Silent Prey by John Sandford Read Free Book Online

dragged it into the maze of curves . . . .
    Another siren brought him back. It was somewhere down Bleecker, but he couldn’t see the lights. He hurried back to the car, sweating, climbed inside, and looked back through the open door at the mortal remains of Louis Cortese. From any more than a few feet, the body looked like a bum sleeping on the sidewalk. And there were hundreds of bums in the area.
    He risked a last look at the terra-cotta, felt the pull, then tore his eyes away and slammed the door. Hunched over the steering wheel, he headed for home.
     
    Thick picked up the pay phone and dialed the number scrawled on a scrap of paper. He let the phone ring twice,hung up, waited a few seconds, dialed again, let it ring twice more, hung up again.
    Thin was waiting in the car, didn’t speak.
    “It’ll be okay,” Thick said.
    After a very long time, Thin said, “No, it won’t.”
    “It’s fine,” the big man said. “You did good.”
     
    When Bekker got to the Lacey building, he parked the car, went down into the basement, stripped off his clothes, scrubbed his face, changed into a sweat suit. And thought about the killing he’d seen. New York was a dangerous place—someone really ought to do something about it . . . . There was some cleanup to do in the operating theater. He worked at it for ten minutes, with a sponge and paper towels and a can of universal cleaner. When he was done, he wrapped all the paper and put it in the garbage. He remembered the blood just as he was about to turn out the lights. He picked up the bottle and tipped it into a drain, the blood as purple and thick as antifreeze.
    Again he reached for the lights, and saw the four small nubbins of skin sitting on top of an anesthetic tank. Of course, he’d put them there, just a convenient place at the time.
    He picked them up. Shriveled, with the long shiny lashes, they looked like a new species of arachnid, a new one-sided spider. They were, of course, something much more mundane: Cortese’s eyelids. He peered at them in the palm of his hand. He’d never seen them like this, so separate, so disembodied.
    Ha. Another one. Another joke. He looked in the stainless-steel cabinet, laughed and held his belly, and pointed a finger at himself. Disembodied  . . .
    He went back to them, the eyelids. Fascinating.

CHAPTER
4
    Lucas was lying on the roof of his house, the shingles warm against his shoulder blades, eyes closed, not quite snoozing. He’d put down one full flat of green fiberglass shingles and didn’t feel like starting another. A breeze ruffled the fine black hair on his forearms; the humid air was pregnant with an afternoon storm and pink-and-gray thunderheads were popping up to the west.
    With his eyes closed, Lucas could hear the after-work joggers padding along the sidewalk across the street, the rattle of roller blades, radios from passing cars. If he opened his eyes and looked straight up, he might see an eagle soaring on the thermals above the river bluffs. If he looked down, the Mississippi was there, across the street and below the bluff, like a fat brown snake curling in the sunshine. A catsup-colored buoy bobbed in the muddy water, directing boat traffic into the Ford lock.
    It all felt fine, like it could go on forever, up on the roof.
    When the taxi pulled into the driveway, he thought about it instead of looking to see who it was. Nobody heknew was likely to come calling unexpectedly. His life had come to that: no surprises.
    The car door slammed, and her high heels rapped down the sidewalk.
    Lily.
    Her name popped into his head.
    Something about the way she walked. Like a cop, maybe, or maybe just a New Yorker. Somebody who knew about dog shit and cracked sidewalks, who watched where she put her feet. He lay unmoving, with his eyes closed.
    “What are you doing up there?” Her voice was exactly as he remembered, deep for a woman, with a carefully suppressed touch of Brooklyn.
    “Maintaining my property.” A