Easy Prey

“Please, let me go.”
    “I can’t yet,” Scott said. He looked at Lucas. “There oughta be more than this.”
    “There is no more than this, Martin,” Lucas said. He gestured at the crowd, at the cameras. “You just spoke to the entire world. ”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “There oughta be more.”
    Lucas sighed, looked around, then said, “All right. Maybe there is.”
    “What?”
    “I’ll be back.”
     
 
HE TRUDGED BACK across the parking lot. Rose Marie said, “What?”
    “We’re getting there. It’s like pulling a goddamn snail out of a shell.” He spotted Jael and walked over to her. “I gotta ask you a favor.”
     
 
THEY WALKED TOGETHER toward the gas station, and Jael said, “I’m gonna wet my pants.”
    “That’s good,” Lucas said. “For six billion viewers, you’re gonna wet your pants.”
    “Sort of a trip, isn’t it?”
     
 
LUCAS LEANED IN the door again. “Mr. Scott, I’m sure you know this young woman. You’ve been trying to kill her. She wants to apologize to you for any wrong she might have done to Alie’e, and in turn, she wants you to apologize for killing her brother, who she deeply loved.”
    Jael stepped just inside the door. Lucas had warned her to stay close so she could back off if Scott did anything crazy. “As long as he’s inside the booth, you should be okay.”
    She began, “Mr. Scott, I am truly sorry . . .”
    She did it almost perfectly, Lucas thought, fixing him with her eyes, letting him take in her torn-paper face. “I had a hard childhood. Look at my scars,” she said. She touched her face. “I was in a car accident . . .”
    THEY TALKED FOR a few minutes, then Scott shook his head as though dazed. “So what’s the deal?” he asked Lucas.
    Lucas said, “The deal is this: We go back to the lines, we get another camera of your choice. We come back here. You shuck all the shells out of your rifle—uh, where’s the shotgun?”
    “In the car. I couldn’t reach it after the crash.”
    “All right. Anyway, you shuck all the shells out of the rifle, lay the rifle to the side. Then you open the booth, and you surrender to Jael—we’re talking the world’s biggest TV audience here—and then we all walk across the gas pad and you’ll be taken into custody. With a lawyer right there.”
    “What channel?”
    “Three? You want Ginger back?” Lucas asked.
    “No. She was okay, but she was a little too . . . smooth. She didn’t have that good jagged quality. How about . . . uh, what do you think?”
    “Six. There’s a woman with Six, sort of an understated beauty, if you know what I mean.”
    “Not Ellen?”
    “Exactly. Ellen. She’s out there, Martin.”
    He thought about it for a long beat. Then: “All right. Ellen.”
     
 
LUCAS WENT BACK, pointed at Ellen Goodrich, who raced out of the crowd, towing her camera. “Lucas . . . what can I say? And what’re we doing?”
    “We’re gonna do the surrender.”
    “Aw, jeez, that’s just . . . that’s just . . .” He thought she might weep with gratitude, but she didn’t.
    “Let’s go,” Lucas said.
     
 
THE SURRENDER WENT well, to a point, Lucas thought.
    Jael made a statement, a formal apology for any wrongs that had been done to Alie’e. Scott apologized for the killings, said he still felt that they were necessary—but that Jael through her gracious actions had made up for some of it.
    Then, with the TV camera focusing on him, Scott jacked the slide on the Ruger until shells stopped popping out. He said, “I hereby surrender to Jael Corbeau, a brave woman.”
    He reached out and popped the lock on the door. As it opened, the dark-haired hostage, Ralph, screamed, “YOU COCKSUCKER.” He snatched the small portable TV off the shelf, and as Scott turned, startled, Ralph hit him in the face with it.
    Scott went down as though he’d been struck by a meteorite, and Lucas shouted, “Hey,” and tried to get the door open, but the woman, Melody, began kicking at Scott, screaming “SONABEECH” in an unexpected Mexican accent. Then she snatched a can of Pyroil starting fluid off the shelf and began hitting Scott in the back of the head, slicing off swaths of scalp.
    Scott pushed up, tried to crawl through the rain of blows. Jael was there. Lucas tried to push past her, but she screamed, “You killed my brother, you motherfucker.” Scott, stunned and bleeding, looked up, and she kicked him in the eye and he went down again.
    The camera was crowding in, and