John Sandford - Rules of Prey

Bats flicked through his head, bats with razor-edged wings that cut like fire. Monsters. Kill factor low, but they were virtually transparent, like sheets of broken glass, and almost impossible to see at night in the thorn brush outside the dark castle…

Lucas looked up at the clock. Eleven-forty. Damn. If the cop who took the gun was planning to call, he should have done it. Lucas looked at the phone, willing it to ring.

It rang. He nearly fell off his drawing stool in surprise.

"Yes?"

"Lucas? This is Jennifer."

"Hey. I'm expecting a call. I need the line open."

"I got a tip from a friend," Jennifer said. "He says there was a survivor. Somebody who fought off the killer. I want to know who it was."

"Who told you this bullshit?"

"Don't play with me, Lucas. I got it solid. She's some kind of Chicana or something."

Lucas hesitated and realized a split second later that his hesitation had given it away. "Listen, Jennifer, you got it, but I'm asking you not to use it. Talk to the chief first."

"Look. It's a hell of a story. If somebody else gets onto it and breaks it, I'd feel like an idiot."

"It's yours, okay? If we have to break her out, we'll get you in first. But the thing is, we don't want the killer to start thinking about her again. We don't want to challenge him."

"C'mon, Lucas…"

"Listen, Jennifer. You listening?"

"Yeah."

"If you use this before you talk to the chief, I'll find some way to fuck with you. I'll tell every TV station in the world how you fed the name and address of an innocent woman to a maddog killer and made her a target for murder and rape. I'll put you right in the middle of the controversy, and that means you'll lose your piece of it. You'll be doing dog-sled stories out of Brainerd."

"I heard he hit her in her apartment, so he already knows-"

"Sure. And after about a week of argument, that'd probably come out too. In the meantime, the local feminists would be doing a tap dance on your face and you wouldn't be able to get a job anywhere east of the Soviet Union."

"So fuck you, Lucas. When can I talk to Daniel?"

"What time you want him?"

"Nine o'clock tomorrow morning."

"I'll call him right now. You be down there at nine."

He dropped the phone in its cradle, looked at it for a second, picked it up, and dialed Daniel's home phone. The chief's wife answered and a moment later put Daniel on the phone.

"You got him?" He sounded like he was talking around a bagel.

"Yeah, right," Lucas said dryly. "Go stand on the curb in front of your office and I'll drop him off in twenty minutes. If I'm late, don't worry, I'll be along. Just wait there on the curb."

The chief chewed for a minute, then said, "Pretty fuckin' funny, Davenport. What do you want?"

"Jennifer Carey just called. Somebody told her about Ruiz. "

"Shit. Wasn't you, was it?"

"No."

"Somebody told me you were puttin' the pork to the young lady."

"Jesus Christ…"

"Okay, okay. Sorry. So what do you think?"

"I shut her mouth for the time being. She's coming down to your office to see you tomorrow. Nine o'clock. I'd like to hold her off Ruiz for at least a couple of days. But if somebody tipped her, it's going to get out."

"So?"

"So when she sees you tomorrow, tell her to hold off a couple of days and then we'll set up an interview for her, if Ruiz will go along. Then, if Ruiz is willing to go along, we'll set up an interview for six o'clock in the evening and let Jennifer tape it for the late news. While I'm over there with her, you can call a press conference for eight o'clock or eight-thirty. Then I bring Ruiz over, we let the press yell at her for twenty minutes or so, and they get tape for ten o'clock."

"Carey'll be pissed if we burn her."

"I'll handle that. I'll tell her that you wouldn't go for an exclusive break, but she's the only TV station with a personal interview. The other stations will have nothing but press-conference stuff. Then we'll tell the other stations that Carey had a clean tip, had us against the wall, but because you're their friend, you decided to go with a press conference. That way, everybody owes us."

"How about the papers? They're out of it."

"We let them sit in on the interview with Carey so they can drop in long profiles. They won't publish until the next morning anyway, so Jennifer still gets the break. I'll feed it to the two papers as special treatment from you. I'll let them know that the even-handedness could change if we start having trouble with them."

"Okay. So tomorrow morning I'll see Carey at nine o'clock, put her off, maybe feed her a tidbit. We can work all the rest out later, in detail."

"See you tomorrow."

"Don't forget the meeting."

When he got off the phone, Lucas rubbed his eyes and bent over the drawing table again. He read penciled numbers from a list on a yellow legal pad, cranking them through an electronic desk calculator. A near-empty coffee cup sat at the top of the table. He took a sip of the oily remnant and grimaced.

Lucas wrote games. Role-playing fantasies, Civil War historical reconstructions, combat simulations from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Stalingrad, Battle of the Bulge, Tai-pan, the Punch Bowl, Bloody Ridge, Dien Bien Phu, Tet.

The games were marketed through a New York publisher who would take all he could create, usually two a year. His latest was a role-playing fantasy adventure. They were the best moneymakers but the least intrinsically interesting.

He looked at the clock again. Twelve-ten. He walked over to the sound system, picked out a compact disc, slipped it in the player, and went back to the numbers as Eric Clapton started on "I Shot the Sheriff."

The fantasy game's story line was complicated. An American armored platoon was fighting in the Middle East at some unspecified time in the near future. The platoon got word that a tactical nuke was headed toward it and dug in the best it could.

At the instant of expected detonation, there was an intolerable flash and the platoon found itself-complete with M3 tanks-in Everwhen, a land of water and fens and giant oaks. Where magic worked and soulless fairies danced in the night.

The whole thing tended to give Lucas a headache. Every fantasy game in the world, he thought, had a bunch of computer freaks with swords wandering around Poe-esque landscapes with red-haired freckled beauties with large breasts.

But it was money; and he had a responsibility to the prepubescent intellectuals who might someday buy his masterpiece, the Grove of Trees. He thought about Grove for a minute, the Gettysburg game he was perfecting in the weekly bouts at St. Anne's. Grove required an IBM computer and a separate, dedicated game room, along with teams of players. It took two nights just to set up the pieces. As a game it was impractical and unwieldy. But fascinating.

He tapped the pencil against his teeth and stared sightlessly over the drawing table. On the fifth night of the game, Jeb Stuart was still out of touch with Lee, riding far to the east around the Union army that was slowly crawling north toward Gettysburg. That had happened in the actual conflict, but this time, in the game, Stuart-in the person of the St. Paul grocer-was moving more aggressively to close the gap and could reach Gettysburg in time to scout the good ground south of town.

In the meantime, Lee's order of battle had been shuffled. As he closed through the mountains toward Gettysburg, Pickett's division was in the lead and was hunting for bear. Even if Reynolds-a university student-got there ahead of Stuart, and Reynolds managed to stay alive, as he hadn't in the original fight, Pickett's aggressiveness might push him aside and allow the Confederates to take the hills at the end of Cemetery Ridge or even the entire ridge. If he did, then the gathering Union forces would have to choose between an offensive battle or retreating on Washington…