John Sandford - Mortal Prey

When she came back out, they stood beside Rinker's car and Pollock asked, "What're you going to do now?"

"I've got another place I can stay," Rinker said. "Another old friend."

"If you stay, they're going to kill you."

"Not for a while yet," she said.

"Clara, you gotta get out."

Rinker hugged her and said, "You take care of yourself, Patsy. I won't be seeing you again, I guess, but you been a good friend all my life. I'm gonna get out of here before I cry."

Pollock hung on to her for a minute, a big, ungainly woman, hard-used, and Rinker started to tear up. Then she broke away and said, "One thing…"

She went around to the trunk of the car, took out a sack, and handed it to Pollock. "Twenty thousand dollars. For the lawyer."

"Clara, I can't…"

"You shush. This isn't for you, this is for her. She sure as hell will take it. Tell her you were afraid to put it in the bank, and it's your life savings."

Another minute of small talk, and Rinker loaded up and was gone, leaving Pollock in the parking lot with the sack. Rinker didn't know if her friend had a chance or not. Thought she might.

She turned out of the parking lot and headed back toward town.

She still had some gear at the apartment, which should be okay until afternoon. She looked at her watch. If Pollock drove like she did, she'd be getting to Memphis around two-thirty. Pollock's parents should have been in touch with the lawyer by now, so Pollock could get in to see her by three o'clock.

Lucas, Andreno, Bender, and Carter worked the neighborhoods in Soulard, and the area just west of Soulard, for most of the morning, humping along from one confirmed contact to the next, marking off blocks on their xeroxed city maps. They worked through lunch, getting hungry and short-tempered. Then, at four o'clock, Carter found Patsy Hill's apartment.

He called just at four, not particularly excited. "Amity Jenetti says a woman in the next block kind of looks like her, her face does. Says the woman has black hair and is generally dark, and the last picture of Hill was blond, but Jenetti says the face is right and she's tall. But then, she says she's big, you know-heavy, and Hill was skinny as a bull snake. About the right age, late thirties or early forties, and lives alone. Says the woman probably got here ten or twelve years ago."

"I don't know. Sounds better than anything we've gotten so far," Lucas said. "You got a name and address?"

"Dorothy Pollock, and the address is…" He had to look it up.

When Lucas got it down, he said, "Call you back in a few minutes."

He and Andreno were eating meatball sandwiches at a sidewalk place, under a green-and-white-striped awning, at a tippy metal table with a top the size of a hubcap. Lucas phoned Sally and gave her the information. Sally called back fifteen minutes later. "The woman is supposedly how old?"

"Late thirties, early forties."

"She's twenty-six, according to her Social Security account. Her application is hinky. We can't find anybody by that name at the listed address, when she was supposedly a teenager."

"Interesting," Lucas said.

"We got a driver's license, and the age doesn't match the Social Security. It says thirty-five. Hill's supposed to be thirty-seven, but she'd take years off, right? We got Neil looking at it-he's a picture maven."

"Well, what's he say?"

Lucas heard Sally turn away from the phone and ask somebody, "Well, what do you say, Neil?"

Behind Sally, he heard another voice said, "Darn. The picture sucks, but… You know what?"

Sally came back. "You better get over there. An entry team'll meet you in the brewery parking lot in fifteen minutes."

"Damn," Lucas said. He hung up, wiped the phone with a napkin.

Andreno said, "Nothing, huh?"

"They think it's her," Lucas said. "We're supposed to meet an entry team in the brewery parking lot in fifteen minutes."

Andreno stopped chewing long enough to look at his watch. "So we got three minutes to eat."

"Basically."

"We're so fuckin' good."

"That's true." Lucas licked his fingers, then cleaned up his face with the napkin. "Gotta call Carter and Bender. Carter's gonna pass a kidney stone when he hears."

Andreno stood up, bunched the remnants of his sandwich in its waxed-paper wrapper, and pitched it into a garbage can. "Fuck a bunch of sitting here being cool," he said, his voice suddenly excited. "Let's go."

The entry team was as tough-looking as any Lucas had seen, big men sweating in dark blue uniforms and heavy armor. Carter and Bender had brought the woman who'd fingered the apartment, along with another woman, named Amy, who'd actually been inside. The entry team leader worked through as much as Amy knew. They learned that Hill's apartment actually consisted of the converted back rooms of a house owned by an elderly woman named Betty McCombs.

Lucas and the three ex-cops stood around and watched the team get ready. Mallard and Malone arrived a moment later, in a Dodge, and then a half-dozen other agents in two other cars.

"Two options," the team leader told Mallard, and the semicircle of faces around him. "The first is, we hit them now, hard, take them down. The downside is, we might have to take them out. If the place is empty, we put the door back together and wait for them to show. The second option is to watch the place, and catch them in the open, either coming or going. There are no cars parked outside right now, but there could be one in the garage."

Sally had been on the phone as they were talking, and now spoke up. "Carson got in touch with Pollock's employer. She called in this morning and said she was sick. She's not at work."

"Can they see the street from the back of the house, where these rooms are?" Lucas asked.

Carter said, "We cruised by. They could see the street, but not much of it. They could see it especially on the north side, the garage side. The other side, they'd be looking down a little narrow strip between the next house over."

"So if we sent Sally in with another guy, the youngest-looking guy, and we got into this old lady's house with some listening gear… we should be able to figure out if they're in there."

"We could do that," the team leader said. "And we could get a better layout from her."

"So let's do it," Mallard said.

Without the prospect of instant action, the intensity faded a bit, the entry team guys peeled off their armor and flopped around the place, and ten minutes later, when Sally and a youthful, blond agent named Meers left for McCombs's house, Lucas and the three St. Louis ex-cops congregated around Andreno's car.

"You guys get anything to eat?"

"Meatball sandwiches up at Dirty Bill's," Andreno said.

"Nasty, but tasty. You better stick close to the can," Carter said. Then, to Lucas: "What do you think?"

"Maybe," Lucas said. "They wouldn't be going out much in the daytime."

"What about these guys?" He nodded at the federal entry team.

"Look like pros," Lucas said. "The ones up in Minneapolis are good."

Bender nodded. "Everything I've heard about these guys is, they're good."

"So we wait," Lucas said.

They waited an hour and a bit more, the sun still bright in the sky, but angled now, and Lucas began to worry about the problems of darkness. Then Sally came back with a layout. "The old bat, you oughta see her," she said to Mallard. "She's got a bad mouth, she apparently hates people on sight, she smells-"

"Are they there?" Mallard asked impatiently.

"I don't think so, not at the moment-but it's her. It's Hill," Sally said. Sally was wearing an olive-drab shirt, made of a crinkly cotton fabric, without epaulets but with a military cut. "Tommy set up the listening gear and it's working, and we put it right on the wall, but we didn't hear anything. They could be asleep."