John Sandford - The Fool's Run

Dace was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the Post. He looked up when we came in and said, "Haven't touched a thing except this coffee cup!"

"You ready?" LuEllen asked, kissing him on the forehead.

"Anytime," he said.

"I want to go through this place literally on our hands and knees, to make sure we're not leaving anything behind," I said.

"Let me finish the sports," Dace said. "I don't think they write about the 'Skins down in Mexico."

LuEllen and I pulled on the plastic gloves, and she followed me to the first bedroom. I got down on my knees and looked under the bed. She pulled open the drawers in the bureau.

"There's not going to be anything," she said.

"Look under the shelf paper, too," I said. She rolled her eyes and started pulling the shelf paper out of the drawers. We were about finished with the first room when the doorbell rang. LuEllen looked at me, and I stood up.

"Maggie," I said. "I thought I saw her.

"Could be the landlord," Dace said, coming out of the kitchen with the paper in one hand and the coffee cup in the other. "I told him we'd be pulling out." He crossed to the door and opened it.

Two men stood in the hallway. The one in back was mostly out of sight, but he was big. The one in front was wearing a neat red-and-white striped golf shirt, tan slacks, and tennis shoes. Ratface. He pulled a long, skinny gun from under his shirt and raised it toward Dace. Dace said "Wait" and held up the newspaper, and Ratface shot him three times in the head.

The shots went phut-phut-phut. LuEllen, who had gone into the hallway before I did, spun and started toward me and we both surged back into the bedroom, and I slammed the door and flipped the lock. Since it was a whorehouse, the door was heavy wood and the locks were solid, but I picked up the rosewood dressing table and literally threw it against the door. LuEllen didn't stop to look. She dashed across the bedroom to the old-fashioned, double-hung windows, frantically turned the crescent lock on the top of one and slid it up, and slapped at the hooks holding the screen outside.

"Go-go-go," she screamed; she had her feet out the window, and I ran across the room toward her. The guy in the hallway outside kicked the bedroom door at the lock, but it held, and he kicked it again, but by then I was at the window, watching LuEllen drop into the alley behind the apartment. She landed like a cat and turned to run toward the back of the building. I slid through, hung for a second, heard the door splinter, and dropped.

LuEllen was thirty feet in front of me when I landed; I yelled, "Car, car," and she cut behind the apartment. When I turned the corner she was squatting, gasping for breath, next to the passenger door. I unlocked the driver's side, slid in, pulled the lock, and cranked the engine. We left the back end of the lot in a hurry, and LuEllen, looking back, said, "There he is!" Looking in the rearview mirror as we turned the corner, I saw Ratface limp around the building, stop, and then hobble back out of sight.

"They killed Dace," LuEllen moaned.

"Yeah." There was nothing else to say.

I took a left at the next corner, drove a block, took another left, and headed west toward a big commercial street. There was no sign of a chase.

"What the fuck happened?" LuEllen demanded. "Who were those guys?"

"I don't know," I said. "But they've got Maggie, too."

"What?" LuEllen was stricken, her face white and drawn, but she was functioning. "What makes you think that?"

"When we were going into the building, I thought I saw her face in a car across the street. I didn't think it could be her, because she's not due for a couple hours. But I got a bad feeling.

"They're not coming after us," LuEllen said. "Let's get on another street somewhere, find a phone, and call Chicago. They'll know if she left early. If she didn't, they should know her flight number, and we can catch her at the airport."

I drove another two miles and spotted a phone booth outside a convenience store. I pulled around to the side of the store where the car couldn't be seen from the street, and called Chicago, collect.

Maggie had not left early. She'd taken a three o'clock flight out of O'Hare, just as she had planned, and was still in the air. Dillon was stunned by the shooting. "I don't know what to tell you," he said. "This is far out of bounds from anything I've ever heard of."

"Who would they be? Whitemark? They can't just be some fuckin' private eyes like you guys said," I said.

"That's what we got from people in Washington-good people. That they're just private detectives. I don't know, it doesn't add up." There was another long silence and finally he said, "I can't imagine it would be Whitemark. Big corporations can be ruthless, but we don't have gunmen hanging around. I'm afraid it might be the federal people. When we checked on these private detectives, we heard they'd had some trouble with the government in the past. Remember?"

"Yeah, I remember something like that."

"So maybe somebody's got them on a string. It would be a way of. killing somebody without official involvement."

"But why would they come after us?"

There was another moment of silence, and he said, in a cooler voice, "It's very hard to think. Very hard. But suppose they figured out what happened at Whitemark and talked to each other, and said, 'If we arrest these people, the publicity could set off a whole rash of these things. Like a rash of jet hijackings.' If there is some kind of murder squad in the CIA or the NSA, they might have decided that this was the most expedient way to solve the problem."

"Jesus," I said. I thought about the people I'd known in the Strategic Operations Group. A few were killers, plain and simple. They were career military men, Special Forces, and some held rank, but at heart, they were gunmen. If an intelligence agency needed a couple of shooters, they'd know where to find them. And private investigation was just the kind of job that attracted former company cowboys.

"Where are you?" Dillon asked. I looked around, but there were no street signs. "I don't know. Standing at a 7-Eleven on a street corner. We have to stay out of sight for a while and then head out to the airport in time to find Maggie."

"No. Don't do that. They may very well be looking for you at the airport. I'll call Maggie in the air. We have a business code we use for open phones, when we're negotiating deals, and I can warn her off. She'll call me from National, and I'll tell her what happened and turn her right back around. There won't be anything you can do for her. I'll arrange for extra security and talk to Mr. Anshiser about what to do next."

"So what about us?"

"If we can get a line on who it is, we might be able to work some kind of a deal. Can you call back here later?"

"Yeah. We'll get out of town. Find someplace we can hide out for a couple of days until we figure out what's happened."

"What about your friend? The one who was shot?"

"There's nothing we can do about that," I said. "There's no way he could still be alive."

"All right, we can leave that for now. Had you finished wiping the apartment?"

"Yes."

"Good. And you still have your car?"

"Yes."

"If they're federal or have federal sponsors they may put out a watch for your car. They won't have done it yet, though, if they thought they would catch you at the apartment. And if they're an assassination team, they're illegal; it might take them a while to get everything set. Can you hold on there just a minute?"

"Yes."

His phone receiver hit the desktop, and I scanned the street for the red Buick with the dark windows. Nothing. Cars coming and going, some of them red, but nothing that looked like the Buick.

"Okay, are you still there?"