutely. I’m taking everything I got with me. Lopez
supposedly runs a flower shop out there, like a longtime hood is gonna run a flower shop.” Mallard laughed, and Lucas looked at the phone: Mallard seemed to be running a little hot.

“Mind if I watch?”

“Hell, no. I’m going out this afternoon, I’m leaving here in five minutes. We’re staying at the Holiday Inn, uh, the Holiday Inn East. We got a warrant going on a wiretap, and we’re getting all of his phone records now. Listen, I gotta run.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “I’ll see you down there, probably tonight, if nothing comes up. I’m driving down.”

“You could fly in a couple of hours.” “Yeah, yeah, I’m driving,” Lucas said.
L
UCAS
WAS
a longtime Porsche driver. He enjoyed driving the car up to a couple of hundred miles, but it was not a long-distance cruiser. Six hundred and fifty miles would leave him both shaken and stirred. Besides, the Porsche needed servicing.

“Look,” he told his Porsche dealer on the telephone, “you’re gonna charge me an arm and a leg, so I oughta get something decent for a loaner. I know damn well that you’ve got that BMW on the lot, because I saw Larry showing it to a guy . . . Yeah, yeah, I don’t want a Volkswagen Passat. How about this: I’ll pay mileage. I’ll pay you fifteen cents a mile, and I buy all the gas. I’m driving to Wichita, which is six hundred and fifty miles, more or less, so that’s thirteen hundred miles, you’ll get a couple of hundred bucks for three or four days, and then I won’t be hassling you about your slow work on the Porsche . . . Come on, goddamnit. Whattaya mean, fifty cents? The government doesn’t pay fifty cents, and that’s supposed to cover gasoline . . .”

He got the 740IL, a long black four-door with a cockpit
like an F-16’s, gray leather seats, a CD player in the trunk and sixty-one thousand miles on the clock, for twenty-five cents a mile. He was two miles out of the dealership when he tripped the ill-placed hood-cover latch with his left foot, without knowing what he’d done, and the hood began rattling up and down. Fearing that the hood was about to blow back in his face, he swerved to the edge of the highway and risked his neck to relatch it. He tripped the hood lever again, five minutes later, and again took the car to the shoulder. This time, he called the Porsche dealer, who said, “You’re tripping the hood with your left foot. Stop doing that.”

Lucas found the hood latch and said, “That’s a good place for it.”

Thirty miles out of town, a yellow light popped on the left dash that said
Check Engine,
and he took it to the side again, fearing that he was about to blow a rod. He was still within cell phone distance, and he called the dealer again, who said the light meant that the emission system wasn’t working quite right. “Don’t worry about it; it doesn’t mean anything.”

“On any other car, ‘check engine’ means all your oil just ran out on the road,” Lucas said.

“That’s not any car,” the Porsche guy said. “When the oil runs out on the road, that one says ‘STOP!’ in big red letters.”

“So the light’s gonna be on all trip?”

“That’s right, pal. You wanted it, you got it,” the dealer said, without a shred of sympathy.

“There’s this whistling noise . . .”

“The windshield’s not quite right. We’re gonna try to reseal it when you get back.”

“I’m beginning to think this thing’s a piece of shit,” Lucas grumbled.

“What do you want for sixty-nine thousand?” the Porsche guy asked. “You shoulda took the Volkswagen.”

• • •

B
UT
THE CAR
was comfortable, and certainly looked good. He made the six hundred and fifty miles to Wichita in nine hours, whipping through Des Moines and Kansas City, pausing only for gas and a sack of hard-shell Taco Supremes at a Taco Bell. He got a room at a Best Western, called Mallard’s office in Washington, where an after-hours secretary said she’d relay his number to Mallard. Mallard called five minutes later: “We’re downtown at a place called Joseph’s. Let me read the menu to you . . .”

Lucas ordered a steak, medium, baked potato without sour cream and a Diet Coke. He found Joseph’s fifteen minutes later, just as the waiter was delivering the food to Mallard and an angular gray-haired woman named Malone. She was just about his age, Lucas thought, somewhere in the murky forties.

“Malone is our legal specialist,” Mallard said as he went to work on the steak. “She keeps track of the taps and the warrants and all that, and talks to the judge when we need to talk to him.”

“Are you an agent?” Lucas asked.

Malone had just pushed a tiny square of beef into her mouth, and instead of answering, opened the left side of her pin-striped jacket so Lucas could see the butt of a black automatic pistol.

“Nice accessories,” Lucas said. Trying a little bit.

“Cop charm works really well on me,” Malone said, after she swallowed. “I get all atwitter.”

“You wanna stop that?” Mallard asked. “I hate middle-aged courtship rituals.”

“What’s his problem?” Lucas asked Malone.

“Recently divorced,” Malone said, tipping her head at Mallard. “Still loves her.”

“Sorry,” Lucas said.

“Not true, anyway. I’m all done with that,” Mallard said, and for one small second he looked so miserable that Lucas
wanted to pat him on the back and tell him it’d be okay; but Lucas didn’t believe it would be, and Mallard wouldn’t either. “Besides,” Mallard added, “I’m not all alone in that condition.”

“If you’re talking to me, you’re talking to the wrong person,” Malone said. “I don’t like any of them.”

“Them?” Lucas asked.

“Four-time loser,” Mallard said, jabbing his fork at Malone.

“Jesus,” Lucas said. “In the FBI?”

“If it hadn’t been for the second one, I’d be a deputy director by now,” Malone said.

“What’d he do?” Lucas asked.

“He was an actor.”

“Bad actor,” Mallard said.

“No, he was a good actor; he just couldn’t stay away from the nude scenes,” Malone said. “The killer was when
The Washington Post
interviewed him, nude, and he mentioned he was married to an FBI agent.”