Mortal Prey

real personally, and if they mess him up, if they put him in prison, or hurt him, or do any of that, then they better look to their families. I won’t try to blow up the president. I’ll start killing agents’ husbands and wives, and you know I’ll do it.”
    “I’ll try to get him cut loose. But I’m not a fed.” In the background, faint but clear, she heard a man’s voice say, “She’s not on her cell.”
    “You’d lie to me anyway,” she said.
    “Hey, Clara—I’d put your butt under the jail if I got my hands on you, but I’m not fuckin’ with Gene. I think Gene is a bad idea, and I’ll try to get him cut loose. I’m just not sure how much clout I’ve got.”
    “Okay.” She looked at her watch. They’d been talking for exactly one minute. “I gotta go now. They’re probably pretty close to busting this line. Give me your cell phone number.”
    “I don’t have—”
    “Goodbye.”
    “Wait, wait, wait…I was just trying to stall you.” He read off the number, and Rinker jotted it down. Without saying goodbye again, she hung up, moved quickly out to her car, and put it on the highway back to St. Louis. Six miles out, an Illinois Highway Patrol car went by in a hurry, going east, all lights and no siren.
    Maybe a train wreck, she thought.
     
    SHE WAS RESTLESS , and though she wasn’t inclined to move around in the daylight, she headed back downtown. Maybe, she thought, another little probe on Andy Levy. Maybe she should call Levy, to sweat him a little, to get him used to the idea of talking. And she thought about that: Davenport was in town.
    She’d been told that he was not only ruthless but lucky, which really frightened her. Ruthless she could deal with. Lucky was a problem. When she’d been stalking people, she’d always been so careful, but always so aware that at any moment, luck could turn and strike at her like a rattlesnake. In her disastrous visit to Minneapolis, she and her client had twisted and turned and worked and struggled and never had been able to pull the last piece of sticky-tape bad luck off their backs. Luck had beaten them, not intelligence, skill, or bad planning.
    But maybe she’d had a piece of luck this time. She’d heard that man’s voice talking about a cell phone. They must have the number on the cell phone that Dichter had called: They would have traced the number he was calling when he was shot, and when it came up with a stolen phone, must have known it was her. What if they’d traced it to John Sellos? She’d asked Sellos about both Dichter and Levy.
     
    BEFORE SHE WENT to look at Levy again, she might as well ask Sellos about it. She saw a sign for a BP station coming up, took the off-ramp, rolled in to a drive-up phone, found Sellos’s number in her phone book, and punched it in. Sellos answered—Sellos, who was always home. Rinker said, “If you tell me why you talked to them, if you tell me honestly, I won’t hurt you.”
    “What?”
    “I won’t hurt you.”
    After a pause, and then in what was almost a groan, Sellos said, “They knew all about it. I didn’t have a choice. They said if I didn’t talk to them, they’d bust me on the Dichter murder, as an accessory, and send me to death row. They said they could trace the guy who stole the phone. I didn’t know what to do.”
    “You gave them Levy’s name.”
    “Clara, what could I do? I figured I could either tell them to screw themselves, and maybe wind up on death row, or maybe sneak it past you.”
    He was honest enough, anyway. “Goddamnit, John. Was Davenport there? A guy from Minneapolis? Big, dark hair, good-looking guy?”
    “Yeah. Guy from Minneapolis. Tough guy. He came in with a local ex-cop, another tough guy. I don’t know how they found me, exactly.”
    “All right.”
    “You gonna kill me?”
    “No. But I’ll tell you, John, the feds are cutting a wide swath with this one. If they really think you’re involved, you could be in deep shit.”
    “Ah, you don’t know half of it….”
    “What?”
    “Clara, you know that guy Troy who works for Ross? Muscle guy with a flattop who always puts that tanning stuff all over himself?”
    “No. He must’ve been after me.”
    “Well, he’s a real mean asshole, and he’s going around to everybody, asking if they’ve seen you, or heard where you might be. Guess who he’s traveling with?”
    “I don’t know, John. Why don’t you tell me?”
    “Honus Johnson.” Again, it came out almost as a groan.