Certain prey

'Are they tapping Carmel?'

'Maybe. They say they're not – yet – but they could be lying about it.'

'The FBI? Lying?'

'Yeah, yeah… you get anything?'

'I got about twenty names,' Sherrill said.

'Lot of names.'

'Yeah. But if there's a Mafia-connected guy in St. Louis who can order these hits, his name is almost for-sure on the list.'

'So what?'

'I'm getting to that,' she said. 'You know how you guys were looking at where all those checks came from? And you figured the person sending them must come from southwest Missouri or eastern Kansas or those other places?'

'Northern Arkansas or northern Oklahoma…'

'So if we do an analysis of these, Mafia guys, who are all like these uptown dudes wearing loafers with no socks and driving Cadillacs… and if we find one of them has a lot of calls going out to some farm in East Jesus, Oklahoma. ..'

Lucas looked at her for a second and said, 'That's good.'

'You like it?'

'First decent idea anybody's had in a week.' He pulled open his desk drawer and found Mallard's card. 'Even better, it involves dealing with bureaucrats from the phone company: I mean, this is Mallard's life.'

Mallard liked it: he had three agents working on it overnight, and called Lucas back in the middle of the afternoon, the next day. He was, Lucas thought, a teeny bit breathless.

'Have you ever heard of Allen Kent?'

'No…'

'He's this Italian guy – his father's name was Kent, he was nobody, but his mother's family was tied right to the top of the St. Louis and the Chicago Mafia families, back when Sam Giancana was running the world.'

'Who's he been calling?'

'Well, he calls all over the place, he's a booze distributor. He calls every little goddamn bar in the Midwest. But he's got an AT amp;T calling card which he uses when he's out-of-town, and we analyzed all those calls for the past ten years and guess what?'

'He's actually Lee Harvey Oswald and he's holding JFK in a cave.'

'No. But you know we have all these Mafia-related hits attributed to this woman.

In each case,-Kent was making calls from Wichita, Kansas, between twenty-four and thirty days before each hit. He'd spend two days there, each time, every time. Now, you figure he goes out to Wichita to meet the shooter and give her the assignment, and maybe talk about information she needs. Then she needs time to do some recon -we know she's careful, we know she's watching the target for a while before she moves. And maybe she needs some time to get oriented in each new city… and time to drive there, if she drives like we think she does.'

'You think she's from Wichita,' Lucas said.

'We think it's a possibility. We even think we might have a name.'

'Yeah? Whatisit?'

'John Lopez.'

Lucas grappled with the name for a moment. 'John?'

'Yeah. A guy, disguised as a woman, which makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. A woman hitman for the Mafia? Come on. Never happen. We found him in our data base: he's Puerto

Rican, five-five, one hundred and thirty pounds, so he could be a woman. He's a mean little bastard, too. Back a few years ago, there was a massive amount of cocaine coming in through the south coast of Puerto Rico, and then it was transhipped by plane to the states, because there's no customs on Puerto Rican flights – it's an internal flight. He was one of the mules, hauling it up to

Chicago, taking the money back. When he was busted, he gave up all the Puerto

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…'