Certain Prey

five-twenty-nine, less than a hundred to go. Pushing a boulder up a hill would have been a snap compared to the Report. “Does she still think she’s gonna catch Rinker?”
    “I don’t know exactly what she thinks,” Sherrill said. “When I talked to her Friday afternoon, she was like really quick, incisive. Executive—maybe that’s the word I was looking for. Really tightly wound, you know?”
    Lucas turned the page, kept reading.
    “But this morning, I mean, she was a lot looser. Hair was a little messed up, you know—she actually giggled once. Lipstick wasn’t quite straight.”
    Now Lucas looked up. “What?”
    “Giggled. Like, girly-giggled. In fact, she looked like somebody who’d had her brains fox-trotted loose.”
    “Detective Sherrill, aren’t you in the middle of a case? I mean, I’ve got to read this report.”
    “That’s what I thought,” Sherrill said. T HE COMMISSION HAD nine members: the chairman, a desperately fading politician named Bob, once known in the Statehouse for his fine ethics, and viciously ridiculed in the same institution after he lost his seat to a twenty-six-year-old spitballer; seven members of affected constituencies; and Lucas. After the routine Robert’s Rules of Order opening, the meeting devolved into a nasty fight about whether adding to the list of minority or disability statuses would dilute the authority of prior assertions of those statuses . . . or that’s what Lucas thought somebody said.
    He wasn’t sure. Passing through a bookstore earlier in the day, he’d discovered that Donald Westlake had revived the “Richard Stark” Parker novels, and Lucas had Backflash buried in the pages of the Report. By the end of the meeting, he was more than halfway through, just finishing a chapter that ended with the word Asshole. He agreed. T HE NIGHT WAS straight out of a country-and-western song, one of those smooth warm evenings made for rolling around in a haymow with a farm girl. Even the traffic seemed subdued, as though people had abandoned their cars to walk.
    Lucas’s neighborhood was quiet, with only occasional cars rolling along the boulevard between his house and the bluff that dropped to the Mississippi. As he pulled into the driveway, he realized that he needed milk and cereal, if he wanted to eat at home the next morning; and he’d noticed a slight puffiness around the waist that needed to be trimmed away, and eating in a diner wouldn’t help that. He thought about it, and decided to leave the car in the driveway. He popped the door, swiveled, reached back to pick up the copy of the Report and the novel, started to climb out of the car . . . A ND SAW HER COMING.
    She was coming fast, from the corner of the garage. And though it was dark and late, he knew exactly who she was. He could just make out her height, and the smooth way she moved, a small woman, like a dancer. She was handicapped by the car: she had to clear around it. She had expected him to drive inside, and then she would have had him trapped between the Porsche and the big Chevy Tahoe parked on the other side of the garage. But she was ready and he could see her hand up with her gun and he reached desperately for his .45 and at the same time threw up the Report in front of his face and the explosions started, the night-flashes.
    He was going down as the Report came up, and the Report flew out of his hand of its own will and he concentrated on clearing his holster, which wasn’t made for fast draws, concentrated on jacking the slide, and he triggered the first shot blindly. The shot went into the car at an upward angle and punched through the windshield. He hit the ground and rolled, fired again, still half-blindly, just trying to slow her down, to shake her, saw another flash, felt a slug pluck at his suit, fired at the flash, rolled back toward the car and fired under it at where he thought she was, sensed that she was moving, fired again . . .
    She was running.
    He could feel it, maybe hear it—later doubted that he could hear it; the gun blasts, which he hadn’t heard at the time, must have been deafening—and he fired in the general direction she was running, the slug going through the front of the house.
    Then he was after her, running through the wonderful warm night. She was dressed all in black, but he could see her, in the lights of the house windows and the porches, running crazily across his backyard, crashing through bushes, over a chain-link fence. He was running as