Certain Prey

couple of minutes.”
    Lucas turned to Sloan: “Get the chaplain going, send a car. Lights and sirens.”
    Sloan nodded and headed for the cop on the phone. Lucas turned back to Swanson. “What’s going on at the scene?”
    “Goddamnedest thing. Woman was executed, I think.”
    “Executed?”
    “She took at least four or five in the head with a small-caliber pistol, short range: you can see the tattooing on her scalp,” Swanson said. “Nobody heard a thing, which might mean a silencer. Everything in that stairwell echoes like crazy, off that concrete, and Baily told me he couldn’t remember hearing the gun. Baily saw the shooter, but all he remembered was that it was a woman, and she was a redhead. Nothing else. No age, no weight, nothing. We figure the shooter was white if she was a redhead, but shit, there’re probably five thousand redheads downtown every day.”
    “Who’s working it?”
    “Sherrill and Black. I heard about it, first call, and ran over, took a quick look at the dead woman and then came over here with Baily and the paramedics.”
    “So the dead woman’s still over there.”
    Swanson nodded. “Yeah. She was way dead. We didn’t even think about bringing her in.”
    “Okay . . . you say the doc’s scrubbing?”
    “Dan Wong, right down the hall. By the way, Baily says he was only shot once, but the docs say he’s got two slugs in him.”
    “So much for eyewitnesses,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. But it means that this chick is fast and accurate. The holes are a half-inch apart. Of course, she missed his heart.”
    “If she was shooting for it. If it was a twenty-two . . .”
    “That’s what it looked like.”
    “. . . then she might have been worried about punching through his breastbone.”
    Swanson shook his head. “Nobody’s that good.” “I hope not,” Lucas said. L UCAS BRUSHED PAST a nurse who made a desultory effort to slow him down, and found Wong up to his elbows in green soap. Wong turned and said, “Uh-oh, the cops.”
    “How bad is it?” Lucas asked. “Not too bad,” Wong said, going to work on his fingernails. “He’s gonna hurt for a while, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse. Two slugs—in the pictures, they look pretty deformed, so they were probably hollowpoints. They went in at his right nipple, lodged under the right scapula. Two little holes, he hardly bled at all, though his body fat makes it a little hard to tell what’s going on. His blood pressure’s good. Looks like some goddamn gang-banger with a pieceof-crap twenty-two.”
    “So he’s gonna be okay?” Lucas could feel the tension backing off.
    “Unless he has a heart attack or a stroke,” Wong said. “He’s way too fat and he was panicking when they brought him in. The surgery, I could do with my toes.”
    “So what’ll I tell the press? Wong is doing surgery with his toes?”
    Wong shrugged as he rinsed: “He’s in surgery now, listed in guarded condition, but he’s expected to recover barring complications.”
    “You gonna talk to them afterwards?”
    “I got a two o’clock tee time at Wayzata,” Wong said. He flicked water off his hands and stepped away from the sink.
    “You might have to skip it,” Lucas said.
    “Bullshit. I don’t get invited all that often.”
    “Danny . . .”
    “I’ll give them a few minutes,” Wong said. “Now, if you’ll get your germ-infested ass out of here, I’ll go to work.” R ANDALL T HORN, the newly promoted deputy chief for patrol, showed up ten minutes later. Fifteen cops stood around the emergency area now. The crowd was beginning to gather. “I was all the way down by the goddamn airport,” he told Lucas. His uniform showed sweat rings under his armpits. “How is he?”
    Lucas briefed him quickly, then Sloan came over and said, “The chaplain’s on his way to Baily’s house. He oughta notify the old lady in the next five minutes or so.”
    Lucas nodded and looked back at Thorn: “Can you hold the fort here? I ran over because Rose Marie is gone and I knew you and Lester were out of the house. But he’s sort of your guy.”
    Thorn nodded: “I’ll take it. You going over to the scene?”
    “For a minute or two,” Lucas said. “I want to get a picture in my head.”
    Thorn nodded and said, “You know what picture I can’t get in my head? Baily Dobbs getting shot. Last goddamn . . .”
    “Guy in the world,” Lucas finished for him. I F THE EMERGENCY ROOM had seemed unnaturally calm, the Sixth Street parking