John Sandford

by Shadow Prey

  “We’re tightening down. It’ll work, with a little time.”

  “Maybe. I just hope they don’t pull some shit first. We better get down to Daniel’s office for this meeting with Clay.”

  Sloan, Lucas, Lily, Anderson, Del and a half-dozen other cops had been waiting ten minutes when Daniel and Clay arrived, trailed by the mayor, two of Clay’s bodyguards and a half-dozen FBI agents.

  “Your show, Larry,” Daniel said.

  Clay nodded, stepped behind Daniel’s desk and gazed around the crowded office. He looked like an athlete gone to fat, Lucas thought. You wouldn’t call him porky, but you could get away with “heavyset.”

  “I always like to talk to local police officers, especially in serious situations like this where everything depends on cooperation. I spent several years on the streets as a patrolman—got to the rank of sergeant, in fact . . .” Clay began, and he nodded at a uniform sergeant standing in the corner of the room. He was a solid speaker, picking out each local cop in turn, fixing him with his eyes, soliciting agreement and cooperation. Lily glanced up at Lucas after Clay had given them the treatment, and cracked a smile.

  “Good technique,” she whispered.

  Lucas shrugged.

  “ . . . wide experience with Indians, and I will tell you this. Indian rules are not our rules, are not the rules of a rational, progressive society. That statement—I’d prefer to keep it in this room—is not a matter of prejudice, although it can be twisted to sound that way. But it’s a solid fact; and most Indians themselves recognize it. But we don’t have two sets of rules in America. We have law, and it applies to everybody . . . .”

  “Heil Hitler,” Lucas muttered.

  When they finished, Clay whipped out of the building in his cloud of bodyguards.

  “Let’s go look at his hotel,” Lucas suggested.

  “All right,” Lily said. “Though I’m starting to have my doubts. His guys are pretty good.”

  Clay’s chief of security was a nondescript, pale-eyed man who looked like a desk clerk until he moved. Then he looked like a viper.

  “We’ve got it nailed down,” he said after Lucas and Lily identified themselves. “But if you think you might see something, I’d be happy to walk you through.”

  “Why?” asked Lucas.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you happy to walk us through, if it’s all nailed down?”

  “I never figured myself to be the smartest guy in the world,” the security man said. “I can always learn something.”

  Lucas looked at him for a minute, then turned to Lily. “You’re right. They’re good,” he said.

  They took the tour anyway. Clay was on the fourteenth floor. There were higher buildings around, but none closer than a half-mile.

  “Couldn’t take him through a window,” the security man said.

  “How about something set up in advance? Clay’s stayed at this hotel before, right?”

  “Like what?”

  Lucas shrugged. “A bomb in an elevator?”

  “We sniffed the place out. Routine,” the security man said.

  “How about a suicide run? The Crows are crazy . . . .”

  “We’ve checked the staff, of course. No Indians at all, nobody with the kind of background that we’d worry about. Most of them are career people, been here a while. A few new people on the desk and kitchen staff, but we screen them out when the boss comes and goes . . . . And when he does come and go, we check the lobby and the street first. He’s in and out in a hurry, with no warning. So it wouldn’t be anybody on the street.”

  “Hmmph,” said Lucas.

  They were headed back down in the elevator and Lucas asked, “Is there any way to get up on top of the elevator from the basement or the roof, ride up that way?”

  The security man allowed himself a small grin. “I’m not going to talk about that,” he said, glancing at Lucas. “But in a word, no.”

  “You’ve got the elevators wired,” said Lily.

  The security man shrugged as the elevator stopped at the third floor. An elderly woman wearing a fur wrap got on, peered nearsightedly at the lighted buttons and finally pushed the button for the second floor. A room-service waiter pushed a dinner cart past the elevators just as the doors were closing.

  “How about a disguise?” Lucas asked after the old lady had gotten off. “What if somebody came in disguised as an old lady . . .”

  “Metal detectors would pick up the gun.”

  “ . . . and had a gun stashed on the third floor. Rode up to the third floor, picked it up and then went up to fourteen . . .”

  The security man shrugged again. “That’s a fantasy. And when they got up there, they’d have to shoot their way past three trained agents. And the boss is armed, and he knows how to use it.”

  Lucas nodded. “All right. But I got a bad feeling,” he said.

  He and Lily left the security man in the lobby and headed for the doors. Just as they were about to go out, Lucas said, “Wait a minute,” and turned back.

  “Hey,” he called to the security man. “How did that room-service food get up on three?”

  The security man looked at Lucas, then at Lily, then at the elevators.

  “Let’s go ask,” he said.

  “In a dumbwaiter,” a cook told them. He pointed to an alcove, where they could see the opening for the chain-driven lift.

  The security man looked from the dumbwaiter to the cook to Lucas. “Could a man ride up in that?” he asked the cook.

  “Well . . . I guess a couple guys have. Sometimes,” the cook said, his eyes shifting nervously.

  “What do you mean, ‘sometimes’?”

  “Well, when it’s busy, you know, the boss doesn’t want a lot of waiters riding up in the elevators with the customers. The waiters are supposed to take the stairs. But sometimes, I mean, if it’s on the tenth floor . . .”

  “How often do guys ride up?” the security man asked.

  “Look, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble . . . .”

  “Nobody’ll hear a word from us,” Lily promised.

  The cook wiped his hands on his apron, then lowered his voice and said, “Every day.”

  “Shit,” said the security man.

  The security man laid it out: “A suicide run. Four guys. They come down the alley to the service dock. They push the bell. One of the staff opens the door to see who it is. The Crows stick a gun in his stomach. One guy stays in the kitchen while the other three ride up in the dumbwaiter, one at a time. They come out in the service area on fourteen. They’ve got automatic weapons or shotguns. They check the hall, somehow . . . maybe just peek, or they use a dental mirror . . . they come out and take the two agents in the hall. That leaves one guy with the chief. They knock the door out with a shotgun, and then it’s three on two, maybe three machine guns or shotguns against two pistols . . . .”

  “It’s a possibility,” said Lily.

  Now it was Lucas’ turn to shake his head. “You know, when you lay it out like that, it sounds pretty unlikely . . . .”

  “The Crows are pretty unlikely,” the security man said. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll freeze the kitchen. Stick a monitor somewhere. If they come in, we’ll snap them up.”

  “A trap,” said Lily.

  “Right. Well—excuse me, I gotta go talk to the chief. And listen: Thanks.”

  On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, Lucas shook his head again.

  “It was a hole, but that’s not what the Crows are up to,” he said.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In the car, Lily looked at her watch. “Why don’t we talk about it over lunch?”

  “Sure. Want to go to my place?” Lucas asked.

  Lily looked at him curiously. “This is a new attitude,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Jennifer . . .”

  “ . . . figured us out,” she finished, sitting up straight in her seat. “Oh, s
hit. Did she throw you out?”

  “That’s about it,” Lucas conceded. He cranked the car and pulled away from the curb.

  “You don’t think she’d call David, do you?” Lily asked anxiously.

  “No. No, I don’t. She’s spent some time in bed with married men—I know some of them—and she’d never have thought of talking to their wives. She wouldn’t break up a marriage.”

  “It makes me nervous,” Lily said. “And that must be why you’re so bummed out. You sat in Daniel’s office looking like your dog had died.”

  “Yeah. It’s Jen and it’s this fuckin’ case. Larry killed, executed. And I’ve been useless. That feels weird, you know? When something important is happening—drugs, gambling, credit-card scams, burglary rings—I’ve got these contacts. Daniel comes to me and says, ‘Talk to your net. We got thirty-six burglaries on the southeast side last week, all small shit, stereos and TVs.’ So I go out and talk to the net. A good part of the time, I’ll find out what’s happening. I’ll squeeze a gambler and get sent to a fence and squeeze the fence and find a junkie, and squeeze the junkie and get the whole ring. But this thing . . . I got nobody. If they were regular crooks, I could find them. Dopers need dope or need to sell it, so they’re out and about. Burglars and credit-card hustlers need fences. But who do these guys need? An old friend. Maybe a former university professor. Maybe an old sixties radical. Maybe some kind of right-wing lunatic. Maybe Indian, maybe white. Who the fuck knows? I spent my whole goddamn life in this town, and most of the time I lived right around where the Indians live and I never saw them. I know a few, but it’s because they’re in drugs or burglary, or because they’re straight and I go to their stores. Other than that, I just don’t have a net out there. I’ve got a black net. I’ve got a white net. I’ve even got an Irish net. I don’t have an Indian net.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Lily said. “You got the tip on the trouble out at Bear Butte and found the photograph that I picked Hood out of.”

  “I got tied up like a fuckin’ pig by Hood and almost got my brains blown out . . . .”

  “You figured out how to squeeze the Liss woman and got the names of the Crows out of her. You’re doing all right, Davenport.”

  “It’s been luck, and that ain’t going to hack it from here on out,” Lucas said, glancing at her. “So stop trying to cheer me up.”

  “I’m not,” she said cheerfully. “We don’t have a lot to be cheerful about. As a matter of fact, unless we get real lucky, we’re completely fucked.”

  “Not completely,” Lucas said. He downshifted, let the car wind down to a red light and touched her thigh. “But in an hour, who knows?”

  Lily prowled through the house like a potential buyer, checking each of the rooms. Once, Lucas thought, he caught her sniffing the air. He grinned, said nothing and got two beers.

  “Pretty good,” she said finally, as she came up the stairs from the basement. “Where’d you get that old safe?”

  “I use it as a gun safe,” Lucas said, handing her a beer. “I picked it up cheap when they were tearing out a railroad ticket office here in St. Paul. It took six guys to get it in the house and down the stairs. I was afraid the stairs were going to break under the weight.”

  She took a sip of beer and said, “When you invited me for lunch . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “ . . . am I supposed to make it?”

  “Oh, fuck no,” he said. “You got your choice. Pasta salad or chicken-breast salad with slices of avocado and light ranch dressing.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a zoo over on Franklin and down on Lake,” Lily said as she worked down into her salad. “With Clay in town, the feebs are crawling all over the place.”

  “Assholes,” Lucas grunted. “They’ve got no contacts, the people hate them, they spend twenty-four hours a day stepping on their dicks . . . .”

  “They’re doing that now, in major numbers,” Lily agreed. She looked up from her chicken-breast salad and said, “That was delicious. That pasta looks pretty good too . . . .”

  “Want a bite?”

  “Maybe just a bite?”

  After lunch, they went to the study and Lily pulled out one of Anderson’s notebooks for review. They both drank another beer, and Lucas put his feet up on a hassock and dozed.

  “Warm in here,” Lily said after a while.

  “Yeah. The furnace kicked in. I looked at the thermometer. It’s thirty-six degrees outside.”

  “It felt cold,” she said, “but it’s so pretty, you don’t notice it. With the sun and everything.”

  “Yeah.” He yawned and dozed some more, then cracked his eyes open as Lily peeled off her cotton sweater. She had a marvelously soft profile, he thought. He watched her read, nibbling at her lower lip.

  “Nothing in the notebooks,” he said. “I’ve been through them.”

  “There must be something, somewhere.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Why did the Crows kill Larry? They must have known that it would be counterproductive, in the political sense. And they didn’t have to kill him—he wasn’t helping us that much.”

  “They didn’t know that. He was on TV after the raid on the Crows’ apartment . . . . Maybe they thought . . .”

  “Ah. I didn’t think of that,” she said. Then she frowned. “I was on TV the other night. After Larry was cut.”

  “Might be a good idea to lie low for a while,” Lucas said. “These guys are fruitcakes.”

  “I still can’t figure Larry,” she said. “Or this other guy, Yellow Hand. Why kill Yellow Hand? Revenge? But revenge doesn’t make any sense in this kind of situation, against one of your own people. It just muddies things up. And they never mention those shootings in their press releases . . . .”

  “I got no ideas,” Lucas said. After a moment he added, “Well, that’s not quite right. I do have one idea . . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why don’t we sneak back to the bedroom?”

  She sighed, smiled a sad smile and said, “Lucas . . .”

  When they talked about it later, Lucas and Lily agreed that there wasn’t anything notable about the time they spent in bed that afternoon. The love was soft and slow, and they both laughed a lot, and between times they talked about their careers and salaries and told cop stories. It was absolutely terrific; the best of their lives.

  “I’ve decided what I’m going to do about David,” Lily said later in the day, rolling out to the edge of the bed and putting her feet on the floor.

  “What are you going to do?” Lucas asked. He had been putting on his jockey shorts, and he stopped with one foot through a leg hole.

  “I’m going to lie to him,” she said.

  “Lie to him?”

  “Yeah. What we’ve got going, David and I, is pretty good. He’s a good guy. He’s attractive, he’s got a nice sense of humor, he worries about me and the kids. It’s just . . .”

  “Keep talking.”

  “There’s not the same kind of heat as there is with you. I can look at him sometimes and I get a lump in my throat, I can’t even talk. I just feel so . . . warm toward him. I love him. But I don’t get that kind of driving hot feeling. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “I was thinking about it the other night. I was thinking, Here’s Davenport. He’s large and he’s rough and he makes himself happy first. He’s not always asking me if I’m okay, have I come. So what is this, Lily? Is this some kind of safe rape fantasy?”

  “What’d you decide?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t decide anything, really. Except to lie to David.”

  Lucas got fresh underwear from his chest of drawers and said, “Come on. I’ll give you a shower.”

  She followed him into the bathroom. In the shower she said, “David wouldn’t do this either. I mean, you just kind of . . . work me over. Your hands are . . . in everything, and I . . . kind of like it.”

  Lucas
shrugged. “You’re hurting yourself. Stop talking about David, for Christ’s sake.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I better.”

  When they got out of the shower, he dried her, starting the rough towel around her head and slowly working down her legs. When he finished, he was sitting on the side of the bathtub; he reached around her and pulled her pelvis against his head. She ruffled his hair.

  “God, you smell good,” he said.

  She giggled. “We’ve got to stop, Davenport. I can’t handle much more of this.”

  They dressed slowly. Lucas finished first and lay on the bed, watching her.

  “The hardest part of lying to him will be the first ten or fifteen minutes,” he said suddenly. “If you can get through the first few minutes, you’ll be okay.”

  She looked up, a guilty expression on her face. “I hadn’t thought of that. The first . . . encounter.”

  “You know when you bust a kid for something, a teenager, and you’re not sure that they did it? And they get that look on their face when you tell them you’re a cop? And then you know? If you’re not careful, you’ll look like that.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” she said.

  “But if you can get through the first ten minutes, just keep bullshitting along, you’ll stop feeling guilty and it’ll go away.”

  “The voice of experience,” she said, with the tiniest stain of bitterness in her voice.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said, a little despondently. “I don’t know. I love women. But I look at Sloan. You know, Sloan’s wife calls him Sloan? And they’re always laughing and talking. It makes me jealous.”

  Lily dropped onto the foot of the bed. “Let’s not talk about this,” she said. “It’ll put me in an early grave. Like Larry.”

  “Poor old Larry,” Lucas said. “I feel for the sonofabitch.”

  The next day was sunny. Lucas had on his best blue suit with a black wool dress coat. Lily wore a dark suit with a blue blouse and a tweed overcoat. Just before they left Lily’s hotel room, TV3 had begun live coverage of Larry Hart’s funeral. The coverage opened with a shot of Lawrence Duberville Clay arriving at the funeral. Clay spoke a few clichés into a microphone and went inside.