John Sandford - The Fool's Run

He knew, and he wasn't interested.

LuEllen was dazed and heavy-eyed from the stress. "We have to keep going another half hour or so, and then we can get some sleep," I said.

We unloaded the box of electronics supplies in my room. The first item was a compact motion detector-a burglar alarm. I mounted it behind the door, at ankle level. Then I made a few simple changes in the telephone wall outlet. Next, using the power drill I'd bought, I drilled a neat hole through the wall into LuEllen's room, and ran two lines through.

The first line was hooked into the motion detector. If my door opened, the detector would buzz us in LuEllen's room. The second line would allow me to make and take calls in LuEllen's room from my phone. The stapler made the job neat. All the wiring ran under the edge of the carpet, along the baseboards. Even a maid shouldn't notice the changes.

"If it's the CIA or NSA, they could be monitoring everything Anshiser's got. If they trace us, it'll give us a break," I said.

We left the car one space down from LuEllen's room, in front of another room where the lights were on, and carried our suitcases, the portable, and our cash reserve down to LuEllen's.

What?

Can fast check Anshiser house lines for trace?

Yes. 30 minutes.

Need money?

No. Put terminal on receive.

LuEllen had collapsed on the bed and was out, breathing jerkily with an occasional moan, but asleep. I was crumbling when Bobby's call came in, and the terminal automatically answered.

Lines clean.

Thanx.

"Maggie's not back yet, but she's okay. I turned her around at National and talked to her in the air not more than an hour ago. We still don't know what happened," Dillon said. "It's hard to ask the right questions without admitting your guilt."

"What if they don't know what we're talking about?"

"Then we'll have to look into other possibilities. It could be Whitemark, but that doesn't seem likely. Mr. Anshiser was wondering if it might have something to do with the nature of the place you were staying? Some kind of prostitution-related activity, a mistake, just like we thought the first time?"

"That's bullshit," I said. "You don't kill somebody to get the goods on him for a divorce. They knew who we were and they were there to kill us."

"Yes, that's what I think," Dillon said. "Maggie should be back almost anytime. She wants to talk to you. Can you give me a number?"

"Yeah." I gave him the motel's phone number and my own room extension. "Have her call as soon as she gets in."

LuEllen groaned again and said "Dace?" and started to wake up. "Shh," I whispered, "go back to sleep." She frowned and muttered something, but went quiet again, I turned out the light, took off my shoes, and put my head on the pillow, feeling her breathing next to me. That's all I knew until the phone rang.

The phone sounded like a distant dentist's drill. I'd wrapped it in a heavy synthetic blanket to muffle the ringing, and now I couldn't find it. I twisted off the bed and floundered around for a minute in the darkness and finally stepped on it.

"What?" said LuEllen.

"I got it."

The receiver came free and I said, "Yeah?"

"Kidd? This is Maggie."

"Jesus. You okay?"

"Yes. I just got back. I talked to Dillon and we'll start talking to people in Washington in the morning. But we've got another problem. Something happened to Rudy. He collapsed. He's on his way to the medical center. The ambulance just left."

"A stroke? A heart attack? What?"

"No, no, he started spouting gibberish, babbling. It could be nervous exhaustion, a breakdown, they don't know. I'll let you know when we hear."

"Okay."

"Tell me what happened at the apartment."

I told her in a few words, and she asked if we were sure that Dace was dead.

"If they weren't shooting blanks. Ratface shot him three times from a range of about two feet."

LuEllen grabbed me by the arm; I half turned, and then I heard it: the soft buzz of the alarm. The door in my room had been opened.

"Ah, shit," I said.

"What? What's going on?" Maggie asked.

"Somebody's outside. I gotta call the cops. Talk to you later," I said, and hung up.

LuEllen crawled across to the single window and peeked out through a gap between the heavy fiberglass curtain and the windowsill.

"Don't move the curtain," I said. I fumbled the MAC-10 out of the open suitcase, cocked it, and crawled over beside her.

"There's nobody out there," she said. The alarm continued to burp. "You think. wait a minute. Wait a minute."

I looked out over her head. We couldn't see much, but a man in a dark raincoat stepped onto the sidewalk outside my room.

"They're confused," I whispered. "They don't know what to do." The dark shape moved away, and I crawled back to the telephone and dialed 911.

"Is this an emergency?"

"Goddamned right it is. I'm the night clerk at the Knight's Ease Motel and there are two guys with fuckin' machine guns out in the parking lot. Jesus Christ. I gotta go. " And I slammed the phone down.

"Think they'll send somebody?"

"Oh yeah. And if they're good Jersey cops, they'll come in with the sirens screaming. That's in case there really are guys with machine guns. It'll give them a chance to get away."

We huddled below the window, listening, the MAC-10 ready. If the hunters were talking to the night clerk, he might tell them about my "secretary." So we waited in the dark until we heard the siren and then risked another look. A few seconds later, two men crossed the parking lot and got into a big red Buick with dark windows.

"That's them," LuEllen breathed. Ratface was wearing a tan gabardine trench coat that looked two sizes too big for him. The other guy was a barrel-chested pug in a cheap double-knit suit. He moved with the easy grace of an aging heavyweight fighter.

"Yeah." The car pulled away, and we watched it all the way to the freeway entrance. When the phone rang again, LuEllen started across the room. I grabbed her ankle. "Don't," I said. It rang thirty times before it stopped. By then the cops were in the parking lot.

We left the hotel twenty minutes later on the heels of the cops, hustling the luggage and the computer into the car. We didn't bother to drop off the keys, but left them with a ten-dollar bill on a bureau. I did clean up the phone and alarm wires, leaving nothing behind but a nearly invisible half-inch hole in the wall.

"We need some sleep before we can think," I said. "We'll head back through Philadelphia and grab a motel somewhere on the other side."

"We're not worried about federal cops anymore?" From the corner of my eye, I could feel her studying my face.

"No."

"You figured it out?" she asked.

"Some of it."

"I'm glad I didn't have to tell you. That was no coincidence, the phone call coming at exactly the same time as those two goons. Maggie fingered us."

"There's more to it than that," I said.

She thought for a minute, then nodded. "That rat-faced guy. He got here in an hour and a half."

"With the car," I said. "The car was the one I saw in Washington. Dillon routed them right along with us. They must have driven up to Philadelphia, then waited for us to call. He told me to call in six hours, which would tell them about how far we'd get."

"But Jesus Christ, Kidd, what are they doing?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe Anshiser cut a deal with the feds."

"I don't think so. The feds wouldn't be interested in knocking off the small guys and letting the big ones go. They'd do it the other way around, if anything. Net the big fish."

"Jesus," she said. "Maggie. Remember her in the Japanese baths, kidding you about burning your balls off? I thought she'd never stop laughing. She was a friend. I thought you two guys were developing into something."