Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
Mortal Prey

Mortal Prey

Titel: Mortal Prey
Autoren: John Sandford
Vom Netzwerk:
organized crime, to the Mafia. A minor person, he was not important. We are asking more questions of our police, and our police are talking with the Americans. We will find out more, sooner or later.”
    “When you find them,” Rinker said through her teeth, her cold eyes only inches from the old man’s, “when you find them, kill them.”
    His eyes held hers for a moment, doing an assessment of the woman he knew as Cassie McLain. They didn’t know each other well, but the old man knew that Paulo’s involvement with her was more than casual; knew she’d been pregnant with one of his own grandchildren, this tidy blond American with the perfect Spanish. After the moment, he nodded. “Something will be done,” he said.
    “This dead American at the airstrip,” she said, at the end of the audience. “Do you even know where he was from?”
    “That we know,” he said. He closed his eyes for a minute, parsing the information in his head. He smelled lightly of garlic, and had fuzzy ears, like a gentle Yoda. There was a legend that in his early years he’d had an informer hung upside down by his ankles, and had then lit a fire under his head. According to the legend, the informer stopped screaming only when his skull exploded. Now Mejia opened his eyes and said, “He lived in a town in Missouri, called Normandy Lake. A woman who lived there told the Missouri police that he’d gone to Cancún on vacation. She said she would come for the body, but she didn’t come. When the police went back to the house, she had gone. She’d packed all her personal belongings and had gone away.”
    “That’s crazy,” Rinker said, shaking her head. But her brain was moving now, cutting through the glue that had held her since the shooting, and she was touched by a cool tongue of fear. After a moment, she said, “I don’t want to go home. I’m a little frightened. If it would be all right, I would like to go to the ranch until I can walk. Then I think I will go back to the States.”
    “You are welcome to stay as long as you wish,” the old man said. He smiled at her. “You may stay forever, if you wish. The friend of my baby.”
    She smiled back. “Thank you, Papa, but Cancún…” She made the same figure eight in the air as he had. “Cancún is Paulo. I think it would be better to go away when I am well.”
    One of the old man’s bodyguards wheeled her back out to the BMW, and as the car pulled away, she looked at the driver’s shoulders and the back of his head and realized that she now knew more about what happened at Gino’s than the old man did.
     
    SHE KNEW THAT the bullet had been aimed not at Paulo, but at her.
    If the old man found out that his baby boy had been killed because of Rinker, and that Rinker had never told them of the danger—she hadn’t expected it, hadn’t believed it could happen—then maybe the old man’s anger would be directed at her.
    She shivered at the thought, but not too much, because Rinker was as cold as the old man. Instead of worrying, she began planning. She couldn’t do anything until she got her strength back, which might take some time. She’d benefited from the report put out by the Mejia family and the Mexican police that she’d been killed along with Paulo—at the time, they’d done it simply to protect her from a possible cleanup attempt if it turned out that she’d seen the shooter.
    The story would serve her well enough. The St. Louis goombahs didn’t have anything going in Mexico, as far as she knew, and the only information they would have gotten would have come from the newspapers.
    On the other hand, with the old man pushing his drug-world contacts, sooner or later the truth would come out. By that time, she had to have made her move.
    Before she talked to the old man, she hadn’t had anything to do; now she’d be busy. As Cassie McLain, she’d retired, and was living on her investments. As Clara Rinker, she had to move money, retrieve documents, talk to old acquaintances across the border.
    She had to be healthy to do it all.
     
    RINKER SPENT A MONTH at the old man’s ranch, living in a bedroom in the main house, with an armed watcher to follow her around. The middle brother, Dominic, visited every third day, arriving at noon as regular as clockwork, to bring her up to date on the family’s investigation.
    All the time at the ranch, she waited for her image of Paulo to fade. It never did. To the very end of her stay, she could smell him, she
Vom Netzwerk:

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher