Silent Prey

asses.”
    “Boy . . .” Lily shook her head. “I’ve got a pretty good line on what O’Dell’s doing, but I don’t know anything like that. And I’m not holding out on you, Richard. I’m really not.”
    “And I’m telling you, he’s behind it.”
    Lily leaned forward. “Give me a few days. I’ll find out. Let me ask some questions. If he’s doing it, I’ll tell you.”
    “You will?”
    “Of course I will.”
    “All right.” He grinned at her. “It’s, like, when you’re a lieutenant and down, you’ve got friends and lovers. When you’re a captain or above, you’ve got allies. You’re my first ally-lover.”
    She didn’t smile back. She said: “Richard.”
    The smile died on his face. “Mmm?”
    “Before I risk my ass—you’re not Robin Hood?”
    “No.”
    “Swear it,” she said, looking into his eyes.
    “I swear it,” he said, without flinching, looking straight back at her. “I don’t believe there is such a guy. Robin Hood is a goddamn computer artifact.”
    “How?”
    He shrugged. “Flip a nickel five hundred times. The events are random, but you’ll find patterns. Flip it another five hundred times, you’ll still find patterns. Different ones. But the pattern doesn’t mean anything. Same thing with these computer searches—you can always find patterns if you look at enough numbers. But the pattern’s in your head; it’s not real. Robin Hood is a figment of O’Dell’s little tiny imagination.”
    Her eyes narrowed: “How’d you find out so much about what he’s doing?”
    “Hey, I’m in intelligence,” he said, mildly insulted by the question. “The word gets around. I thought his little game was pretty harmless until my name started popping up.”
    She thought about it a minute, then nodded. “All right. Let me do some sneaking around.”

CHAPTER
22
    Lucas called Darius Pike in Charleston and gave him the plane’s arrival time, then met Sloan and Del downtown. They hit a sports bar, talking, remembering. Lucas was long out of the departmental gossip—who was kissing whose ass, who was shagging who. Sloan went home at one o’clock and Lucas and Del wound up in an all-night diner on West Seventh in St. Paul.
    “ . . . shit, I said, gettin’ married was okay,” Del said. “But then she started talking about a kid. She’s, like, forty.”
    “Ain’t the end of the world,” Lucas said.
    “Do I look like Life with Father? ” Del asked. He spread his arms: he was wearing a jeans jacket with a black sleeveless tank top. An orange and black insignia on the sleeve of the jacket said, “ Harley-Davidson —Live to Ride, Ride to Live.” He had a five-day beard, but his eyes were as relaxed and clear as Lucas had ever seen them.
    “You’re looking pretty good, actually,” Lucas said. “A year ago, man, you were ready for the junk heap.”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    “So why not have a kid?”
    “Jesus.” Del looked out the window. “I kinda been asking myself that.”
    Del peeled off at three o’clock and Lucas went home, opened all the windows in the house, and began writing checks to cover the bills that had arrived with the mail. At five, finished with the bills, and tired, he closed and locked all the windows, went back to the bedroom and repacked his overnight bag. He called a cab, had the driver stop at a SuperAmerica all-night store, bought two jelly doughnuts and a cup of coffee, and rode out to the airport.
    The plane taxied away from the terminal at six-thirty. The stewardess asked if he wanted juice and eggs.
    “I’m gonna try to go to sleep,” he said. “Please, please don’t wake me up . . . .”
    The fear got him as the takeoff run began, the sense of helplessness, the lack of control. He closed his eyes, fists clenched. Got off the ground with body English. Held his breath until the engine noise changed and the climb rate slowed. Cranked back the seat. Tried to sleep. A while later, he didn’t know how long, he realized that his mouth tasted like chicken feathers, and his neck hurt. The stewardess was shaking his shoulder: “Could you bring your seat upright, please?”
    He opened his eyes, disoriented. “I was sleeping,” he groaned.
    “Yes,” she said in her most neutral voice. “But we’re approaching Atlanta, and your seat . . .”
    “Atlanta?” He couldn’t believe it. He never slept on airplanes. The plane’s left wing dipped, and they turned on it, and, looking down, he could see the city of