Chosen Prey

hillside, tipped his head back to look up through the oak branches. Again he cocked the gun up against Qatar’s head. “Well, I guess there ain’t gonna be any big ceremony in this.”
    Qatar looked at Lucas, his voice level but desperate. “Help me.”
    Lucas said, “Terry . . .”
    “You want to say a couple of words, this is your last chance. You’re gonna be in hell in ten seconds,” Marshall said to Qatar.
    Qatar turned his head away, trembling violently. And then he stopped. Maybe the finality of the situation had finally hit him, maybe he was embarrassed by his pleading, maybe this was simply the real Qatar—Lucas didn’t know. But he reached down, carefully brushed some mud off his pajamas as well as he could with his cuffed hands, and then looked Marshall in the eyes.
    “Your niece—she was a tasty little cunt,” he said. “She took a long time to die.”
    “You cocksucker,” Marshall screamed, and Lucas shouted, “Terry, goddamnit . . .”
    The pistol shot was an earsplitting BANG, and Lucas flinched away from it. Qatar’s face had a bloody hole in it where the hollow-point had exited; his legs went out, and he pitched down onto one of the refilled graves. He twitched once; he was dead. He didn’t look like Edward Fox anymore, not even a bald one.
    “Terry . . . Jesus Christ, Terry . . .” Lucas said. He was twenty feet away.
    Marshall was talking, but talking to Qatar. “I didn’t think you had the guts for that,” he said. “You got to me. You did that.”
    He shook his head, looking down the slope at Qatar’s crumbled body, but now talking to Lucas. “I had a little time to think on the way down here,” Marshall said. “Time to think. I spent ten years of my life looking for the miserable shit. Ruined my life, what was left of it, after June was killed. Took Laura . . . I just wish Laura would have had a chance in life, you know? Where’s Jesus when you need him?” He put the pistol under his own chin and turned his head to look Lucas in the eyes. “But you know what, Lucas?” He took a last look around and a deep breath. “Today’s a nice day for this. You might want to look away for a second. . . .”
    “Terry!” Lucas screamed.
     
    D EL ARRIVED TWENTY minutes later, pounding into the parking lot in his wife’s Dodge. He jammed the transmission into park and jumped out of the car. Lucas was sitting cross-legged on the hood of the Porsche.
    “Weather called,” Del said. “I got here as soon as I could. Thought maybe I should call somebody, but I didn’t . . . not yet.” Lucas didn’t respond, and Del looked up at the hill. The bodies were out of sight, untouched, except for the handful of dried oak leaves that Lucas had dropped over Marshall’s half-open eyes. “Too late?”
    Lucas sighed, rubbed his forehead with his fingers, eyes closed. “Just in time to say goodbye,” he said.

30
    L UCAS AND W EATHER were working on her boat, an aging S-2. The sky was a perfect blue, and the sun felt as if it wanted to burn down on the back of his neck but didn’t yet have the horsepower.
    “The thing is made of fiberglass—you wouldn’t think you’d have to sit around and sandpaper and varnish,” Lucas grumbled. “What the hell is fiberglass for, anyway? Why did they make the goddamn hatch cover out of wood when they had a fiberglass factory?”
    “Shut up and paint,” Weather said.
    “Aren’t you supposed to have, like, croissants and wine when you’re working on a sailboat? And some friends come by and the guy has got a square chin and the chick is really good-looking and has loop earrings? And they’re both wearing turtlenecks and you get this little vibration of possible group sex?”
    “The more you talk, the sloppier you get. Just paint and shut up and let me scrub.” She was down below, scrubbing what appeared to be chemically hardened chipmunk shit out from under the sink. Lucas was sitting in the cockpit, working on the slip-out hatch board. He secretly believed it was makework to keep him out of the way while she did the real cleanup.
    Around them, in the marina, two dozen people were working on boats, and from where he sat on top of the boat, which was on top of the trailer, he could see a mile across Lake Minnetonka to one of the season’s early regattas.
    “Glad we’re not out there racing,” he said. “Those guys gotta be freezing their asses off.”
    “Best time of year,” she said. She stepped into the