Certain Prey (34 page)

Lucas shook his head: “No. We’re about done. I’m gonna take one last cruise through the place.”

Carlton went to Carmel and said, “I’m chairing a bar meeting at seven o’clock. Will you be all right here?”

“Sure. It’s all over.”

And Sherrill, her voice low, asked Lucas, “Got the shell?”

“Yeah: take off as soon as Carlton’s out of here.”

“I’ll be across the street with Sloan. Franklin and Del are headed for your house.”
C
ARLTON
LEFT,
Sherrill looked at her watch: “You want me to stay?” she asked Lucas. “I’m kind of in a rush.”

“Take off,” Lucas said. “I’ll say good-bye to Carmel, make sure nobody left anything behind.”

Carmel shouted at Sherrill, as she left, “Good riddance to all of ya. Fuck ya. Fuck ya . . .”

Sherrill flashed her the finger over her shoulder, and Carmel’s eyes widened and she took a step after Sherrill, and Lucas stepped between them and said, “Hey, hey . . .” Then, to Sherrill, “Knock it off, okay?” At the same time, he winked at her.

“Yeah, yeah . . .” And she was gone, too, and Lucas and Carmel were left alone in the fabulous apartment.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Carmel asked, “Are you wearing a wire?” They were still standing in the living room, by the open door to the hallway.

“No. Should I be?” Lucas stepped over to the door and pushed it shut.

“When I think about it, I don’t really care,” Carmel said. “I’m gonna get you for this, Davenport, I swear to God. I’m gonna dedicate my life to it.”

“Gonna take a lot of dedication, if you’re out at the women’s prison for thirty years,” Lucas said.

She flushed, and he could see her eyeteeth, bared, as she spoke: “There’s not gonna be any prison. Not for me. Could be for you, when we’re done with you. You’ve got nothing.”

Lucas shook his head and said, “They’re arguing about that over at the courthouse. Some of the guys think we’ve got enough, some of them don’t. Gonna be close.” He drifted across the living room as he talked, poked his head into the guestroom, then continued to her bedroom, Carmel following him down the hall. “What do you want in here?” she demanded.

“I’m just closing the place down, making sure nobody
left anything behind,” he said. The shell was between two shoes in the open part of the closet. “I’ll tell you something, Carmel. Just between you and me—and I don’t care if
you’re
wearing a wire. I know you were involved in these killings. I know it. I know you were involved in the first one, Barbara Allen, and I think you did it because you wanted Hale. You were screwing him before the body was in the ground.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. Hale told me that.”

“Hale?” Her hand went to her throat.

“Yeah. We had a long talk about you. I know all about you, about your sexual preferences, about what you like to talk about in bed. And you know what? You scared the shit out of Hale. He didn’t have the courage to stop you, but he did have the courage to come in and talk to me, and I taped it. Hale telling me about how you hated Barbara, about how she was holding him back, about how he was lucky to be rid of her.” Lucas was adding that last bit on, but he bet it was true.

“That sonofabitch,” she said.

“Naw. He was just a dummy. Worked hard, liked women, not too much upstairs. Not a lot of guts, either— but he was just trying to get through life. He felt guilty about Louise Clark, but a lot of guys who love their wives have affairs. And Louise was something else in bed. He couldn’t stop talking about her. He said she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch: that’s the way he put it. He said that compared to Clark, you were like the Roman Army, just grinding him down.”

“He never said that,” Carmel shouted. But there were tears streaking her face now, and she hated it, and screamed louder, “Hale never said that.”

“Yeah, he did, and I think you know it, because it rings right,” Lucas said. He felt odd, standing in the cool, professionally feminine bedroom, alone with this tearstreaked
women, hands in his pants pockets, almost abashed: he felt cruel. He pushed on. “He said you were like some kind of machine, marching all over him; but he was afraid to dump you, because he was . . .
afraid.
Because he thought you may have killed his wife.”

“Louise Clark killed her . . . and him.”

“Oh,
please
,” Lucas said, sounding in his own ears like a character in a New York TV comedy. “Louise Clark
had
him. He was going to marry her, as soon as he could get rid of you. And Louise Clark, to tell you the truth, was a good match for him. Smart enough, but not exactly the wizard of the Western world. But a nice woman. And good in bed. And as far as we can tell from talking to all of her friends, Louise Clark had never fired a gun in her life, right up to the day when we found her in the middle of that phony suicide tableau in her bedroom.”

“Fuck you, Davenport,” Carmel said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Get out of my house.”

Lucas said, “Yeah, I’m going: I’ll scout the . . .” It seemed a little faked, he didn’t do it quite right, the frown, the near double take, but Carmel was tired, stretched out of shape. “What is that?”

“What?” Carmel was confused.

“Here,” Lucas said. He brushed past her, pushed the sliding door back so he could get a better look at the shoe. “Goddamnit.”

He stood up, took Carmel by the arm and said, “Come out here,” tugging her toward the living room.

“Let go of me . . .” She tried to pull away.

“I just want you out in the living room with me.” And in the living room he shouted, “Hello? Hey, anybody here? Goddamnit . . .”

Carmel took a step back toward the bedroom, and Lucas said, “No.” And he said it with bite, and she stopped. He looked around, stepped into the kitchen, got a
roll of Saran Wrap from the kitchen counter and carried it back toward the bedroom. She followed behind him and he knelt by the closet door and pushed the shoe away and, wrapping his thumb and forefinger with Saran Wrap, picked up the cartridge.

“A twenty-two,” he said. He looked at her. “A fuckin’ twenty-two.”

“You put that there,” she said.

“Bullshit. You know I didn’t put it there. And I’ll tell you what—I bet it’s got your fingerprints on it. I bet it’ll check out when they do the metallurgy, won’t it? What’d you do, drop a box of twenty-twos in the closet? Shuck out a clip or something? How’d the cartridge get into your closet, Carmel?”
D
AVENPORT
SEEMED
to recede from her. He loomed over her in real space, but the pressure on her was so great that he seemed to squeeze down, until he looked like a little man seen through the glass peephole on an apartment door. Carmel’s brain stopped: she couldn’t bear this. She said something to him, but she didn’t know what, and walked stiff-legged out of the bedroom. He was talking to her, at her, reached out to her, but she batted his arm away.

She was screaming back at him, but a broken, isolated part of her brain seemed to be in control now. She walked straight across the living room, picked up a fistful of car keys from the entry table, and went out the door, leaving the door open, Davenport staring after her, saying something incomprehensible at her back . . .

Out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, pushing blindly at the buttons, out the door at five, into the parking ramp, down the ramp to the blue Volvo, into the trunk, into the gym bag, out with the gun.

Because this is where she’d put the gun she got from Rinker: the car, with her mother’s registration under her mother’s new married name, nobody to know, nobody even
to look at such an out-of-character non-Carmel-like motor vehicle.

She marched back through the door, propelled by the rage, got the elevator where it waited, the gun solid in her hand.
L
UCAS
WATCHED HER
go out the bedroom door, thought,
Whoa.
He followed after her, holding the shell. He had to tell her that he was taking the shell with him: she had to see the shell go in his pocket. But something about the way she was walking, robotlike, across the front room. And suddenly he feared she’d had some kind of a stroke, and he said, “Carmel? Carmel? Are you all right?”

Then she was gone down the hall. He stood uncertainly in the bedroom door for a moment, expecting her to come back, then flipped out his cell phone, punched a speed dial button and said, when Sherrill answered, “This is me. I think something’s happened to Carmel. She just went out of here, acting weird.”

“Want us to come back up?”

“No. I’ll . . . Well, maybe. Yeah. Come on back. Think of some reason to come back, I’m gonna check on her.”

Lucas walked across the living room, out into the hall— and she was gone. Either through the door into the stairway, or the elevators. Lucas walked down to the elevators and pushed the button. He bounced on his toes for a moment, thought about going down to look at the stairway door, then thought about the apartment door and hurried back, checked that it wasn’t locked and started to pull it shut. At that precise moment, an elevator
ding
ed, and Lucas stepped toward it. “Carmel?”

She stepped out of the elevator: Lucas didn’t see it as it was coming up, didn’t instantly recognize it in the context, but then . . .

• • •

C
ARMEL
FIRED
at him as the sights crossed the line of his face and saw the surprise and the gun jumped and Davenport was moving sideways and down and she felt the rush of a kill and tracked him with the barrel and fired again and again and then . . .
L
UCAS
FELT
the first shot sting his neck and then he was moving, diving back into the apartment, felt another shot across his shoulders, and then, back in the living room, he was rolling across the fabulous carpet as a hornet’s nest of bullet fragments ricocheted off the door a few feet away. As he fought to get upright and oriented, his cheek stung, then something hit him in the thigh, and his own gun was coming out and Carmel was in the doorway . . .
L
UCAS
FIRED ONE SHOT
and Carmel felt as though she’d been hit by a baseball bat. The .45 took away a fist-sized chunk of skin just below her rib cage, and she staggered back. Hurt. Bad hurt. Hospital. She still had the keys to the cars in her left hand, and she turned and lurched down toward the elevators. The doors were just closing, and she slapped at the button and they started to open and she looked back and saw Lucas peek from behind her doors and she fired again, and let herself fall into the elevator.

Lucas fired twice more, but had a bad angle at the closing doors; one slug hit the doors, the other might have slipped inside . . . He crawled toward them and pushed the
down
button.

“F
UCKIN’GUN,” Sherrill said to Sloan in the lobby, their guns coming out. “That was a fuckin’ gun. A big fuckin’ gun.”

“Wait for the elevator, it’s coming down,” Sloan said. “I’m taking the stairs.”

“Too far, too far,” Sherrill said, but Sloan was moving: “Gotta block them, gotta block the parking ramp.”

“Careful,” she shouted after him.

“Call in,” he shouted back, and Sherrill got her cell phone out and pushed the speed-dial for dispatch and began shouting into it as the numbers came down to five. Then it stopped, and Sherrill ran to the stairway and yelled up, “Elevator stopped at five, watch the ramp.”

“Got it,” Sloan called.

The other elevator was going up again and Sherrill, without thinking, punched the
up
button. The first one, the elevator that stopped at five, started down. But the other rose inexorably to twenty-seven before it stopped. She ran back to the stairway access and shouted after Sloan, “The elevator’s on twenty-seven.”

At that moment, the second elevator dinged in the lobby. She shouted at the frightened security guard, “Turn off that elevator. Stop it. Can you stop it on this floor? Stop it!”

He ran to the elevator as the door opened, but then almost stumped, stopping outside of it: “My, God, there’s blood . . .”

Sherrill pushed him aside, saw a puddle of blood in the middle of the carpet. “How do you stop it?” she asked.

“Pull the red
emergency stop
button.”

She saw it, a red knob the size of her thumb, and pulled it out. “That’ll do it?”

“Yeah, that . . .” The security guard looked up at the numbers above the elevator doors. “The other one’s coming down.”

“Oh, fuck. Get out of the way.” She stood back from the elevator doors, her pistol at gut level: remember the chant,
Two in the belly and one in the head, knocks a man down and kills him dead . . .

Then the elevator doors opened and she saw Lucas on the floor with his gun pointing at her chest and blood streaming into his eyes and Sherrill screamed, “Lucas, Lucas, Jesus . . .”

• • •

T
HE
ELEVATOR SEEMED
to move at a deliberate and insolent crawl; Carmel pushed herself up, realized that her arm was burning; looked, and saw more blood. Her body was on fire. She staggered into the hallway at five, out to the parking ramp. The stairwell came up just inside the parking-ramp door, and somebody was on the stairs, coming up. “Fuck you,” Carmel screamed down at the man. She could see his arm, still three flights down. He stopped and looked up at her, and she fired the gun, once, twice.
S
LOAN
BRACED HIMSELF.
He was only at three and a half, confused. Carmel? Two shots sailed past, and he aimed blindly up, and fired once.