Broken Prey

the road, I think maybe he’s just pulled off, you got somebody west of here on Nineteen?”
    “Yeah, we got a couple guys, I’ll get them headed that way.”
    “Tell them to shut down the flashers, he saw mine and dodged . . . I’m not seeing anything . . .”
    “Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, as the dispatcher talked to cops farther out. “Where is this, where is this . . . ?”
    One of the cops poked a map; his finger touched a spot where Goodhue, Rice, and Dakota counties came together.
    Then another guy came up and shouted, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guy ran by me moving fast . . . high lights. He was doing eighty-eight, I think it’s the SUV, I’m turning. I’m on Nineteen, Jenny, get me some help up here . . .”
    “C’mon,” Lucas shouted at the radio.
    The deputy shouted, “Ah, shit, he’s gone, he’s killed his lights, I don’t know, shit, don’t know whether he went north, south, or straight ahead. Goddamn . . . I’m going north on Boyd, that was the first turn, but he maybe ditched somewhere, do we have anybody west on Nineteen? Or south, we need somebody south . . . Man, he was moving. Andy, if you’re still around Waterford, get over to Nineteen and head east. He may be coming at you, I don’t know what color the car was, his high lights were on, but I think it was an SUV . . . I clocked him at eighty-eight . . . He could be going south, do we have anybody south . . . ?”
    Lucas listened for another few seconds, then asked, “Where is that?”
    One of the cops jabbed a finger at a wall map. “Tommy was coming west on Highway Nineteen when he saw the guy, and the guy disappeared here. Tommy went north, Andy is coming in this way . . .”
    Lucas looked at it, said, “Maybe he should have gone south here instead of north . . .” He was second-guessing the guy on the scene, and he had absolutely nothing to base it on, except his own case of nerves.
    “Flip of the coin,” the cop said. “It’s all cut up over there, hills and farm plains. We—”
    He shut up for a moment as the dispatcher said, “Manny, are you up?”
    “Yeah, I’m moving, but I’m way over northwest of town.”
    Lucas looked at the map for another minute, then said, “I’m going out there. South. I can be there in five minutes.”
    “Big chunk of territory.”
    “I’m doing nothing here,” he said. “And there’s nobody out there right now.”
     
    HE FELT BETTER as soon as he got in the truck. He put the light on the roof and ripped south out of town, working with the navigation system on his truck. If the guy had been going west on 19 and turned south, and was trying to dodge cops by taking a twisty route out of trouble . . . Lucas manipulated the scale of the map up and down, running out to One Hundredth Street at high speed. There were few cars around—more pickups than anything—and few of them were moving fast, as far as Lucas could tell without radar. He punched the number of the Northfield center into his cell phone: “This is Davenport—any action?”
    “Tommy’s coming south again. Andy hasn’t hit anything on Nineteen, he’s going to turn south on Kellogg, but the guy’s gotta be way south of that, if he went south. Most likely, he’s ditched in some woods off Nineteen.”
    “I’m running with a single flasher on One Hundredth Street, I haven’t seen anything yet.”
    “Have you crossed Kane?”
    “About a minute ago.”
    “Then you’re coming up on Goodhue. It’s gravel down there, I’d suggest you head south, then come back west on One Hundred Tenth. There are a bunch of little streets south of there on Kane.”
    Lucas traced the suggested route on his nav system, thought it sounded reasonable. He cut south on Goodhue, spraying gravel.
    The night was hazy, the lights of the surrounding small towns showing up as ghosts on the sky. He took Goodhue across some railroad tracks to One Hundred Tenth, cut west, hesitated at the next crossroad, and turned south again. He zigged back and forth, following the dusty gravel roads, narrow, no shoulders, houses flicking by in the night; some of the houses were old farmsteads, some looked like they’d been airlifted out of a St. Paul suburb. Most showed a yard light; and though the night was deadly dark, it was pierced all around by yard lights, mercury-vapor blue and sodium-vapor orange, and far away, the red-blinking lights of radio towers.
    Hard-surface road now.
    He flicked through the tiny