Mortal Prey

back to the shopping center, where an ambulance was screaming out of sight and Sally, covered with blood, said, “The guy in the garage was shot in the ear and was squirting blood and I, and I, and I…”
    “Okay, okay,” Lucas said. “She’s in a Dodge van, a dark van, maybe dark blue….”
    Mallard came up and said, “A woman in a van…There’s a woman in a van at a bar who said her husband was shot.”
    “Let’s go,” Lucas said. “That’s her….”
    And they went roaring off in two more cop cars, a night for roaring off, Lucas thought, and on the way, Sally said, “You hit Rinker hard. I saw her go down and there’s blood all over the place, she’s gonna bleed to death if she doesn’t get to a hospital.”
    “What color was the blood?”
    “What?”
    “What color was the blood? Dark or bright red, or was there any green stuff in it?”
    “Just…purple. Why?”
    “Real bright red is lungs, but I don’t think I hit her that high. Green is guts. If it’s nothing but purple, it may just be meat. If it’s just meat, she could stay out. If I hit her anyplace in the body cavity, though, she’ll need a hospital. I’m shooting Speer Lawman JHPs.”
    At the bar, the mother had collapsed, and the young girl seemed to be drifting toward a trance state.
    Lucas said, “We gotta get these people to a hospital,” and the bartender said, “Ambulance on the way,” and Sally told the woman, “Your husband’s not dead. He’s on the way to the hospital, but he’s not hurt bad, he was only shot in the ear, and he’s gonna be okay.”
    The woman shook her head and curled into a tighter ball.
    Lucas stepped away and looked down the street and said, “We’re losing her. We had her. We’re losing her right now.”

25
    MALLARD PULLED TOGETHER ALL THE local police forces and had them do a grid search, starting around the shopping center, checking parked cars, any car that looked unusual or out-of-the-way; looking for blood.
    The ID came back on the Benz, and they went for Honus Johnson’s house, and pounced on it with a full entry crew, but there was nobody home—nobody alive. They eventually found Johnson in the freezer and the California car in the garage, and they got Rinker’s clothes and her guns, but no money, no passport, no paper.
    Mallard, frenzied, crazy, said, “I’m not sure where we’re at. It all comes down to how hard you hit her.”
    “I can’t tell you that,” Lucas said. “I knocked her down and she got right back up. I might have hit her in her left leg, because she was dragging a leg, but I’m not sure.”
    “Lot of blood,” Sally said again. “Lot of blood.”
     
    THEY WENT AFTER Treena Ross, but when Rinker shouted “Cops!” she hadn’t immediately dumped the phone. She’d used it to call her attorney, and her attorney had come down to the hospital, where Mallard’s agents had picked her up. When Mallard, Lucas, and Sally showed up at the hospital, the attorney said to Mallard, “Is it true that you were eavesdropping on conversations between my client and myself?”
    They had been, of course. They’d stayed on the phone from the time Rinker’s call came in through the call to the attorney. Mallard had nodded and said, “Yes.”
    “That’s a violation of—”
    “Bullshit. I have a law degree, sir, and it wasn’t a violation of anything. If your client doesn’t wish to tell us what really happened inside that dome tonight, we’ll see that’s she’s charged with premeditated murder and we’ll recommend that the state seek the death penalty. So what do you want to do?”
    “Charge her,” the attorney said, “or we walk now. Either way, she says nothing.”
    “Then we’ll charge her.”
    “That’s certainly your privilege.”
    They smiled at each other, nodded, and Mallard said, “I’ll go make the call.”
     
    LATER THAT NIGHT , he said to Lucas, “I don’t think we’ll get Treena. We were focused on Rinker and we didn’t process her right. We didn’t keep her under control.”
    “What happened?”
    “Well, we got the phone, and she says the phone was her husband’s, she was carrying it because he was wearing a tux and didn’t have a place for it. And we took tape samples from her hands and arms looking for nitrites, and didn’t find any. I think she used a plastic bag or a piece of cloth to cover her hand and sleeve when she fired the gun. She was wandering around in the hospital before we put a hold on her; she was in the