Night Victims. John Lutz

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СКАЧАТЬ What do you think?”

      “The man looks like he shouldn’t climb stairs; the woman doesn’t look big enough to open an olive jar. I don’t like the idea of you having to depend on them, maybe for your life.”

      “The man’s a good cop with a lot left in him.”

      “He looks like he should use what remaining energy he has to work out in a gym and try to lose some weight.”

      “He’s about to retire.”

      Anne shook her head. “Don’t you know what always happens in crime novels and movies to cops who are about to retire?”

      “If this were a book or movie,” Horn said, “I’d be chief.”

      She frowned. The parallel lines again, deeper with each year, with each new worry in her life. Her cop husband, her job, the lawsuit against the hospital, and now her pensioned-off husband’s involvement in a murder case. “I really don’t like the feel of this, Thomas. You sure they’re going to be okay?”

      “They’ll do just fine,” Horn said, grinning to show his confidence. “A wheezy fat man with savvy, and a feisty Cajun. I could do a lot worse.”

      Anne smiled. “Isn’t that profiling?”

      “Full frontal nudity wasn’t possible,” Horn said, and kissed away the lines in her cool forehead.

      The last glance back at Horn and his wife in the doorway as the car pulled away stuck in Paula’s mind. The alpha male with his mate, made clever by experience and still plenty able. Like some rock-hard Cajuns she’d known. Her uncles, who’d roamed the Louisiana swamp with their shotguns modified to fire solid lead slugs, poached for whatever could be sold or eaten, the bigger the better. Hunters, southern version.

      Horn was the northern version. Despite his obvious sophistication, the image of him in the deep woods in camouflage, armed with a high-powered rifle, still and silent and sighting through the scope at a distant and elusive moose, persisted.

      Poor moose.

      6

      Central America, 1998

      Hector Ruiz carried his ancient but well-oiled Kalishnikov automatic rifle loosely by the barrel, not in any way recommended in arms manuals. His fellow guerilla fighter, Armand Mora, stood beside him in the deep shade of the forest canopy. They were exhausted after spending the night in the forest. Armand had a slight shrapnel wound in his thigh from when a grenade had detonated near him during their fight the day before with government troops who were searching for them and trying to cut off their escape route back into the hills. To make matters worse, an American commando force was rumored to be operating in the area.

      Hector was perspiring heavily and the palms of both his hands were scraped. He used his free hand to brush bits of bark and leaf from his clothes as both men stared at the object he had lowered from the tree using a rope.

      The object was the body of a dead girl no more than thirteen. She was wrapped in mud-caked leaves held fast by vines wound around her thin form. The leaves and mud were dark, discolored by blood.

      Last night Hector, standing watch, had looked up to find the moon and see if it might foretell rain. He’d noticed a dark, still object high in the branches of the tree, and his heart leaped; for a second he thought he might be looking at a government sniper. But there was a looseness about the dark bulk above, as if it weren’t lying on or affixed to a limb but might be tied there, suspended.

      In the morning he’d climbed high into the tree to satisfy his curiosity, only to raise more questions.

      “What must have done this to her?”

      “It looks as if she was stabbed to death,” Armand said, his dark eyes wide. “Stabbed many times. See the slits in the leaves?”

      Hector slung his Kalishnikov over his shoulder and nodded. “She was dangling in a kind of sling made of vines. This poor child…who would do such a thing?”

      “Not the Americans. Probably the government troops. They’re bastards! Think of some of the things they did to those of us they captured.”

      “But this young girl—”

      Hector stopped talking, astounded, as Armand’s right ear exploded from his head. Armand’s eyes wore the vacant gaze of the dead as he dropped straight down to lie beside the girl.

      Hector whirled to run, but the automatic weapons fire that had erupted from the surrounding forest brought him to his knees, killing him before his upper body struck the ground.

      7

      New York, 2003

      Pattie Redmond hung up the phone behind the counter at Styles and Smiles and looked pensively out the window at the backed-up morning traffic on Second Avenue.

      The guy she’d just talked to, Gary, was still a question, so maybe she shouldn’t have agreed to meet him for drinks tonight at the same place they’d met last night. It was a bar in the Village, where she and Ellen had gone to pass time before seeing a movie. Pattie’s mom, who lived up in White Plains, had cautioned her about meeting men in bars enough times. Still cautioned her regularly over the phone. A young girl living alone shouldn’t take chances, her mother would tell her. Some things, she would say ominously to Pattie, never change. Like Pattie might meet some nice fella in church, if she went to church.

      Pattie had to smile. She was twenty-four—not so young, at least in her mind. Pretty enough, she knew, with her long auburn hair and too-wide mouth with white, even teeth that almost didn’t look real. Lips a little too large, like they’d been collagened. Gary said it was her smile that attracted him.

      This guy, Pattie had thought last night in the bar, looked like something out of a soap opera. He was tall enough, darkly handsome, and perhaps partly Hispanic—the sexy part. And his suit looked expensive, maybe even Armani. Pattie knew clothes; she’d learned about them working here at Styles and Smiles, which sold men’s as well as women’s apparel.

      Ellen had listened to their conversation and afterward told her that Gary had a practiced line of bullshit. Sure he did. Didn’t they all? He was single—said he was, anyway. And he’d been straightforward enough, just walking over and asking if he could buy her a drink. Ellen thought he might have assumed they were prostitutes, the way they were perched at the bar on those high stools and surveying the room, and for a few seconds Pattie thought the same. She’d even found herself toying with the possibilities. In her mind, toying.

      Line of bullshit? Maybe. But it turned out Gary was more interested in listening to Pattie’s story than in telling his. She hadn’t told him where she lived, but she had mentioned where she worked. So he’d called and—

      “…forty percent off each of these, or if you buy two?” a short redheaded woman holding a blue blouse was asking. “The sign says buy two, get forty percent off.”

      “You don’t get the forty percent off if you only buy one,” Pattie said.

      “But if you buy two, do you get forty percent off each of them, or off the total price?”

      “It’s the same thing,” СКАЧАТЬ