Broken Prey

was Pope. The hope itself would jinx him. A meth distributor? There were dozens of labs south of the metro . . .
    The truck bounced and jounced and struggled along the track, pain banging through his face, spreading from his broken nose: he ignored it, clenched his teeth. He saw movement to his left, quick, jerked his head that way. Gone: a cow?
    “Fence,” he said aloud. He was running parallel to a fence and slightly downhill. Up ahead, his headlights were showing nothing but darkness. Hill coming up, he thought, and a few seconds later, he was over the lip of it.
    Closer now, maybe two hundred yards ahead, he could again see the other vehicle’s headlights bouncing wildly over the countryside, heading down, down toward what looked like a crack in the earth. Still couldn’t make out anything of the car: just the light on the fields it was crossing.
    Moving faster and faster: closing in. Moving faster.
    “Fuckin’ hold on . . . ,” he said.
    Another hill, another lip, even steeper, and the car disappeared again, only to suddenly reappear, bucking wildly, then suddenly heading uphill. The guy had made it to the far side of the valley but was only a hundred yards ahead, his taillights clear ovals now. Lucas groped for the cell phone with one hand, couldn’t find it on the passenger seat.
    “Goddamnit.” The ride had thrown the phone on the floor, and he couldn’t see it.
    Ahead, the other car slowed, made a sharp wiggle, then moved forward again, away from him, only seventy-five yards, less than the length of a football field.
    Just a moment too late, Lucas saw the black line in his headlights. The crack in the earth, and he remembered how the other car had suddenly bucked so wildly. A creek?
    He jabbed at the brake, dropped over a short, steep bank, and hit hard, water splashing on the windshield. He floored the accelerator, and the car bucked and hit something hard, got sideways. He wrenched the steering wheel back to the left, and hit the far bank of the creek with a heavy whack that stopped him dead. He tried to push up it, but he could feel wheels spinning in sand. He reversed, tried to get straight, hit the bank again, stopped. Backed up again, tried again, near panic now: he was losing him. How’d the other guy gotten out?
    Stymied, he groped in the glove compartment, found a flashlight, got out of the truck into ankle-deep water, and looked at the situation. He was stopped dead in the middle of a small creek, a six-foot-wide trickle of water in a bed maybe thirty feet wide. Nothing but sand under his feet.
    When he shined the light on the opposite bank, he picked out two narrow tracks, tractor tracks, going up the far side. He’d simply missed them, missed the alignment when he went into the creek.
    He jumped back in the truck, backed it down, found the two small tracks in his headlights, and pushed up them. As the other car had, the truck bucked up and then he was on dry ground again: but he’d lost three or four minutes.
    He continued up the hill, fast as he could. He saw the track disappear in front of him, remembered that the other car had wiggled up the hill, slowed, spotted the wiggle, and followed it up. A moment later, the track intersected with another highway, the highway where he’d seen headlights.
    There were taillights in sight, both east and west: the nav system told him he was back on Dennison Boulevard.
    Decide.
    He looked both ways, remembered the cell phone. He found it under the front passenger seat, punched up the Northfield center.
    Decide. He said, “Shit,” and turned west, accelerated.
    “The guy took me across a field,” he told the Northfield cops. “I’m on Dennison, but I don’t know exactly where. Near James. I’m heading west . . .”
    “We got guys on the way, but they’re east of you, we’ll vector them in there.”
    He gave it everything the truck had, blowing by two pickups and a Toytota Corolla before coming back into the lights of Northfield.
    “Shit. Shit.” Lucas pounded the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. Northfield was a big town, crowded with every kind of car. The guy was gone.
     
    THEY DID HEAR from the driver, though.
    At two-thirty, Lucas had just gotten back to the Northfield center when Ruffe Ignace called, freaked: “Pope just called again. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wants your cell-phone number. He didn’t say why. I lied and told him I didn’t have it but I might be able to get it. He said he would wait