John Sandford - Mortal Prey

Lucas was convinced. "So Treena's out of it."

He nodded. "Yes. And she knows it."

"If she had any little thing about Rinker, maybe we could deal with her… especially since we're not going to get her anyway."

Mallard shook his head. "She's not gonna deal. The whole thing was… I feel like a moron. That's what I feel like, Lucas. As soon as we clean up here, I'm going to Malone's funeral, and then I'm going home for a while, and just sit and think."

"What about Rinker?"

"Fuck her. I hope she dies of blood poisoning."

Rinker got on I -44 and headed southwest, drove for fifteen minutes before the pain dragged her off the highway. Feeling faint, she took an exit at random, spotted a hotel, turned into its parking lot, and parked the truck. She pressed the dead man into the footwell, found an Army blanket behind the seat, and threw it over him. Then, moving ever so slowly, she did a survey of her assets.

She had money, ID, two passports, both good, a black wig, and a hole in her butt that continued to bleed. She also had a small toolbox, a battered leather briefcase, and a brown sack with a grease spot that might have contained a lunch. She had a day-old newspaper.

When the dead man rolled off the passenger seat, he'd exposed a copy of the Post-Dispatch. The news section looked unread, and Rinker had heard that unread newspaper pages were virtually sterile. She pulled out the middle section, ripped then, unbuckled her slacks, touched the wound a few times, wasn't sure she should be pleased or frightened that she couldn't feel much other than the basic pain, then, in the light of the truck's overhead lamp, made eight-inch-square pads of newsprint and pressed them onto the wound.

Digging into the toolbox for a roll of duct tape, she wrapped her leg and thigh with half the roll of tape, an awkward, unprofessional mess, but it held.

She felt sleepy, and that worried her. Even with the pain in her butt starting to come on, she felt sleepy. Struggled to stay up. Dug into the briefcase and found a cell phone. Everybody had a cell phone.

She took the man's wallet out and looked at his ID and the cards inside, a couple of notes, no pictures. She checked his left hand: no wedding band. Single, she thought. Maybe nobody to come looking right away.

Fought the sleep, kept coming back to the cell phone. Finally, she decided she had no choice: one more risk to run.

She dialed, got an interrupt, and wound up talking to an operator before she got it right. Then she dialed again, and heard it ring, and then a man's voice said, "Sн?"

She switched to Spanish: "This is Cassie McLain. May I speak to Papa?"

They talked for less than a minute, and then Rinker hung up, and after a few moments, as she reconstructed it later, she passed out. She woke again later, terribly thirsty, but there was no water in the truck, and when she moved a wave of pain tore at her.

That goddamn Davenport. He'd shot her in the back while she was running away. He'd had no call to do that, she wasn't even looking at him…

She passed out again, and only woke when a bright light hit her in the eyes. A man said, in Spanish, "Are you alive?"

"Yes."

"I have a car."

He'd had to lift her out of the truck and place her in the front seat of his Cadillac. The front seat was covered with plastic garbage bags so she wouldn't make a mess. When he'd transferred her, she'd passed out again, just for a moment, and when she came to, he was wiping his hands on paper towels. "Still alive?"

"Yes." But very weak now. "Where are we going?"

"Carbondale, Illinois. Maybe two hours, I've never been there."

"What time is it?"

"Five o'clock… The sun is just coming up."

And she passed out again.

Some time later, the man backed into a one-car garage in Carbondale, woke Rinker, who was only fuzzily aware of it, and carried her into a house and put her facedown on a firm bed. A man's voice said, "I'm going to give you a shot."

The Feds have found the orange pickup for a week if the hotel hadn't been feuding with a pancake house. The pancake house's parking lot was too small, so people parked in the hotel lot, and the hotel people got pissed and required guests to put parking tickets behind the windshields of their cars. If a car sat too long without a ticket, it was towed.

The orange truck didn't have a ticket, and the hotel security guard had seen it parked in the lot when he came in that morning, so in the middle of the afternoon he finally checked…

Lucas went out with Mallard and they looked at the dead man in the footwell, and at the blood-soaked front seat, and talked to the cop who'd decided that it might be related. "Whoever was driving was shot in the butt, in the left cheek, and it wasn't the dead guy, and I saw your bolo this morning and thought I'd better have my guys give you a call."

"Done good," Lucas said. He looked around. "The question is, where'd she go from here?"

"No blood on the ground," the cop said. The local crime-scene crew had taped off the area and were going over it, looking for anything relevant. "She probably didn't walk, because she was really pumping it. The seat is soaked with blood."

"Somebody else, then? She grabbed another car?" Mallard asked.

Lucas shook his head. "No. She got help. Why would she grab another car? This one was good enough, and grabbing another car would just be another problem, with no predictable outcome, especially if she's wounded."

"So she's hiding."

"Got more friends than we thought," Lucas said. "Your report said she didn't have any, and now we know of two who were willing to risk their lives on her."

"Yeah, well… I'll write a memo."

They walked around, watching the crime-scene people for a while, but Mallard's attention was drifting and finally he asked, "You getting out of town?"

Lucas nodded. "I have no more ideas. I mean, I do, but none are relevant at the moment."

"Coming to Malone's funeral?"

"Nope. Wouldn't help her, and would bum me out worse than I already am. I liked her."

"So'd I," Mallard said. He slapped Lucas on the back. "Let's go."

When Rinker woke up, she was lying facedown on a white sheet. Her legs were spread a bit, as were her arms. And her cheek was wet. Drool, she realized. She tried to move but found her arms and legs restrained. Near panic, she pulled her head up and saw a piece of paper a few inches from her eyes. It said, in large block letters, "Call out."

"Hey," she called, her voice weak. "Hey!"

And a woman's voice from somewhere else said, "Coming…," and a second later, a brown-faced woman with a red dot in the middle of her forehead squatted up beside the bed, her face a few inches from Rinker's.

"You're taped down so you couldn't roll over and pull the saline out," the woman said. "We didn't have anything better. Let me get the tape." There was a stripping-tape sound, and one hand came free, then her left foot, then her right foot and her right hand. She started to turn, saw the saline bottle on a hook over her head, and the woman put a hand on her shoulder. "Don't move too much," she said. "You're all taped up and you've had some analgesics, but it's going to hurt. Do you have to urinate?"

Rinker thought about it and shook her head. "No, but I could use a drink of water. How long have I been here?"

"You got here this morning. This is the afternoon, about four o'clock. My husband is a doctor at the university, and this is our house."

"How bad?"

The woman smiled sympathetically. "It's never good, but the wound was confined to your buttock." She enunciated buttock perfectly, with a bit of a British accent, and Rinker nearly smiled: It reminded her of a favorite Monty Python. "So it will hurt, and even when you are healed, you might not be able to run as fast or climb as quickly as you once did. And of course there is cosmetic damage, there will be a scar… but you are in no danger. Now."