Hidden Prey

that was almost a triple murder if it wasn’t for my guy here, and nobody in this fuckin’ humpty police department would tell me what the hell was going on and now I find my guy all chained up and let me ask you—you caught the guy who went running out of here, right? The double murderer who went running out of here because you put the call on your fuckin’ unscrambled police frequency . . .” His voice was rising and he could feel the blood in his forehead.
    Andreno said, “Tell ’em, brother,” which didn’t help, and added, “They didn’t catch him—they didn’t even chase him. A guy went outside and looked around with a fuckin’ flashlight.”
    “That’s not fuckin’ true,” said Terry. He was a weathered sixty, maybe, with a red drinker’s face and a pushed-in nose. “We’ve got a team looking for him.”
    “Yeah, now,” Andreno said. “By now the guy’s down in the fuckin’ Twin Cities shootin’ pool and playing with his girlfriend’s tits.”
    “Who the fuck are you?” Terry demanded. “You got no ID, you got no badge, you got no car, who the fuck do you think you are?”
    “I’m under fuckin’ cover,” Andreno shouted at him. “Maybe you heard of that? And I gotta car. I just didn’t want you in it.”
    One of the cops, trying to be reasonable, said, “The call was on the command channel . . .”
    Lucas took a step back and put up his hands, palms out, as if pushing away from them. “All right, all right: let’s start over. Okay? Let’s start over. And let’s take the cuffs off my guy, here, okay? Okay? Let’s take the cuffs off.”
     
    T HEY MOVED OUT to the front of the bar. One of the cops went around behind the bar and put together some Cokes and ice, and Lucas told Terry about the investigation.
    “ . . . I got this spy here, this Russian, and we think she’s got somebody working with her. So after we come up with Spivak, she says, ‘Well, let’s do Spivak tomorrow, after we do the paperwork.’ I think, I wonder why that is? Why don’t we do him today? But I go along with it, because I already called Micky in. I tell Micky to keep an eye on Spivak, just in case. So he stakes out the place, and Spivak never comes out after the place closes. Micky starts to worry about it, so he stands up on the garbage can in back and peeks into the back room . . .”
    “I see Spivak standing on two six-packs of whatever . . .”
    “Bud Light,” Terry said.
    “Whatever,” Andreno said. “His knees are shaking like crazy, he’s about to hang himself, and I call Lucas. I’m standing in the back, still on the phone, and I hear Lucas talking to you, and the next thing I know, the back door bangs open and this guy comes outa there like a rocket ship. I go running after him but as I go past the door I see Spivak hanging by the neck, so I gotta stop and run inside and try to lift him up by the legs so he don’t strangle, and then your guys got there. About an hour later.”
    “Two fuckin’ minutes,” one of the uniformed cops said. “And we looked for the guy. We knocked on doors down there to see if anybody saw anybody tearing out of there in a hurry, or anything.”
    “Nobody saw anything,” said another cop.
    “What pisses me off,” Andreno said, “Is that when your guys got here, one of them points his pistol at me and says, ‘Okay, drop him,’ and Spivak is going aaagggaaaaaaghh.”
    They all looked at him for a moment and then Lucas started tolaugh, and then another cop started and then the second one, and the chief rubbed his forehead and said, “Ah, for Christ’s sakes.”
     
    S PIVAK WAS AT the medical center with rope burns around his neck and on his face where the rope had cut against it. He had pulled muscles in his neck and back, and had a damaged larynx. He could talk—croak—but just barely, said the cops who’d brought him in.
    His wife, a short, broad woman who might have been Spivak’s sister, was in the hallway outside the hospital room where Spivak was being treated, and when she saw them coming, she said, “John Terry, I don’t want you talking to him. You go away.”
    She was frightened and angry. Terry said, “I’m sorry, Marsha, but we gotta talk to him. This is a murder investigation. Two people have been murdered . . .”
    “He almost got hung,” she wailed, and then she started to cry, “You almost got him killed . . .”
    Two more people came around the corner, a man and a woman, both short and