Certain Prey

toward the front door, he registered Lucas on his knees, the blood, Sherrill with the gun, and then the red Jag blasting through the wooden guard arms at the exit and out into the street, wheels screaming, car sliding, going away from him, and Sloan ran out into a street full of people and couldn’t fire his gun . . . L UCAS HAD DONE an inventory and was shouting, “Not bad, not bad,” and was trying to get up, while Sherrill screamed, “Lay down, you’re hurt, lay down,” and Lucas finally pushed her roughly out of the way and hobbled toward the front of the building and saw Sloan running away down the street and Carmel’s Jag just turning the corner at the far end.
    “Didn’t think of this,” he said, trying to grin at Sherrill. Blood trickled down at the corner of his mouth. “That she’d do this. She cracked.”
    “Lucas, ya gotta sit down, the ambulance . . .”
    “Fuck the ambulance.” And they saw people at the other end of the block, turning to stare, and Sherrill shouted, “She’s coming back, she went around the block.”
    Lucas started to run, half-hobbled, toward the end of the block, Sherrill finally leaving him to run on ahead, her pistol out, shouting at people, “Police, get away, police . . .”
    Lucas saw her stop at the curb, then raise her gun . . . and the Jag came from behind the building and Sherrill pointed her pistol at the sky as the Jag hurtled by and Lucas came up and said, “Jesus Christ, she’s doing a hundred and twenty.” C ARMEL WASN’T FEELING much: a kind of mute stubbornness, a will to do what she pleased. She turned the last corner, realized that she was going the wrong way on a one-way street: and the wrong way in any case—the hospital was behind her. Instead of trying to turn, she focused her eyes on the Target Center, the auditorium where the Minnesota Timberwolves played basketball. Focused on the building and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
    She was going seventy at the end of the first block, a hundred when Davenport saw her, at the end of the second. The car topped out at the end of the fifth block, at about a hundred and thirty. She drove straight down the white line between two lanes, cars dodging away from her, white faces going by like faces on postage stamps, half-seen, half-realized, frozen in expression. She hit a stout black man carrying a grocery sack, in which he had milk and cookies and a dozen oranges. He never saw her as he crossed at a crosswalk, looking into the grocery bag, thinking about opening the cookies. He was too heavy, he shouldn’t have bought them, his wife would kill him . . . He never saw Carmel coming, and she hit him with the very center of the Jag and he flew over the car as though lifted by angels.
    At a hundred and thirty miles an hour, Carmel hit the curb outside the Target Center and the Jag went airborne, turning, tumbling . . .
    Lucas and Sherrill watched, appalled, as the car hit first the black man and then the concrete wall.
    The black man was dead in a tenth of a second; he’d felt nothing but a sudden apprehension. As for Carmel, the transition from life to death was so sudden that she never felt it.
    In the silence following the shattering impact, an even dozen oranges bounced and rolled in the dirt along the street, bright and promising like the best parts of a broken life.

TWENTY-EIGHT

    Charlie Ross and his yuppie flip-fone pals at the Merchants Bank in Portland, Oregon, had invented a new classification system for women. One that went down, not up. One duckling was a woman who bordered on the acceptable. Ten ducklings was a truly ugly duckling.
    Ross was hacking his way through the billing entries for that month’s box rentals, and incidentally keeping his eye on the safety-deposit counter while the regular clerk was at lunch, when a six-duckling came to the counter. She was bad news. If you were even tempted to throw her a mercy fuck, you’d want to put a rug over her head first. All of that went through Ross’s bottle-cap-sized brain as he pushed himself up from the desk and dragged his lard-ass over to the counter.
    The woman was small, dark-haired, olive-complected. She had a mole by the corner of her mouth, a notable mole, nearly black, and another one beside her nose. And she wore oversized glasses, the kind that are supposed to turn dark in sunlight, but always made your eyes look yellow when you were indoors. She handed him a key and he took it, ran it through the file machine, found