Silent Prey (2 page)

He left Shaltie living, turned the lock knob, peered into the hallway. The internal corridor was empty. Went to the next door—public hall. Half-dozen people, all down at the public end, near the elevators, talking. He wouldn’t have to walk past them. The stairs were the other way: he could see the exit sign, just beyond the fire hose.

Another breath. And move. He stepped out into the
hall, head down. A lunchtime bureaucrat-jogger on his way outside. He walked confidently down the hall to the stairs, away from the elevators. Waiting for a shout. For someone to point a finger. For running feet.

He was in the stairway. Nobody took the stairs, not from this high up . . . .

He ran down, counting the floors. As he passed six, a door slammed somewhere below and he heard somebody walking down ahead of him. He padded softly behind, heard another door open and shut, and stepped up the pace again. At the main level, he stopped and looked out. Dozens of people milled through the reception area. Okay. This was the second floor. He needed one more. He went down another level, and found an unmarked steel door. He pushed it open. He was outside, standing on the plaza. The summer sun was brilliant, the breeze smelled of popcorn and pigeons. A woman sitting on a bench, a kid next to her. She was cutting an apple with a penknife, her kid waiting for the apple.

Head down, Bekker jogged past her. Just another lunchtime fitness freak, weaving through the traffic, knees up, sweating in the sunshine.

Running like a maniac.

Lucas whipped down the asphalt backroads of Wisconsin, one hand on the wheel, one on the shifter, heel-and-toe on the corners, sunlight bouncing off the Porsche’s dusty windshield. He slow-footed across the St. Croix bridge at Taylor’s Falls into Minnesota, looking for cops, then dropped the hammer again, headed south into the sun and the Cities.

He caught Highway 36 west of Stillwater, the midday traffic sparse and torpid, pickups and station wagons clunking past the cow pastures, barns and cattail sloughs. Eight miles east of Interstate 694, he blew the doors off a red Taurus SHO. Clear road, except for the occasional crows picking at roadkill.

His eyes dropped to the speedometer. One hundred and seven.

What the fuck are you doing?

He wasn’t quite sure. The day before, he’d rolled out of his lake cabin late in the afternoon and driven eighty miles north to Duluth. To buy books, he thought: there were no real bookstores in his corner of Wisconsin. He’d
bought books, all right, but he’d wound up drinking beer in a place called the Wee Blue Inn at eight o’clock in the evening. He’d been wearing a dark-blue dress shirt under a silk jacket, khaki slacks, and brown loafers, no socks. A laid-off ore-boatman, drunk, had taken exception to the bare feet, and for one happy instant, before the barkeeps arrived, it had looked like the boatman would take a swing.

He needed a bar fight, Lucas thought. But he didn’t need what would come afterward, the cops. He took his books back to the cabin, tried to fish the next day, then gave it up and headed back to the Cities, driving as fast as he knew how.

A few miles after blowing off the SHO, he passed the first of the exurban ramblers, outriders for the ’burbs. He groped in the glove box, found the radar detector, clipped it to the visor and plugged it into the cigarette-lighter socket as the Porsche screamed down the cracked pavement. He let his foot settle further; punched up the radio, Cities-97. Little Feat was playing hard hot boogie, “Shake Me Up,” the perfect sound to accompany a gross violation of the speed limit.

The interstate overpass flicked past and the traffic got thicker. A hundred and eighteen. Hundred and nineteen. A stoplight he’d forgotten about, looming suddenly, with a blue sedan edging into a right-on-red turn. Lucas went left, right, left, heel-and-toe, blowing past the sedan; and past a station wagon, for a split second catching at the periphery of his vision the surprised and frightened face of a blond matron with a car full of blond kids.

The image fixed in his mind. Scared. He sighed and eased off the gas pedal, coasting. Dropped through a hundred, ninety, eighty. Across the northern suburbs of
St. Paul, onto the exit to Highway 280. When he’d been a cop, he’d always been sneaking off to the lake. Now that he wasn’t, now that he had time sitting on him like an endless pile of computer printout, he found the solace of the lake less compelling . . . .

The day was warm, sunshine dappling the roadway, playing games with cloud-shadows on the glass towers of Minneapolis to the west. And then the cop car.

He caught it in the rearview mirror, nosing out of Broadway. No siren. His eyes dropped to the speedometer again. Sixty. The limit was fifty-five, so sixty should be fine. Still, cops picked on Porsches. He eased off a bit more. The cop car closed until it was on his bumper, and in the rearview mirror he could see the cop talking into his microphone: running the Porsche’s tags. Then the light bar came up and the cop tapped his siren.

Lucas groaned and rolled to the side, the cop fifteen feet off his bumper. He recognized him, a St. Paul cop, once worked with the Southwest Team. He used to come into the deli near Lucas’ house. What was his name? Lucas dug through his memory. Kelly . . . Larsen? Larsen was out of the car, heavy face, sunglasses, empty-handed. No ticket, then. And he was jogging . . . .

Lucas shifted into neutral, pulled the brake, popped the door and swiveled in the seat, letting his feet fall on the shoulder of the road.

“Davenport, God damn it, I
thought
this was your piece of shit,” Larsen said, thumping the Porsche’s roof. “Everybody’s looking for your ass . . . .”

“What . . . ?”

“Fuckin’ Bekker blew out of the government center. He’s knocked down two people so far.”

“What?” Lucas Davenport: deep summer tan, jagged white scar crossing his eyebrow, khaki short-sleeved
shirt, jeans, gym shoes. A surge of adrenaline almost took his breath away.

“Two of your buddies are laying up at your place. They think he might be coming for you,” Larsen said. He was a large man who kept hitching up his belt, and peering around, as though he might spot Bekker sneaking through a roadside ditch.

Lucas: “I better get my ass down there . . . .”

“Go.” Larsen thumped the top of the car again.

Back on the highway, Lucas picked up the car phone and poked in the direct-dial number for the Minneapolis cops. He was vaguely pleased with himself: he didn’t need the phone, rarely used it. He’d installed it the week after he’d bought the gold-and-steel Rolex that circled his wrist—two useless symbols of his freedom from the Minneapolis Police Department. Symbols that he was doing what every cop supposedly wanted to do, to go out on his own, to
make
it. And now the business was snaking off in new directions, away from games, into computer simulations of police tactical problems. Davenport Games & Simulations. With the growing sales, he might have to rent an office.

The switchboard operator said, “Minneapolis.”

“Gimme Harmon Anderson,” Lucas said.

“Is that you, Lucas?” the operator asked. Melissa Yellow Bear.

“Yeah.” He grinned. Somebody remembered.

“Harmon’s been waiting. Are you at home?”

“No, I’m in my car.”

“You heard what happened?” Yellow Bear was breathless.

“Yes.”

“You take care, honey. I’ll switch you over . . . .”

A moment later, Anderson came on, and said without
preamble, “Del and Sloan are at your place. Sloan got the key from your neighbor, but they’re wasting their time. He won’t be coming after this long. It’s been three hours.”

“How about Del’s place? He and Bekker are relatives of some kind.”

“We’ve got a couple of guys there, too, but he’s hiding somewhere. He won’t be out, not now.”

“How did he—”

“Go on home and Sloan can fill you in,” Anderson said, interrupting. “I gotta go. This goddamn place is a madhouse.”

And he was gone.
Police work to do, no time for civilians.
Lucas got off at University Avenue, took it to Vandalia, across I-94 and down Cretin, then over to the tree-shaded river road. Brooding.
No time for Davenport.

Feeling sorry for himself, knowing it.

Two blocks before he got to the house, he slowed, watching, then turned a block early. The neighborhood offered few places to hide, other than inside the houses. The yards were open, tree-filled, burning with color: crabapple blossoms and lines of tulips, banks of iris, pink peonies and brilliant yellow daffodils, and the odd patch of buttery dandelions that had somehow escaped the yard-service sprayers. The day was warm, and people were working in their yards or on their houses; a couple of kids in shorts shot baskets at a garage-mounted hoop. Bekker couldn’t hide in the open yards, and breaking into a house would be tough. Too many people around. He turned a corner and idled down toward his house.

Lucas lived in what a real estate woman had once called a soft rambler: stone and clapboard, a fireplace, big trees, two-car garage. At the end of the asphalt drive, he slowed, punched the garage-door opener, and waited
at the end of the driveway until the door was all the way up. A curtain moved in the front room.

When Lucas pulled into the garage, Sloan was waiting in the door between the house and the garage, hand in his jacket pocket. He was a thin man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. As Lucas got out of the car, Del drifted up behind Sloan, the butt of a compact 9mm pistol sticking out of his waistband. Del was older, with a face like sandpaper, a street burnout.

“What the hell happened?” Lucas asked as the garage door rolled down.

“An old-fuck deputy uncuffed him so he could take a shit,” Sloan said. “Bekker’d been telling everybody that he had hemorrhoids and he always went to the can at the noon recess.”

“Setting them up,” Lucas said.

Del nodded. “Looks like it.”

“Anyway, the jury went out and the deputy took him to the bathroom before hauling him down to the holding cell,” Sloan continued. “Bekker unscrewed a steel toilet-paper holder from the wall of the stall. Came out of the stall and beat the shit out of the old guy.”

“Dead?”

“Not yet, but he’s leaking brains. He’s probably paralyzed.”

“I heard he hit two guys?”

“Yeah, but the other was later . . .” Del said, and explained. Witnesses waiting outside a courtroom had seen Bekker leave, without knowing until later who he was. Others saw him cross the government-center plaza, running past the lunchtime brown-baggers, through the rafts of pigeons, heading down the street in his shorts. “He went about ten blocks, to a warehouse by the tracks, picked up a piece of concrete-reinforcement rod, went in
the warehouse and whacked a guy working at the dispatch desk. A clerk. Took his clothes and his wallet. That’s where we lost him.”

“The clerk?”

“He’s fucked up.”

“I’m surprised Bekker didn’t kill him.”

“I don’t think he had time,” Del said. “He’s in a hurry, like he knows where he’s going. That’s why we came here. But it don’t feel right anymore, the longer I think about it. You scare the shit out of him. I don’t think he’d take you on.”

“He’s nuts,” said Lucas. “Maybe he would.”

“Whatever, you got a carry permit?” asked Sloan.

“No.”

“We’ll have to fix you up if we don’t get him . . . .”

They didn’t get him.

Lucas spent the next forty-eight hours checking old sources, but nobody seemed much inclined to talk to him, not even the cops. Too busy.

He brought a Colt Gold Cup .45 up from the basement gun safe, cleaned it, loaded it, kept it under the bed on a book. During the day, he carried it hidden in the Porsche. He enjoyed the weight of the gun in his hand and the headache-making smell of the gun-cleaning solvent. He spent an hour in a Wisconsin gravel pit, shooting two boxes of semi-wadcutters into man-sized silhouettes.

Then, two days after Bekker broke out of the courthouse, neighbors found the body of Katherine McCain. She’d been an antiques dealer and a friend of Bekker’s wife, and she’d had the Bekkers to a party six or eight weeks before Bekker’s wife had been murdered. Bekker knew the house and knew she lived alone. He’d been waiting when she came home, and killed her with a
hammer. Before he left in her car, he’d used a knife to slash her eyes, so her ghost couldn’t watch him from the other world.

And then he disappeared.

McCain’s car was eventually found in an airport parking lot in Cleveland, Bekker long gone. On the day the car was found, Lucas put the .45 back in the gun safe. He never got the carry permit. Sloan forgot, and then after a while, it didn’t seem important.

Lucas had temporarily gone off women, and found it hard to focus on the idea of a date. He tried fishing, played golf every day for a week. No good. His life, he thought with little amusement, was like his refrigerator—and his refrigerator contained a six-pack of light beer, three cans of diet caffeine-free Coke, and a slowly fossilizing jar of mustard.

At night, unable to sleep, he couldn’t get Bekker out of his head. Couldn’t forget the taste of the hunt, of closing in, of cornering him . . .

He missed it. He didn’t miss the police department, with its meetings and its brutal politics. Just the hunt. And the pressure.

Sloan called twice from Minneapolis, said it looked like Bekker was gone. Del called once, said they’d have to get a beer sometime.

Lucas said
yeah.

And waited.

Bekker was a bad penny.

Bekker would turn up.

Louis Cortese was dying.

A brilliant floodlight lit his waxy face and the blood on his cheeks, and emphasized the yellow tint in his eyes. His lips were twisted, like those of an imp in a medieval painting.

Bekker watched. Touched a switch, heard the camera shutter fire. He could feel death swooping down on them, in the little room, in the lights, as Louis Cortese’s life drained into a plastic jug.

Bekker’s brain was a calculator, an empty vessel, a tangle of energy, a word processor, and an expert anatomist. But never more than one thing at a time.

Three months in the Hennepin County Jail had changed him forever. The jailers had taken away his chemicals, boiled his brain, and broken forever the thin electrochemical bonds that held his mind together.

In jail, lying in his cell in his rational-planner mode, he’d visualized his brain as an old-fashioned Lions Club gumball machine. When he put in a penny, he got back
a gumball—but he never knew in advance what color he’d get.

The memory of Ray Shaltie, of the escape, was one color, a favorite flavor, rattling down the payoff chute of his psyche. When he got it, it was like a wide-screen movie with overpowering stereo sound, a movie that froze him in his tracks, wherever he was. He was
back there
with Ray Shaltie, with the steel fist, smashing . . . .

Bekker, real time.

He sat in a chromed-steel chair and watched Cortese’s death throes, his eyes moving between the monitor screens and the dying subject’s face. A clear plastic tube was sewn into Cortese’s neck, piping the blood from his carotid artery to an oversized water jug on the floor. The blood was purple, the color of cooked beets, and Bekker could smell it, his fine nostrils twitching with the scent. On the EKG, Cortese’s heart rate soared. Bekker trembled. Cortese’s consciousness was moving outward, expanding, joining with . . . what?

Well. Nothing, maybe.

Cortese’s . . . essence . . . might be nothing more than a bubble reaching the top of a cosmic glass of soda water, expanding only to burst into oblivion. The pressure of the thought made Bekker’s eyebrow jump uncontrollably, twitching, until he put a hand to his forehead to stop it.

There
had to be
something beyond. That he himself might just blink out . . . No. The thought was insupportable.

Cortese convulsed, a full-body rictus throwing him against the nylon restraining straps, his head cranking forward, his eyes bulging. Air squeezed from his lungs, past the elaborate gag, a hoarse bubbling release. He
was looking at nothing: nothing at all. He was beyond vision . . . .

The alarm tone sounded on the blood-pressure monitor, then on the EKG, twin tones merging into one. With his left hand still clapped to his forehead, restraining the unruly eyebrow, Bekker turned toward the monitors. Cortese’s heart had stopped, blood pressure was plummeting toward zero. Bekker felt the large muscles of his own back and buttocks tighten with the anticipation.

He looked at the EEG, the brain-wave monitor. A jagged, jangled line just seconds before, it began flattening, flattening . . .

He felt Cortese go: could feel the
essence
go. He couldn’t measure it—not yet—but he could feel it. He bathed in the feeling, clutched at it; fired a half-dozen photos, the motor drives going
bzz-whit, bzz-whit
behind his head. And finally the magic
something
slipped away. Bekker jumped to his feet, frantic to hold on. He leaned over Cortese, his eyes four inches from the other’s. There was something about death and the eyes . . . .

And then Cortese was gone, beyond Bekker’s reach. His body, the shell of his personality, went slack beneath Bekker’s hands.

The power of the moment spun Bekker around. Breathing hard, he stared at a reflection of himself in a polished stainless-steel cabinet. He saw himself there a dozen times a day, as he worked: the raw face, the sin face, he called it, the cornrows of reddened flesh where the gunsights had ripped through him. He said in a small, high voice: “Gone.”

But not quite. Bekker felt the pressure on his back; his spine stiffened, and a finger of fear touched him. He turned, and the dead man’s eyes caught him and held him. They were open, of course. Bekker had carefully
trimmed away the eyelids to ensure they would remain that way.

“Don’t,” he said sharply. Cortese was mute, but the eyes were watching.

“Don’t,” Bekker said again, louder, his voice cracking. Cortese was watching him.

Bekker snatched a scalpel from a stainless-steel tray, stepped to the head of the table, leaned over the body and slashed at the eyes. He was expert: it only took a second. He carved the eyes like boiled eggs, and the vitreous aqua leaked down Cortese’s dead cheeks like jellied tears.

“Good-bye,” Bekker said dreamily. The ruined eyes were no longer threatening. A gumball dropped, and Bekker went away . . . .

Thick stopped at the curb, rocking on his heels, waiting patiently for the light. Thin snapped a cigarette into the street, where it exploded in a shower of sparks. The cars went by in a torrent, battered Toyotas and clunking Fords, fender-bent Dodges, pickups and vans blocking the view ahead, trucks covered with graffiti, buses stinking up the streets with noxious diesel fumes, all rolling past like iron salmon headed upstream to spawn. Through all of it, the taxis jockeyed for position, signaling their moves with quick taps on their horns, an amber warp to the woof of the street. New York was noise: an underground rumble of trains and steam pipes, a street-level clash of gears and motors and bad mufflers, a million people talking at once, uncounted air conditioners buzzing above it all.

All of it congealed in the heat.

“Too fuckin’ hot,” Thick said. And it was; he could feel it on his neck, in his armpits, on the soles of his feet. He glanced at Thin, who’d stopped at the curb beside
him. Thin nodded but didn’t answer. They were both wearing long-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled down to their wrists. Thin was a problem, and Thick didn’t quite know what to do about it. Hadn’t really known, he thought wryly, for almost forty years now . . . .

The walk sign flashed on and he and Thin crossed the street. A traffic-light pole, splattered with pigeon shit and encrusted with the grime of decades, sat on the corner. At the bottom, and up as high as a hand could reach, it was covered with fading posters. Above that, two street signs were mounted at right angles to each other, a bus-stop sign faced the street, and a temporary traffic-diversion sign pointed an arrow to the left. Above all that, a spar went out to the traffic signal, and another supported a streetlight.

Oughta put one in a fuckin’ museum someplace, just like that. Our own fuckin’ totem poles
 . . .

“Dollar . . .” The woman on the sidewalk reached up at him, holding a dirty hand-lettered card: “Help me feed my children.” Thick walked past, thinking that it was impossible that the woman had children. In her forties, perhaps, she was withered as a week-old carrot, her emaciated legs sprawled beneath her, her bare feet covered with open sores. Her eyes had a foggy-white glaze, not cataracts, but something else. She had no teeth at all, only dimples in gray gums, like the vacant spots left by corn kernels popped from a cob.

“I read this book about Shanghai once, the way it was before World War Two,” Thick said as they passed on. Thin looked straight ahead, not responding. “The thing was, begging was a profession, you know? But an ordinary guy couldn’t get any alms. You needed to be special. So they’d take kids and burn their eyes out or smash their arms and legs with hammers. They had to make them
pitiful enough to get money in a whole city full of beggars . . . .”

Thin looked up at him, still saying nothing.

“So we’re getting there, too,” Thick said, looking back at the woman on the street. “Who’s gonna give money to your average panhandler when you walk by something like that every day?” He half turned to look back at the woman.

“Dollar,” the woman wailed, “Dollar . . .”

Thick was worried. Thin was talking about running out. He glanced at his partner. Thin’s eyes were angry, fixed straight ahead. Thinking . . .

Thick was carrying a large, flat, cardboard box. It wasn’t particularly heavy, but the shape was awkward, and he slowed to hitch it up under his arm.

“I wouldn’t mind . . .” Thick started, then let it go. He reached up to scratch his face, but he was wearing thin, flesh-colored surgeon’s gloves, and he couldn’t effectively scratch. They moved along, quickly, to an apartment building across the street from the steak house. Thick had the key in his free hand and opened the door.

Thin said, “I can’t do it.”

“We gotta. Jesus Christ, if we don’t we’re fuckin’ dead, all of us . . . .”

“Listen . . .”

“Off the street, off the street . . .”

Inside the door, the hall and landing were dimly lit by a yellow sixty-watt bulb. The stairs were immediately to the right, and Thick started up. Thin, undecided, looked back out at the street, then, reluctantly, because Thick was already moving, followed. At the top of the stairs, they stopped in the hallway for a moment and listened, then went to the front apartment and opened the door with a key. The only light in the apartment came through
the yellowed shades on the front windows, from the street. The place smelled of dead air, old coffee grounds, and dry plants. The owners had been in Rome for a week, to see the Pope. They’d go to the Holy Land afterward. The Holy Land in July. They’d burn their brains out, if they had any, which they probably didn’t, if they were going to the Holy Land in July.

Thin shut the door behind them and said, “Listen . . .”

“If you weren’t going to do it, why’d you come this far?”

“Because you got us into it. I don’t want you to get fucked up.”

“Jesus . . .” Thick shook his head and stepped carefully through the dark room to the windows and lifted a shade. “Get the rifle.”

“I’m not . . .”

“All right, I’ll do it. Jesus, if that’s the way you feel about it, go. Get the fuck out,” Thick said, anger riding his voice. He was older than Thin by twenty-three years and two days, his face stamped with the cuts and gullies of a life on the street. He picked up the box he’d carried in. “Go.”

Thin hesitated, watching. The box was five feet long by three wide, but only eight inches deep. It might have held a mirror, or even a painting, but it didn’t—it held a Colt AR-15 with a flash suppressor, a twenty-shot magazine, a two-power light-gathering scope, and a laser sight. The weapon, manufactured as a semiautomatic, had been converted to selectible fire, semiauto or full auto, by a machinist in Providence.

Thick had spent an afternoon in the Adirondacks shooting plastic milk jugs from a perch high on the bank of a gully. The gallon-sized jugs closely simulated the kill zone of a man’s chest from any angle. Thick used
hand-loaded cartridges, and he was a very good shot. When hit by one of Thick’s hot loads, the milk jugs literally exploded.

Thick used a penknife to cut the twine that held the box shut, stripped off a couple of pieces of tape, opened it, and took the weapon out of the sponge-rubber packing. New scope mounts weren’t as delicate as those he’d grown up with, but there was no point in taking chances. He hadn’t. A fully loaded magazine was packed with the weapon. Each cartridge had been polished with a chamois to eliminate fingerprints. Thick slapped the magazine home with his rubber-gloved hands.

“Get the couch,” Thick said. “Hurry it up.”

“No: he’s a cop. If he wasn’t a cop . . .”

“Bullshit.” Thick went to the windows, looked out on the empty street, then unlocked one of them and carefully raised it until it was fully open. Then he turned, glanced at Thin, and picked up the rifle.

“You never had this problem before . . . .”

“The guy hasn’t done anything. The others were scumbags . . . . This is a cop . . . .”

“He’s a goddamn computer asshole cockroach and he’s gonna put good guys in jail for doing what had to be done. And you know what happens if we get sent up? We’re fuckin’ dead, that’s what. I personally doubt that I’d last a fuckin’ week; if they come for me, I’m stickin’ my goddamn pistol in my mouth, because I ain’t goin’ . . . .”

“Jesus . . .”

Thick, standing well back from the window, looked at the restaurant across the street through the low-powered scope. A Visa emblem was stuck to the window on the door, under the script of the restaurant’s name and logo. Looking at the logo, the theme song from an old
television show trickled through his head:
“Have gun, will travel” is the card of a man
 . . .

He picked up the Visa sign in the scope, touched the laser switch with his thumb. A red dot bloomed on the sign. Thick had a head the size of a gasoline can, with small ears that in the semidark looked like dried apricots. “He’s worse than the shooflies.”

“He . . .” Thin’s eyes went to the street, and Thick followed them. The restaurant door was opening.

“Wrong guy,” Thin blurted.

“I know . . . .”

A man in a white tennis shirt and white shoes stood there, probing his gums with a plastic toothpick. The toothpicks were shaped like swords, Thin knew. They’d made a recon trip to the steak house the night before, to figure times and placements. The target always came in for the Friday special, New York strip with sour-cream baked potato and choice of draft beer. The man in the tennis shirt ambled down the street.

“Fuckin’ faggot,” said Thick. He flicked the switch on the laser sight and the red dot bloomed on the Visa sign.

Bekker sighed.

All done.

He turned away from Cortese’s body, his mind like a coil of concertina wire, tense, sharp, dangerous. He touched his shirt pocket: the pocket was empty. He stepped out of his room, with a touch of anxiety, and went to the old dresser where he kept his clothes. A half-handful of pills were scattered across the top of it, and he relaxed. Enough. He picked up several, developing a combo rush as he went, popped them into his mouth, savored the acrid bite, and swallowed. So good; but so few. He looked at the top of the dresser, at the pills
there. Enough for another day, no more. He’d have to think about it—but later.