Mortal Prey

prostate cancer. His father died from it.”
    “Onions, or prostate?” Lucas asked.
    “I almost died from the onions once,” the red-haired man said.
    He put them on an interstate heading west, and Lucas frowned. “Where’re we going?”
    Sally looked at him and then said, “Oh—we’re not going to Lambert. There’s another airport out west. Called, um, Spirit of St. Louis. Dallaglio’s signed up for a private jet, a place called Executive Air. He’s flying out of there to Newark, and then from Newark to Rome to Naples on commercial flights. First class, of course. The whole family.”
    “Napoli,” said the nearly silent Derik. Derik had a buzz cut and high, dry cheekbones and looked like a member of the Wehrmacht. “Roma.”
    Sally was looking at a map now and said to the red-haired agent, “We’re on Sixty-four, right? Because if we’re on Forty-four, we’ll wind up down in Bumfuck, Missouri, and there’s no way back.”
    “The language,” Lucas said.
    “We’re on Sixty-four,” the red-haired guy said. “There’s a sign.”
    Sally checked the sign and then turned to Lucas. “Malone was, like, ten years in service before I signed up. She was appointed to mentor some of the younger women agents, and one time she told me that I should carefully use a few words. You know, nothing really nasty, none of the gynecological stuff, but the occasional fuck or shit, just to let them know that you weren’t a sissy. She said getting treated ladylike or if you were expected to be ladylike, it was the end of you. She said you had to be a lady, but not ladylike.”
    “A point,” Lucas said.
    “Back then, it was,” Sally said. “Ten years ago. I don’t think it matters so much anymore.”
    “Yeah, you’ve pretty well taken over now,” the red-haired man said.
    “Better believe,” Sally said. Derik said nothing, just bobbed his skin-head to some unseen music with a jerky beat. Sally got on a radio and talked to the crew with Dallaglio. “They’re just getting out to the cars,” she said. “We ought to get there about the same time.”
     
    RINKER HAD AN unfamiliar weight on her shoulders, the weight of death. Not the killing of Dichter, or Levy, or Malone, or even of all of them together, but rather the killing of Honus Johnson. She’d thought about it, as she waited for Johnson to come lurching out of the basement like a frozen Frankenstein, to stand over the couch while she was half asleep…waited for the sound of the freezer lid opening, was sure she’d heard it a half-dozen times.
    One of the few literary experiences of her young life had come with a Stephen King novel, Carrie, which had scared the shit out of her, as she sprawled across the bed in her apartment, alone, reading. The feeling now was the same, but even more intense: There really was a frozen dead man in the basement, and he really had been a torturer, who would come back from hell with a bloody machete….
    She analyzed it, as she’d been taught in her college psych classes back in Wichita—and she decided that her problem was not so much the dead man in the basement as the fact that she hadn’t left him behind. In all her other killings, she’d almost instantly walked away from the bodies. In a couple of cases, she’d had to move them, but she’d been done with them in a few hours at most. She’d been able to escape what she’d done, put it behind her and out of mind.
    This one, she was stuck with, at least for a few more days. He was riding on her shoulders as she drove west into the setting sun.
    She looked a little like a fashionable female Johnny Cash, she thought—thin black long-sleeve shirt, black jeans, dark blue running shoes from which she’d carefully torn the reflective patches. In the backseat she had a black silk scarf and a black baseball cap. When she had it all on, she thought, she’d be invisible in the dark.
     
    THEY’D BEEN IN the car for fifteen minutes when Sally took a radio call, then looked at her map. “They’re ahead of us, about three miles,” she said, after a minute. “Four vehicles—two of ours and two of theirs. They’re staying on the speed limit, so if we can step on it a bit, we’ll catch them.”
    They caught them a couple of miles east of the airport, rolling off the interstate and down onto a country highway. “When Dallaglio gets out of here, everything will come back to Ross, unless she’s really after Ferignetti, too—but Ferignetti’s so sure that she