Chosen Prey

said, “Well, shit. That really put the dog amongst the cheeseburgers.”
    “What’s happening in there?” Lucas asked. He took a step back toward the door.
    “They’re talking about bail,” Marshall said. “They’re gonna give it to him.”

28
    “S OMEBODY CALLED R ANDY last night and talked to him,” Lansing said. He was on the phone from his office in St. Paul. Lucas and Marcy had just gotten back from a meeting with the county attorney, where Kirk and Towson began laying the lines of a deal offer for Qatar. “Randy’s not the most coherent guy, but the basic story is, whoever talked to him told him that the word on the street is that you turned him. That you own him, that you’re running him, and that you’re going around town bragging about it. It’s supposed to be all over town.”
    “That’s bullshit,” Lucas said.
    “Who’ve you talked to?”
    “Outside of this office, nobody. My social life is my fiancé, and we haven’t been going out that much. I have been nowhere, I’ve talked to no one.”
    “How about other people?” Lansing said.
    “I’ll ask around, but it smells like bullshit.”
    “Randy doesn’t think so.”
    “Get Randy on the line with some of his pals—or if he doesn’t have any, some of his acquaintances. Have him ask,” Lucas said.
    “Well . . . let’s see what happens.”
    “I’ll tell you one thing that happens. The deal he made was predicated on honest testimony. He either lied to us in his statement—and I know he didn’t do that, because he picked the pictures out without having seen them before—or he perjured himself this morning. You can tell the little cocksucker two things for me: First, I never talked to anybody; and second, he can kiss his ass goodbye. He’s on the train to Stillwater, and when he gets out, he’ll be ten years older than I am now.”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute. . . .”
    “I’m not gonna wait a minute. I’m gonna take a couple of days off, and if Randy decides he wants to change his mind, he’ll have to change it with somebody else. I’m finished with him. He can rot in fuckin’ Stillwater.”
    Marcy, who’d been listening, said, “Wow. Really?”
    “Really. If anything urgent happens, call me on my cell phone. I’ll keep it on, but don’t call unless you’ve got no choice.”
    “Marshall took off?” she asked.
    “Yeah. His head must have been about to blow up.”
    “I don’t know. He just shook his head and that was that. He was a hell of a lot calmer than you were. More like he was amazed. You want to put a team on Qatar? Just to make sure?”
    Lucas shook his head. “He’s got to wear an ankle bracelet, he doesn’t have any access to money, and J. B.’s already told him we’re whipped. Why would he run? What would he run with?”
    “All right. See you when? Wednesday?”
    “Or maybe Thursday. I want to take a little time with Weather. . . . Goddamnit.”
     
    L UCAS SPENT THE evening thinking about the phone call from Lansing—and about the phone call to Randy. He and Weather ate in, Weather watching him, and when they were done she said, “I’m going to let you brood,” and got out her laptop to do some office catch-up. Lucas wandered around first the house and then the garage, cleaning nothing out of the Porsche, then the yard, and back into the house again, working through it. Weather fired up a DVD movie, but he couldn’t focus. “You haven’t figured it out yet, whatever you’re figuring out?”
    “I hope not,” he said.
    They finally went to bed at midnight, and just before she went to sleep, Weather asked, “Are you really going to stay home all day?”
    “Nah. Probably not. May go for a run in the Porsche. Knock around a little.”
    “I’ll try to get home early. Why don’t we go out to the marina and take a look at my boat?”
    “Okay.”
    She went quickly and softly to sleep, as she often did. Lucas lay awake, waiting for the phone to ring. He thought it might ring sometime after three o’clock, but it didn’t. He never heard Weather leave, and when he opened his eyes, it was eleven in the morning.
    He ate breakfast, went out and got in the car, took it out on the Interstate across the river to Wisconsin, jumped on his favorite blacktop road to River Falls, and let the Porsche engine out of the box. For the next hour he looped along the backroads, surprised that the golf courses were already open, looking for but not seeing any more snow in the