Silent Prey (4 page)

On the street below, an old-fashioned Volkswagen, a Bug, zipped past. Thick, looking through the scope, ignored it. A man had stepped out on the street and paused. He had light hair, slightly mussed, and gold-rimmed glasses. Narrow shoulders. He was smiling, his lips moving, talking to himself. He was wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt, and jeans that were too long for his legs. He used his index fingers to push his glasses up on his nose.

“Yes,” Thick grunted, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“No . . .” said Thin, taking two steps toward the window.

But a red dot bloomed on the target’s chest. He may have had an instant to think about it; again, maybe not. The blast of the gun was deafening, the muzzle flash brighter than Thin had expected. The target seemed to jump back, and then began a herky-jerky dance. Thin had once seen a film showing Hitler dancing a jig after the fall of France. The man on the street looked like that for just a second or two: as though he were dancing a jig. The thunder rolled on, six shots, eight, twelve, quick, evenly spaced, the lightning flickering off their faces.

A little more than halfway through the magazine, Thick flicked the selector switch and unloaded the remaining cartridges in a single burst. The target was now flat on the sidewalk, and the burst of bullets splattered about his head like copper-jacketed raindrops.

Thin stood by the window, unspeaking.

“Go,” said Thick. He dropped the rifle on the floor. “Hands.”

With their gloved hands pressed to their faces, they walked down the hall to the back of the building, ran down a flight of stairs, along another hallway, then out a side door into an alley. The alley led away from the shooting.

“Don’t run,” said Thick as they emerged onto the street.

“Watch it,” said Thin.

A Volkswagen lurched past, a Bug, catching them in its lights, their pale faces like street lamps in the night. It was the same car that had driven past the restaurant just before the computer fag came out on the sidewalk . . . .

With the body beside him, Bekker was tense, cranked, watching for cop cars, watching everything that went by.
He had a small pistol by his side, a double-barreled derringer .38 Special, but if he had to use it, he’d probably be finished.

But so far, so good.

SoHo streets were quiet at night. Once out of the neighborhood, things would get more complicated. He didn’t want anything high beside him, a van or a truck. He didn’t want a driver looking down into the Volkswagen, even though he probably wouldn’t see much. The body, wrapped in dark plastic, looked more like a butterfly’s chrysalis than anything, a cocoon. What you might expect from a Bug.

Bekker almost laughed. Not quite; he was too crazy to have a genuine sense of humor. Instead he said, “Motherfucker.”

He needed a wall, or an unguarded building with a niche in the wall. Some place where nobody would look out and see him unloading the body. He hadn’t thought much about disposal: he’d have to think more. He’d need a random dispersal pattern, nothing they could use to focus on his particular block. He’d have to decide the optimum distance—far enough not to point at SoHo, but not so far that the drive itself became risky.

He drove past the Manhattan Caballero, a Village steak house, a couple of bright beer signs in the small barred windows. The door opened as he went by and he saw a slender man come out, caught just for a moment by the light inside the doorway; and behind him, a cigarette machine.

The gunshots sounded like popcorn. Or like a woman ripping a piece of dress material. Bekker looked in the mirror, saw the lightning. Bekker had been in Vietnam; he’d heard this noise from a distance, this snickering popcorn thunder. He’d seen this flickering light. The man
he’d seen in the doorway was flopping on the sidewalk as the bullets tore through him.

“Motherfucker . . .” Teeth bared, mouth wide, Bekker screamed the word: he was innocent, he had nothing to do with it, and he could get caught, right here. Half panicked, afraid that neighbors would take the number of every car they saw, Bekker floored the accelerator and raced to the end of the long block. The gunfire lasted for only two or three seconds. It took another five before he could turn left, out of sight, onto a one-way street. The adrenaline surged through him, the PCP panic. And up ahead, yellow lights flashed in the street.

What?

The panic jumped him. He jammed on the brake, forgetting the clutch, and the Volkswagen stalled. The body crinkled its plastic coat as it swayed in the seat toward him. He pushed it back with one hand, fighting the fist in his throat, trying to breathe, trying to get some air, and stabbed at the gas pedal. Finally realizing what had happened, he dropped the clutch and turned the key again, got started, shifting into second.

He jerked the car to the left, still dazzled, before he realized that the yellow lights were road-construction warnings. No reason to turn—but he already had, and he sped on. Near the end of the block, two figures stepped out of an alley. His headlights swept them, and he saw their hands come up. They were hiding their faces, but before they’d covered them, they’d been as clear as the face of the moon.

Bekker swerved, kept going.

Had they seen his plates? No way to tell. He peered into the rearview mirror, but they were already lost in the dark. He was okay. He tried to choke down the fear. The back plates were old and dirty.

But the gunfire.

Had to think. Jesus, he needed help. He felt for the matchbox. No, that wouldn’t be right. He needed speed. Uppers, to help him think.

Sirens.

Somewhere behind him. He wasn’t sure quite where he was anymore, took a left, moving away, coming up to a major intersection. He looked up at the street signs. Broadway. What was the other? He rolled forward a few feet. Bleecker. Okay. Good. Straight ahead, along Bleecker. Had to get the body out. A darker block, a deep-red building with niches, but no place to pull over. Another fifty feet . . . there.

He pulled to the curb, hopped out, and looked around. Nobody. He could hear somebody talking, loud, but it sounded like a drunk. He hurried around the car, shifted the body out and dropped it in a doorway. Looked up: the ceiling in the deep doorway was decorated with intricate designs in white terra-cotta; the designs caught his mind, dragged it into the maze of curves . . . .

Another siren brought him back. It was somewhere down Bleecker, but he couldn’t see the lights. He hurried back to the car, sweating, climbed inside, and looked back through the open door at the mortal remains of Louis Cortese. From any more than a few feet, the body looked like a bum sleeping on the sidewalk. And there were hundreds of bums in the area.

He risked a last look at the terra-cotta, felt the pull, then tore his eyes away and slammed the door. Hunched over the steering wheel, he headed for home.

Thick picked up the pay phone and dialed the number scrawled on a scrap of paper. He let the phone ring twice,
hung up, waited a few seconds, dialed again, let it ring twice more, hung up again.

Thin was waiting in the car, didn’t speak.

“It’ll be okay,” Thick said.

After a very long time, Thin said, “No, it won’t.”

“It’s fine,” the big man said. “You did good.”

When Bekker got to the Lacey building, he parked the car, went down into the basement, stripped off his clothes, scrubbed his face, changed into a sweat suit. And thought about the killing he’d seen. New York was a dangerous place—someone really ought to do something about it . . . . There was some cleanup to do in the operating theater. He worked at it for ten minutes, with a sponge and paper towels and a can of universal cleaner. When he was done, he wrapped all the paper and put it in the garbage. He remembered the blood just as he was about to turn out the lights. He picked up the bottle and tipped it into a drain, the blood as purple and thick as antifreeze.

Again he reached for the lights, and saw the four small nubbins of skin sitting on top of an anesthetic tank. Of course, he’d put them there, just a convenient place at the time.

He picked them up. Shriveled, with the long shiny lashes, they looked like a new species of arachnid, a new one-sided spider. They were, of course, something much more mundane: Cortese’s eyelids. He peered at them in the palm of his hand. He’d never seen them like this, so separate, so disembodied.

Ha. Another one. Another joke. He looked in the stainless-steel cabinet, laughed and held his belly, and pointed a finger at himself.
Disembodied
 . . .

He went back to them, the eyelids. Fascinating.

Lucas was lying on the roof of his house, the shingles warm against his shoulder blades, eyes closed, not quite snoozing. He’d put down one full flat of green fiberglass shingles and didn’t feel like starting another. A breeze ruffled the fine black hair on his forearms; the humid air was pregnant with an afternoon storm and pink-and-gray thunderheads were popping up to the west.

With his eyes closed, Lucas could hear the after-work joggers padding along the sidewalk across the street, the rattle of roller blades, radios from passing cars. If he opened his eyes and looked straight up, he might see an eagle soaring on the thermals above the river bluffs. If he looked down, the Mississippi was there, across the street and below the bluff, like a fat brown snake curling in the sunshine. A catsup-colored buoy bobbed in the muddy water, directing boat traffic into the Ford lock.

It all felt fine, like it could go on forever, up on the roof.

When the taxi pulled into the driveway, he thought about it instead of looking to see who it was. Nobody he
knew was likely to come calling unexpectedly. His life had come to that: no surprises.

The car door slammed, and her high heels rapped down the sidewalk.

Lily.

Her name popped into his head.

Something about the way she walked. Like a cop, maybe, or maybe just a New Yorker. Somebody who knew about dog shit and cracked sidewalks, who watched where she put her feet. He lay unmoving, with his eyes closed.

“What are you doing up there?” Her voice was exactly as he remembered, deep for a woman, with a carefully suppressed touch of Brooklyn.

“Maintaining my property.” A smile crept across his face.

“You could have fooled me,” she said. “You look like you’re asleep.”

“Resting between bouts of vigorous activity,” he said. He sat up, opened his eyes and looked down at her. She’d lost weight, he thought. Her face was narrower, with more bone. And she’d cut her hair: it had been full, to the shoulders. Now it was short, not punk, but asymmetrical, with the hair above her ears cut almost to the skin. Strangely sexy.

Her hair had changed, but her smile had not: her teeth were white as pearls against her olive skin. “You’re absolutely gorgeous,” he said.

“Don’t start, Lucas, I’m already up to my knees in bullshit,” she answered. But she smiled, and one of her upper incisors caught on her lower lip. His heart jumped. “This is a business trip.”

“Mmmm.” Bekker. The papers were full of it. Six already dead. Bodies without eyelids. Cut up, in various
ways—not mutilated. Bekker did very professional work, as befitted a certified pathologist. And he wrote papers on the killings: strange, contorted, quasiscientific ramblings about the dying subjects and their predeath experiences, which he sent off to scientific journals. “Are you running the case?”

“No, but I’m . . . involved,” she said. She was peering up at him with the comic helplessness with which people on the ground regard people on roofs. “I’m getting a crick in my neck. Come down.”

“Who’ll maintain my property?” he teased.

“Fuck your property,” she said.

He took his time coming down the ladder, aware of the special care:
Five years ago, I’d of run down . . . hell, three years ago . . . getting older. Forty-five coming up. Fifty still below the horizon, but you could see the shadow of it . . .

He’d been stretching, doing roadwork, hitting a heavy bag until he hurt. He worked on the Nautilus machines three nights a week at the Athletic Club, and tried to swim on the nights he didn’t do Nautilus. Forty-four, coming onto forty-five. Hair shot through with gray, and the vertical lines between his eyes weren’t gone in the mornings.

He could see the two extra years in Lily as well. She looked tougher, as though she’d been through hard weather. And she looked hurt, her eyes wary.

“Let’s go inside,” he said as he bent to let her kiss him on the cheek. He didn’t have to bend very far; she was nearly as tall as he was. Chanel No. 5, like a whiff of distant farm flowers. He caught her by the arm. “Jesus, you look good. Smell good. Why don’t you call?”

“Why don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah . . .” He led the way through the front door to the kitchen. The kitchen had been scorched in a
gunfight and fire two years past, a case he’d worked with Lily. He’d repainted and put in a new floor.

“You’ve lost some weight,” he said as they went, groping for something personal.

“Twelve pounds, as of this morning,” she said. She dropped her purse on the breakfast bar, looked around, said, “Looks nice,” pulled out a stool and sat down. “I’m starving to death.”

“I’ve got two cold beers,” Lucas said. He stuck his head in the refrigerator. “And I’m willing to split a deli roast beef sandwich, heavy on the salad, no mayonnaise.”

“Just a minute,” Lily said, waving him off. He shut the refrigerator door and leaned against it as she took a small brown spiral notebook from her purse. She did a series of quick calculations, her lips moving. “Airline food can’t be much,” she said, more to herself than Lucas.

“Not much,” he agreed.

“Is it light beer?”

“No . . . but hell, it’s a celebration.”

“Right.” She was very serious, noting the calories in the brown notebook. Lucas tried not to laugh.

“You’re trying not to laugh,” she said, looking up suddenly, catching him at it. She was wearing gold hoop earrings, and when she tipped her head to the side, the gold stroked her olive skin with a butterfly’s touch.

“And succeeding,” he said. He tried to grin, but his breathing had gone wrong; the dangling earring was hypnotic, like something out of a magician’s show.

“Christ, I hate people with fast metabolisms,” she said. She went back to the notebook, unaware of his breathing problems.
Maybe.

“That’s all bullshit, the fast-metabolism excuse,” Lucas said. “I read it in the
Times.
”

“Another sign of decline, the
Times
printing obvious bullshit,” Lily said. She stuffed the notebook back in her purse, put the purse aside and crossed her legs, clasping her hands on her knees. “Okay, a beer and half a sandwich.”

They ate at the breakfast bar, facing each other, making small talk, checking each other. Lucas was off the police force and missed the action. Lily had moved up, off the street, and was doing political work with a deputy commissioner. Lily asked, “How’s Jennifer? And Sarah?”

Lucas shook his head, finishing the sandwich. “Jen and I—we’re all done. We tried, and it didn’t work. Too much bad history. We’re still friends. She’s seeing a guy from the station. They’ll probably get married.”

“He’s okay?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Lucas said.

But he was unconsciously shaking his head as he said it.

Lily considered the tone: “So you think he’s an asshole?”

“Hell . . . No. Not really.” Lucas, finished with his half of the sandwich, stepped over to the sink, squirted Ivory Liquid into the palm of one hand, turned on the water and washed off the traces of the sandwich’s olive oil. His hands were large and square, boxer’s hands. “And he likes Sarah and he’s got a kid of his own, about seven months older than Sarah. They get along . . . .”

“Like a family . . .” Lily said. Lucas turned away and shook the water off his hands and she quickly said, “Sorry.”

“Yeah, well, what the fuck,” Lucas said. He went back to the refrigerator, took out another bottle of
Leinenkugel’s and twisted the top off. “Actually, I’ve been feeling pretty good. Ending it. I’m making some money and I’ve been out on the road, looking at the world. I was at Little Bighorn a couple of weeks ago. Freaked me out. You can stand by Custer’s stone and see the whole fucking fight . . . .”

“Yeah?”

He was marking time, waiting for her to tell him why she’d come to the Cities. But she was better at waiting than he was, and finally he asked, “What’re you here for?”

She licked a chip of roast beef from the corner of her mouth, her long tongue catching it expertly. Then: “I want you to come to New York.”

“For Bekker?” he asked skeptically. “Bullshit. You guys can handle Bekker. And if I was a New York cop, I’d get pissed off if somebody came in from the outside. A small-town guy.”

She was nodding. “Yeah, we can handle Bekker. We’ve got guys saying all kinds of things: that we’ll have him in a week, in ten days . . . . It’s been six weeks, Lucas. We’ll get him, but the politics are getting ugly.”

“Still . . .”

“We want you to jawbone the media. You’re good at that, talking to reporters. We want to tell them that we’re doing everything we can, that we’re even importing the guy who caught him the first time. We want to emphasize that we’re pulling out all the stops. Our guys’ll understand that, they’ll appreciate it—they’ll know we’re trying to take the heat off.”

“That’s it? A public-relations trick?” He grimaced, began to shake his head. He didn’t want to talk to reporters. He wanted to get somebody by the throat . . . .

“No, no. You’ll work the case, all right,” she said. She
finished the sandwich and held her hands out, fingers spread, looking for a napkin, and he handed her a paper towel. “Right down on the street with the rest of them. And high priority, too. I
do
value your abilities.”

Lucas caught something in her voice. “But?”

“But . . . all of that aside, there’s something else.”

He laughed. “A third layer? A Lily Rothenburg layer? What’re you doing?”

“The thing is, we’ve got serious trouble. Even bigger than Bekker, if you can imagine it.” She hesitated, searching his eyes, intent, then balled up the paper napkin and did a sitting jump shot into a wastebasket before continuing. “This can’t come out anywhere.”

Irritated, he wordlessly backhanded the comment away, like a bothersome gnat. She nodded, slipped off the stool, took a quick turn around the kitchen, picked up an enamel coffee cup, turned it in her hands, put it down.

“We’re looking at thirteen murders,” she said finally. “Not Bekker’s. Someone else’s. These are all . . . hits. Maybe. Of the thirteen—those are the ones we’re sure of, we think there are more, as many as forty—ten were out-and-out assholes. Two of them were pretty big: a wholesaler for the Cali cartel and an up-and-coming Mafia guy. The other eight were miscellaneous small-timers.”

“Number eleven?”

“A lawyer,” Lily said. “A criminal defense lawyer who represented a lot of big dopers. He was good. He put a lot of people back on the street that shouldn’t have been there. But most people thought he was straight.”

“Hard to be straight, with that job,” Lucas said.

“But we think he was. The investigation hasn’t turned up anything that’d change our mind. We’ve been combing his bank records, along with the IRS and the state tax
people. There’s not a goddamned thing. In fact, there wouldn’t have been any point in his being crooked: he was pulling in so much money he didn’t need any more. Three million bucks was a slow year.”

“Okay. Who was twelve?”

“Number twelve was a professional black . . . spokesman,” she said. “A community leader, a loudmouth, a rabble-rouser, whatever you want to call him. But he wasn’t a crook. He was a neighborhood politician trying to climb the pole. He was shot in a drive-by, supposedly a couple of gang-bangers. But it was very slick for gang-bangers, good weapons, a stolen car.”

“Thirteen?”

“Thirteen was a cop.”

“Crooked?”

“Straight. He was investigating the possibility that we’ve got a rogue group inside the police department, inside intelligence, systematically killing people.”

There was a moment of silence as Lucas digested it. “Sonofabitch,” he said finally. “They’ve killed thirteen people for sure, and maybe forty?”

“The cop who was killed—his name was Walter Petty—claimed there were twelve, for sure. He’s the thirteenth. We think. He said there could be thirty or forty more.”

“Jesus Christ.” Lucas pulled at his lip, turned away from her, blankly staring at the microwave. Forty? “You should’ve picked it up . . . .”

“Not necessarily,” Lily said, shaking her head. The short hair whipped around her ears, like a television advertisement, and he caught a smile and suppressed it. This was
business,
she said. “For one thing, they were killed over a long time. Five years, anyway. And most of them died like you’d have expected, knowing their
records. Except more efficiently. That’s what you notice when you decide you’ve got a pattern: the efficiency of it. Bang, bang, they’re dead. Never any cops close by—once or twice, they were actually decoyed out. There are never any good witnesses. The getaways are preplanned. No collateral damage, no mushrooms getting knocked down.”

“So you’ve got a pattern of small-time assholes killed by big-time shooters,” Lucas said.

“Right. Like this one guy, I met him myself, years ago, when I was just coming off patrol. Arvin Davies.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and wet her lips, remembering the file. “He was forty-two when he was killed. He was a doper, a drunk. A brawler. He had twenty priors going back to age twelve, and he’d been picked up for one thing or another maybe twenty more times. All small stuff. Street muggings, burglaries, car thefts, rip-offs, possession. He’d get his nose clogged up with angel dust and beat his victims. He killed one five or six years ago, but we could never prove it. He spent twenty years inside, all short time. The last time he got out, he did a couple of muggings and then somebody put him on a wall. Shot him twice in the heart and once in the head. The head shot came when he was already down, a coup de grace. The shooter walked away,” she said, hopping back up on the breakfast-bar stool across from him.

“A pro,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. And there just wasn’t any reason a pro would go after Arvin Davies. He was small-time, chickenshit. But whoever killed him took a real asshole off the streets for good. Maybe forty or fifty nasty crimes a year.”

“All the miscellaneous hits are like that?”

“Yup. I mean the techniques are different, but they’re all cold, efficient, researched.”

Lucas nodded, studying her. “All very enlightening—but where do I come in?”