Prey #13 - Mortal Prey by John Sandford

Author:John Sandford [Sandford, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780425189863
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2003-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

12

THE PAIN PUSHED THROUGH THE SLEEP like an arrow, and he rose to the surface and tried to sit up and stretch his right leg, but the cramp held on and got deeper, and Lucas groaned, “Man, man, man-o-man-o-man,” and tried to knead it out, but the cramp held on for fifteen seconds, twenty, then began to slacken. When it was nearly gone, he climbed gingerly out of bed and took a turn around the hotel room.

His calf still ached, as though with a muscle pull. He sniffed, and looked around, getting oriented: He was on the eighth floor of a Holiday Inn outside of Springfield, Missouri. Like most Holiday Inns, it was nice enough, neat and clean, but still . . . smelled a little funny. Nothing he could quite pin down.

Years before, in college, he’d ridden buses down to Madison to see a particular University of Wisconsin coed, and had noticed that there was always the faint snap of urine in the air, and assumed that it was . . . urine. Then one day on a longer trip, on an express bus, they’d all been asked to get off in Memphis so the bus could be cleaned. When he got back on, one of the cleaners was still at work, and the urine smell was not only fresh, but intense and close by—and he realized that the ever-present urine smell was nothing more than the cleaning agent, whatever it was, and not the end product of somebody pissing down the seats. He hadn’t ridden those buses in years, but he could still summon up the memory of the odor.

As he limped around the hotel room, it occurred to him that the funny smell in Holiday Inns—something you could never quite put a label on—might be built-in. If it was, he thought, they should build in something else.

He stopped the circular march long enough to click on the TV, hoping to pick up the weather. He got CNN by default, and as he was about to click around for the Weather Channel, the blond newsreader turned expectantly to her left, and the shimmering image of a St. Louis reporter came up, and under his ruddy round face, the label “Sandy White, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”

“. . . sounded distraught, and while people may certainly have no sympathy at all for Miz Rinker, I personally find the plight of her brother, Gene, to be intensely painful. He was arrested and charged on a crime that usually produces something on the order of a traffic ticket in California, and here he is being dragged across the nation and exhibited to television cameras as if he were a criminal mastermind. In fact, Betty, there is good evidence that Gene Rinker is mentally impaired, and may not even understand why he is locked up in a special high-security cell in one of the hardest jails in Missouri. . . .”

“Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said to the TV, as the two heads continued to talk.

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