Easy Prey

shrine and looked in. From the outside, they could see only the wall opposite; from the inside, they could see that all four walls, plus the ceiling, had been done in Alie’e’s face.
    The sheriff shook his head. “This gives me the creeps,” he said. “If he’d showed me this on a nice summer day with Alie’e running around alive, it’d give me the creeps.”
    “It’s a little too much,” Lucas agreed.
    Green shirt was up on the porch. “Us guys just want to come in and take a quick look, or go back to McLeod’s. It’s too goddamn cold out here to be hanging around.”
    The sheriff looked at Lucas, who shrugged. “I don’t care . . . maybe they’ll see something we don’t.”
    So the sheriff let them come in as Del and Lucas probed Scott’s bedroom and kitchen; they found a box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells—skeet shot—in a bedroom closet, but no shotgun; a scoped .300 Winchester Magnum; and a Ruger .22 semiauto carbine.
    “So maybe he’s got a shotgun with him, too,” Lucas said.
    “I’ll call it in,” Del said.
    A small living room had black velvet curtains to block the light; a love seat was pushed against one wall; opposite the couch was a projection TV, a Sony, with a screen five feet wide; and next to the TV, a rack of tuning and sound equipment. A Nintendo console sat on the floor next to the couch, with a dozen game boxes—and next to that, a Dreamcast console with even more games. Five small speakers were spotted around the room, with a sub-woofer the size of a trash can next to the TV.
    “Nine hundred and ninety-nine channels of shit on the TV to choose from,” Del said, sounding like he might be quoting someone.
    In the kitchen, they found nothing at all. The last of the shirts had taken a look at the shrine, and gold shirt came out in the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a beer, and screwed off the top.
    “What the hell are you doing?” the sheriff asked.
    “He ain’t gonna need it,” gold shirt said. “Gonna go to waste.”
    “Gimme one of those,” Friar said. Gold shirt opened the refrigerator, handed him a beer. As he unscrewed the cap, Friar said, “The thing about Martin is, he always thought he’d be famous. That might be all he thought about. He thought he could do it by starting small here in Burnt River, and if he worked hard and kept his nose clean, Coke would take care of him. He’s been working his ass off, driving that goddamned truck for ten years, and I’d have to say he ain’t made much progress up the corporate ladder.” He took a pull on the bottle, then added, “Such as the corporate ladder is around here.”
    “You think he could kill a guy?” Lucas asked.
    “Nobody’ll go huntin’ with him,” blue shirt said. “He likes them guns a little too much. One time this guy I know was walking in from his deer stand--”
    Gold shirt jumped in. “Ray McDonald.”
    Blue shirt continued. “--and he bumps into Martin, and Martin goes, ‘You smoke cigarettes and the deer’ll smell it a mile away.’ So Ray goes on home and he’s laying in bed that night about to go to sleep, thinking about nothing, and then all of a sudden he realizes that he was about a half-mile away when he stripped that butt and threw it away.”
    Blue shirt looked at Lucas, Del, and the sheriff, a look that said, This is of significance. Lucas took a minute to decipher the look. “He’d been watching him through his scope.”
    “Yup. Ray said he almost shit in his pants, laying there in bed. Martin Scott had been looking at him smoking, through a scope on that .300 Magnum.”
    “Didn’t shoot him,” Del said.
    “But I bet he was thinking about it,” blue shirt said. “Martin is fuckin’ loony tunes, and he was a loony tunes when I met him in kindergarten.”
    LATE THAT NIGHT, when Lucas and Del and a pensive Tom Olson were a hundred miles out of the Sheridan airport, on the way back to the Twin Cities, the sheriff called. “I got some sorta bad news,” he said.
    “Ah, God, I don’t need any,” Lucas said. “No time for it.”
    “We didn’t find Scott, but we found his truck,” the sheriff said. “It’s parked next to the Coke truck, at the distribution center. We talked to Randy Waters again, and he said that Scott parks it there on nights he thinks will be extra cold, because his garage doesn’t have heat.”
    “It’s not gonna be that cold tonight,” Lucas protested. “What’s it gonna be?”
    “Maybe ten below,” the sheriff