Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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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.

“You’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.”

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

SHADOW PREY

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1990 by John Sandford

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

For information address:

The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

http://www.us.penguingroup.com

ISBN: 1-101-14622-2

A BERKLEY BOOK®

Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Berkley and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

Electronic edition: May, 2002

Contents

In the Beginning . . .

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

In the End . . .

In the Beginning . . .

They were in a service alley, tucked between two dumpsters. Carl Reed, a beer can in his hand, kept watch. Larry Clay peeled the drunk Indian girl, tossing her clothes on the floor of the backseat, wedging himself between her legs.

The Indian started to howl. “Christ, she sounds like a fuckin’ coon-dog,” said Reed, a Kentucky boy.

“She’s tight,” Clay grunted. Reed laughed and said, “Hurry up,” and lobbed his empty beer can toward one of the dumpsters. It clattered off the side and fell into the alley.

Clay was in full gallop when the girl’s howl pitched up, reaching toward a scream. He put one big hand over her face and said, “Shut up, bitch,” but he liked it. A minute later he finished and crawled off.

Reed slipped off his gunbelt and dumped it on top of the car behind the light bar. Clay was in the alley, staring down at himself. “Look at the fuckin’ blood,” he said.

“God damn,” Reed said, “you got yourself a virgin.” He ducked into the backseat and said, “Here comes Daddy . . . .”

The squad car’s only radios were police-band, so Clay and Reed carried a transistor job that Reed had bought in a PX in Vietnam. Clay took it out, turned it on and hunted for something decent. An all-news station was babbling about Robert Kennedy’s challenging Lyndon Johnson. Clay kept turning and finally found a country station playing “Ode to Billy Joe.”

“You about done?” he asked, as the Bobbie Gentry song trickled out into the alley.

“Just . . . fuckin’ . . . hold on . . .” Reed said.

The Indian girl wasn’t saying anything.

When Reed finished, Clay was back in uniform. They took a few seconds to get some clothes on the girl.

“Take her, or leave her?” Reed asked.

The girl was sitting in the alley, dazed, surrounded by discarded advertising leaflets that had blown out of the dumpster.

“Fuck it,” Clay said. “Leave her.”

They were nothing but drunk Indian chicks. That’s what everybody said. It wasn’t like you were wearing it out. It’s not like they had less than they started with. Hell, they liked it.

And that’s why, when a call went out, squad cars responded from all over Phoenix. Drunk Indian chick. Needs a ride home. Anybody?

Say “drunk Indian,” meaning a male, and you’d think every squad in town had driven off a cliff. Not a peep. But a drunk Indian chick? There was a traffic jam. A lot of them were fat, a lot of them were old. But some of them weren’t.

Lawrence Duberville Clay was the last son of a rich man. The other Clay boys went into the family business: chemicals, plastics, aluminum. Larry came out of college and joined the Phoenix police force. His family, except for the old man, who made all the money, was shocked. The old man said, “Let him go. Let’s see what he does.”

Larry Clay started by growing his hair out, down on his shoulders, and dragging around town in a ’56 Ford. In two months, he had friends all over the hippie community. Fifty long-haired flower children went down on drugs, before the word got out about the fresh-faced narc.

After that it was patrol, working the bars, the nightclubs, the after-hours joints; picking up the drunk Indian chicks. You could have a good time as a cop. Larry Clay did.

Until he got hurt.

He was beaten so badly that the first cops on the scene thought he was dead. They got him to a trauma center and the docs bailed him out. Who did it? Dope dealers, he said. Hippies. Revenge. Larry Clay was a hero, and they made him a sergeant.

When he got out of the hospital, Clay stayed on the force long enough to prove that he wasn’t chicken, and then he quit. Working summers, he finished law school in two years. He spent two more years in the prosecutor’s office, then went into private practice. In 1972, he ran for the state senate and won.

His career really took off when a gambler got in trouble with the IRS. In exchange for a little sympathy, the gambler gave the tax men a list of senior cops he’d paid off over the years. The stink wouldn’t go away. The city fathers, getting nervous, looked around and found a boy with a head on his shoulders. A boy from a good family. A former cop, a lawyer, a politician.

Clean up the force, they told Lawrence Duberville Clay. But don’t try too hard . . . .

He did precisely what they wanted. They were properly grateful.

In 1976, Lawrence Duberville Clay became the youngest chief in the department’s history. He quit five years later to take an appointment as an assistant U.S. attorney general in Washington.

A step backward, his brothers said. Just watch him, said the old man. And the old man was there to help: the right people, the right clubs. Money, when it was needed.

When the scandal hit the FBI—kickbacks in an insider-trading investigation—the administration knew where to go. The boy from Phoenix had a rep. He’d cleaned up the Phoenix force, and he’d clean up the FBI. But he wouldn’t try too hard.

At forty-two, Lawrence Duberville Clay was named the youngest FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. He became the administration’s point man for the war on crime. He took the FBI to the people, and to the press. During a dope raid in Chicago, an AP photographer shot a portrait of a weary Lawrence Duberville Clay, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, a hollow look on his face. A huge Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol rode in a shoulder rig under his arm. The picture made him a celebrity.

Not many people remembered his early days in Phoenix, the nights spent hunting drunk Indian chicks.

During those Phoenix nights, Larry Clay developed a taste for the young ones. Very young ones. And some of them maybe weren’t so drunk. And some of them weren’t so interested in backseat tag team. But who was going to believe an Indian chick, in Phoenix, in the mid-sixties? Civil rights were for blacks in the South, not for Indians or Chicanos in the Southwest. Date-rape wasn’t even a concept, and feminism had barely come over the horizon.

But the girl in the alley . . . she was twelve and she was a little drunk, but not so drunk that she couldn’t say no, or remember who put her in the car. She told her mother. Her mother stewed about it for a couple of days, then told two men she’d met at the res.

The two men caught Larry Clay outside his apartment and beat the shit out of him with a genuine Louisville Slugger. Broke one of his legs and both arms and a whole bunch of ribs. Broke his nose and some teeth.

It wasn’t dope dealers who beat Larry Clay. It was a couple of Indians, on a comeback from a rape.

Lawrence Duberville Clay never knew who they were, but he never forgot what they did to him. He had a lot of shots at Indians over the years, as a prosecutor, a state senator, a police chief, an assistant U.S. attorney general.

He took them all.

And he didn’t forget them when he became director of the FBI, the iron fist on every Indian reservation in the nation.

But there were Indians with long memories too.

Like the men who took him in Phoenix.

The Crows.