Rules of Prey (30 page)

The maddog should never have spotted the surveillance. It was purely an accident.

He left a late-afternoon real-estate closing at a bank in the Mississippi River town of Hastings, twenty-odd miles south of the Twin Cities. It was dark. He crossed the Mississippi at the Hastings bridge and drove north on Highway 61, through the suburban towns of Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, and Newport. As he passed through St. Paul Park he found himself behind an uncovered gravel truck. Pieces of gravel bounced out of the back of the truck and along the highway. A big one could star a windshield.

The maddog, thinking of the shiny finish on his new Thunderbird, moved into the left lane and accelerated around the truck. The close-surveillance car behind him caught the truck a moment later. Since the maddog appeared to be in no particular hurry, intent only on staying ahead of the truck, the surveillance car fell in behind it.

Gravel bounced around the surveillance car, but the cops inside didn’t care. The car was mechanically sound, but, like most surveillance cars, was not much to look at, just a plain vanilla Dodge. A few dings more or less wouldn’t make any difference. And the gravel truck made excellent cover.

None of it would have mattered if one particularly large rock hadn’t bounced off the highway and knocked half the plastic lens off the amber left-turn light. The cops inside heard the thump, but couldn’t see the broken lens.

“We oughta give this asshole a ticket,” one of the surveillance cops said as the rock bounced off.

“Right,” the driver answered. “Go ahead and stick the light on the roof.”

“Could you see Daniel’s face? We say, ‘Well, we was following him when we ran into this incredible asshole with a truck full of rocks . . .’ ”

“He’d put us in prison,” the first cop said. “He’d find a way.”

The maddog decided to stop at a fast-food restaurant off the Interstate loop highway, I-494. The loop intersected with Highway 61 just north of the town of Newport. When the maddog pulled onto the circular entrance ramp for I-494, he glanced into the rearview mirror and noted, with no particular interest, the unusual turn signal on a car a hundred yards back. The signal flashed a peculiar combination of amber and unshielded white.

The close-surveillance car was tighter on the maddog’s tail than it normally would have been. The lead car had continued up Highway 61 through the I-494 interchange and would now have to find a place to turn around and catch up from behind. In the meantime, until one of the trailing surveillance cars could move up into the lead position, the cops in the close-surveillance car couldn’t take chances. They stuck close.

They were still close when the maddog turned off on the Robert Street exit, heading for one of the restaurants just north of the interchange. As he came down the ramp and slowed to a stop at the bottom, the maddog again noticed the car with the odd turn light. Something was wrong with it, he thought. A broken lens or something. The car was slow in coming down the ramp behind him.

When the traffic signal turned green, the maddog forgot about it and took a left, went up the hill, and pulled into a restaurant parking lot. Outside the entrance, he got a copy of
USA Today
and carried it inside.

While the maddog ate and read his newspaper, the surveillance cops took turns stocking up on burgers and Cokes at a McDonald’s a half-mile away. Two teams always stayed on the maddog.

When he left the restaurant, the maddog decided to drive
into St. Paul on Robert Street. It was a crowded, tricky street, but there were two movie theaters not far ahead. A movie would go down well.

He saw the shattered turn light halfway up Robert Street. It was three cars back. At first he wasn’t certain, but then he saw it again, more clearly. And again.

They were on him.

He knew it.

He sat halfway through a green light, staring blindly at the street ahead, until the cars behind him started to honk. Should he run for it?

No. If he was being watched, it would tip them off that he knew. He needed time to think. Besides, maybe he was wrong. He wasn’t certain about the light. It could be a coincidence.

But it didn’t feel like a coincidence.

He passed a shopping center, took a right turn, and drove down to the high-speed Highway 3, which went north to intersect with Interstate 94. Coming off the exit ramp, he watched the mirror. A car followed him down the ramp, but far enough away that he couldn’t see the turn light.

He thought about pulling over, feigning car trouble; but that could precipitate something, force their hands. He was not sure that he wanted to do that. He did a mental catalog. There was nothing at the apartment. Nothing. Nothing in the car. There was nothing to hang him with. If they were really watching, they must be waiting for an attack.

Approaching the I-94 interchange across the LaFayette Bridge, the maddog let his speed drop sharply. The cars behind began to close up, and he picked up the surveillance car in an adjacent lane. He still couldn’t see it clearly, but there was something definitely wrong with its turn signal.

Two cops in a trailing surveillance car had moved up and finally passed the maddog as they all drove north on Highway 3. As they approached I-94, the two women cops in the new lead car made the logical decision that the maddog was heading back to Minneapolis on the Interstate. They committed to the ramp. Behind them, the maddog drove through the
interchange and into the dark warren of streets in St. Paul’s Lowertown. The net spread out around him on parallel streets, staying in touch. Again, with the lead car out of it, the close-surveillance car moved in a bit tighter. Tight enough that when they turned a corner and found the maddog at a dead stop, backing into a parking place, they had to drive by.

And the maddog, who was watching for them, clearly caught the broken lens on the turn signal.

He was being watched. Coincidence was one thing. To believe all these sightings were coincidences was to believe in fairy tales.

The maddog locked his car and walked briskly into a downtown shopping mall and went up two floors. The net was thinner, but still in place. The drivers of the trailing units had been alerted by the close-surveillance car that the maddog was parking. The passenger-cops were on the street before the maddog had fully gotten into his parking place.

They followed him into the theater. The theater was a place to think. How had they gotten onto him? Perhaps, as part of their surveillance of McGowan’s house, they had routinely noted the license plates of all cars in the neighborhood. Perhaps somebody had heard the shots, seen him drive away, and noted the tag number. Maybe they had nothing at all but a number that didn’t quite fit in the neighborhood. Perhaps he should start preparing an alibi for being there. He couldn’t think of any offhand, but something might occur to him if he considered the problem.

If they were following him, there was little he could do about it. He didn’t dare try to dodge the surveillance. That would confirm that he was guilty. He had disposed of all evidence that would put him at the crime scene. As far as he knew, there was no conclusive evidence against him anywhere.

When the movie ended, the maddog walked down to his car, resisting the almost overwhelming temptation to look around, to search the doorways for watchers. He wouldn’t see them, of course. They would be too good for that. He stayed on city streets out to I-94, then turned east toward his
own exit. He didn’t see the broken turn signal on the way out to the Interstate. That meant nothing, he knew, but he couldn’t suppress a tiny surge of hope. Maybe it
had
been coincidence.

The Interstate was crowded, and though he watched, he didn’t see any cars with broken turn signals. He sighed, felt the tension seeping out. When he reached his exit, he ran the car up the ramp to the traffic signal and waited. Another car came off behind. Coasted up the ramp, slowly. Too slowly.

The traffic light changed to green. The maddog waited. The other car eased up. The left-front turn signal was broken, the white light shining brightly past the amber. The maddog looked up, saw the green, and took a right.

“Jeez, you don’t look so good. You sick?” His secretary seemed concerned.

“No, no. Just had a little insomnia the last few nights. Could you get the papers for the Parker-Olson closing?”

The maddog sat at his desk, the office door closed, a blank yellow pad in front of him. Think.

The news stories of the surveillance on McGowan’s house mentioned that the cops set up observation posts both in front and in back. Would they have done the same at his place? Probably. There were empty apartments on the block; he’d seen the signs, but not paid much attention. Nor did he know his neighbors, other than to nod at the others in his fourplex. Could he spot the other surveillance posts?

The maddog stood and stepped over to the window, hands in his jacket pockets, staring sightlessly out at the street.

Maybe. Maybe he could spot them, maybe he could deduce where they were. Where would that get him? If they came for him, he would not resist. That would be pointless. And had he not imagined himself in court, defending himself against his accusers? Had he not dreamed of capturing the jury with his eloquence?

He had. But now the vision of a magnificent defense did not come so easily. Deep in his heart, he knew they were right. He was not a good attorney; not in court, anyway. He’d
never taken the fact out and looked at it, but the fact was there, like a stone.

He paced two steps one way, two steps back, tugging at his lip. They were watching. No matter how long he suppressed the urge to take another woman, they would eventually come. They wouldn’t wait forever.

He sat down, looked at the yellow pad, and summarized:

They were not sure enough to arrest him yet.

They could not wait forever.

What would they do?

He thought of Davenport, the gamer. What would the gamer do?

A gamer would frame him.

It took him a half-minute on his knees in the garage to find the radio transmitter on the car. It took another hour to find the photographs under the mattress. The beeper he left in place. The photos he stared at, frightened. If the police should come through the door at this instant, he would go to jail for eighteen years, a life sentence in Minnesota.

He took the photographs into the kitchen and, one by one, burned them, the pictures curling and charring in the flames from the stove burner. When they were gone, reduced to charcoal, he crushed the blackened remains to powder and washed them down the kitchen sink.

That night he forced himself to lie in bed for fifteen minutes, then crept to the window and looked down the street. There was a patchwork of lighted windows, and many more that were dark. He watched, and after a while crawled back to his bed, got both pillows and put one on the floor and the other upright against the wall, where he could lean on it. It would be a long night.

After three hours, the maddog dozed, his head falling forward. He jerked it back upright and peered groggily through the window. Everything was about the same, but he couldn’t watch much longer. There were only two lights still on, he had noted them, and he was simply too tired to continue.

He got up, carrying the pillows, and flopped facedown on the bed. Paradoxically, as soon as he was willing to allow himself to sleep, he felt more alert. The thoughts ran through his brain like a night train, hard and quick and hardly discernible as independent ideas. A mishmash of images—his women, their eyes, Lucas Davenport, the fight outside McGowan’s, the broken turn signal.

From the mishmash there came an idea. The maddog resisted it at first, because it had the quality of a nightmare, requiring a broad-scope action under the most intense stress. Finally he considered it and paraded the objections, one by one. The longer he turned it in his mind, the more substantial it became.

It was a winning stroke. And the surveillance? What better alibi could he find? Would he have the courage to attempt the stroke? Or would he sit there like a frightened rabbit, waiting to have his neck wrung by the hunter?

He bit his lip. He bit so hard that he found blood on the pillow the next morning. But he had decided. He would try.

Lucas sat on a tall three-legged stool, hunched over his workbench, manipulating pieces of white two-inch polyvinyl-chloride pipe, wing nuts, bolts, aluminum tubes, and lengths of the Thinsulate batting normally used as insulation in winter coats.

He had hoped to settle the maddog himself. Instead, the investigation was moving into a tedious rook-pawn endgame. The outcome would probably be determined by laborious maneuver rather than a
coup de maître.

Nevertheless, he would prepare for the
coup,
should one unexpectedly present itself.

His first attempt at building a silencer cost him blood.

“I don’t know,” he said aloud. It should work, but it looked awful. A foot-long length of PVC pipe split lengthwise, screwed back together with wing nuts but with gaps down the split. Through the gaps, the tightly wound batting protruded in soft puffs. Deep inside, the aluminum pipe was pierced with dozens of hand-drilled holes.

He attached the assembly to the barrel of one of his cold street weapons, a Smith & Wesson Model 39 in nine-millimeter parabellum. He turned on a miniature tape recorder, jacked a round into the chamber, pointed the weapon at a stack of St. Paul Yellow Pages, and pulled the trigger. There was very little noise from the shot, but there was a mechanical clank as the telephone books jumped and simultaneously the silencer twisted in his hands and came half apart. A sharp edge on the PVC pipe sliced into the side of his middle finger.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. He turned off the tape recorder and went upstairs, looked at the cut, which was superficial, washed it, bandaged it, and went back down the stairs.

The tape recorder had picked up the sound of the shot, along with the clank when the silencer pulled apart, but he would not have identified either of the noises as a shot.

The silencer was a mess. The internal tube had been knocked out of alignment with the gun’s barrel, either by the blast of gases ahead of the slug or by the slug itself. It hadn’t changed the slug’s trajectory much. He made some mental notes on alterations to the silencer. The main requirement was that it had to be easily detached from the gun and just as easily disassembled. Accuracy counted not at all.

When he had finished examining the silencer and decided on the alterations he would make, he dug the slug out of the telephone books and looked at it. It was a handgun hunter’s hollow-point and was so deformed that it would take an expert to identify its exact caliber.

Lucas nodded. He had the right ammunition, but he needed time to work on the silencer.

He had yet to make the blank.

Midmorning. Gray light filtered in through the kitchen window as he tried to wake up with coffee and an aging bagel. The Smith, with silencer modified and reattached, was in a disreputable-looking gym bag he’d found in a back closet. The gun/silencer combination was grossly illegal. If, somehow, it was found in his car, he would claim that he’d taken it off the street.

A car door slammed close by and he picked up the cup of coffee and stepped into the hallway and peered out the front windows. Carla Ruiz coming up the driveway, a taxi pulling away. He stuffed the gym bag under the kitchen sink, walked back to the bedroom, and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. The doorbell rang and he pulled a sweatshirt over his head, went out to the door, and let her in.

“Hi,” she said softly, her face down, looking at him only in brief lateral glances.

“What’s wrong?”

“I thought we should have some coffee.”

“Sure,” he said curiously. “I’ve got some hot water.” He led her into the kitchen, dumped a heaping teaspoon of instant coffee into an oversize ceramic cup, and handed it to her.

“Jennifer Carey came over last night,” she said as she sat down. She unbuttoned her coat but left it on.

“Oh.” Lucas sat down across the table.

“We had a talk.”

Lucas looked away from her into the front room. “And did you decide my future? Between the two of you?”

Carla smiled a very small smile. “Yeah,” she said. She took a sip of coffee.

“Good of you to let me know,” Lucas said sourly.

“We thought it was the polite thing to do,” Carla said, and Lucas had to laugh in spite of himself.

“What did you decide?”

“She gets custody,” Carla said.

“You don’t mind?”

“I mind, kind of. It makes me angry that you were sleeping with us alternately, one down here, one up in the North Woods. But I figured our relationship wasn’t long for the world. We live in different places. I weave, you shoot people. And it seemed like she had a better prior claim, with the baby and all.”

“What about what I want?”

“We decided that didn’t matter too much. Jennifer said you’d wiggle and squirm, but eventually you’d come around.”

“Now,
that
pisses me off,” Lucas said, no longer smiling.

“Tough,” Carla said.

They stared at each other across the table. Lucas flinched first. “I may tell Jennifer to take a hike,” he said.

“Not with her being pregnant,” Carla said, shaking her head. “No chance. That’s Jennifer’s judgment, and I agree. I asked her what she’d do if you went with somebody else. She said she’d go over and have another talk with the somebody else.”

“Jesus,” Lucas said. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back and massaged the back of his neck. “What’d I do to deserve this?”

“Slept with one too many women,” Carla said. “It’s actually pretty flattering, when you think about it. She’s good-looking and smart. And in her own screwed-up way, she’s in love with you. In my own screwed-up way, I’m not—though I’d still like to use the cabin a couple of times a year. Until I can afford my own.”

“Anytime,” Lucas said wistfully. He wanted to say more, but couldn’t think of anything.

Carla took a last sip of coffee, pushed the cup, still half-full, into the middle of the table, and stood up.

“I better get going,” she said. “The cab should be back.”

Lucas sat where he was. “Well, it was real.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked as she retrieved her purse.

“That’s what you say when you can’t think of anything to say.”

“Okay.” She buttoned her coat. “See you.”

“How come Jennifer didn’t deliver the message?”

“We talked about that and decided I should do it. That’d make a clean break between us. Besides, she said you’d spend about a half-hour on some kind of Catholic guilt trip, then you’d go into a rage and kick stuff, then you’d try to call her on the telephone so you could yell at her. Then in about two hours you’d start laughing about it. She said she’d rather skip the preliminaries.” Carla glanced at her watch. “She’ll be over in two hours.”

“Motherfucker,” Lucas said in disbelief.

“You got that right,” Carla said as she went out the door. A yellow cab was waiting. She stopped with the screen door still open. “Call you next spring. About the cabin.”

It was more like three hours. When Jennifer arrived, she wasn’t embarrassed in the slightest.

“Hi,” she said when he opened the door. She walked past
him, took off her coat, and tossed it on the couch. “Carla called, said the talk went okay.”

“I’m pretty unhappy—” Lucas started, but she waved him off.

“Spare me. McGowan’s going to network, by the way. It’s all over town.”

“Fuck McGowan.”

“Better hurry,” Jennifer said. “She’ll be gone in a month. But I still think what you did was awful. McGowan’s just too dumb to recognize it.”

“Goddammit, Jennifer . . .”

“If you’re going to yell, we could have this talk some other time.”

“I’m not going to yell,” he said grimly. He thought he might strangle.

“Okay. So I thought I might give you my position. That is, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Sure. I mean, why not? You’re running the rest of my life.”

“My position is, I’m pregnant and the daddy shouldn’t screw anybody else until the baby is born, and maybe”—she paused, as though considering the fairness of her proposition—“maybe a year old. Maybe two years old. That way, I can kind of pretend like I’m married and talk to you about the baby and what we did during the day and his first words and how he’s walking and I won’t have to worry about you fooling around. And then, when you can’t stand it and start fooling around again, I can just pretend like I’m divorced.”

She smiled brightly. Lucas was appalled.

“That’s the coldest goddamn thing I ever heard,” he said.

“It’s not exactly an extemporaneous speech,” she said. “I rewrote it about twelve times. I thought it was rather cogently expressed, but with enough emotion to make it convincing.”

Lucas laughed, then stopped laughing and sat down. He looked haggard, she thought. Or harried. “All right. I give up,” he said.

“All right to all of it?”

“Yeah. All of it.”

“Scout’s honor?”

“Sure.” He held up the three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

Late in the evening, Lucas lay on the surveillance team’s mattress and thought about it. He could live with it, he thought. For two years? Maybe.

“That’s weird. You see that?” said the first surveillance cop.

“I didn’t see anything,” said his partner.

“What?” asked Lucas.

“I don’t know. It’s like there’s some movement over there. Just a little bit, at the edge of the window.”

Lucas crawled over and looked out. The maddog’s apartment was dark except for the faint glow from the night-light.

“I don’t see anything,” he said. “You think he’s doing something?”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing. It’s just every once in a while . . . it’s like he’s watching
us.”