Hidden Prey

be cool with the old man hunched in the corner, peering out over the windowsill.
    He got the pizza, olives, onions, and pepperoni, and they each ate a slice on the way back to the hotel, found a parking spot two blocks away, across a welter of streets, not far from a corner. “If it goes smooth, then I just walk back. If there’s a problem, it’ll be easier to lose them on foot,” Carl explained. “You’ve got your radio, I’ve got mine, I can hide, you can come and get me.”
    “I’ve got the map . . .”
    Carl walked around to the back of the car: right. Like he’s got this black Mustang, 4.6 liter V8 punching out 390 horsepower, and he’s cool, but this cop has got to pull him over, see, and the thing is, something’s going on and he can’t be late so he pops the cop. But don’t the cops call in your license tags when they stop you? It seems like they did on Cops . . .
    He was caught up in the fantasy, but came out of it when he had to struggle with the hatch lid. He had a piece-of-shit Taurus with about as much cool as a fuckin’ baby buggy. He got the gun out of a storage bin,checked the magazine, reseated it, went back to the passenger side. Grandpa handed him a pair of light gloves, and said, “I wiped the box, it should be clean.”
    “Back in a minute,” Carl said.
    “Wait, wait.” Grandpa fished under the seat, took out a single blaze-orange glove, the kind that hunters wore during deer season. “You must remember—whatever else, you must drop this in the room, you must drop it. This is part of the confusion, part of the plan. Drop the glove.”
     
    N EW GIRL BEHIND the desk. She was reading something, and when Carl sensed that she was about to look up, he looked away from her. He pushed the elevator button, but then walked up the seven floors, carrying the pizza, to make sure the stairs were clear.
    On seven, he poked his head out into the corridor. Empty. He took his old pizza delivery hat out of his pocket, walked down the corridor, the pizza balanced on top of the gun, which he held horizontally. Knocked on the door. “Pizza.”
    Nothing. Shit, the lights were on. He knocked again. “Pizza.”
    Then a thump, and his heart sped up just a step. Somebody coming. An eye at the eyehole, blue. He stepped back a bit, to let the woman get a look at him, the flat box and the hat.
    The door opened. No woman. A guy, a big guy, a great big fuckin’ guy with short hair, barefoot, slacks, and a T-shirt, and then, an instant later, behind him, the woman, saying, “I didn’t order a pizza . . .”
    And the guy saw the gun, or at least the barrel of it. His eyes widened, and Carl—what the heck—shot him in the heart. The guy looked surprised, and then went down like a ton of bricks and the woman screamed and ran back into another room.
    The Imperfect Weapon thought with a tiny splinter of his mind, Might have known there was another room, and went after her—strode after her, tall, movie-killer-like—it was all over but the shooting, bitch. Heheard a latching sound—sounded like a gun?—and he did a quick peek at the doorway and saw her kneeling behind the bed, fumbling with something, and he brought the gun up.
    And she started to turn and he saw the gun in her hand and thought Whoa, and the gun seemed to explode in her hand and the doorway next to his head splintered and Carl got off a shot and the woman fired again, ten feet away, hit the door, and then another shot punched through the drywall next to his head and Carl poked the gun around the door and fired twice, quickly, and heard what sounded like a piece of china exploding. He remembered the pink lamp on the nightstand where she got the gun, thought he must have hit it; another shot hit the door and Carl said, “Fuck it,” and ran.
    And as he ran, he dropped the orange glove Grandpa had given him. He’d forgotten about it until that minute, had held it under the pizza box, but now he’d changed his grip on the box and he saw the glove fall and thought, “Yes,” and hurtling the body in front of the door, ran down the corridor, into the stairwell and down the stairs.
    He was two flights down when he heard somebody, a man, shout, “Hey, hey . . .” but he kept going, averting his face from the front desk as he hurried by, and was outside before he realized he still had the pizza. He headed for the car—walking fast, trying not to catch anybody’s eye, two minutes, no more—and a hundred yards out, realized