Mortal Prey

both himself and Weather and a nice family room and a spot for Weather’s piano. The new house was a place he thought he could happily live and die in. Die when he was ninety-three, he hoped. And with any luck, it should be finished before the kid arrived….
    Right now, he didn’t want to leave. Not even with the screaming up on the roof. He wanted to hang around and talk with the foreman and the other guys, but he knew he’d just be sucking up their time. He walked around the first floor once more, thinking about color schemes that would fit with the rock he’d picked for the fireplace. Twenty minutes after he arrived, he dragged himself back to the car.
     
    AND REMEMBERED MALLARD . He took the cell phone out of his pocket and leaned against the Porsche and punched in the number written in the palm of his hand. An old lady went by on her bike, a wicker basket between the handlebars. She waved, and he waved back—a neighbor making her daily trip to the supermarket up the hill on Ford Parkway.
    “Mallard.”
    “Is that pronounced like the duck?” Lucas asked.
    An instant of silence, then Mallard figured it out. “Davenport. How far are you from the airport?”
    “Ten minutes, but I ain’t flying anywhere.”
    “Yeah, you are. You’ve got a Northwest flight out of there in, mmm, two hours and eight minutes for Houston and from there to Cancún, Mexico. Electronic tickets are already under your name. It’s all cleared with your boss, and your federal tax dollars are picking the tab. I’ll meet you at IAH in about six hours, and you can buy some clothes there.”
    “Whoa, whoa. I hate flying.”
    “Sometimes a man’s gotta do…”
    “What’s going on?”
    “Six weeks ago, somebody shot and killed a Mexican guy outside a Cancún restaurant and wounded his girlfriend. The guy who got killed was the youngest son of a Mexican druglord, or a guy who’s supposedly a druglord, or maybe an ex-druglord…something like that. So the Mexicans started sniffing around, and word leaks out to a DEA guy. The shooter wasn’t aiming at the druglord’s son. It was a mistake.”
    “That’s really fascinating, Louis, but Cancún is outside the Minneapolis city limits.”
    “The shooter was going for the girl, see. She was wounded, and the cops put out the word that she was dead, until they could find out what was going on. So after she got out of the hospital, she went out to the druglord’s ranch outside of Mérida—that’s a city down there—for a month, recovering. Then she disappeared. Like a puff of smoke. Everybody was looking for her, and eventually we get this request from the Mexican National Police about these fingerprints they’d picked up at the ranch. We had one print that matched. Came off a bar of soap.”
    Lucas finally caught up. “It’s her?”
    “Clara Rinker,” Mallard said.
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “Get your ass down to Houston, first thing. The DEA has hooked us up with the National Police, and we’re gonna talk to some people who knew her down there. You got a better feel for her than anybody. I want you to hear it.”
    Lucas thought about it for a minute, looking up at the half-completed house. “I can do it for a couple of days,” he said. “But I got stuff going on here, Louis—I mean, serious stuff. My fiancée is gonna be pissed. She’s in the middle of planning the wedding, she really needs me right now, and I’m running off—”
    “Just a couple of days,” Mallard said. “I promise. Listen, I gotta go. I’m just coming up to National right now, and I gotta make some more calls before I get out of the car.”
    “Is Malone coming?”
    “Yeah, she’s coming, but you’re engaged.”
    “I was just asking, Louis. You got something going with her?”
    “No, I don’t. But she does. Have something going. I gotta hang up. See you in Houston.”
     
    WEATHER WOULD BE UPSET , Lucas thought, looking back at the construction project. The house was only halfway done and needed constant supervision. The wedding planning was completely disorganized, and needed somebody to stay on top of it. Finally, there was a political pie-fight going on at City Hall, as a half-dozen candidates jockeyed for position in the Democratic primary for mayor. The political ramifications of the fight were severe—the chief was already dead meat, her job gone. Lucas, as a political deputy-chief, was on his way out with the chief. But with a little careful maneuvering, they might be