Mortal Prey

”
     
    MALLARD WAS PHYSICALLY shaky, brutally unhappy. “I’m here for today and tomorrow. The funeral is day after tomorrow.”
    “Are you up to speed on what we’re doing?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes. Sally…sort of turned out to be an executive. I hadn’t seen that before.”
    Lucas grinned at him, a small wan smile. “Everybody else did. There wasn’t even any discussion—she just took it over.”
    “Good for her,” Mallard said. He was wearing a tuxedo, as were the other agents that Lucas could see, and a few men who weren’t agents. He and Andreno were wearing sport coats and slacks and loafers. Lucas felt like a radish at a convention of tulips. “You think she’ll show up?”
    “I can’t figure it,” Lucas said. “I’m getting the feeling, from what we’ve seen so far, that she started planning her moves right after she was shot down in Mexico. She’s had a couple of months to think about them, and to have her show up and start blazing away—that’s out of character.”
    “That’s what she did last night,” Mallard said.
    “But we didn’t see it coming last night,” Lucas said. “The thing about last night—we could only see it later—is that she had a source of information that could feed her the Dallaglios in a hurry, somebody who could actually call her, or who she could call. I actually thought running was a great idea, from the Dallaglios’ point of view. Once he was out of sight, she was out of luck. But…she knew where and when he was going. Exactly.”
    “Sally told me about the phone idea, the calls to Ross.”
    “And here she comes,” Lucas said. Sally was wandering toward them, wearing a tight, deep burgundy dress that started low and ended low—below the collarbones and down to the ankles, slits on the sides. She was carrying a small black purse that Lucas decided must hold her pistol, because she couldn’t have gotten a pencil under the dress without it showing. As she came up, Lucas said, “Nice purse.”
    She smiled at him. “Didn’t think I could clean up, did you?”
    “I thought you might,” he said. “We’ve been talking about Ross, and what the hell’s going on here.”
    “If she comes in, I think we’ll get her. We’ve got teams moving all through the place.”
    Lucas looked away, staring at a pink rose, trying to work through it. They looked at him, waiting, and finally he said, “I can’t nail it down. Can’t figure what she’ll do next. I’ve been stymied before, because I didn’t know what I needed to know. But I’ve never felt stupid. She’s got me feeling like a moron.”
    “We’ll see,” Mallard said. He patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, with a wan smile, “Dumbass.”
     
    MORE PEOPLE WERE arriving, men in tuxedos, women in party dresses. A small pop orchestra set up in front of the brick building that acted as a backstop for the party; a dozen long-haired men and women who started off with an even more orchestrated version of Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All,” as if the original weren’t bad enough.
    Lucas started away after the first few bars, and Sally said, after him, “Don’t like music?”
    “Anytime they start by playing Air Supply, there’s a risk they’ll move on to the Hooters,” Lucas said.
    Sally said, “My. You listen to rock ’n’ roll?”
    “It’s not rock ’n’ roll. It’s rock. It’s the music I grew up with. Just like you.”
    She looked at him, doing a readjustment, and said, “I guess you always think that people older than you listen to, like, Big Band or something. Jazz.”
    “Jesus, Sally, the first music I can remember was the Stones. Mick Jagger was probably in high school when I was born.”
    “Yeah, but…” She looked past him. “The Rosses.”
    Lucas moved away more quickly, far out to the edge of the rose garden, watching the Rosses as he moved. John Ross was wearing a European-style notchless tux, black on black. Treena was wearing a cream-colored dress with puffs along the edges that managed to look both expensive and tacky, like a Versace knockoff for 7-Eleven. Ross shook hands with a few people, and seemed to be accepted. If they knew he was a hood, they at least appreciated his support for the performing arts.
    Lucas was watching when he saw movement on the roof of the building behind the orchestra. A head. Then a head and a man, with a radio: the red-haired guy, with another man. Lucas lifted a hand to them, and the red-haired guy mimed a