23
LUCAS SLEPT UNTIL ONE O 'CLOCK. HE 'D never had trouble sleeping late, and into the afternoon, even, though he often had trouble getting to sleep at midnight. He felt decent when he got up. He took his time shaving and in the shower, lingered over a sandwich and the newspaper, and at two o'clock walked into the FBI conference room, thinking, Rinker amp; Ross, Ross amp; Rinker.
Sally was there, and said, 'Mallard called-he's on his way back. Washington is going to pull us in a couple of days, he thinks, but we're okay if we can come up with something. Anything. They're not going to do anything public, especially after Malone went down. But it doesn't look good for the hometown kids.'
'Rinker and Ross,' Lucas said. 'Let me tell you about the phone calls.'
He told her, but pointed out so many shortcomings with the concept that she said, 'I'd have believed it was Rinker if you hadn't talked me out of it.'
'Still think it was,' he grunted. 'Feels too good.'
'If it was Ross, then she's gone. She's done everybody.'
'Maybe we ought to brace Ross about it, see what happens,' Lucas said.
'He's a smart man. He'll tell us to go have sexual intercourse with ourselves.'
'He's going to this orchestra thing at botanical gardens this evening. I'm gonna crash the party. Take Andreno along, if he'll go. Watch him. See if we can make him nervous.'
'Maybe we ought to take a few people along.'
'You coming?'
'If I have time,' she said. 'I did bring a nice little red party dress, just in case.' Then she clouded up. 'I wish Malone were here. She was really good at this.'
WITH SALLY, the red-haired guy, Derik, and a half-dozen others, Lucas argued the question of the phone calls from the coast, and found the group divided almost fifty-fifty, with a one-man majority in favor of the calls coming from Rinker. They all went back to the paper, looking for more ties.
One guy said, suddenly, 'We ought to have a few people there tonight. You know, like a crew.'
'We've got a crew escorting Ross,' Sally said.
'More than that, we need more than that,' the guy said, excited by an idea. 'Think about this. If nothing happens to Ross, we'd be suspicious. But what if he's shot at and missed? What if he's rescued before he can be killed-by his security guys?'
'You mean… a faked hit?'
'Yeah…'
'Oh, God. ' Somebody's head hit the table with a hollow thump, followed by a groan. Everybody was looking at the guy who suggested the fake hit, who said, 'What?'
Then somebody started to laugh, and the laughter rippled around the room, and finally Sally said, 'You got one thing right. We need more people there. We'll work it out.'
LUCAS CALLED ANDRENO and asked him if he wanted to go to the botanical gardens party. 'Would this be, like, a date? ' Andreno asked.
'Of course not,' Lucas said. 'I'm engaged to be married.'
'All right, but nothing below the waist, then.'
THEY HOOKED UP for dinner, a place called Brownies, ate shrimp and salads, and Andreno wanted a blow- by-blow account of the shoot-out at Spirit of St. Louis.
'Hell of a thing,' he said when Lucas finished. 'I was in two shoot-outs when I was on the force, and I can't remember shit about either one of them, but there was, like, a total of four shots fired. This was like a war.'
'One of the agents said something to me after Malone was shot,' Lucas said. 'He said something like, 'It used to be a hobby. Now it's a war.' But he thought it'd be us making the war.'
The waitress came by to check the state of their drinks. They were okay, but she chatted for a minute, making serious eye contact with Andreno. When she was gone, Lucas asked, 'You know her?'
'Not yet.'
'I felt like a goddamn cuckoo clock or something, sitting here and you guys got this lip-lock going over the salads.'
'You got relationship cooties,' Andreno said. 'Women can pick those up in one second-they know you're hooked up with somebody else.'
Lucas nodded, looking after the waitress. 'Nice-looking woman, though. I could get used to this place. St. Louis. Except it's so fuckin' hot.'
Andreno shrugged. 'You get a pool.'
'You have a pool?'
'No. But I'm used to it. I like it, the heat. Better than six months of ice storms. I was up in Minneapolis in August once-my old lady at the time had relatives up there and she wanted to visit and they said come up for the state fair. So we went up to the state fair and I almost froze to death. I was walking around in a golf shirt and slacks, and it was twelve degrees or something.'
'Twelve is a little cooler than we'd expect in August,' Lucas said.
'You know what I mean.'
'I like the snow,' Lucas said. 'I even like blizzards. I go up north in the winter. Got a couple of sleds.'
They talked about their towns until it was time to leave. As they were walking across the parking lot to the Porsche, Andreno said, 'Wish I had a gun.'
'Got a knife?'
'Yeah, but that wouldn't…'
'I wasn't thinking you could stab her,' Lucas said. 'But they got all those trees in there. I was thinking you could cut down a big stick.'
'Ah. I could hit her with the stick. '
'Right.'
'Wish I had a gun.'
THEY PARKED IN the lot in front of the botanical gardens and took a walk around it, looking. 'She knows your Porsche, right?'
'Maybe. Probably. If she remembers it.' Andreno kept looking at the houses on the other side of the street. 'What're you thinking?'
'Suppose she's scouted the place, and she spotted a house with some old lady in it. She's got these silenced pistols, right? So she goes up to a house, say, a hundred and fifty yards away, two hundred yards, plugs the old lady when she answers the door, and then just sits there and waits, with that machine gun. Or the sniper rifle she used on Malone. Maybe parks her car in the back so we'll never see her when she pulls out. Ross gets here, and she nails him walking across the parking lot. Just like with Dallaglio.'
Lucas considered it, then said, 'Look-she had months to work this all out. One thing she always did was her planning, the way she got at people, isolated them, then killed them. She's never expected. We really didn't expect her last night, but now that she's done that… and Malone… she's got to think that we're ready for rifles.'
'So maybe she won't use a rifle, but the goddamn things scare the shit out of me. Never see it coming. Whack, and you're dead before you know it.' They walked along for a minute, and he added, 'Man, that must've been something last night. I wish I could've been there, as long as I wouldn't have gotten shot. That FBI guy, they say he could lose a leg.'
'That's not the word anymore,' Lucas said. 'The word is, he's gonna be okay.'
'All right. Still, this fuckin' woman ought to be in the CIA or something. They could use her.'
Lucas looked up and down the street. 'I'd say we could put a squad at the far end, but then… it'd just scare her off, if she's coming. I'd rather have her come.'
'And fuck a bunch of Rosses?'
'He knows what he's getting into… And yeah, fuck him.'
Andreno shook his head. 'That's harsh, man.' He looked down the street again. 'Just like standing naked in the window.'
