Easy Prey

older, dark car . . . we thought we should take a look.”
    “I didn’t do it,” Olson said. “If I were you, I’d take a close look at those hellhounds that Alie’e hung out with. They’re the crazy ones. Not me. They’re the crazies.”
    “You seem a little loosely wrapped yourself,” Del said. He’d edged a few inches closer to Olson, to a spot that would allow him to hook the other man in the solar plexus.
    “Only to a sinner,” Olson said.
    Del tightened up. “Easy, dude,” Lucas said.
    “Where were you at four-twenty this afternoon?” Del asked.
    Olson looked at his watch. “Well, let me see. I must’ve still been at the mall.”
    “Mall of America?”
    “Yes.” They all turned and looked at it. The mall looked like Uncle Scrooge’s money bin, without the charm. “I spent a couple of hours walking around the place.”
    “What’d you buy? Do you have any receipts?” Del was pressing.
    “No, I didn’t buy anything,” Olson said. “Well, a cinnamon roll. I just walked around.”
    “Talk to anybody?”
    “No, not really.”
    “In other words, you couldn’t find anybody to back up your story, if you had to.”
    Olson shrugged. “I don’t think so. I was just walking. I’d never been in the place before. It’s astonishing. You know, don’t you . . . our whole culture is dying. Something new is being born in places like that. Snake things.”
    “Yeah, well . . .” Now Del shrugged. “What’re you going to do?”
    “Pray,” Olson said.
    There was nothing more to say, and the need to know what was going on at the hospital was pressing on them. Lucas said, “Let’s get back,” and Del nodded.
    “Sorry about this,” Del said to Olson.
    Lucas had parked behind Olson’s car. Olson watched them get back in, then pushed through a set of glass doors to a stair lobby. Lucas rolled the Porsche out of the parking lot. “I got a bad feeling about Marcy,” he said, with a dark hand on his heart.
    Del said, “They got her alive, dude. . . .”
    “I got a bad feeling, man.” At the end of the motel drive, he slowed to let a car go, took a right, idled a hundred feet up the street to a traffic light, and stopped. “This is the second time she’s been hit hard.”
    “You been hit just as hard.”
    “I never took a shot in--”
    Del interrupted, his voice harsh. “What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this?”
     
 
HE WAS LOOKING out the passenger-side window, and Lucas leaned forward to look past him. Tom Olson was running toward them, across the motel parking lot, waving his arms. They could see that he was shouting or screaming, but were too far away to hear him. There was a craziness in the way he ran—a violent, high-kick full-back run, as though he were fighting his way through invisible tacklers.
    Lucas stopped the car, and both he and Del stepped out as Olson got closer. The traffic light changed to green; the driver of the Lexus that had come up behind them touched his horn. Lucas shook his head at the driver and stepped between the Lexus and the Porsche, heading toward Olson. Olson was fifty yards away when he suddenly stopped, leaned forward, and put his hands on his knees, as though he’d run out of breath. The Lexus guy pushed open his car door and stepped out on the street. The Lexus was trapped behind the Porsche, with more cars behind the Lexus. The driver shouted, “Move the car, asshole,” and honked his horn again.
    Lucas shouted back, “Police. Go around it.” The man leaned on the horn, shouting unintelligibly; then another car behind the Lexus started. As suddenly as he’d stopped, Olson heaved himself upright and began running toward them again, crossed out of the blacktopped parking lot onto a grassy verge as Lucas and Del stepped onto the grass from the other side.
    Then, with the horns honking behind them, Olson ran to within a few feet of them and stopped, his eyes wide and anguished, grabbed hair on both sides of his head above his ears, opened his mouth, said nothing, his jaw working—and then pitched facedown on the ground.
    “Jesus Christ,” Del said.
    A few of the horns stopped, but one or two continued. They could hear the Lexus driver’s voice again: “Hey, asshole, asshole . . .”
    They crouched next to Olson, and Lucas turned the unconscious man’s face, lifted an eyelid with a thumb. Olson’s eyes had rolled up, and Lucas could see nothing but a pearly sliver of white. “He’s breathing, but he’s out,” Lucas said.