Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “She had these nice little hard tits like cupcakes,” Baker continued. “And you got the feeling she’d probably fuck back at you.”

  “The dogs?” Lucas repeated.

  “I don’t know. If she can shoot all those people she’s supposed to, I guess she could shoot the dogs. Somebody did,” Baker said. “Right in the head, bam bam.”

  “Anybody figure out what kind of gun it was?”

  “It were a .22,” Baker said. “I couldn’t bring myself to dig out the slugs, but I looked at the holes and I’d say it was a standard-velocity .22. Good tight entry wounds, no sign of bullet breakup, no exit wound. Good shootin’, too. They never knew what hit them.”

  “And you haven’t seen her for all that time.”

  “Nope. Kinda like to, though, if you catch her. I might go see her in jail. She was a nude dancer before she was a killer. I bet she’s got some stories to tell.”

  “Bet she does,” McCoy said, nodding. His tongue flickered over his lips. Tasty stories.

  “Did she know about your guns?” Lucas asked.

  “Oh, sure. Pretty much everybody around here knows I got an interest,” Baker said. “I used to hang with her brother, and she was over here a time or two when we were gunnin’. I’m the one who taught her brother how to reload.”

  “So you were friends,” Andreno said.

  “Nah. Not with Clara. She was around, because Roy took her around—I personally think Roy may have been knocking a little off her, you know what I mean?—but she was standoffish, even when she was little. She’d just look at you. I didn’t have much to do with her.”

  “Did you know any of her friends?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t think—” Then he stopped and looked from Lucas to Andreno. “You know about Patsy Hill, right?”

  Lucas and Andreno shook their heads, and Lucas said, “Haven’t seen the name.”

  “Jeezus.”Baker looked at McCoy. “You know about Patsy Hill?”

  McCoy shook his head.

  Baker said, “Great fuckin’ police work, huh? All you runnin’ around like maniacs and you haven’t heard of Patsy Hill?”

  “Well, who is she?” Lucas asked.

  “Patsy lived over by Clendenon, over toward Springfield. That’s where Carl Paltry came from.”

  Andreno said, “Who?”

  Lucas remembered the FBI report. “Rinker’s stepfather.”

  Baker nodded. “That’s right. I think he was fuckin’ her, too. Clara. Anyway, he come from over there, and I think maybe they even lived there for a little while, or off and on, if you know what I mean. That’s where Rinker met Patsy Hill.”

  “So who in the fuck is Patsy Hill?” McCoy asked.

  “Another goddamned killer,” Baker said, with a wide green smile. “I always thought it was amazin’. Two small-town girls, get to be best friends, and they both grow up to be killers. Cops was all over the place here, about ten years ago, must be, maybe longer, because Patsy was living down in Memphis with her husband, and she killed him with an ax or something like that. Maybe it was a hammer. Whacked the shit out of him. Then she ran, and they never caught her.”

  “Never?” Lucas asked.

  “Not as far as I know, and I think I’d probably hear about it. I know some people who growed up over there. It ain’t that far.”

  “Cross the county line, near to Springfield,” McCoy said. He was plainly relieved: not his jurisdiction.

  “Clara and Patsy didn’t go to the same school?” Lucas asked.

  “Not here,” Baker said. “I don’t know where Patsy went to school, maybe Springfield. But there was a time when Patsy and Clara was like this.” He crossed two fingers. “They both grew up to be killers.”

  “She got any family around? Patsy?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, over in Clendenon. Right there on Tree Street.”

  THEY TALKED A while longer, got a list of the stolen guns, and headed back into Hopewell. Lucas thanked McCoy for his help, then he and Andreno drove back toward the interstate in the Porsche.

  “We going to Clendenon?” Andreno asked.

  “We might be onto something,” Lucas said. “The feds don’t know about this—I read the whole file. If this Patsy Hill killed somebody years ago, and ran, and Rinker hid her, and if she’s somehow living and working around St. Louis . . .”

  “Then Hill could be paying Rinker back. Letting her stay over.”

  “And Hill couldn’t turn Rinker in, no matter how big the reward was. Even more, I’ll bet none of Clara’s Mafia friends knew about Hill. Why would Clara tell them? One of them might have been tempted to use Hill as a get-out-of-jail card,” Lucas said. He looked over at Andreno. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll bet five United States dollars right now that Rinker is staying with Hill. I don’t know where Hill is, but if we can find her, we’ll find Rinker.”

  Andreno thought about it for two minutes, then said, “No bet.” He said it with a tone: Like Lucas, he could smell the trail.

  A little farther down the road, Lucas said, “Let’s not forget about that list of guns, huh? She’s always been a pistol queen, but now she’s got a carload of rifles. We gotta let Mallard know. We need to spread the net around Levy.”

  ON THE WAY to Clendenon, Lucas got the address for a Hill family on Tree Street, Chuck and Diane, and the phone number. He tried to call ahead, but there was no answer and no answering machine. “We could be here for a while,” he said to Andreno.

  Clendenon was a small town, not quite a suburb of Springfield, with a block-long downtown and a BP station at the end of that block. They asked the gas station attendant about Tree Street, and got detailed instructions. “You might want to keep your speed down in that Porsche,” the attendant said, as they turned to go. “The town cop figures out speeds based on his best estimate, and your car looks like it’s going forty when it’s sitting at the gas pump.”

  “Thanks,” Lucas said.

  “No problem. You’ll find the cop just about a block down that way . . . sitting behind that blue house. Take ’er easy.”

  They crept by the blue house at twenty miles an hour, and if there was a cop in the black Mustang parked at the curb behind the house, he made no move to come after them. They took a left two blocks farther on, and found Tree Street two more blocks down. Lucas took a left, found the house numbers going the wrong way, made a U-turn, drove two blocks down, and parked in front of the Hill place.

  As with the Rinker and Baker houses, the Hills’ was an older place, small, with a detached garage; but all of it was neatly kept, with a front window-box full of yellow- and wine-colored pansies and a strip of variegated marigolds along the driveway. When they got out of the car, Lucas could smell freshly cut grass. They knocked, got no answer, tried the neighbors. A woman in a housecoat told them that Chuck Hill worked at the grain elevator and Diane went grocery shopping in the morning and should be back at any moment: “Saw her leave an hour ago, so she oughta be . . . Here she comes.”

  DIANE HILL ARRIVED in an aging Taurus station wagon, bumped up the drive, and got out with a plastic grocery sack. She saw them coming, and waited in the driveway. Lucas identified them, and she said sullenly, “What do you want?”

  “When your daughter disappeared, she had to go somewhere. We think she might have gone to Clara Rinker, and we think Clara might be with her now.”

  A transient look of—What? Pleasure? Lucas thought so—crossed Hill’s face and then vanished as quickly as it had come.

  “We don’t have any idea where Patricia might be. We just hope to God that everything is all right with her, after the hell that her husband put her through.”

  “She never got in touch, just to tell you that she’s all right?”

  “Yes, she’s called from time to time, and I told the police that. She calls sometimes, and she cries because she can’t come home and she can’t tell us where she is, because she’s afraid that somebody will find out and the police will come get us. She’s protecting us by not tell
ing.”

  Andreno tried: “Mrs. Hill, honest to God, we don’t care about Patsy—Patricia—she’s somebody else’s problem. But Clara is killing people—”

  “Mafia hoodlums,” Hill snapped.

  “She’s killed a lot of innocent people,” Lucas put in. “She’s going to kill more.”

  “That’s not my problem,” Hill said, clutching at her groceries. “All I know is, she was kind to my daughter when my daughter needed some kindness, and couldn’t come here to get it. And I know what happened to poor Clara when she was just a girl, and it doesn’t seem strange to me at all that she’s grown up to kill people. Where were the police when her stepdaddy was working his perversions on her, and her not even fourteen? Where were they when Patricia’s husband was burning her back with a clothes iron?”

  “Mrs. Hill . . .”

  “You tell me where the police were then.”

  “Mrs. Hill . . .”

  “And if I were you, I wouldn’t go talking to Chuck—that’s my husband—because he’s gonna be a damn sight less cordial than I’ve been. We don’t approve of any kind of criminality, but if the police really took care of crime, there wouldn’t be any Clara Rinker and our Patsy would still be with us. Excuse me.” She marched up the driveway and into the house, and slammed the door.

  After a moment, Andreno said, “I think we handled that pretty well.”

  “We oughta get a warrant and tear the house down.”

  “Really?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No. Shit.”

  “Want to try Chuck?”

  “I’ll drop you off, if you want to.”

  “No, thanks. Back to St. Louis, then?”

  Lucas sighed, looked up at the Hill house. “I guess.”

  TEN MILES OUT of town he said, “The Hills didn’t mention any other children.”

  Andreno shook his head. “No. I sorta got the impression that Patsy might be the only one.”

  “Huh. How many long-distance phone calls you think come pouring into the Hills’ house?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I bet she calls on Christmas,” Lucas said. “Or New Year’s, or right around then.”

  “I bet the feds can get a warrant for their phone records.”

  “Bet they can, too.” He picked up his cell phone.

  “Gonna tell them?”

  “About the rifles, so they can spread the net around Levy. I want to tell them in person about the Hill idea—I don’t want them pissing on it when I can’t defend it. They’ve sat around that conference table and pissed on every idea I’ve had, even when they paid off.”

  “They’re feds. That’s what they do.”

  13

  THERE ’S NO GOOD WAY TO GET FROM St. Louis to Anniston, Alabama, in a hurry, any more than there’s a good way to get from Minneapolis to St. Louis. Rinker couldn’t hurry anyway, because she couldn’t risk a traffic stop. She took I-64 east to I-24, and I-24 down to Nashville, where she picked up I-65, and I-65 all the way to Birmingham, and then I-20 east to Anniston.

  She started late in the afternoon and was still driving at dawn. She listened to a St. Louis Cardinals game heading down to Nashville, thinking about those times in the liquor warehouse, about a million years earlier, when the Cards games always ran in the background, and she, no baseball fan, knew every man on the roster.

  She lost the Cardinals outside of Nashville, and poked around the radio looking for some decent country, but that was hard to come by. She finally found a local station along the Alabama line, playing a long string of LeAnn Rimes, including “Blue,” one of Rinker’s favorites. When that station faded, she spent the rest of the night dialing around the radio for more good places to listen.

  At 6A .M ., a little beat-up, but pleasantly so—she always liked road trips—she checked into a cheap motel called Tapley’s, and when asked how many there’d be, she said, “Well, my husband’s probably coming over during the day, he’s a sergeant in the Army, but I’m not sure if he’ll be staying the night.”

  The lady clerk looked at her with a touch of warmth in her eyes and said, “We’ll put you down for one, and if that changes, honey, just let me know.”

  “I’ll do that, and thanks,” Rinker said. “I’d give you a credit card, but I don’t know if it’d work. He’s probably put a bass boat on it. I’ll just give you cash, if that’s okay.”

  “That’d be fine.”

  SHE CALLED WAYNE MCCALLUM at eight o’clock, and got him on the first ring: “Sergeant McCallum, ordnance.”

  “Wayne George McCallum. How are you?” She used her best whiskey Rinker voice.

  There was a pause, then: “Oh, shit.”

  “I need to talk.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it, but things are pretty hectic right now.” His voice was casual, with an underlying layer of stress.

  “Did you take that twelve-step I heard about, or are you still running down to Biloxi on the weekends?”

  “I sure as shit ain’t took no twelve-step,” he said. McCallum had a fondness for craps.

  “So come on. I got something you need, and you got something I need.”

  “I can’t talk right now. Could you call me at my other number, in about five minutes?” He gave her a number.

  “I’ll call,” she said. She waited while he ran out to a pay phone, gave him an extra minute, and dialed. He picked up on the first ring. “I can get you two good ones, equipped. Three thousand.”

  “I don’t need them. I need something special.”

  “Special.”

  “Real special.”

  “We better talk. See you at the usual?”

  “The usual.”

  SHE GOT FOUR hours of sleep, and a little after noon, got cleaned up, changed into jeans, running shoes, and a short-sleeved shirt, and clipped one of her pistols into a pull-down fanny pack. Behind the pistol she stuffed a brick of fifty-dollar bills, wrapped with rubber bands.

  When she was ready, and feeling a little adrenaline, she headed south to Talladega, then east into the mountains of the Talladega National Forest. She stopped at a wayside park, where a hiking trail started off into the woods. She sat in her car for a moment, watching, then retrieved the fanny pack from under the front seat and strapped it on, with the pack in front. She also dug out one of her cell phones, checked to make sure it was the right one, and carried it with her.

  FOR YEARS ,Wayne McCallum had been her main source of silenced nine-millimeter pistols, and she’d dealt with him twenty times. They’d once had a long talk about meeting places, places to talk, places to exchange equipment for money. They had agreed that cleverness was its own enemy. If you met in a crowded public place, which was one theory on how you do it—the crowd bought you protection from the person you were meeting—and if somebody was onto you, you’d never see them coming. If you could just see them coming, there was always a chance. A lonely spot, but still technically public, where you wouldn’t seem suspicious just for being there, was the best solution.

  A hiking trail was perfect, as long as she had her best friend along . . . with a full magazine and a spare.

  She climbed out of the wayside park, up the hiking trail, then looped up a secondary track to a scenic overlook. When she got to the top, she found it empty. She had, in fact, met McCallum a half-dozen times at the overlook, and, except for McCallum, had never encountered another soul. The overlook was nothing more than a circle of rocks around a patch of beaten earth, on the edge of a steep hill. There was a good view back toward Talledega, and no sign of recent use: nothing but old cigarette filters scattered around the rocks, and a couple of weather-rotted clumps of toilet paper back in the bushes. She expected the filters would last until the next ice age—longer than the rocks, anyway.

  McCallum arrived precisely at one o’clock, driving an older Cadillac. He’d always driven a Caddy, because that’s what men like him drove, and there’d always be a set of good golf clubs in the trunk. He climbed out, smiled up at where he thought she was, an
d came puffing up the trail, a fat, red-faced man in civilian clothes, way out of shape. Welcome to today’s Army, Rinker thought.

  “We gotta find some goddamn place flat,” he said, as he wheezed into the overlook. He was close enough that she could smell his breath, and it smelled like Sen-Sen. She wondered if they still made it.

  “Or you gotta take off some weight,” Rinker said. She smiled. “How are you?”

  “A hell of a lot better than you,” McCallum said. He looked her over, then said, “After all that shit up in Minnesota, I figured the next time I saw you, we’d both be in hell.”

  “Not there yet,” she said.