Broken Prey

carrying guns when they do it. And they got dogs. I think it’s best if a couple of us came along.”
    “The sheriff told you what we’re doing?” Lucas asked.
    “Yup. That’s another reason.”
    “Glad to have you,” Lucas said.
     
    YOUNGIE WAS AS TALL as Lucas, maybe sixty, gray haired with a Marlboro-man mustache. He was leaning on the front fender of his car, smoking a cigarette, when Lucas came off the interstate and pulled in behind him.
    “Nice truck,” he said, when Lucas got out. Youngie had cool blue eyes like Lucas’s own, and they seemed slightly amused.
    “I got it for the Magic Fingers seats,” Lucas said, looking back at the blue Lexus. “Keeps you company on the long hauls.”
    Youngie glanced at the truck, biting just for a second, then back at Lucas, amused again. “You gonna catch Charlie?”
    “Yeah. Or else kill him.”
    “I heard that about you,” Youngie said. “The or-else part.”
    “Just the job I had,” Lucas said.
    “I hear you.” Youngie put out his hand and Lucas shook. Youngie’s hand was like a wood file. “Here come the kids . . .”
    Another sheriff’s car was coming off the interstate. Lucas could see two cops inside. “The kids?”
    “They got three, four years between them,” Youngie said. “I’ll have them come in last.”
    “You really think . . . ?”
    “If we ain’t ready, why’re we going out there at all?”
    “That’s a point,” Lucas said.
     
    YOUNGIE BRIEFED THE TWO young cops on the visit to the Martin farm. He would lead the way in, Lucas would follow, and the kids would come in and block and watch. “If there’s trouble, you call in first, help us later,” Youngie told them.
    One of the kids, who was trying to hide premature baldness by shaving his head, hitched up his pistol: “We’re cool,” he said.
     
    THE MARTIN PLACE was an aging farmhouse that sat foursquare at the top of a hill. A gravel driveway, badly humped in the middle, led up the hill to the side of the house and then behind it. Halfway up the driveway, a barn emerged from the umbra of the house.
    The house was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century structure of two stories, gray shingles on the top, with twin dormers over a front porch. The porch had space for a swing, but no swing. The house, barn, and lawn were on a quarter section, a hundred and sixty acres, a square a half mile on a side.
    To the left of the house was a cornfield; to the right, at the bottom of the hill, was an untended apple orchard, with knee-deep weeds growing up around a few dozen old apple trees, all crabbed over like aging crones. Farther up the hill, beyond the apple orchard and to the right of the drive, was a fallow field, deep in weeds. It had, in the not-too-distant past, been cultivated; Lucas could see the tangled yellow dead vines in what was once a squash or pumpkin patch.
    Lucas pushed the Lexus up through the cloud of dust thrown up by Youngie’s car. As they topped the hill, coming up to the space between the house and the barn, Youngie suddenly juked left.
    Lucas went right and hit the brake and saw what Youngie had seen a half second sooner: three men had burst from the barn and were running toward the cornfield. A second later, a fourth man ran out of the farmhouse, headed down the hill, then slanted toward the cornfield like the others. One of the first three was oversized, and not fast.
    Pope, Lucas thought, and then he was out of the car and running.
     
    “WAS THAT POPE?” Youngie shouted. He had his hand on his pistol.
    “I think so,” Lucas yelled back. “Get some help in here.”
    He was fifty yards from the cornfield and could see cornstalks rippling in front of the running men. Youngie was shouting something at him, but he kept going, trying to sort it out as he ran. The big guy had gone right, and Lucas plunged into the field after him.
    And was blinded.
    Though the tops of the cornstalks were only a few inches higher than his eyes, the field might as well have been a rain forest. He stopped, listened, ran after the thrashing sound to his right. The other two men, he thought, had gone straight in, but Pope had been curling away, as though he had a destination in mind, as though he weren’t simply trying to hide.
    Lucas had his gun out now, jacked a shell into the chamber, locked the safety down: cocked and locked and a quick click from action. Farmhouses had guns, so Pope might have one. He couldn’t see, the corn leaves were whipping him in the