Free Mortal Prey by John Sandford Page A

he’d been paid, and said, “Cast me off, there.” Tom tossed the bowline back in the Whaler, and they drifted apart again. “See you,” Juan called. “Maybe got something week after next.”
    “Call me,” Tom said.
    That was pretty much all there was to it. The Lawtons gave the body a peanut-butter-and-tangerine-marmalade sandwich, which she’d ordered in advance, through Duarte. They talked in a desultory way, as they loafed through the night. The body had a nice husky whiskey voice, and Tom thought if she kept talking he might get a little wood on the sound alone, though he’d never tell Michelle that. Tom turned on the running lights a few miles north of the rendezvous. They saw boats coming and going; nothing came close.
    By morning, they were off Long Beach again, and they took their time going in. There was always a chance that they’d be stopped by the Coasties, but the passenger’s documents were good and the boat was clean. Tom had no idea who the body was—his one really salient criminal characteristic was a determined lack of curiosity about his cargoes.
    He was not even interested in why an American wanted to be smuggled back into the country. There were any number of people who preferred to come and go without unnecessary time-wasting bureaucratic entanglements, and Tom really didn’t blame them. We were the home of the free, were we not?
    A few minutes after eight o’clock in the morning, the body walked down the dock, a cheap TWA flight bag on her shoulder. The Lawtons were still on the boat, stowing equipment. The $3,000 that the body left behind was taped to Michelle’s butt, just in case. Michelle last saw the other woman walking toward the corner of the ship’s store. When she looked back again, a moment later, the body was gone.
     
    RINKER CAUGHT A CAB to LAX, and from LAX, another to Venice, and from Venice, after getting a quick lunch on the beach and walking along some narrow, canal-lined streets for a while, watching her back, she caught another one out to the industrial flats in Downey. The driver didn’t much want to go there, but when Rinker showed him a fifty, he took the money and dropped her in front of Jackie Burke’s store. Burke ran a full-time custom hotrod shop on the front side of his warehouse, and a part-time stolen-car chop shop in the back. Rinker had once solved a desperate problem for him.
    Burke was a chunky man, strong, dark-complected, balding, tough as a lug nut; his store smelled of spray paint and welding fumes. He was standing beside the cash register, sweating and talking over a hardboard counter to a young Japanese-American kid about putting a nitrox tank in the kid’s Honda.
    He didn’t recognize Rinker for a moment. Women didn’t often come into the shop, and he sort of nodded and said, “Be with you in a minute,” and went back to the kid and then suddenly looked back. Rinker lifted her sunglasses and smiled. Burke said, “Holy shit,” and then to the kid, “Let me put you with one of my guys. I gotta talk to this lady.”
    He held up a finger, stuck his head through a door in the back, yelled, “Hey Chuck, c’mere.” Chuck came, Burke put him with the kid, then led Rinker into the back and to a ten-by-twenty-foot plywood-enclosed office in the back. He shut the door behind them and said, again, “Holy shit. Clara. I hope, uh…”
    “I need a clean car that’ll run good, with good papers. Something dull like a Taurus or some kind of Buick. Sort of in a hurry,” she said. “I was hoping you could help me.”
    His eyes drifted toward the doors, as though they might suddenly splinter. “Are the cops…?”
    “No.” She smiled again. “No cops. I just got back in the country, and I need a car. Not that you should mention it, if you happen to bump into a cop.”
    “No problem there,” Burke said. He relaxed a couple of degrees. He liked Clara all right, but she was not a woman he would choose to hang out with. “I can get you