John Sandford - Prey 04 - Silent Prey

by Silent Prey

  "It's weird, is what it is," he said.

  "You're not saying the right thing," said Fell. She propped herself up again, and he drew three fingers across the soft skin on the bottom of her breast.

  "That's because Lily and I are seriously tangled up," Lucas said. "You know she's sleeping with Kennett."

  "I figured. The first time I saw them together, she was dropping him off at Midtown South, and she kissed him good-bye and I had to go inside and put a cool wet rag on my forehead. I mean, hot. But then I saw you two talking to each other, you and Rothenburg, and it looked like unfinished business."

  "Nah. But I was there when her marriage came apart and she helped kill off the last of my relationship with a woman I had a kid with. We were kind of... pivotal... for each other," Lucas said.

  "All right," Fell said.

  "Lily was driving?"

  "What?"

  "You said she dropped off Kennett."

  "Well, yeah, Kennett can't drive. That'd kill him, the Manhattan traffic would." She sat up again, half turned, and this time he could see her eyes. "Davenport, what the fuck are you up to?"

  "Jesus..." He laughed, and caught her around the waist, and she let him pull her down.

  "The one thing I want to know-if you're up to something, you're not screwing me to get it, are you?"

  "Barbara..." Lucas rolled his eyes.

  "All right. You'd lie to me anyway, so why do I ask?" Then she frowned and answered her own question: "I'll tell you why. Because I'm an idiot and I always ask. And the guys always lie to me. Jesus, I need a shrink. A shrink and a cigarette."

  "So smoke, I don't mind," Lucas said. "Just don't dribble ashes on my chest."

  "Really?" She scratched him on the breastbone.

  "I mean, it's killing you, slowly but surely, but if you need one..."

  "Thanks." She got out of bed-a wonderful back-found her purse, got her cigarettes, an ashtray and the TV remote. "I gotta get some nicotine into my bloodstream," she said. Ingenuously, genuinely, she added, "I didn't have a cigarette because I was afraid my mouth would taste like an ashtray."

  "I thought you'd decided not to sleep with me, and changed your mind."

  She shook her head. "Dummy," she said. She lit the cigarette and pointed the remote control at the TV, popped it on, thumbed through the channels until she got to the weather. "Hot and more hot," she said, after a minute.

  "It's like Los Angeles, 'cept more humid," Lucas said.

  "Shoulda been here last year...."

  They talked and she smoked, finished the cigarette, and then lit up another and went around the room and stole all his hotel matches. "I never have enough matches. I always steal them," she said. "When I'm working I've got two rules: pee whenever you can, and steal matches. No. Three rules..."

  "Never eat at a place called Mom's?"

  "No, but that's a good one," she said. "Nope: it's never sleep with a goddamn cop. Cops are so goddamn treacherous...."

  CHAPTER

  16

  Sunday morning.

  Sunlight poured like milk through the venetian blinds. Fell woke at nine o'clock, stirred, then half-sat, looking down at Lucas' dark head on the pillow. After a moment, she got up and stumbled around, picking up clothes. Lucas opened an eye and said, "Have I mentioned your ass?"

  "Several times, and I appreciate all of them," she said. She offered a smile, but weakly. "My head... that goddamn cheap wine."

  "That wine wasn't cheap." Lucas sat up, still sleepy, dropped his feet to the floor, rubbed the back of his neck. "I'll call Kennett, see if we can figure something out."

  She nodded, still groggy. "I gotta go home to change clothes, then back to Bellevue. There'll be people around we wouldn't see during the week."

  Lucas said, "This is really important to you, isn't it?"

  "It's the biggest case I've ever been on," she said. "God, I'd love to get him. I mean, me, personally."

  "You won't get him at Bellevue," Lucas said. "Even if you find Whitechurch's helper, and she talks, I wouldn't be surprised if Bekker's using a pay phone. Then where are you?"

  "So if we find the phone, we can stake it out. Or maybe he uses one on the block where he lives, we can look at the apartments."

  "Mmm."

  "Maybe we'll get him tomorrow night, at the speech."

  "Maybe... C'mon. I'll make sure you get clean in the shower."

  "That's something I've always needed," she said. "Help in the shower."

  "Well, you said your head feels weird. What you need is a hot shower and a neck massage. Really. I say this in a spirit of fraternity and sorority."

  "Good, I don't think I could handle another sexual impulse," Fell said. But the shower took them back to the bed, and that took them back to the shower, and Fell was leaning against the wall, Lucas standing between her legs, drying her back with a rough terry-cloth towel, when Anderson called from Minneapolis.

  "Cornell Reed. United to Atlanta out of La Guardia, transfer to Southeast to Charleston. No return. Paid for by the City of New York."

  "No shit... Charleston?"

  "Charleston."

  "I owe you some bucks, Harmon," Lucas said. "I'll get back to you."

  "No problem..."

  Lucas hung up, turning it over in his head.

  "What's Charleston?" Fell asked from the bathroom doorway.

  "It's both a dance and a city.... Sorry, that was a personal call. I was trying to get through to my kid's mother. She's gone to Charleston with the Probe Team."

  "Oh." Fell tossed the towel back into the bathroom. "You're still pretty tight with her?"

  "No. We're done. Completely. But Sarah's my kid. I call her."

  Fell shrugged and grinned. "Just checking the oil level," she said. "Are you going to call Kennett?"

  "Yeah."

  They ate a quick breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, then Lucas put Fell in a cab back to her apartment. He called Kennett from his room and got switched from Midtown South to a second phone. Kennett picked it up on the first ring.

  "If we don't get him tomorrow, at the speech, I'm heading back to the Twin Cities, see what I can find," Lucas said.

  "Good. I think we've got all the routine stuff pinned down here," Kennett said. "Lily's here, and we were about to call you. We're thinking about a boat ride."

  "Where's here?" Lucas asked.

  "Her place."

  "So come and get me," Lucas said.

  After talking to Kennett, Lucas sat with his hand on the phone, thinking about it, then picked it up again, dialed the operator, and got the area code for Charleston. He had no idea how big the city was, but had the impression that it was fairly small. If they knew assholes in Charleston the way they knew them in the Twin Cities...

  The information service got him the phone number for the Charleston police headquarters, and two minutes later, he had the weekend duty officer on the line.

  "My name is Lucas Davenport. I'm a cop working out of Midtown South in Manhattan. I'm looking for a guy down your way, and I was wondering about the prospects of finding him."

  "What's the problem?" A dry southern drawl, closer to Texan than the mush-mouth of South Carolina.

  "He saw a guy get shot. He didn't do it, just saw it. I need to talk to him."

  "What's his name?"

  "Cornell Reed, nickname Red. About twenty-two, twenty-three..."

  "Black guy." It was barely a question.

  "Yeah."

  "And you're from Midtown South."

  "Yeah."

  "Hang on..."

  Lucas was put on hold, waited for a minute, then two. Always like this with cops. Always. Then a couple of clicks, and the line was live again. "I got Darius Pike on the line, he's one of our detectives.... Darius, go ahead..."

  "Yeah?" Pike's voice was deep, cool. Children were laughing in the background. Lucas identified himself again.

  "Am I getting you at home? I'm sorry about that...."

  " 'S okay. You're looking for Re
d Reed?"

  "Yeah. He supposedly witnessed a killing up here, and I'm pretty hot to talk to him."

  "He came back to town a month ago, the sorry-ass fool. You need to bust him?"

  "No, just talk."

  "Want to come down, or on the phone?"

  "Face-to-face, if I can."

  "Give me a call a day ahead. I can put my hands on him about any time."

  Now he had to make a decision: Minneapolis, Charleston. Two different cases, two different leads. Which first? He thought about it. He wouldn't be able to get down to Charleston and back in time. The New School trap was the next night; if they didn't get Bekker, then the trip to Minneapolis was critical. Bekker was killing people, after all. Charleston might shed some light on Robin Hood, and Robin Hood was killing people, too-but those were mostly bad people, weren't they? He shook his head wryly. It wasn't supposed to matter, was it? But it did.

  Lucas made one more call, to Northwest Airlines, and got a seat to Minneapolis-St. Paul, then a triple play, Minneapolis-St. Paul to Charleston to New York. There, that was all he could do for now. It all hinged on tomorrow night.

  When Lily called from the front desk, he'd changed to jeans and blue T-shirt. He went down, found her waiting, eyes tired but relaxed. She was wearing jeans and a horizontally-striped French fisherman's shirt that might have cost two hundred dollars on Fifth Avenue, and an aqua-colored billed hat.

  "You look like a model," he said.

  "Maybe I oughta call Cruising World. "

  "Yeah, you look kinda gay," he said.

  "That's a sailboat magazine, you dope," she said, taking a mock swipe at him.

  Kennett was waiting in the passenger seat of a double-parked Mazda Navaho, wearing comfortable old khakis and a SoHo Surplus T-shirt.

  "Nice truck," Lucas said to Lily as he crawled in back.

  "Kennett's. Four-wheel drive must help testosterone production," Lily said, walking around to the driver's side and climbing in. "You've got one, don't you?"

  "Not like this: this is sort of a Manhattan four-wheel drive," he said, tongue in cheek. To Kennett he said, "I didn't think you could drive."

  "Got it before the last attack," Kennett said. "I think the price is what brought the attack on. And don't give me any shit about Manhattan four-by-fours, this is a fuckin' workhorse...."

  "Yeah, yeah..."

  They left Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerging in Jersey, took a right and then followed a bewildering zigzag path back to the waterfront. The marina was a modest affair, filling a dent in the riverbank, a few dozen boats separated from a parking lot by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Most of the boats were in concrete slips, halyards clinking softly against the aluminum masts like a forest of one-note wind chimes; a few more boats were anchored just offshore.

  "Look at this guy, putting up his 'chute," Kennett said, climbing down from the truck. Lucas squeezed out behind him as Lily climbed out of the driver's seat. Kennett pointed out toward the river, where two sailboats were tacking side-by-side down the Hudson, running in front of a steady northwest breeze, their sails tight with the wind. A man was standing on the foredeck of one of them, freeing a garish crimson-and-yellow sail. It filled like a parachute, and the boat leapt ahead.

  "You ever sailed?" Kennett asked.

  "A couple times, on Superior," Lucas said, shading his eyes. "You feel like you're on a runaway locomotive. It's hard to believe they're barely going as fast as a man can jog."

  "A man doesn't weigh twenty thousand pounds like that thing," Kennett said, watching the lead boat. "That is a locomotive...."

  They unloaded a cooler from the back of the truck and Lucas carried it across the parking lot, past a suntanned woman in a string bikini with a string of little girls behind her, like ducklings. The smallest of the kids, a tiny red-headed girl with a sandy butt and bare feet, squealed and danced on the hot tarmac while carrying a pair of flip-flops in her hands.

  Lily led the way through a narrow gate in the chain-link fence, Lucas right behind her, Kennett taking it slow, down to the water. Here and there, people were working on their boats, listening to radios as they worked. Most of the radios were tuned to rock stations, but not the same ones, and an aural rock-'n'-roll fest played pleasantly through the marina. Few of the boats actually seemed ready to go out, and the work was slow and social.

  "There she blows, so to speak," Kennett said. The Lestrade was fat and graceful at the same time, like an overweight ballerina.

  "Nice," Lucas said, uncertainly. He knew open fishing boats, but almost nothing about sailboats.

  "Island Packet 28-it is a nice boat," Kennett said. "I got it instead of kids."

  "Not too late for kids," Lucas said. "I just had one myself."

  "Wait, wait, wait." Lily laughed. "I should have a say in this."

  "Not necessarily," Lucas said. He stepped carefully into the cockpit, balancing the cooler. "The goddamned town is overrun with nubile prospects. Find somebody with a nice set of knockers, you know, not too smart so you wouldn't have to worry about the competition. Maybe with a fetish for housework..."

  "Fuck the sailing, let's go back into town," Kennett said.

  "God, I'm looking forward to this," Lily said. "The flashing wit, the literary talk..."

  Lily and Lucas rigged the sails, with Kennett impatiently supervising. When he was bringing the sails up, Lucas took a moment to look through the boat: a big berth at the bow, a tidy, efficient galley, a lot of obviously custom-built bookshelves jammed with books. Even a portable phone.

  "You could live here," Lucas said to Kennett.

  "I do, a lot of the time," Kennett said. "I probably spend a hundred nights a year on the boat. Even when I can't sail it, I just come over here and sit and read and sleep. Sleep like a baby."

  Kennett took the boat out on the motor, his fine white hair standing up like a sail, his eyes shaded by dark oval sunglasses. A smile grew on his tanned face as he maneuvered out along the jetty, then swung into the open river. "Jesus, I love it," he said.

  "You gotta be careful," Lily said anxiously, watching him.

  "Yeah, yeah, this takes two fingers...." To Lucas he said, "Don't have a heart attack-it just unbelievably fucks you up. I can run the engine and steer, but I can't do anything with the sails, or the anchor. I can't go out alone."

  "I don't want to talk about it," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, fuck it," Kennett agreed.

  "What does it feel like?" Lucas asked.

  "You weren't gonna talk about it," Lily protested.

  "It feels like a pro wrestler is trying to crush your chest. It hurts, but I don't remember that so much. I just remember feeling like I was stuck in a car-crusher and my chest was caving in. And I was sweating, I remember being down on the ground, on the floor, sweating like a sonofabitch...." He said it quietly, calmly enough, but with a measure of hate in his voice, like a man swearing revenge. After another second, he said, "Let's get the sails up."

  "Yeah," Lucas said, slightly shaken. "I gotta pull on a rope, right?"

  Kennett looked at the sky. "God, if you heard the man, forgive him, the poor fucker's from Minnesota or Missouri or Montana, some dry-ass place like that."

  Lucas got the mainsail up. The jib was on a roller, with the lines led back to the cockpit. Lily worked it from there, sometimes on her own, sometimes with prodding from Kennett.

  "How long have you been sailing?" Lucas asked her.

  "I did it when I was a kid, at summer camp. And then Dick's been teaching me the big boat."

  "She learns quick," Kennett said. "She's got a natural sense for the wind."

  They slid lazily back and forth across the river, water rushing beneath the bow, wind in their faces. A hatch of flies was coming off the water, their lacy wings delicately floating around them. "Now what?" Lucas asked.

  Kennett laughed. "Now we sail up and then we turn around, and sail back."

  "That's what I thought," Lucas said. "You're not ev
en trolling anything."

  "You're obviously not into the great roundness of the universe," Kennett said. "You need a beer."

  Kennett and Lily gave him a sailing lesson, taught him the names of the lines and the wire rigging, pointed out the buoys marking the channel.

  "You've got a cabin on a lake, right? Don't you have buoys?"