John Sandford - Shadow Prey

"Jesus, it freaked me out." He couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Thanks for the rose."

"What?"

"The rose…" She turned her head away, then back and forth, as though trying to loosen up her neck muscle. "Very… romantic."

Lucas had no idea what she was talking about, and then she said, "I got through the first fifteen minutes… with David. I hurt so bad I wasn't thinking of you or anything, I was just happy to be here. And we were talking and when I thought of you, the first fifteen minutes were gone… and it was okay."

"Jesus, Lily, I feel so bad."

"Nothing you could do: but you be careful," she said in \ her rusty voice. Her eyelids drooped. "Are you getting anywhere?" • j Lucas shook his head. "We've got a screen of people around Clay-I still think it's him. I just haven't figured out j how. We're watching the dumbwaiter, but that's not it."

"I don't know," she said. Her eyes closed and she took j two deep breaths. "I'm so damn sleepy all the time… Can't think…"

And she was gone, sleeping, her face going slack. Lucas sat by her bed for five minutes, watching her face and the slow rise and fall of her chest. He was lucky, he thought, that he wasn't walking beside her coffin across another cemetery, just as with Larry…

Larry.

It came back in a flash, as real as the shotgun behind his ear. He'd been walking across the cemetery grass with Lily and Anderson, after leaving Rose Love's well-tended grave. Anderson was talking about the cost of grave maintenance and the perpetual-care contract he and his wife had bought…

And the question popped into his head: Who paid to take care of Rose Love's grave? Neither Shadow Love nor the Crows had enough money to endow a perpetual-care fund, so they must pay it annually or semiannually. But if they were on the road all the time, where would the bill be sent? Lucas stood, looked down at Lily's sleeping face, paced out of the ICU, past a patient who looked as though he were dying, and then back in, until he was standing by her bed again.

The Crows or Shadow Love, whoever paid for maintenance, might simply remember to write a check once or twice a year and mail it, without ever getting a bill. But that didn't feel right; there must be a bill. Maybe they had a postal box; but if they had their mail sent to a box, and didn't get back into town for a while, important messages might sit there for weeks. Lucas didn't know what the Crows had done, but he knew what he would do in their circumstances. He'd have a mail drop. He'd have the cemetery bill and other important stuff sent to an old, trustworthy friend. Somebody he could rely on to send the mail on to him. He half ran from the ICU to the nurses' station.

"I gotta have a phone," Lucas snapped at his friend. She stepped back and pointed at a desk phone. He picked it up and called Homicide. Anderson was just getting ready to leave.

"Harmon? I'm heading out to Riverwood Cemetery in a hurry. You get on the line, find out where Riverwood does its paperwork and call me. I've got a handset. If the office is closed, run down somebody who can open it up, somebody who does the bills. I'll be there in ten minutes."

"What have you got?" Anderson asked.

"Probably nothing," Lucas said. "But I've got just the smallest fuckin' hangnail of an idea…"

Clay and a security man stood in the parking garage and argued.

"It's a fuckin' terrible idea," the security man said intently.

"No, it's not. When you get a little higher in management, you'll recognize that," Lawrence Duberville Clay replied. An undertone in his voice hinted that it was unlikely the security man would ever rise higher in management.

"Look: one car. Just one. You wouldn't even see it."

"Absolutely not. You put a car on me and you better warn the people inside that I'll fire their asses. And you with them. No. The only way for me to do this is to go out on my own. And I'll probably be safer than if I was here. Nobody'11 expect me to be out on the street."

"Jesus, boss…"

"Look, we've been through this before," Clay said. "The fact is, when you're surrounded by a screen of security, you don't have any feel for anything. I need to get away, to be effective."

They had a car for him, a nondescript rental that one of the agents had picked up at the airport. Clay took the wheel, slammed the door and looked out at the unhappy security man.

"Don't worry, Dan. I'll be back in a couple, three hours, no worse for the wear."

Lucas had to wait ten minutes at the cemetery office, watching the moon ghost across the sky behind dead oak leaves. He shivered and paced impatiently, and finally a Buick rolled up and a woman got out.

"Are you Davenport?" she asked in a sour voice, jingling her keys.

"Yes."

"I was at a dinner," she said. She was a hard woman in her early thirties, with a beehive hairdo from the late fifties.

"Sorry."

"We really should have some kind of papers," she said frostily as she unlocked the door.

"No time," Lucas said.

"It's not right. I should call our chairman."

"Look, I'm trying to be fuckin' nice," Lucas said, his voice rising as he spoke. "I'm trying as hard as I can to be a nice guy because you seem like an okay woman. But if you drag your feet on this, I'll call downtown for a warrant. It'll be here in five minutes and we'll seize your whole goddamn billing system. If you get lucky, you'll get it back sometime next year. You can explain that to your chairman."

The woman stepped away from him and a spark of fear touched her eyes. "Please wait," she said. She went into a back room, and soon Lucas could hear her typing on a computer keyboard.

It was all bullshit, Lucas told himself. Not a chance in a fucking million. A moment later a printer started, and then the woman came out of the back room.

"The bills have always been sent to the same place, every six months, forty-five dollars and sixty-five cents. Sometimes they're slow-pay, but they always pay."

"Who?" asked Lucas. "Where'd you send the bill?"

The woman handed Lucas a sheet of computer paper, with one short line pinched between her thumb and forefinger. "It's right here," she said. "A Miss Barbara Gow. That's her address under her name. Does that help?"

Corky Drake had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, only to have it rudely snatched away in his teens. His father had for some years neglected to report his full income to the Internal Revenue Service. When the heathens had learned of Corky Senior's oversight… well, the capital barely covered what was owed, much less the fines.

His father had removed himself from the scene with a garden hose that led from the tailpipe of a friend's Mercedes into the sealed car. The friend had refused to forgive him, even in death, for what he had done to the upholstery.

Corky, who was seventeen, was already a person of refined taste. A life of poverty and struggle simply was not on the menu. He did the only thing he was qualified to do: he became a pimp.

Certain friends of his father's had exceptional interests in women. Corky could satisfy those, for a price. Not only were the women very beautiful, they were very young. They were, in fact, girls. The youngest in his current stable was six. The oldest was eleven, although, Corky assured the wits among his clientele, she still had the body of an eight-year-old…

Corky Drake met Lawrence Duberville Clay at a club in Washington. If they hadn't become friends, they had at least become friendly. Clay appreciated the services offered by Drake.

"My little perversion," Clay called it, with a charming grin.

"No. It's not a perversion, it's perfectly natural," Drake said, swirling two ounces of Courvoisier in a crystal snifter. "You're a connoisseur, is what you are. In many countries of the world…"