John Sandford - Prey 01 - Rules of Prey

by Rules of Prey

  "You stay right here," he told the janitor, who stood with his mouth hanging open. "Some St. Paul cops are going to come here, and you take them up in the elevator. You wait right here, you got it?"

  The janitor nodded. "Wait right here," he said.

  "Right." Lucas patted him on the shoulder and dashed up the stairs.

  Carla's door had better locks, he thought breathlessly as he came up the last few steps, but it was still a crappy door. No time to think about it really. Christ, if the maddog wasn't here, this was going to be embarrassing. He hurried down to the doorway, saw the light coming from beneath it. He dropped the gym bag, took a step back, and kicked the door in. Lucas exploded into the room, his pistol in a two-handed grip.

  The studio was empty.

  CHAPTER

  34

  There was a quiet sound from the left, like a cat dropping from a bookcase. But it was no cat. Lucas pivoted and extended the gun. There was a small room, dark, cavelike. A groan. He stepped forward. Couldn't see. Stepped forward, still couldn't see. Another step, three feet from the door. A white shape, trussed, arched, on the bed, another groan, nothing else....

  Another step, and suddenly Vullion was there, his eyes wide and hard like boiled eggs, his hands covered with fuzzy yellow gloves, a pipe of some kind in one hand, the pipe sweeping down, and Lucas twisted the last three inches he needed to fire and the pipe smashed into the back of his hand and the gun went down on the floor. Lucas felt the bones in his right hand go and he pushed the pipe sideways with his left and Vullion's other hand was coming up in a long sweeping thrust and in it the knife was glittering like a short-sword toward Lucas' bowels. Lucas pivoted and caught the thrust with his broken hand and felt the hand flex and he screamed but the blade passed clear, under his arm, and he caught Vullion's knife hand with his left hand and smashed his right elbow into Vullion's eye socket. The impact lifted Vullion back, and they staggered together back into the tiny bedroom and Vullion's legs folded beneath him as he hit the bed and they fell together on top of Carla and Lucas pounded Vullion's face with his forearm once, twice, three times, the pain from his broken hand like lightning in his brain.

  And then Vullion stopped. Then Lucas twisted the knife arm, and the knife fell to the floor. Vullion was stunned, not out. Lucas hit him twice with his left hand, pounding Vullion's ear, then rolled him off Carla into the narrow space between the bed and the wall and knelt on his head and shoulders.

  "Motherfucker," Lucas groaned. His own breath was harsh and ragged in his ears. He reached awkwardly into his pocket with his good hand and took out his key ring. A miniature Tekna knife dangled from the ring. He pulled the knife out of its plastic sheath and gently slipped the blade under the tape that circled Carla's head, holding the gag in place. When he pulled the Kotex from her mouth, she gasped and then whimpered, an animal cry, like a rabbit's. She was alive.

  "Hurt me," Vullion moaned from beneath Lucas' knees. "I'm hurt."

  "Shut up, motherfucker," Lucas said. He hit him on the head with his closed left fist and Vullion twitched and moaned again.

  Lucas reached forward and cut the tape that bound Carla's arms to the bed, then freed her legs.

  "It's me, Lucas," he said next to her ear. "You're going to be okay. The ambulance is coming, just stay here."

  He levered himself up off the bed, grabbed Vullion by the back of his shirt and physically lifted him from the floor and half-dragged, half-led him into the studio. Lucas' pistol was lying against the wall. With a sweeping kick he knocked Vullion's legs out from beneath him, and guided his upper body down to the floor, protecting his head. He didn't want him unconscious. Vullion went down like a rag man.

  While he was down, Lucas picked up the pistol and walked quickly backward to the hallway, got the gym bag, and brought it inside. He pushed the door closed with his foot.

  Vullion, on his stomach, brought his hands to his ears.

  "Get up," Lucas said to Vullion. Vullion made no response, and Lucas kicked him in the hip. "Get up. Come on, get up."

  Vullion struggled up, fell back to his stomach, then pushed up to one knee. Blood was running from his nose into his mouth. The pupil of one eye was dilated. The other eye was closed, the lid and flesh around the socket bloody and swollen.

  "On your feet, asshole, or I swear to Christ I'll kick you to death."

  Vullion was watching him as best he could, still dazed. With an exhausted heave he got to his feet and swayed.

  "Now, back up. Five steps." Lucas thrust the pistol at Vullion's chest. Vullion stepped back carefully, but looked as though he might be recovering.

  "Now, you just stand there," Lucas said as he stepped toward the telephone.

  "I knew about the surveillance," Vullion said through broken teeth.

  "I figured that out about ten minutes ago," Lucas said. He gestured with his left hand.

  "Is your hand broken?"

  "Shut up," said Lucas. He lifted the receiver from the phone.

  "Did you deliberately lure me here? With your friend? Like you did with McGowan?"

  "Not this time. McGowan was bait, though," Lucas said.

  "You're worse than I am in some ways," Vullion said. Blood dribbled down his chin. He swayed again, and he reached out to Carla's sink to brace himself. "I was taking people who were... chips. You set up a friend. If I had a friend, I would never do that."

  "Like I told the papers, you're not that much of a player," Lucas said quietly in a voice just above a whisper.

  "We'll see about that," the maddog said. He was growing stronger, and Lucas was impressed in spite of himself. "I have defenses. You won't be able to prove any of the murders. After all, I did not kill Miss Ruiz. And you'll notice that my method is different this time. You won't find a note. I was going to make it here, afterward. If it comes to negotiations, I'll get an insanity plea. A few years at the state hospital and I'm out. And even if worse comes to worst, and I get a first-degree, well, it's eighteen years at Stillwater. I can do it."

  Lucas nodded. "I thought of that. It would be like losing, seeing you get away alive. I really couldn't stand that. Not with an inferior player."

  "What?"

  Lucas ignored him. He groped in his pants pocket and took a single nine-millimeter shell from his pocket. Watching Vullion carefully, he braced the pistol against his armpit and punched the magazine out of the pistol butt. This was when Vullion would act, if he was going to, but he did not; he stood still, puzzled, as Lucas pushed the blank into the top slot, slammed the magazine back into the butt, and jacked the shell into the chamber.

  "What are you doing?" Vullion asked. Something was happening. Something not right.

  "First, I'm going to call the cops," Lucas said. He stepped to Carla's wall phone and dialed 911. When he got the dispatcher, he identified himself and asked for an ambulance and backup. The operator asked that he leave the line open and Lucas said he would. That was standard operating procedure. Lucas let the phone dangle and stepped away from it.

  Vullion was still watching him, frowning. When Lucas stepped away from the phone, the maddog stepped back from the sink. Lucas pointed his pistol at the ceiling, fired once, his eyes tracking the ejected shell, the maddog's eyes involuntarily widening at the sharp explosion. He was still reacting when Lucas fired two more shots. One hit Vullion in the right lung, one in the left.

  The three shots were in a quick musical rhythm, a bang; bang-bang.

  Vullion was swatted back a step, two, and then he fell, going straight down as though his bones had melted. His mouth worked a few times and he rolled onto his back. The shots were killing shots, but not too good; not too aimed. It was supposed to have been a gunfight. Lucas stepped over to look down at the dying man.

  "What happened?"

  The voice might have come from an animal. Lucas turned, and Carla stood in the doorway to the bedroom. She was no longer bleeding, but had been battered, her nose broken, her face cut. She tottered over to Lucas.

  "Yo
u've got to go back and lie down," Lucas said.

  A witness could kill him.

  "Wait," Carla said as he gripped her arm. She looked down at Vullion. "Is he dead?"

  "Yeah. He's gone."

  But Vullion was not quite gone. His eyes moved fractionally toward the dark-haired woman who stood over him, and a tiny spate of blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth as his lips spasmed and opened.

  "Mom?" he asked.

  "What?" said Carla. Vullion's legs spasmed.

  "Forget it," Lucas said. He moved her physically back toward the bedroom, pushed her onto the bed. "Stay here. You're hurt." She nodded dumbly and let her body fall back.

  There was almost no time now. The St. Paul cops would be here in seconds. He stepped quickly back out of the room, over to Vullion. Vullion was dead. Lucas nodded, retrieved the gym bag, and lifted out the silenced pistol. He fitted it to Vullion's gloved hand, pointed it at Carla's shelf of art books, and pulled the trigger. There was a phut and pop! as the slug hit a three-inch-thick copy of The Great Book of French Impressionism. Lucas pulled the silencer off the muzzle and laid the weapon on the floor a few feet from Vullion's outstretched hand. He looked around on the floor, found the shell casing from the blank he'd fired, and pocketed it.

  The elevators started up and Lucas pulled the silencer apart as he reviewed the scene.

  There would be powder residue, nitrites, on Vullion's glove, on his bare wrist, on the sleeve of his coat and his face. The slug in the bookshelf, if it could be salvaged at all, would match test shots from the Smith found on the floor next to Vullion's body. Both the Smith and Lucas' P7 were nine-millimeters, so that would account for the fact that the shots would sound the same on the 911 tape. And the shots were sequenced so closely that no one would doubt that Lucas had fired in self-defense.

  It would hold up, he thought with satisfaction. He would have to work on his story a bit. He and Vullion fought in the bedroom. He dragged Vullion out, not wanting to endanger Carla, and outside the room, Vullion had pulled the pistol, which had been tucked into his waistband. That would do it. Nobody would want to know too much, anyway.

  He walked to a window, pulled it open, and threw out the two big plastic pieces of the silencer. Just more street junk. The Thinsulate wrapping and the internal tube he tossed among Carla's stock of weaving materials. He would retrieve it later, get rid of it.

  He slipped his own pistol into its holster and walked back to Carla's bedroom. She lay unmoving on the bed, but her chest was rising and falling regularly.

  "It's Lucas again," he told her, gripping her leg with his good hand. "Everything's going to be okay. It's Lucas."

  He heard the first St. Paul cop enter the room, and yelled, "Back here, Minneapolis police, Lucas Davenport, we need an ambulance quick..."

  As he called out, Vullion's stunned and dying face flashed through the back of Lucas' mind.

  He thought, "That's six."

  CHAPTER

  35

  Two days after Christmas, his hand still in a cast six weeks after the surgery, Lucas walked across an empty campus, through a driving snowstorm, to Elle Kruger's office in Fat Albert Hall. Her office was on the third floor. He took the worn concrete steps, unzipping his parka and brushing snow from his shoulders as he climbed. The third-floor hallway was dark. At the far end, one office showed a lighted pane of frosted glass. His footsteps echoed as he walked down and knocked.

  "Come in, Lucas."

  He pushed open the door. Elle was reading in an armchair that sat to one side of the desk, facing a small couch. An inexpensive stereo played "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Pictures at an Exhibition. Lucas handed her a package he'd carried in his coat pocket.

  "A gift." She smiled happily, her face lighted, weighing the package in her hand. "I hope it wasn't expensive."

  Lucas hung his parka on a coatrack and dropped onto the couch. "Tell you the truth, it cost an arm and a leg."

  Her smile diminished slightly. "You know we seek poverty."

  "This won't make you any richer," Lucas said. "If you ever sell it, I'll come over and strangle you."

  "Ah. Then I suppose..." She shook her head and began to unwrap the box. "My biggest problem, the cause of my most grievous sin, is curiosity."

  "I'll never understand the Church," Lucas said.

  The nun opened the small red box and fished out a medallion of yellow gold on a long gold chain. "Lucas," she said.

  "Read it," he said.

  She turned it in her hands and read, "'Agnus Dei: qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis'... it's from the Missal. 'O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.'"

  "That's certainly pious enough."

  She sighed. "It's still gold."

  "So wear it with disdain. When you start to like it, send it to Mother Teresa."

  She laughed. "Mother Teresa," she said. She looked at the medallion again, then looked closer and said, "What's this? On the other side."

  "A minor inscription."

  "The letters are so small." She held it eight inches from her nose, peering at it.

  Necessity has no law

  As Augustine descries her,

  So the maddog's brought to earth

  With the help of Nun the Wiser.

  She gasped, then started to laugh, throwing her head back and letting it roll out. "This is terrible," she said at last. "Augustine is whirling in his grave."

  "It's not that bad," Lucas said with a bit of frost. "In fact..."

  "Lucas, it's awful." She started laughing again, and finally Lucas began laughing with her. When she stopped, she brushed tears from her eyes and said, "I'll treasure it forever. I don't know what my sisters will think when they find it on my body..."

  "They can send it to Mother Teresa," Lucas suggested.

  ***

  They talked as old friends: of phony fainting spells during the rosary after school, of the boy who admitted in fourth grade that he didn't believe in God. His name was Gene, that's all they could remember.

  "Are you okay?" she asked after a while.

  "I think so."

  "And your relationship..."

  "Is doing well, thank you. I want to marry her, but she won't."

  "Officially, I'm appalled. Unofficially, I suspect she must be quite an intelligent woman. You are definitely a high-risk proposition.... What about Carla Ruiz?"

  "Gone to Chicago. She has a new friend."

  "The nightmares?"

  "Getting worse."

  "Oh, no."

  "She's seeing a counselor."

  ***

  And later still.

  "You feel no qualms about Louis Vullion's death?"

  "None. Should I?"

  "I had wondered at the circumstances," she said.

  Lucas pondered for a moment. "Elle. If you want to know everything, I'll tell you everything."

  It was her turn to ponder. She turned to the big window, a black silhouette against the snow that drove against the glass.

  Finally she shook her head, and he noticed she was clutching the medallion. "No. I don't want to know everything. I'm not a confessor. And I will pray for you and for Louis Vullion. But as for knowing..."

  She turned back, a tiny, grim smile on her face. "... I'm content to be Nun the Wiser."

  The End