John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"Have you got the title here?" the maddog asked.

"Sure do."

"Get somebody to clean the paint off the windshield and take the consumer notice off the side window," the maddog said. He showed the salesman a sheaf of fifties. "I'll take it with me."

He told them his name was Harry Barber. With the stack of fifties sitting there, nobody asked for identification. He signed a statement that said he had insurance.

On the way back to his apartment, the maddog stopped at a salvage store and bought a two-foot length of automobile heating hose, a bag of cat litter, a roll of silver duct tape, and a pair of work gloves. As he was going past the cash register he saw a display of tear-gas canisters like the one Carla Ruiz had used on him.

"Those things work?" he asked the clerk.

"Sure. Works great."

"Give me one."

In the car, he wrapped the open end of the heating tube with the duct tape until it was sealed, then poured the tube full of cat litter and sealed the other end. When he was done, he had a slightly flexible two-foot-long weighted rubber club. He put the club under the seat and the tape in the bag with the cat litter.

Then, if he remembered right from his university days…

The motel vending machines were all gathered in a separate alcove. He dropped in the coins and got the single-pack Kotex and stuffed it in his pocket. A few more coins bought two slim roles of medical adhesive tape.

He dumped the sack of kitty litter and the duct tape in a motel garbage can, locked everything else in the trunk of the car, and drove quickly but carefully back to his own neighborhood. He parked on a side street three blocks from his apartment, carefully checking to make sure he was in a legal space. The car should be fine for a few days. With any luck, and if his nerve held, it wouldn't have to wait for more than a few hours.

He glanced at his watch. He'd been out of Hart's office for an hour and a half. If he wanted to attempt the pinnacle of gaming elegance, he would go back to Hart's office on the fifth floor, walk down the stairs, and exit past the receptionist. There was a chance-even a good chance-that the cops would never have made inquiries about where he was.

But if they had, and knew he had left Hart's office, then a faked return would tip them off. They would know that he knew. They would move on him, if they could, and he didn't want to spring any traps prematurely.

On the other hand, if he innocently walked back past the third-floor law office in the well-used main skyway, right past the watchers, wearing only his suit, without a coat or hat…

They'd almost certainly assume that however he'd gotten out, he had been on an innocent trip of some kind. Lunch.

He hoped they'd think that.

The stroke depended on it.

The maddog walked over to a university dormitory to call a cab.

"You lost him?" Lucas' eyes were black with rage.

"For at least two hours," the surveillance chief admitted, hangdog. He was remembering Cochrane and the fight after the Fuckup. "We don't know whether he suckered us or just wandered away."

"What happened?" They were in the front seat of Lucas' car on the street outside Vullion's office. The maddog was inside, at work.

"He started out just like he always does, carrying his briefcase, except he wasn't wearing a coat or hat or anything."

"No coat?"

"No coat, and it's cold out. Anyway, he walks over two blocks to another law office. It's a big one. It's got a glassed-in reception area on the third floor of the Hops Exchange."

"Yeah, I know it. Woodley and something-something."

"That's it. So we set up to watch the door and the rest of the third floor, in case he came out the back. We had guys on the skyway level and on the first floor, watching the exits there. After an hour and a half or so, when he didn't come out, we started to get worried. We had Carol call-"

"I hope she had a good excuse."

"It was semihorseshit but it held up okay. She called and said she had an important message for Mr. Vullion and could the receptionist get him. The receptionist called somebody-we're watching this through the glass-and then she comes back on and tells Carol that he'd left a long time ago. Just stopped in to see some guy named Hart for five minutes."

"So Where'd he go?"

"I'm getting to that," the surveillance man said defensively. "So Carol says this message is important, and asks, like girl-to-girl, did she see him leave? He's so absentminded, she says, you know how lawyers are. The receptionist says no, she didn't see him leave, but she assumed he left through the fifth-floor exits. See, you can only get in through the reception area, but there are three floors, and you can get out on any of them. They've got an internal elevator, and we didn't know."

"He could have known that," Lucas said. "He probably did. Was it deliberate? Do you think he spotted you?"

"I don't think so. I talked to the people, they all think we're clean."

"Christ, what a mess," said Lucas.

"You think we ought to take him?"

"I don't know. How'd you get him back?"

"Well, we were freaking out and I was talking to everybody to see if there was anything, any trace. And then here he comes, bigger'n shit, right through the skyway. He's got his briefcase and a rolled-up Wall Street Journal and he goes motoring past the skyway man like he's in a hurry."

"He went right back to his office?"

"Straight back."

"So what do you think?"

The surveillance man nibbled his lip and considered the problem. "I don't know," he said finally. "The thing is, if he was deliberately trying to lose us, he could have gone out through the parking ramp from the fifth floor. But the other thing…"

"Yeah?" Lucas prompted.

"I hate to admit it, but he might have gotten by the skyway guy. Completely innocently. We had a lot of spots to block, in case he got by us, somehow. We had a guy in the skyway, watching both the elevators and the stairs. If the elevators opened at just the right minute, and our guy looked over at them, and Vullion popped out of the stairway just at that minute and turned the other way…"

"He could have gotten past?"

"He could have. Without ever knowing we were there."

"Jesus. So we don't know," Lucas said. He peered up at Vullion's office window, which was screened by Venetian blinds. The lights were still on.

"I kind of think…"

"What?" Lucas prompted.

"There's a bunch of fern-type restaurants down from where he was coming when we picked him up again. And he was carrying that paper all rolled up, like he already looked at it. I wouldn't swear to it in a court, but I think he just might've gone down to have lunch. He hadn't eaten lunch yet."

"Hmph."

"So? What do we do?"

Lucas raked his hair with his fingertips and thought about the Fuckup. It shouldn't influence him, he knew, but it did.

"Leave him," Lucas said. "I just hope no dead bodies show up under a counter in a skyway shop."

"Good," the surveillance chief said in relief. If they'd had to grab Vullion because the surveillance had screwed up, somebody could wind up working the tow-truck detail in February.

The game was done; the final night had been one of discussion, not play. It was deemed a great success. A few touches might be desirable…

Lee had been mauled by Meade's well-protected troops dug in along Pipe Creek. Meade himself had taken severe casualties. The three days of fighting were as confusing and bloody as the Wilderness or Shiloh. The worst of it had fallen on Pickett: as the first into Gettysburg, his division had held the high ground just south of town. In the pursuit of the Union forces as they retreated on Washington, Pickett's division had been last in the route of march. On the final day at Pipe Creek, Lee had thrown Pickett's relatively fresh division into the center of the line. It died there. The Union held the ground and the Confederates reeled toward a hasty recrossing of the Potomac. The southern tide was going out.