Easy Prey

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
     
EASY PREY
     
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
     
Copyright © 2000 by John Sandford.
     
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    eISBN : 978-0-425-17876-8
     
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For Stephen and Colleen Camp

1
    WHEN THE FIRST man woke up that morning, he wasn’t thinking about killing anyone. He woke up with a head full of blues, a brain that was too big for his skull, and a bladder about to burst. He lay with his eyes closed, breathing across a tongue that tasted like burnt chicken feathers. The blues rolled in through the bedroom door.
    Coming down hard.
    He had been flying on cocaine for three days, getting everything done, everything. Then last night, coming down, he’d stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of Stolichnaya. His bleeding brain retained a picture of himself lifting the bottle off the shelf, and another picture of an argument with the counterman, who didn’t want to break a hundred-dollar bill.
    By that time, the coke high had become unsustainable; and the Stoli had been a bad idea. There was no smooth landing after a three-day toot, but the vodka turned a wheels-up belly landing into a full crash-and-burn. Now he’d pay. If you peeled open his skull and dumped it, he thought, his brain would look like a coagulated lump of Campbell’s bean soup.
    He cracked his eyes, lifted his head, and looked at the clock. A few minutes past seven. He’d gotten four hours of sleep. Par for the course with coke, and the Stoli hadn’t helped. If he’d stayed down for ten hours, or twelve—he needed about sixteen to catch up—he might have been past the worst of it. Now he was just gonna have to suck it up.
    He turned to his left, where a woman, a dishwater blonde, lay facedown in her pillow. He could only see about half of her head; the rest was buried by a red fleece blanket. She lay without moving, like a dead woman—but no such luck. He closed his eyes again, and there was nothing left in the world but the blues music bumping in from the next room, from the all-blues channel, nine-hundred-and-something on the TV dial. Must’ve left it on last night. . . .
    Gotta move, he thought. Gotta pee. Gotta take twenty aspirins and go down to Country Kitchen and get some pancakes and link sausages. . . .
    The man didn’t wake up thinking about murder. He woke up thinking about his head and his bladder and a stack of pancakes. Funny how things