She was no more than a minute away….
LUCAS SAW HER take off, moving through traffic like a broken-field runner, shouted, “She’s onto us. Get on top of her, get on top of her.”
A pilot gave him a thumbs-up and took the chopper into a screaming drive, but they gained ground only slowly and then actually seemed to lose some, and Lucas realized that Rinker must be pushing the black car into the hundreds, like a black comet surging along the street as though to catch the dead-white light of its high beams.
The tech was talking into his microphone, describing the car, describing the action, giving updates on the map as they finally started closing. Then they saw the tunnel, or whatever it was, up ahead, and Lucas said, “She’s heading for that tunnel thing.”
“Parking structure,” the copilot shouted. “It’s the parking structure for the shopping center.”
“Get us down, get us down, right in the mouth of it, she’s gonna beat us there, get me out and then get back up and look for her running.”
And to Sally, as they dropped: “Annie, get your gun.”
RINKER SAW THE chopper at the last minute, right above her, almost ahead of her, at the entrance to the tunnel, but she squirted past it, jammed on the brakes, was thrown into the steering wheel, got the speed down enough that she could cut right into a parking bay and saw, at the far end, three people walking along with shopping bags, one of them a man, jingling his car keys. She went that way, laying on the gas again.
The family had seen her coming and knew she was moving too fast and instinctively flattened themselves against a minivan and she jammed the brakes again and hopped out and started toward them and then something hit her in the butt. Something like a baseball bat, and she went down.
LUCAS WAS OUT and running into the tunnel, saw the Benz cut right and ran harder, Sally dropping behind, came around a pillar into a parking bay and saw the Benz down at the end and Rinker climbing out. Without thinking, he tracked her with the .45 and fired a single shot and amazed himself when she went down, rolled, and then she was crawling and back up and she was standing next to three civilians, two adults and what seemed to be a child, a ten-year-old girl, maybe, and Rinker was screaming at him, “Go the other way. Run the other way.”
Lucas shouted, “Give it up, give it up.”
Rinker shouted back, “Run the other way, Davenport, run back down the tunnel or I swear to God I’ll kill these people, I’ll kill all three of them right in front of your eyes.”
Lucas slowed, still moving up, and shouted, “Clara, you’re hurt, give it up, Clara…”
And Sally closed up and shouted, “Rinker…”
Then, horrified, they saw Rinker point a pistol at the head of the largest of the adults and pull the trigger, the man twisting and bouncing off a car, going down, as the shot echoed through the parking garage, and Rinker pointed the gun at the woman, and she screamed, “Mom goes next, Davenport, and then the kid. Mom goes next, run now or I’ll pop her.”
She pointed the gun at the mother, who lifted her arms to her face and shrank away, screaming herself; she backed up and tripped over her fallen husband and half fell, and Rinker screamed, “Here she goes….”
Lucas shouted, “We’re going,” and he grabbed Sally’s arm and Rinker screamed, “Run, or I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her, run out the tunnel, run…”
They ran.
WHEN SHE’D SHOT the man, he’d dropped his keys and Rinker pointed the gun at the mother and said, “Where’s the car, where’s the fuckin’ car?” And the woman pointed at the Dodge minivan and Rinker dragged her leg to it, her leg wasn’t working, but she hopped and dragged and popped the door on the van, and screamed. “Get in, get in or I’ll kill you. Get in.”
The mother and kid got in and Rinker screamed at them to lie in the footwell on the passenger side and they crawled into it and she cranked the engine and eased out of the parking slot and accelerated away, then slowed, took a corner, took another, and was on the street, driving out.
A helicopter hung overhead, but it stayed behind her, and then another one came in, and then she was on the next street and she saw a man behind her, running, and realized that it was Davenport and accelerated, turned a corner, accelerated again, two blocks, turned again, and again, Davenport long gone now, said to the woman in the footwell, her voice like a chain saw, as ugly and vicious as she could make it, “You stay on the fuckin’ floor or I’ll blow your motherfuckin’ brains out. You stay there, you hear? I’m gonna stop, and I’ll be right outside the car.”
The woman whimpered as she pulled the car off the street. She probably wasn’t more than ten blocks from the shopping center, but Davenport had seen the van, she thought, and she had to get out of it.
There was a bar off to the left, and a man was walking out, toward a lonely orange pickup truck that appeared to have been hand-painted. She pulled in beside it, said, “You stay down, hear? Or I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”
She pulled herself out of the truck, felt her feet mushing as though she were wading in pudding, realized that one shoe was full of blood, that her butt was wet with it, and dragged her leg around the back of the truck to the driver’s-side door, where the man was just getting in.
She came up, and he said, a little startled, “Hello,” and she pointed the gun at him and said, “Get in.”
“Oh, hell…Yes.”
He got in, and she said, “Crawl across. Make it fuckin’ snappy.”
He crawled across, and she said, “Drop the keys on the driver’s seat.” He did, and she shot him in the head, and he fell back dead against the window.
She shouted at the minivan, “I told you to fuckin’ stay down,” and fired another silenced shot through the van’s window, shattering glass but hitting nothing else, and as the mother cried out, Rinker crawled into the truck, fired it up, backed it out, and started away.
Three blocks out, watching the mirrors, she hadn’t seen any sign of Davenport. She took a corner and stayed on back streets, driving a checkerboard pattern away from the shopping center. Once, down a larger street, she saw the lights of a squad car flashing back toward the shopping center, and she crawled on. She thought about trying to make it back to Honus Johnson’s, but then realized that they had the Benz, and they’d be over there. She had to do something…. A wave of nausea crawled through her on the front edge of a bigger wave of pain, and she thought, I’m shot. Jesus, I’m shot.
She didn’t remember hearing a shot, but she remembered falling down, and then seeing Davenport….
A stop sign came up and she stepped on the brakes a little too firmly, and the dead man beside her slumped forward into the footwell. Another wave of nausea. She realized that even if she wanted to go to Johnson’s, she wouldn’t make it.
Had to find a place. Had to think…
LUCAS RAN UNTIL the van turned out of sight, then ran some more, pulling his phone from his pocket as he ran, called Sally to tell her about the van, but Sally didn’t answer the phone, and he ran some more and called Mallard, who did answer, and told him about the van and he heard the choppers lifting higher and then one moved over him and hit him with the spotlight, and he waved it off and it held him for another ten seconds as he waved frantically, and then it drifted away….
Nothing was working. He never saw the van after it turned, and finally a cop car caught up with him and he flagged it down and the cop had no idea that anything was going on, but got on his radio, and nobody he called knew what was going on, but Lucas got a lift back to the shopping center, where an ambulance was screaming out of sight and Sally, covered with blood, said, “The guy in the garage was shot in the ear and was squirting blood and I, and I, and I…”
“Okay, okay,” Lucas said. “She’s in a Dodge van, a dark van, maybe dark blue….”
Mallard came up and said, “A woman in a van…There’s a woman in a van at a bar who said her husband was shot.”
“Let’s go,” Lucas said. “That’s her….”
And they went roaring off in two more cop cars, a night for roaring off, Lucas thought, and on the way, Sally said, “You hit Rinker hard. I saw her go down and there’s blood all over the place, she’s gonna bleed to death if she doesn’t get to a hospital.”
“What color was the blood?”
“What?”
“What color was the blood? Dark or bright red, or was there any green stuff in it?”
“Just…purple. Why?”
“Real bright red is lungs, but I don’t think I hit her that high. Green is guts. If it’s nothing but purple, it may just be meat. If it’s just meat, she could stay out. If I hit her anyplace in the body cavity, though, she’ll need a hospital. I’m shooting Speer Lawman JHPs.”
At the bar, the mother had collapsed, and the young girl seemed to be drifting toward a trance state.
Lucas said, “We gotta get these people to a hospital,” and the bartender said, “Ambulance on the way,” and Sally told the woman, “Your husband’s not dead. He’s on the way to the hospital, but he’s not hurt bad, he was only shot in the ear, and he’s gonna be okay.”
The woman shook her head and curled into a tighter ball.
Lucas stepped away and looked down the street and said, “We’re losing her. We had her. We’re losing her right now.”
25
MALLARD PULLED TOGETHER ALL THE local police forces and had them do a grid search, starting around the shopping center, checking parked cars, any car that looked unusual or out-of-the-way; looking for blood.
The ID came back on the Benz, and they went for Honus Johnson’s house, and pounced on it with a full entry crew, but there was nobody home—nobody alive. They eventually found Johnson in the freezer and the California car in the garage, and they got Rinker’s clothes and her guns, but no money, no passport, no paper.
Mallard, frenzied, crazy, said, “I’m not sure where we’re at. It all comes down to how hard you hit her.”
“I can’t tell you that,” Lucas said. “I knocked her down and she got right back up. I might have hit her in her left leg, because she was dragging a leg, but I’m not sure.”
“Lot of blood,” Sally said again. “Lot of blood.”
THEY WENT AFTER Treena Ross, but when Rinker shouted “Cops!” she hadn’t immediately dumped the phone. She’d used it to call her attorney, and her attorney had come down to the hospital, where Mallard’s agents had picked her up. When Mallard, Lucas, and Sally showed up at the hospital, the attorney said to Mallard, “Is it true that you were eavesdropping on conversations between my client and myself?”
They had been, of course. They’d stayed on the phone from the time Rinker’s call came in through the call to the attorney. Mallard had nodded and said, “Yes.”
“That’s a violation of—”
“Bullshit. I have a law degree, sir, and it wasn’t a violation of anything. If your client doesn’t wish to tell us what really happened inside that dome tonight, we’ll see that’s she’s charged with premeditated murder and we’ll recommend that the state seek the death penalty. So what do you want to do?”
“Charge her,” the attorney said, “or we walk now. Either way, she says nothing.”
“Then we’ll charge her.”
“That’s certainly your privilege.”
They smiled at each other, nodded, and Mallard said, “I’ll go make the call.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, he said to Lucas, “I don’t think we’ll get Treena. We were focused on Rinker and we didn’t process her right. We didn’t keep her under control.”
“What happened?”
“Well, we got the phone, and she says the phone was her husband’s, she was carrying it because he was wearing a tux and didn’t have a place for it. And we took tape samples from her hands and arms looking for nitrites, and didn’t find any. I think she used a plastic bag or a piece of cloth to cover her hand and sleeve when she fired the gun. She was wandering around in the hospital before we put a hold on her; she was in the ladies’ room, and she might have flushed it. She had nitrites on her face, but she says that Rinker fired the pistol right past her, so they would be there. Smeared prints on the gun grip, clear ones on the barrel, and at least one of the good ones belongs to Rinker.”
“Well-thought-out.”
“For a long time,” Mallard agreed. “For weeks. And they pulled it off. If we take her to trial, they’ll have Rinker’s gun, they’ll have Rinker’s blood on the glass, they’ll have our whole investigation and chase with Rinker, and Ross’ll say the phone calls went to her husband. All we’ve got is that last phone call, and Rinker called her, unfortunately, and I listened to the tape. All double-talk. I mean, it sounds good to me, but it won’t be enough. It especially won’t be enough when they get Ross’s character into it, and they show that the third wife was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run.”
Lucas was convinced. “So Treena’s out of it.”
He nodded. “Yes. And she knows it.”
“If she had any little thing about Rinker, maybe we could deal with her…especially since we’re not going to get her anyway.”
Mallard shook his head. “She’s not gonna deal. The whole thing was…I feel like a moron. That’s what I feel like, Lucas. As soon as we clean up here, I’m going to Malone’s funeral, and then I’m going home for a while, and just sit and think.”
“What about Rinker?”
“Fuck her. I hope she dies of blood poisoning.”
RINKER GOT ON I-44 and headed southwest, drove for fifteen minutes before the pain dragged her off the highway. Feeling faint, she took an exit at random, spotted a hotel, turned into its parking lot, and parked the truck. She pressed the dead man into the footwell, found an Army blanket behind the seat, and threw it over him. Then, moving ever so slowly, she did a survey of her assets.
She had money, ID, two passports, both good, a black wig, and a hole in her butt that continued to bleed. She also had a small toolbox, a battered leather briefcase, and a brown sack with a grease spot that might have contained a lunch. She had a day-old newspaper.
When the dead man rolled off the passenger seat, he’d exposed a copy of the Post-Dispatch. The news section looked unread, and Rinker had heard that unread newspaper pages were virtually sterile. She pulled out the middle section, ripped then, unbuckled her slacks, touched the wound a few times, wasn’t sure she should be pleased or frightened that she couldn’t feel much other than the basic pain, then, in the light of the truck’s overhead lamp, made eight-inch-square pads of newsprint and pressed them onto the wound.
Digging into the toolbox for a roll of duct tape, she wrapped her leg and thigh with half the roll of tape, an awkward, unprofessional mess, but it held.
She felt sleepy, and that worried her. Even with the pain in her butt starting to come on, she felt sleepy. Struggled to stay up. Dug into the briefcase and found a cell phone. Everybody had a cell phone.
She took the man’s wallet out and looked at his ID and the cards inside, a couple of notes, no pictures. She checked his left hand: no wedding band. Single, she thought. Maybe nobody to come looking right away.
Fought the sleep, kept coming back to the cell phone. Finally, she decided she had no choice: one more risk to run.
She dialed, got an interrupt, and wound up talking to an operator before she got it right. Then she dialed again, and heard it ring, and then a man’s voice said, “Sí?”
She switched to Spanish: “This is Cassie McLain. May I speak to Papa?”
They talked for less than a minute, and then Rinker hung up, and after a few moments, as she reconstructed it later, she passed out. She woke again later, terribly thirsty, but there was no water in the truck, and when she moved a wave of pain tore at her.
That goddamn Davenport. He’d shot her in the back while she was running away. He’d had no call to do that, she wasn’t even looking at him….
She passed out again, and only woke when a bright light hit her in the eyes. A man said, in Spanish, “Are you alive?”
“Yes.”
“I have a car.”
He’d had to lift her out of the truck and place her in the front seat of his Cadillac. The front seat was covered with plastic garbage bags so she wouldn’t make a mess. When he’d transferred her, she’d passed out again, just for a moment, and when she came to, he was wiping his hands on paper towels. “Still alive?”
“Yes.” But very weak now. “Where are we going?”
“Carbondale, Illinois. Maybe two hours, I’ve never been there.”
“What time is it?”
“Five o’clock…. The sun is just coming up.”
And she passed out again.
Some time later, the man backed into a one-car garage in Carbondale, woke Rinker, who was only fuzzily aware of it, and carried her into a house and put her facedown on a firm bed. A man’s voice said, “I’m going to give you a shot.”
THE FEDS WOULDN’T have found the orange pickup for a week if the hotel hadn’t been feuding with a pancake house. The pancake house’s parking lot was too small, so people parked in the hotel lot, and the hotel people got pissed and required guests to put parking tickets behind the windshields of their cars. If a car sat too long without a ticket, it was towed.
The orange truck didn’t have a ticket, and the hotel security guard had seen it parked in the lot when he came in that morning, so in the middle of the afternoon he finally checked….
LUCAS WENT OUT with Mallard and they looked at the dead man in the footwell, and at the blood-soaked front seat, and talked to the cop who’d decided that it might be related. “Whoever was driving was shot in the butt, in the left cheek, and it wasn’t the dead guy, and I saw your bolo this morning and thought I’d better have my guys give you a call.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 102