Certain Prey

was looking down at him. A woman was beyond him, also coming toward them; he could sense her reluctance.
    “Help me . . .” Baily cried. “Help me, I’ve been shot . . .” S LOAN BANGED into Lucas Davenport’s office and said, “Baily Dobbs’s been shot.” He looked at his watch. “Twelve minutes ago.”
    Lucas was peering glumly into a six-hundred-page report with a blue cover and white label, which said, “Mayor’s Select Commission on Cultural Diversity, Alternative Lifestyles and Other-Abledness in the Minneapolis Police Department: A Preliminary Approach to Divergent Modalities [Executive Summary],” which he’d been marking with a fluorescent-yellow highlighter. He was on page seven.
    He put down the report and said, incredulously, “ Our Baily Dobbs?”
    “How many Baily Dobbs are there?” Sloan asked.
    Lucas stood up and reached for a navy-blue silk jacket that hung from a government-issue coat tree. “Is he dead?”
    “No.”
    “An accident? He shoot himself?”
    Sloan shook his head. Sloan was a thin man, hatchet-faced, dressed in shades of brown and tan. A homicide investigator, the best interrogator on the force, an old friend. “Looks like he walked in on a shooting, over in the Sixth Street parking garage,” he told Lucas. “The shooter killed a woman, and then shot Baily. I figured since Rose Marie and Lester are out of town, and nobody can find Thorn, you better haul your ass over to the hospital.”
    Lucas grunted, and he pulled on the jacket. Rose Marie Roux was the chief of police; Lester, Thorn and Lucas were deputy chiefs. “Anything on the shooter?”
    “No. Well, Baily said something about it being a woman. The shooter was. The woman she shot is dead, and Baily took two rounds in the right tit.”
    “Last goddamn guy in the world,” Lucas said.
    Lucas was tall, lean but not thin, broad-shouldered and dark-complected. A scar sliced across one eyebrow onto his cheek, and showed as a pale line through his summer tan, like a vagrant strand of white thread. Another scar showed on the front of his neck, over his windpipe, just above the V of his royal-blue golf shirt. He took a .45 in a clip-rig out of his desk drawer and clipped it inside his pants, under the jacket. He did it unconsciously, as another man might put a wallet in his back pocket. “How bad is he?”
    “He’s going into surgery,” Sloan said. “Swanson’s over there, but that’s all I know.”
    “Let’s go,” Lucas said. “Does anybody know what Dobbs was doing in the stairwell?”
    “The other people in the office say he was probably sneaking over to Hennepin Medical for a cheeseburger. He’d pretend he was going to the government center, then he’d sneak over to the hospital and drink coffee and read the papers.”
    “That’s the Baily we know and love,” Lucas said. T HE EMERGENCY ROOM was a warm four-minute fast walk from City Hall. A cop was shot, hurt bad, but life went on. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers, the streets clogged with cars, and Sloan, intent on making it to the hospital, nearly got hit in an intersection—Lucas had to hook his arm and pull him back. “You’re too ugly to be a hood ornament,” Lucas grunted.
    The emergency room was oddly quiet, Lucas thought. Usually, after a cop-shooting, thirty people would be milling around, no matter who the cop was. Here, there were three other cops, a couple of nurses and a doc, all standing around in the alcohol-scented reception area. Nobody seemed to be doing much.
    “Place is empty,” Sloan said, picking up the thought.
    “Word hasn’t got out yet,” Lucas said. One of the three other cops was talking on the phone, while a second, a uniform sergeant, talked into his ear. Swanson, a bland-faced, overweight homicide detective in a gray suit, was leaning on a fluids-proof countertop talking to a nurse, a notebook open on the counter. He saw Lucas, with Sloan a step behind, and lifted a hand.
    “Where’s Baily?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s about to go in,” Swanson said, meaning surgery. “They already got the sedative going, so they can plug in the airway shit. He won’t be talking. The surgeon’s down the hall scrubbing up, if you wanna talk to him.”
    “Anybody tell Baily’s wife?”
    “We’re looking for the chaplain,” Swanson said. “He’s at a church thing up on the north side, some kind of yard sale. Dick’s on hold for him now.” He nodded at the cop on the phone. “We’ll get him in the next