Certain Prey

find one of them has a lot of calls going out to some farm in East Jesus, Oklahoma . . .”
    Lucas looked at her for a second and said, “That’s good.”
    “You like it?”
    “First decent idea anybody’s had in a week.” He pulled open his desk drawer and found Mallard’s card. “Even better, it involves dealing with bureaucrats from the phone company: I mean, this is Mallard’s life. ” M ALLARD LIKED IT: he had three agents working on it overnight, and called Lucas back in the middle of the afternoon the next day. He was, Lucas thought, a teeny bit breathless.
    “Have you ever heard of Allen Kent?”
    “No . . .”
    “He’s this Italian guy—his father’s name was Kent, he was nobody, but his mother’s family was tied right to the top of the St. Louis and the Chicago Mafia families, back when Sam Giancana was running the world.”
    “Who’s he been calling?”
    “Well, he calls all over the place, he’s a booze distributor. He calls every little goddamn bar in the Midwest. But he’s got an AT&T calling card which he uses when he’s out of town, and we analyzed all those calls for the past ten years and guess what?”
    “He’s actually Lee Harvey Oswald and he’s holding JFK in a cave.”
    “No. But you know we have all these Mafia-related hits attributed to this woman. In each case, Kent was making calls from Wichita, Kansas, between twenty-four and thirty days before each hit. He’d spend two days there, each time, every time. Now, you figure he goes out to Wichita to meet the shooter and give her the assignment, and maybe talk about information she needs. Then she needs time to do some recon—we know she’s careful, we know she’s watching the target for a while before she moves. And maybe she needs some time to get oriented in each new city . . . and time to drive there, if she drives like we think she does.”
    “You think she’s from Wichita,” Lucas said.
    “We think it’s a possibility. We even think we might have a name.”
    “Yeah? What is it?”
    “John Lopez.”
    Lucas grappled with the name for a moment. “John?”
    “Yeah. A guy, disguised as a woman, which makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. A woman hit man for the Mafia? Come on. Never happen. We found him in our database: he’s Puerto Rican, five-five, one hundred and thirty pounds, so he could be a woman. He’s a mean little bastard, too. Back a few years ago, there was a massive amount of cocaine coming in through the south coast of Puerto Rico, and then it was transshipped by plane to the States, because there’s no customs on Puerto Rican flights—it’s an internal flight. He was one of the mules, hauling it up to Chicago, taking the money back. When he was busted, he gave up all the Puerto Rican links in return for immunity and protection, but claimed he didn’t know who he was dealing with in Chicago. We now think it might have been the Mafia, and that’s where he hooked up with Allen Kent.”
    “How’d he get to Wichita?”
    “Witness protection. God help us, but we might have been protecting the biggest professional killer in the States.”
    Lucas felt slightly deflated: the Feebs were gonna make the bust. “Are you going out there?”
    “Absolutely. I’m taking everything I got with me. Lopez supposedly runs a flower shop out there, like a longtime hood is gonna run a flower shop.” Mallard laughed, and Lucas looked at the phone: Mallard seemed to be running a little hot.
    “Mind if I watch?”
    “Hell, no. I’m going out this afternoon, I’m leaving here in five minutes. We’re staying at the Holiday Inn, uh, the Holiday Inn East. We got a warrant going on a wiretap, and we’re getting all of his phone records now. Listen, I gotta run.”
    “All right,” Lucas said. “I’ll see you down there, probably tonight, if nothing comes up. I’m driving down.”
    “You could fly in a couple of hours.” “Yeah, yeah, I’m driving,” Lucas said. L UCAS WAS a longtime Porsche driver. He enjoyed driving the car up to a couple of hundred miles, but it was not a long-distance cruiser. Six hundred and fifty miles would leave him both shaken and stirred. Besides, the Porsche needed servicing.
    “Look,” he told his Porsche dealer on the telephone, “you’re gonna charge me an arm and a leg, so I oughta get something decent for a loaner. I know damn well that you’ve got that BMW on the lot, because I saw Larry showing it to a guy . . . Yeah, yeah, I don’t want a