Certain Prey

her card and brought it to the counter for her to sign.
    But she was no longer looking at him: she was looking at the television that the bank had screwed to the ceiling of the lounge area, where visitors waited while their spouses or friends went into the vault. The TV was permanently tuned to CNN Headline News, which at that moment was showing the wreck of a bloodred Jaguar that had plowed halfway through a cement-block wall.
    “Ma’am?” Ross said. “Ma’am, can I help you?”
    The woman apparently didn’t hear him as she drifted closer to the TV, listening, looking up at it, her mouth half open.
    “Happened last night,” Ross said helpfully. He’d already seen the loop a dozen times. The ugly duckling watched until another story started, this one involving a dog getting oxygen from a fireman, then turned back to the counter. He dropped her from six ducklings to four: she had a really nice ass, like a gymnast’s. She seemed dazed.
    “Hope it wasn’t somebody you knew,” Ross said.
    “No, no. I just wish they wouldn’t show so much violence on TV,” Rinker said. She signed the card and pushed it across the desk at him. He noticed that her hand was trembling, and he hoped it wasn’t some weird foreign disease. L UCAS HAD BEEN patched up in the emergency room and sent home. The patching had been messy: a slug had burned through the skin on the side of his neck, leaving a groove, which was sewn closed. A fragment of lead—he’d been hit by a storm of ricochet fragments—had pierced the skin on his skull, behind his right ear, but hadn’t reached the bone: the fragment was removed with tweezers, and two stitches used to close the wound.
    “Just like that Wooden Head guy,” Sherrill said happily. She’d cheered up a lot when the doctors said that he wasn’t badly injured.
    Another fragment had struck his hip, which also made Sherrill happy.
    “Hit in the butt,” she said.
    “Hip.”
    “Looks like a big butt to me,” she said. “Your hip is over here, on the side.”
    More fragments were taken from his side and legs. To get at one, just over his kidney, the doc had to make an additional small cut. The wounds in his legs were all superficial, but nasty; three got stitches. When it was done, they gave him a sample pack of ibuprofen and told him not to play basketball that weekend.
    “That’s it?” he grumped. “Don’t play basketball?”
    “Well, we also extend our deepest sympathy,” the doctor said.
    Lucas got down from the examining table, put on his pants, tottered to the door. “You know what hurts the most?” he asked Sherrill. “I really dove into her apartment. She was blasting away and I really racked up my elbow and ribs. I’m gonna be sore for a week.”
    “Better than the alternative,” she said. H E WAS SORE for a week, and hobbled by the feeling that all the stitches were about to unravel. But the stitches came out on Thursday, and by Friday, when Malone came to town with her FBI team, he was beginning to loosen up.
    “No sign of Rinker,” Malone said. She was sitting in his visitor’s chair, wearing a somber blue suit with a red necktie. “But we’ll get her.”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “She’s smart, and she’s had nine or ten years to figure out how to hide. She could be here in the U.S., up in Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and, with her Spanish, anywhere in South America. God only knows how much money she had by the end.”
    “We put her out of business, anyway. I just wish I’d been here for the shoot-out with Carmel.”
    “Really? Why?”
    “I mean, if I coulda gotten wounded like you did . . . you know, not too bad, but go to the hospital . . .”
    “Excuse me, but I think you left your brain out in the hall,” Lucas said.
    “You’re just an ignorant local cop,” Malone said. “You know what it’s worth to be an FBI agent wounded in the line of duty? And if you’re a woman? My God, I’d be up there.”
    “Like an under-assistant deputy director, or something.”
    “At least,” she said. “So . . . how’re you feeling?”
    “Not bad. I could probably manage a fox-trot, if somebody pressed me on it.”
    “Consider yourself pressed,” she said.

    O N M ONDAY, Sherrill went to the FBI office to make a statement. When she came back, she dropped into Lucas’s visitor’s chair and said, “I just talked to Malone.”
    “Yeah?” He was peering into the thick blue volume of the Equality Report. He was on page