Mortal Prey

summon up the memory of the odor.
    As he limped around the hotel room, it occurred to him that the funny smell in Holiday Inns—something you could never quite put a label on—might be built-in. If it was, he thought, they should build in something else.
    He stopped the circular march long enough to click on the TV, hoping to pick up the weather. He got CNN by default, and as he was about to click around for the Weather Channel, the blond newsreader turned expectantly to her left, and the shimmering image of a St. Louis reporter came up, and under his ruddy round face, the label “Sandy White, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”
    “…sounded distraught, and while people may certainly have no sympathy at all for Miz Rinker, I personally find the plight of her brother, Gene, to be intensely painful. He was arrested and charged on a crime that usually produces something on the order of a traffic ticket in California, and here he is being dragged across the nation and exhibited to television cameras as if he were a criminal mastermind. In fact, Betty, there is good evidence that Gene Rinker is mentally impaired, and may not even understand why he is locked up in a special high-security cell in one of the hardest jails in Missouri….”
    “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said to the TV, as the two heads continued to talk. He watched the rest of the segment, which produced nothing more of intelligence, then clicked around until he found the Weather Channel. He sat on the bed rubbing out his calf until the local segment came up, and headed for the bathroom happy with a prediction of late-afternoon thunderstorms. That was okay. They’d be out of Springfield before the storms arrived.
    He shaved, brushed the sour taste of overnight beer from his teeth and tongue, and was in the shower for two minutes when Andreno called. They agreed to meet in the breakfast bar in fifteen minutes, and Lucas finished cleaning up. He’d brought one change of clothes in a plastic laundry bag stolen from the St. Louis hotel. He changed into jeans, golf shirt, and a light woven-silk sport coat, stuffed the dirty clothes back in the plastic bag, and headed out.
    “You get a chance to look at CNN this morning?” Andreno asked.
    “The Gene Rinker thing, with that Sandy guy? Yeah. Assholes.”
    “Of course, he’s right. Sandy White is.”
    “Fuck him, anyway.” Lucas snarled silently across the breakfast room at a pretty young waitress, who hurried over. “Two waffles, maple syrup, two cups of coffee for me.” He looked across the table at Andreno. “And what do you want?”
    Andreno ordered, and when the waitress had gone, Lucas said, “Malone and Mallard are smart people. They’ll figure out Gene. I’ll call them.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Fuckin’ CNN.”
    “Jesus, you sound like you got up on the wrong side of the bed.”
    “I’ll cheer up,” Lucas said, thinking of the leg cramp. “I don’t usually get up at seven o’clock. Christ, I’m amazed that they already let the air outside.”
    When the pretty waitress came back with the food, he smiled at her and tried to make small talk; but she’d already written him off, because of the silent snarl, and he finished breakfast feeling like a jerk.
    “I feel like a jerk,” he told Andreno, as they left. He’d overtipped, and that hadn’t helped.
    “Not me,” Andreno said. “I think she sorta took a shine to me. Before you got there, I told her if she could get off for a few minutes, I’d run her around town in my Porsche.”
    “What’d she say?”
    “She said she couldn’t get off.”
    Lucas started to laugh, and a little of the gloom lifted.
    Tisdale was the second-largest town in Mellan County, after Hopewell, the county seat. They drove through on the way to Hopewell, where the sheriff could meet them at 8:30.
    “What is that smell? ” Andreno asked, as they bumped across a set of railroad tracks into the town.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “It ain’t rosebushes.”
    A minute later, they passed what looked like four of the biggest yellow-steel pole barns in the Midwest. Painted neatly on the side of each building was “Logan Poultry Processing,” and under that, in small letters, “Really Pluckin’ Good.”
    “The smell,” Andreno said. “Like a combination of scorched feathers and wet chicken shit.”
    “Which it probably is,” Lucas said. “You know, if you breathe through your mouth…you can still smell it.”
    There was nothing in Tisdale. They drove past