Chosen Prey

it . . .
    “Goddamnit.” Marshall’s red Jeep Cherokee.
    Lucas screamed into the lot, braked down beside the Cherokee, and hopped out.
    Looked around . . .
    Marshall and Qatar were up on the hillside. They had stopped walking, and both were looking down at him. Qatar was dressed in pajamas, and his feet were bare. He had been gagged for a while, Lucas thought: Several coils of duct tape were looped around his neck, as though they’d been pulled down from his face. He was shivering, either from fear or simply from the cold.
    Marshall was wearing jeans and a tan barn coat. He had one hand on Qatar’s jacket, and in his other, the big-frame .357.
    Qatar shouted down, “Help me, please. He’s crazy, he’s going to kill me.” There was a catch in his voice. His hands had been cuffed, and he held them out toward Lucas as though he were praying.
    “Terry, goddamnit,” Lucas called. “Don’t do this, man.”
    Marshall called back, “I was about half afraid you’d show up here. I didn’t think you’d be this quick. Ten minutes later and we’d have all been fine.”
    “Terry, we got him,” Lucas shouted, moving closer. “I found his laptop computer. It was in the ceiling in the museum. Me and the janitor found it. It’s got pictures of the women on it, it’s gotta have prints—we got him for everything, man.”
    “Little too late for that,” Marshall said. “This is better anyway. Takes care of a couple of problems: his and mine.”
    “Shoot him,” Qatar screamed at Lucas. “Shoot him.”
    Marshall jerked him another step across the hill, dragging him by the loops of duct tape.
    “Terry, goddamnit, stop it. Stop it.” Lucas was walking up the hill toward them.
    “You gonna shoot me and save this asshole?”
    “No. But you gotta listen. We can still smooth this out: You turn him in, we tell everybody you freaked, you talk to a shrink for a couple of weeks . . .”
    He was fifty feet away. Marshall had gotten Qatar to the dug-over area where the graves were.
    “Oh, horseshit, Lucas, you know better’n that,” Marshall drawled. He might have been smiling. “Minnesota’s the same as Wisconsin: They’d hang me by my nuts. They’d make an example out of me. Cops can’t do this shit.”
    Forty feet. Qatar’s eyes were wide, his shoulders twisting away from Marshall. “Don’t let him . . . You can’t just shoot me,” he shouted at Marshall. “I can’t die today. I can’t . . . I have classes today. I have responsibilities. The college is expecting me.”
    “I don’t think so, pal.”
    Thirty feet. Lucas could see that Qatar’s bare feet were bleeding, apparently from dragging over the rocks and roots of the hillside. Marshall lifted his pistol so that it pointed directly into the back of Qatar’s head. “Stop right there,” he said to Lucas.
    “Terry, please, man, you’re a good guy. And listen to this—one last thing.” Lucas was begging for time. “There’s not much chance, but what if he is innocent? What if we’ve screwed this up somehow?”
    “That’s right,” Qatar said. “This is completely illegal. My lawyer—”
    “Shut up.” Marshall snapped the pistol barrel against the back of his head, and Qatar stopped, his mouth open in midsentence. Marshall said to Lucas, “There’s a tape recorder on the front seat of the car. When I got him in the car, I pulled the duct tape off his mouth and told him what I was gonna do, but I told him that maybe I wouldn’t if he’d tell me about the women. You listen to that tape, you’ll get all the names, and pretty close to the dates, and the places he picked them up. He even says there are two more down in Missouri, some godforsaken place down there.”
    “You promised me,” Qatar said. He tried to twist out of Marshall’s grasp, but Marshall played him like a fish. “You promised.”
    “I lied,” Marshall said.
    “All right, I’ll go to trial, I’ll confess,” Qatar said. “You got me. All right? All right? Just stop this, stop this now. You win. Okay ?”
    “On the other hand, I could always shoot you, too,” Marshall said to Lucas, but he was showing a grin again. “How’d they ever prove it was me?”
    Lucas shrugged. “They would. Tire tracks, the slugs, nitrites when they picked you up. There’s probably a parade on the way here now.”
    “Yeah, I know, I guess,” Marshall admitted. The smile, if it was ever there, faded away and he took a deep breath and looked around the