Invisible Prey

ankle, her foot half gone. “No, no, no…”
    Lucas said, “Get an ambulance rolling,” and he turned to Coombs, who’d gone back to her hands and knees.
    “You sure you’re…?”
    Coombs was right there with Widdler’s derringer. She pointed the tiny gun at Widdler’s eye from one inch away and pulled both triggers.
    The second blast was as big as the first one, and Widdler’s head rocked back as though she’d been kicked by a horse.
    Lucas dropped on Coombs and twisted the gun out of her hand, but before he got that done, Coombs had just enough time to look into Widdler’s single remaining dead eye and say, “Fuck you.”

28
    T HE S T. P AUL COPS closed off the park and the street where the shooting took place, stringing tape and blocking access with squad cars. Local television stations put cameras in the surrounding condos, and got some brutal shots of Widdler’s dead body, faceup and crumbled like a ball of paper, crime-scene guys in golf shirts standing around like death clerks.
    Coombs went to jail for three days. In the immediate confusion over the shooting, Ramsay County attorney Jack Wentz showed up for the cameras and announced that he would charge Coombs with murder; and that he would further investigate the regrettable actions by state investigative officers, which led to an unnecessary killing on his turf.
    Lucas, talking behind the scenes, argued that the shooting was part of a continuing violent action—that the killing of Widdler was an unfortunate but understandable reaction of a woman who’d been shot and hit, and the fact that she was wearing a ballistic vest did not lessen the shock. The close-range shooting, he said, combined with the real shooting of Widdler by Flowers, the fact that Coombs had seen Lucas knocked down by a car, that people had been screaming at her, that Widdler had been thrashing around on the ground next to her, had so confused Coombs that she’d picked up the loose gun and fired it without understanding the situation.
    Wentz, replying off the record, said Lucas was trying to protect himself and the other incompetents who’d set up the sting.
     
    T HE NEXT DAY, the local newspaper columnists unanimously landed on the county attorney’s back, and the television commentators followed on the noon, evening, and late-night news.
    The Star Tribune columnist said, “Mrs. Coombs’s mother and daughter were killed by this witch, and she’d just been shot in the chest herself—thank God she was wearing a bulletproof vest, or the whole family would have been wiped out by one serial killer. That Wentz would even consider bringing charges suggests that he needs some quiet time in a corner, on a stool, with a pointy hat to focus his thoughts, if he has any…”
    The police federation said it would revisit its endorsement of Wentz for anything, and the governor said off-the-record that the county attorney was full of shit, which was promptly reported, of course, then disavowed by Neil Mitford, but the message had been sent.
    The county attorney said that what he’d really meant to say was that he’d investigate, and the issue would be taken to the grand jury.
    Coombs was released after three days in jail, with her house as bond. She never went back—the election was coming, and the grand jury, which did what Wentz told them to do, decided not to indict.
     
    R OSE M ARIE R OUX told Lucas, “You got lucky. About six ways. If Coombs had wound up dead, you might be looking for a job—this being an election year.”
    “I know. The thought never crossed my mind that Widdler’d yank out a gun and try to shoot her in broad daylight on a main street,” Lucas said. “And you know what? If it’d been real, if it hadn’t been a setup, she’d have gotten away with it. She’d have walked across the street and gone upstairs to the Skyway and then over to Galtier and down in the parking garage, and that would have been it.”
    Mitford, who had come over to listen in, said, to Rose Marie, “We pay him to be lucky. Lucky is even better than good. Everybody is happy.” And to Lucas: “Don’t get unlucky.”
     
    T HE PUBLIC ARGUMENT would have gone on, and could have gotten nastier, except that Ruffe Ignace published an exclusive interview with the teenage victim of Burt Kline’s sexual attentions.
    Ignace did a masterly job of combining jiggle-text with writing-around, and everybody over fourteen understood that Kline had semicolon-shaped freckles where many