Shadow Prey (38 page)

Lily looked around for her purse, with the gun in the concealed holster: outer room. Shit. She reached back, hit the bathroom light switch and started for the lamp.

Shadow Love pushed the maid forward. The door opened and the woman went through. There was little light, apparently coming from a bathroom.... No. There's another room. Fuckin' rich bitch has a suite.... The light suddenly went out, and they were in darkness, Shadow Love and the maid silhouetted against the light from the hallway.

Lily killed the lamp as the door opened. She felt a tiny surge of relief when she saw the small woman and the familiar colors on the package. She reached again for the wall switch, then saw the man behind the woman and what looked like a gun.

"Freeze, motherfucker," she screamed at the dark figures, dropping automatically into her Weaver stance, her hands empty. But the movement, in the dark, might be convincing....

The scream startled him. Shadow Love sensed the cop woman dropping into a shooter's stance, and swept the maid's feet from under her and went down on top of her. He could feel the woman moving sideways in the minimal light in the room, and he pivoted and kicked the outer door shut. The dark was complete.

"Got a woman, here, a maid," Shadow Love called. He pointed the gun toward where he thought the other door was, although he was disoriented and felt he might be off. But if she fired at him, he'd get her in the muzzle blast. "Come out and talk; I just want to talk about the Indians, about the Crows. I've worked with the police."

Bullshit. Shadow Love. Must be.

"Bullshit. You move, motherfucker, and I'll spread you around like spaghetti sauce."

Lily, nude, crawled across the bedroom floor in the dark, her hands sweeping from side to side, looking for a weapon. Anything. Nothing. Nothing. Back toward the bathroom, creeping in silence, waiting for the killing light... Into the bathroom. Groping. Up the walls. A towel rack. She tugged on it. It held. She put her full weight on it, bouncing frantically, and suddenly, explosively, it came free. She went flat again, frozen, waiting for the light, but nothing came. She went back to the floor and, with the towel bar in her hand, crawled out the bathroom door toward the front room.

There was a sudden, terrific clatter. Shadow Love started, put his face next to the maid's and whispered, "Move, bitch, and I'll slit your fuckin' throat." He could feel the woman trembling in her thin maid's uniform. "And I got the gun; if you go for the door, I'll shoot you."

He left her then, and crawled toward the spot where he thought the inner door was, feeling his way across the carpet in the dark.

What was the noise? What was she doing? Why hadn 't she-risked a light? She wouldn 't be any worse off....

The problem was, the first one to turn on a light would be most exposed....

"I'm not here to hurt anybody," he called.

His voice was a shock: he was so close. Two feet away, three. And now she could smell him: his breath. He'd been eating something spicy, sausage maybe, and his warm breath trick- led toward her over the carpet. Could he smell the bath oils on her? She thought she might be a yard from the door, and he was coming through. She rolled to one side, a slow, inching, agonizing movement, holding the towel bar between her breasts.

Where was she? Why wasn 't she answering? She could be standing over him, pointing a.45 at his skull, tightening on the trigger. The injustice of his death gripped him, and for a full beat, two beats, he waited for the crashing blow that would kill him. There was nothing. He reached ahead in the dark, feeling the baseboard on the wall ahead, sliding his hand to the right, finding the corner and the doorway. The bathroom... that noise she made, that sounded like it came out of a bathroom, the hollow-sharp sound you get from tile walls... What was she doing in there? Moving a few inches at a time, he crossed through the doorway, low-crawling toward the bathroom. Nothing from her. Nothing. Maybe she's not armed....

"Don't got no gun, bitch. That's it. Well, I'm putting my gun away, you know? You know why? 'Cause I'm getting my knife out. Cut open Larry Hart with it, you know? You know what I did then? After I cut him? You know?"

Where is she? Where is the bitch? He strained into the darkness. Got to scare her, got to make her move.

"I sucked the blood, that's what I did," Shadow Love called. "All hot. Better'n deer's blood. Sweeter... Bet yours'll be sweeter yet..."

Where the fuck is she?

There was a change in the darkness next to her, a movement through it. Shadow Love, on the floor next to her, not more than two feet away, low-crawling toward the bathroom. She couldn't see him, but she could sense him there, moving in the dark. Moving as slowly as he was, she pulled her feet under her and quietly stood up, her hand sliding up the woodwork along the edge of the door. She could no longer sense him-standing, she was quite literally too far away- but she figured he had to be through the door.

"You don't have a gun, do you, bitch?" Shadow Love screamed. The cry was as hard and sharp as a sliver of glass and Lily gasped involuntarily. He heard the gasp and froze. She was close by. He could feel it. Very close. Where? He swung an arm out to the right, then his gun hand to the left. And he touched her, raked the back of her calf with his gun hand as she went through the door, into the outer room, and he pivoted and fired the pistol once through the door....

No, she thought. He must have heard...

She took a fast step through the door, high, over him, in case his legs were still in the doorway, and was pushing off with her back leg when his hand struck her calf. Shit. She dodged sideways; there was a flash and a deafening crack, and she twisted sideways toward the television set, crawling....

"Noooo..." The scream clutched at Lily as she hit a body in the dark. Soft... woman... She had just registered the thought as the other woman, sobbing frantically, clubbed at her and she went down, twisting, back on her hands and knees, crawling toward the television, reaching out, sweeping the carpet for the purse....

The muzzle blast blinded him for a second, but now he knew for sure: She had no gun and was heading for the door. The maid's scream froze him, then Shadow Love struggled to his feet, groping for the wall and a light switch. He found the wall and ran his hand toward the switch, watching the doorway in case the cop tried for the door.

And then, in the instant before he would turn on the light...

He heard the slide.

There was no other sound like it. A.45, at full cock.

And then Lily, her voice like a gravedigger's: "I'm out here, motherfucker. Go ahead-turn on the light."

Shadow Love, poised in the doorway, felt the voice coming from his left. One chance: he took it. With the gun in his hand he launched himself straight through the dark toward the other door, where he could hear the maid sobbing.

Two steps, three, and then he hit her. She was standing and she screamed, and he held her for an instant as he found the door, gripped the knob and then thrust the woman toward the place Lily's voice had come from. He felt the maid go, stumbling, and he wrenched open the door. As he went through, he fired once, toward the two women, and then ran toward the stairs, waiting for the bite from the.45....

Light from the hallway flooded the room, and Lily saw movement toward her and realized it was too small to be Shadow Love: maid.

She pivoted to a shooting line past the falling woman and saw Shadow Love in the doorway, his gun arm out toward her. She was still turning past the woman, and then he was gone, his arm trailing behind, like a bat in a drag bunt. Lily was still following with the.45 when Shadow Love pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit her in the chest.

Lillian Rothenburg went down like a tenpin.

Chapter
24

Lucas was chatting with a gambler outside a riverfront bar when his handset beeped. He stepped off the curb, reached through the open window of the Porsche and thumbed the transmit switch.

"Yeah. Davenport." The sun had set and a chill wind was blowing off the river. He stuck his free hand in his pants pocket and hunched his back against the cold.

"Lucas, Sloan says to meet him at Hennepin Medical Center just as fast as you can get there," the dispatcher said. "He says it's heavy-duty. Front entrance."

"Okay. Did he say what it's about?"

After a second's hesitation, the dispatcher said, "No. But he said lights and sirens and get your ass over there."

"Five minutes," Lucas said.

Lucas left the gambler standing on the sidewalk and pushed the Porsche across the bridge, south through the warehouse district to the medical center, wondering all the time. A break? Somebody nailed a Crow? There were three squad cars and a remote television truck at emergency receiving. Lucas wheeled around front, dumped the car in a no-parking space, flipped down the sunshade with the police ID and walked up the steps. Sloan stood waiting behind the glass doors, and Lucas saw a patrol captain and a woman sergeant standing in the lobby. They seemed to be staring at him. Sloan pushed the glass door open, and when Lucas stepped inside he linked his arm through Lucas'.

"Got your shit together?" Sloan asked. His face was white, drawn, deadly serious.

"What the fuck you talking about?" Lucas said, trying to pull away. Sloan hung on.

"Lily's been shot," Sloan said.

For just a second, the world stopped, like a freeze frame in a movie. A guy being wheeled across the lobby in a wheel-chair: frozen. A woman behind an information desk: caught with her mouth half open, staring carplike at Lucas and Sloan. All stopped. Then the world jerked forward again and Lucas heard himself saying, "My fuckin' Christ." Then bleakly, "How bad?"

"She's on the table," Sloan said. "They don't know what they got. She's breathing."

"What happened?" Lucas said.

"You okay?" asked Sloan.

"Ah, man..."

"A guy-Shadow Love-forced a maid to open her hotel room. Lily was taking a bath, but she got to her gun, and there was some kind of fight and he shot her. He got away."

"Motherfucker," Lucas said bitterly. "We were over looking at Clay's hotel security, we never thought about hers."

"The maid's all shook up, but she's looked at a picture and she thinks it was Shadow...."

"I don't give a fuck about that, what about Lily? What are the docs saying? Is she bad? Come on, man."

Sloan turned away, shrugged, then turned back and gestured helplessly. "You know the fuckin' docs, they ain't gonna say shit because of the malpractice insurance. They don't want to say she's gonna make it, then have her croak. But one of the hotel guys was in combat in Vietnam. He says she was hit hard. He said if she'd of been in Vietnam, it would of depended on how fast they got her back to a hospital whether she made it.... He thinks the slug took a piece of lung, and he rolled her up on her side to keep her from drowning in blood.... The paramedics were there in two or three minutes, so... I don't know, Lucas. I think she'll make it, but I don't know."

Sloan led the way through the hospital to the surgical suite. Daniel was already there with a Homicide cop.

"You okay?" Daniel asked.

"What about Lily?"

"We haven't heard anything yet," Daniel said, shaking his head. "I just ran over from the office."

"It's Shadow Love, you know. Doing security work for the Crows."

"But why?" Daniel's forehead wrinkled. "We're not that close to them. And there's no percentage in killing Lily, not for political reasons. I'm a politician and they're politicians, and I can see what they're doing. It makes sense, in a bizarre way. They were so careful to explain the others-Andretti, the judge in Oklahoma, the guy in South Dakota. This doesn't fit. Neither did Larry. Or your snitch."

"We don't know exactly what's going on," Lucas said, his voice on the edge of desperation. "If I could just find something... some little hangnail of information, just a fuckin' scrap... anything."

They thought about it in silence for a moment, then Daniel, in a lower voice, said, "I called her husband."

Two hours later, long done with conversation, they were staring bleakly at the opposite wall of the corridor when the doors from the operating suite banged open. A redheaded surgeon came through, still wrapped in a blue surgical gown dappled with blood. She snapped the mask off her face and tossed it into a bin already half full of discarded masks and gowns, and began peeling off the gown. Daniel and Lucas pushed off the wall and stepped toward her.

"I'm good," she said. She tossed the used gown in the discard bin and wiggled her fingers in front of her face. "Seriously gifted."

"She's okay?" Lucas asked.

"You the family?" the surgeon asked, looking from one of them to the other.

"The family's not here," Lucas said. "They're on their way from New York. I'm her partner and this is the chief."

"I've seen you on TV," she said to Daniel, then looked back at Lucas. "She'll be okay unless something weird happens. We took the slug out-it looks like a light thirty-eight, if you're interested. It entered through her breast, broke a rib, pulped up a piece of her lung and stuck in the muscle wall along the rib cage in back. Cracked the rib in back too. She's gonna hurt like hell."