Certain prey

Rican links in return for immunity and protection, but claimed he didn't know who he was dealing with in Chicago… We now think it might have been the

Mafia, and that's where he hooked up with Allen Kent.'

'How'd he get to Wichita?'

'Witness protection. God help us, but we might have been protecting the biggest professional killer in the states.'

Lucas felt slightly deflated: the Feebs were gonna make the bust. 'Are you going out there?'

'Absolutely. I'm taking everything I got with me. Lopez supposedly runs a flower shop out there, like a longtime hood is gonna run a flower shop.' Mallard laughed, and Lucas looked at the phone: Mallard seemed to be running a little hot.

'Mind if I watch?'

'Hell, no. I'm going out this afternoon, I'm leaving here in five minutes. We're staying at the Holiday Inn, uh, the Holiday Inn East. We got a warrant going on a wire tap, and we're getting all of his phone records now… Listen, I gotta run.'

'All right,' Lucas said. 'I'll see you down there, probably tonight, if nothing comes up. I'm driving down.'

'You could fly in a couple of hours…'

'Yeah, yeah, I'm driving,' Lucas said.

Lucas was a longtime Porsche driver. He enjoyed driving the car up to a couple of hundred miles, but it was not a long-distance cruiser. Six hundred and fifty miles would leave him both shaken and stirred. Besides, the Porsche needed servicing.

'Look,' he told his Porsche dealer on the telephone, 'You're gonna charge me an arm and a leg, so I oughta get something decent for a loaner. I know damn well that you've got that BMW on the lot, because I saw Larry showing it to a guy.. . yeah, yeah, I don't want aVolkswagen Passat. How about this: I'll pay mileage.

I'll pay you fifteen cents a mile, and I buy all the gas. I'm driving to

Wichita, which is six hundred and fifty miles, more or less, so that's thirteen hundred miles, you'll get a couple of hundred bucks for three or four days, and then I won't be hassling you about your slow work on the Porsche

… Come on, goddamnit. Whattaya mean, fifty cents? The government doesn't pay fifty cents, and that's supposed to cover gasoline…'

He got the 740IL, a long black four-door with a cockpit like an F-16's, grey leather seats, a CD-player in the trunk and sixty-one thousand miles on the clock, for twenty-five cents a mile. He was two miles out of the dealership when he tripped the ill-placed hood-cover latch with his left foot, without knowing what he'd done, and the hood began rattling up and down. Fearing that the hood was about to blow back his face, he swerved to the edge of the highway and risked his neck to re-latch it. He tripped the hood lever again, five minutes later, and again took the car to the shoulder. This time, he called the Porsche dealer, who said, 'You're tripping the hood with your left foot. Stop doing that.'

Lucas found the hood latch and said, 'That's a good place for it.'

Thirty miles out of town, a yellow light popped on the left dash that said,

Check Engine, and he took it to the side again, fearing that he was about to blow a rod. He was still within cell phone distance, and he called the dealer again, who said the light meant that the emission system wasn't working quite right. 'Don't worry about it; it doesn't mean anything.'

'On any other car, "check engine" means all your oil just ran out on the road,'

Lucas said.

'That's not any car,' the Porsche guy said. 'When the oil runs out on the road, that one says STOP! In big red letters.'

'So the light's gonna be on all trip?'

'That's right, pal. You wanted it, you got it,' the dealer said, without a shred of sympathy.

'There's this whistling noise…'

'The windshield's not quite right. We're gonna try to reseal it when you get back.'

'I'm beginning to think this thing's a piece of shit,' Lucas grumbled.

'What do you want for sixty-five thousand?' the Porsche guy asked. 'You shoulda took the Volkswagen.'

But the car was comfortable, and certainly looked good. He made the six hundred and fifty miles to Wichita in nine hours, whipping through Des Moines and Kansas

City, pausing only for gas and a sack of hard-shell Taco Supremes at a Taco

Bell. He got a room at a Best Western, called Mallard's office in Washington, where an after-hours secretary said she'd relay his number to Mallard. Mallard called five minutes later: 'We're downtown at a place called Joseph's. Let me read the menu to you…'

Lucas ordered a steak, medium, baked potato without sour cream, and a Diet Coke.

He found Joseph's fifteen minutes later, just as the waiter was delivering the food to Mallard and an angular grey-haired woman named Malone. She was just about his age, Lucas thought, somewhere in the murky forties.

'Malone is our legal specialist,' Mallard said, as he went to work on the steak.

'She keeps track of the taps and the warrants and all that, and talks to the judge when we need to talk to him.'

'Are you an agent?' Lucas asked.

Malone had just pushed a tiny square of beef into her mouth, and instead of answering, opened the left side of her pin-stripe jacket so Lucas could see the butt of a black automatic pistol.

'Nice accessories,' Lucas said. Trying a little bit.

'Cop charm works really well on me,' Malone said, after she swallowed. 'I get all a-twitter.'

'You wanna stop that?' Mallard asked. 'I hate middle-aged courtship rituals.'

'What's his problem?' Lucas asked Malone.

'Recently divorced,' Malone said, tipping her head at Mallard. 'Still loves her.'

'Sorry,' Lucas said.

'Not true, anyway. I'm all done with that,' Mallard said, and for one small second he looked so miserable that Lucas wanted to pat him on the back and tell him it'd be okay; but Lucas didn't believe it would be, and Mallard wouldn't either. 'Besides,' Mallard added, 'I'm not all alone in that condition.'

'If you're talking to me, you're talking to the wrong person,' Malone said. 'I don't like any of them.'

'Them?' Lucas asked.

'Four-time loser,' Mallard said, jabbing his fork at Malone.

'Jesus,' Lucas said. 'In the FBI?'

'If it hadn't been for the second one, I'd be a deputy director by now,' Malone said.

'What'd he do?' Lucas asked.

'He was an actor.'

'Bad actor,' Mallard said.

'No, he was a good actor; he just couldn't stay away from the nude scenes,'

Malone said. 'The killer was when the Washington Post interviewed him, nude, and he mentioned he was married to an FBI agent.'

'Not the best career move,' Mallard said. 'We were all still wearing white shirts.'

'You got number five figured out yet?' Lucas asked.

'Not yet,' Malone said. 'But I'm looking around.'

'This is what it is,' Mallard said, breaking into the dialogue, 'Is that we've got nine guys here, and we're watching Lopez twenty-four hours a day. He's got diree phones, we're listening to all of them, and we've already gotten a couple of ambiguous calls. I mean, people talking in circles about something besides flowers. Nothing that would implicate him, but something's going on…'

'Could I hear them? Your tapes?'

'Sure. I've got an edited tape you can listen to tonight. Tomorrow, when he moves, we'll hook you up with him.'

'Good enough,' Lucas said. 'I don't want him to see me, though, not if he's been in and out of the Cities. I've been on TV a couple of times with this stuff… he might've caught it.'

'You must be sort of a celebrity, then,' Malone said. 'A local hero.'

'Come on, guys,' Mallard said. 'Please? Malone?'

Mallard sprawled on the bed in his motel room while Lucas sat in the single easy chair and Malone perched against a credenza. They listened while voices said, 'I thought I'd stop by today… Not much point… Really? Then when do you think would be a good time?… Gotta be by tomorrow, unless something happened on the way down. I haven't heard anything – I could give you a ring if you want. .. That'd be good, I'm getting, you know…'

Lucas said, 'He's peddling dope.'