Easy Prey

to a Blockbuster Video, rented a movie, and drove back home. The garage door went down. The watchers settled in.
    The guy on the radio said, “Olson’s getting cranked. The crowd’s rolling with him.”
    A minute later: “There’s a guy coming from the north side, he’s walking a pooch. . . .”
    “Got him.”
    Then one of the cops watching Spooner said, “Spooner just came out in his shirt. He’s looking up at his roof. What the fuck is he . . . SPOONER’S DOWN, SPOONER’S DOWN. HOLY SHIT, DAVE, DAVE. Do you see . . .”
    And they lost them; and then they were back. “WEST WEST WEST. JESUS GO BACK. NO, GO BACK. JESUS GET EMS DOWN HERE. GET EMS . . .”
    Lucas was running—around the house, into his car.
    Every step of the way, he could hear people screaming on the radio. In one minute he was on Mendota Road, in two minutes on Robert Street, then on 110, and he was moving as fast as he could without killing anyone, flashing past cars, weaving through traffic, praying that he wouldn’t run into a highway patrolman, running, and all the time the traffic on the radio became more shrill: “GODDAMNIT, WE’RE LOSING HIM. WE’RE LOSING HIM. WE NEED SOME GODDAMN HELP, SOMEBODY . . .”
    Lucas made I-35 and headed north, and called, “I’m coming up. If you’ve got a runner, tell me which way.”
    Then a cop, coming back: “We don’t know. We don’t know.”
    “I thought you said you were losing him.”
    “Spooner, Spooner, we’re losing Spooner.”
    “Where’s the shooter, where’s the shooter?”
    “I don’t know, man, I don’t know, we never saw him. Dave, where are you? Dave, did you get west?” Then Dave: “I got west, man, but I don’t see anything, nothing moving. Lucas, if you’re coming in, get up on the Seventh Street ramp and put on your flashers and see if anybody shies away.”
    Lucas thought: He’s gone. If they were down to blocking ramps, the shooter was gone.
    And he was.
    Spooner died on his front lawn with his wife screaming over him, and two cops trying to stop the blood with their hands. He took a .44 Magnum slug four inches to the left of his sternum; he took a couple of minutes to die, but he didn’t know it. Except for technical purposes, he was dead when the slug hit.

27
    LESTER DROVE OVER from Minneapolis in time to see the body hauled away. He and Lucas stood on the Spooners’ lawn and watched the Ramsey County ME working, and Lester said, “We may be fucked. Personally, I mean. We gotta go talk to Rose Marie so she won’t be blindsided by the press.”
    “I know,” Lucas said. “Before we do that, we ought to wring out Olson. And we have to fill in St. Paul on what we were doing, and get them to grab Spooner’s paper and his computers and close off his safe-deposit boxes—get some people in early tomorrow and notify every bank inside a couple hours’ driving time about the boxes, and maybe get a warrant for the house and grab any keys he’s got.”
    “Jesus, Lucas, it’s gonna look like we got him killed, and then we’re persecuting his wife,” Lester said.
    “Persecuting his wife won’t make a hell of a lot of difference if they hang us for killing her husband,” Lucas said. “But if Spooner’s dirty, then we might kick loose of the whole thing. We’ve got to go after him hard.”
    “Aw, man . . .” Lester was shaken up. He kept coming back to the body, still on the ground, now under a tarp.
    “Listen, this ain’t you,” Lucas said. “This is me. I’m the one who tipped Olson. There are only two possibilities: Olson tipped the killer—he’s managing the killer—or somebody else put the killer on Spooner. I don’t think anybody else leaked Spooner’s name—it’s gotta be Olson.”
    “So what do we do?”
    “I’ll go talk to Rose Marie. You stay out of it. I won’t mention your name. I’ll just tell her that I asked you to put a couple people on Spooner. And that’s really what happened.”
    “Except that I went along with it,” Lester said.
    “Bullshit. I didn’t ask you before I did it. Afterwards, what were you gonna do? Tell Olson to forget the name? And you were just helping protect Rose Marie.”
    “Aw, man . . .”
    “Just sit tight,” Lucas said. He got on the phone and called Del, filled him in. “I’m gonna go shake Olson, if you want to come along.”
    “I’ll meet you,” Del said. “Do you know where he is?”
    “I’ll have the guys at the church call us when he heads back to his motel. We want