Phantom Prey

it?”
    Fairy: “I call him. I tell him that I heard that the cops were coming for him on the California dope warrant. I bet he’ll run. I bet he will.”
    Alyssa: “He’ll recognize my voice.”
    Loren, on the opposite chair, shook his head: “No, he won’t. You two don’t sound much alike. Fairy sounds younger, more perky, like a Valley girl. Her voice is pitched higher. You don’t sound much alike at all.”
    “Really?” Alyssa said.
    “Really,” Loren said. “So. When do we do all this?”
    Alyssa looked at her watch: “Can’t do Frank until we’ve done the car. We’ve got just enough light to scout that right now.”
    “Then we could even do it tonight,” Fairy said.
    They took the Benz, and Loren sat in the back, where he could watch Alyssa’s eyes through the rearview mirror. “I like the idea of tipping Frank so he runs,” he said, as they headed out the driveway. “But if you’re the only one that Davenport’s told about the warrant, then he’ll figure out that you’re the one who told Frank.”
    Alyssa nodded. “Let me think about it.”
    “Gossip,” Fairy said a minute later.
    “What?” Alyssa asked.
    “You could talk to Gina. She’s the worst gossip on the staff, and she goes around to all the spas. You could tell her confidentially about Frank—ask if he’s been giving or selling dope to any of the customers. She’ll tell other people—it’ll be all over the place by the end of the day. Then, if Frank is tipped, it could be any of the staff members, clients, who knows?”
    “Excellent,” Loren said.
    Alyssa said, grudgingly, “It’s an idea.” And a second later, “That would work.”
    The river-bridge area wasn’t going to work for burning the car, they decided—the fire would be too visible to too many people on the highway; too many cell phones. It’d be reported within seconds. They gave it up after driving across the Wakota Bridge a couple of times, and instead began probing the area south of I-494, along the Mississippi.
    The South St. Paul airport, where the car was hidden in Hunter Austin’s hangar, sits on the top level of the Mississippi’s western valley wall. Down the hill east of the airport, Concord Street runs parallel to the river, and on the river side of the street, a complex of railroad-to-truck freight terminals are jumbled along dead-end streets between the river and Concord.
    “If somebody was planning to burn a car, this would be one place to do it,” Loren said, as they probed back into the complex of streets and warehouses. “You’d have to run less than a mile. You’d only be exposed for maybe ten minutes.”
    “It’s better than I thought,” Alyssa admitted. “We do it like this: we drive the Benz to the hangar, leave it, drive the little car down here. Right behind that pallet yard, along the fence, where the fire would be hidden from the street by the warehouse. Touch the fire off, and we run straight down the road for what . . . maybe two hundred yards? We hook around that garage, cross Concord, and head up the hill to the airport. If we’re lucky, we’ll be across the street before anybody sees the fire.”
    “Unless there are watchmen,” Loren said.
    “Watchmen would be inside, not out. I’ll look for lights . . . can’t be out here without lights. We can always revise at the last minute, drive around the block and come back, if we have to.”
    “You could hurt yourself running in the dark.”
    “Not if I stay in the middle of the street. There are enough lights around that I should be okay.”
    They drove the route, and Loren pointed out a couple of potholes left over from winter. “If you step in one of those, you’ll sprain your ankle. You could break a leg.”
    Alyssa looked back along the road. “They’re both on the left side. I’ll stay on the right.”
    They followed the approach up the hill to the airport, and the road in. Access to the private hangar area was through a card-controlled electronic gate, no problem to a person on foot, who could simply duck under it. Again, there should be enough ambient light to work with.
    “Can’t do it in the middle of the night, though,” Loren said. “If people see you running then, they will notice.”
    “So, nine o’clock.”
    “We’ve got the gas,” Fairy said. “Let’s do it tonight.”
    “What about the knife?” Loren asked.
    “Soon as we can—before Davenport has too much time to think about everything,” Alyssa said. “I asked his