John Sandford - Mortal Prey

Unless she climbed a tree, he thought. As he stood at the garden entrance, he could see that the ground rose off to the left, and they went that way.

"Put a guy right here. Or two or three guys," Andreno said, as they walked up the higher ground. "There're so many trees that she'd have to get close or she couldn't see through them to shoot. And if she got that close, and then tried to climb, she'd be easy to spot."

They walked around for a while, looking at flowers and trees, until the humidity started to get to them. "That place over there," Andreno said, nodding at a dome-shaped building, "is like a tropical jungle. All bamboo and palm trees and shit. Neat place in the winter."

"This whole place is like a jungle. I didn't know St. Louis was so hot."

"We used to have a saying, "It's not the heat…"

"… it's the humidity."

"We'd never say anything that stupid," Andreno said. "We used to say, it's not the heat, it's the assholes. Goddamn hot nights, no air-conditioning, what are you gonna do? You're gonna whack the old lady around, that's what. You get nights like this one's gonna be, there'll be people smacking people all over town."

"Maybe you oughta provide air-conditioning as a public service," Lucas suggested.

"It'd be a plan," Andreno said, seriously. "It'd stop more bullshit than a lot of other plans."

On the way back to Andy's, where Andreno had left his car, Sally called and said, "The guys on Dallaglio say that he's leaving. He's going into hiding. He says they can follow along, but he won't tell anybody where he's going until he's started."

"That's a little dumb-if we knew where he was going, we could sterilize it in advance. Did you tell him that?"

"Yes. But he said there was no point in trying, and they were safer if nobody knew. They're not leaving until the kids get home from school, they're gonna get them packed up. They're going out tonight."

"Call around. You've got the weight. Check the major airlines, see where the tickets are. If they're going to Italy or somewhere, there aren't many options."

"We're doing that-I just wanted you to know."

"Is Mallard back?"

"No. They finished the postmortem, and they're flying the body out this afternoon. There'll be a memorial service in Washington, and most of us are going."

"You're just shutting down here?"

"Won't be for a couple of days, and there'll still be a crew here. We won't need the Dallaglio crew anymore, and most of the rest of us have just been walking in circles anyway."

Lucas was watching an Atlanta game when Sally called at eight o'clock and said, "Dallaglio's about to roll. Me and Carl and Derik are heading out, if you want to ride along."

"It's either that or hang myself. I'm down to watching Atlanta."

"You got two minutes."

Lucas got a jacket, clipped a. 45 onto his hip, took a half-finished beer along, hid it from a prim-looking saleslady in the elevator, and caught up with the feds in the lobby. They were already moving, out the doors, into a heat-soaked night-Lucas dropped the beer bottle into a trash can-and across the parking lot where Malone had been shot and into the Suburban.

A block away, Lucas could see a Mazda MPV van, sitting on the street, looking into the back of the buildings where Rinker had set up with the rifle. Inside the van was a bored FBI surveillance crew, hoping against hope that she'd be back. She hadn't been, although they had netted an attractive forty-five-ish commercial real-estate agent who'd come over later for drinks with one of the surveillance guys.

"Glad I'm not in that van," Sally said, picking up on Lucas's thought. "I've done that. Down in Baltimore, working with Jack Hand?"

The red-haired agent was driving again. He nodded and said, "Onions."

"You better believe it. He ate them like apples. He said they prevented prostate cancer. His father died from it."

"Onions, or prostate?" Lucas asked.

"I almost died from the onions once," the red-haired man said.

He put them on an interstate heading west, and Lucas frowned. "Where're we going?"

Sally looked at him and then said, "Oh-we're not going to Lambert. There's another airport out west. Called, um, Spirit of St. Louis. Dallaglio's signed up for a private jet, a place called Executive Air. He's flying out of there to Newark, and then from Newark to Rome to Naples on commercial flights. First class, of course. The whole family."

"Napoli," said the nearly silent Derik. Derik had a buzz cut and high, dry cheekbones and looked like a member of the Wehrmacht. "Roma."

Sally was looking at a map now and said to the red-haired agent, "We're on Sixty-four, right? Because if we're on Forty-four, we'll wind up down in Bumfuck, Missouri, and there's no way back."

"The language," Lucas said.

"We're on Sixty-four," the red-haired guy said. "There's a sign."

Sally checked the sign and then turned to Lucas. "Malone was, like, ten years in service before I signed up. She was appointed to mentor some of the younger women agents, and one time she told me that I should carefully use a few words. You know, nothing really nasty, none of the gynecological stuff, but the occasional fuck or shit, just to let them know that you weren't a sissy. She said getting treated ladylike or if you were expected to be ladylike, it was the end of you. She said you had to be a lady, but not ladylike."

"A point," Lucas said.

"Back then, it was," Sally said. "Ten years ago. I don't think it matters so much anymore."

"Yeah, you've pretty well taken over now," the red-haired man said.

"Better believe," Sally said. Derik said nothing, just bobbed his skinhead to some unseen music with a jerky beat. Sally got on a radio and talked to the crew with Dallaglio. "They're just getting out to the cars," she said. "We ought to get there about the same time."

Rinker had an unfamiliar weight on her shoulders, the weight of death. Not the killing of Dichter, or Levy, or Malone, or even of all of them together, but rather the killing of Honus Johnson. She'd thought about it, as she waited for Johnson to come lurching out of the basement like a frozen Frankenstein, to stand over the couch while she was half asleep… waited for the sound of the freezer lid opening, was sure she'd heard it a half-dozen times.

One of the few literary experiences of her young life had come with a Stephen King novel, Carrie, which had scared the shit out of her, as she sprawled across the bed in her apartment, alone, reading. The feeling now was the same, but even more intense: There really was a frozen dead man in the basement, and he really had been a torturer, who would come back from hell with a bloody machete…

She analyzed it, as she'd been taught in her college psych classes back in Wichita-and she decided that her problem was not so much the dead man in the basement as the fact that she hadn't left him behind. In all her other killings, she'd almost instantly walked away from the bodies. In a couple of cases, she'd had to move them, but she'd been done with them in a few hours at most. She'd been able to escape what she'd done, put it behind her and out of mind.

This one, she was stuck with, at least for a few more days. He was riding on her shoulders as she drove west into the setting sun.

She looked a little like a fashionable female Johnny Cash, she thought-thin black long-sleeve shirt, black jeans, dark blue running shoes from which she'd carefully torn the reflective patches. In the backseat she had a black silk scarf and a black baseball cap. When she had it all on, she thought, she'd be invisible in the dark.

They 'd been in the car for fifteen minutes when Sally took a radio call, then looked at her map. "They're ahead of us, about three miles," she said, after a minute. "Four vehicles-two of ours and two of theirs. They're staying on the speed limit, so if we can step on it a bit, we'll catch them."