Naked Prey

Lucas told him, and Del dug them out of Lucas’s coat pocket and ran back to get the truck. One of the firemen ran up and asked, “She burned?” and Letty said, “No, I’m hurt.” Del was there in a few seconds, and Lucas lifted her into the back seat and then crawled in with her, and Del put the truck on the highway and they were headed back to Armstrong, running at top speed.
    “You okay?”
    “I’m hurt bad . . . ” She began sobbing again.
    Lucas got on the cell phone, found a signal, called into the sheriff’s comm center. “How do we get to the hospital? We’ve got a hurt kid.”
    “You on your way back to town?
    “Running fast.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Just went through Broderick.”
    “There’ll be a car sitting on the edge of town with its light bar flashing. Blink your headlights a bunch of times when you come up, and he’ll take you right through to the medical center.”
    “We’re coming . . . ”
    Lucas relayed the information to Del, then turned backto Letty. “I know you’re hurt. But tell me what happened, if you can.”
    “I was up in my bedroom, and Mom was down in hers, and I heard this knock . . . ” She told the story, and when it was done, Del muttered, “Jesus Christ, Letty,” and Lucas said, “You think he was shot.”
    “He was shot. He fell down.”
    “Maybe he was . . . you know, going down so you couldn’t see him.”
    “He was shot,” she said, stubbornly. “I’d never miss anyone that close. He’s shot in the chest.”
    “All right. Twenty-two short?”
    “Yes.” Her body was shaking with grief and pain. “He shot Mom. She was yelling for me to run, and she was fighting him, and then there was a shot and she stopped yelling and he started coming up the steps . . . You didn’t see her outside, in the yard or anything?”
    Lucas said, “I didn’t look. I was just trying to stay out of the way of the fire guys. You never saw the guy?”
    “Only his outline. It was way dark. But . . . he talked to me. He knew who I was. He called me Letty. And he sounded like . . . he was from around here. He sounded like one of us.”
    “Did you see his car?”
    After a moment of silence, she said, “He didn’t have a car. He didn’t have a car. I shot him and he fell down and then he got up and walked back to the house while I was trying to reload, and then I just sat there and the house caught on fire and I couldn’t get up, and then the house burned and then you came. No car ever drove away.”
    “You’re sure.”
    “No car. He didn’t have a car.”
    “Okay. Listen . . . ”
    He was about to say something, but she pushed a handout of her coat sleeve and tried to look at it, and Lucas saw a huge gash that started at her wrist and ran across the palm and disappeared between her middle and ring fingers.
    “Better keep your hand down,” he said. “It’s bleeding a little.”
    “Coming up on the patrol car,” Del said. Lucas looked down the highway, and saw the light bar. Del clicked the high beams off and on, and the patrol car pulled out on the highway, rolled slow until they’d gotten close, and then sped up and led them through town to the medical center’s Emergency Room. Three people were standing on the ramp, and then a fourth joined them, pushing a gurney, and Del pulled up next to them.
    T HE FOUR MOVED Lucas and Del out of the way and loaded Letty onto the gurney and pushed her inside, and Lucas went over to a plastic trash barrel and punted it out into the driveway, where it rolled around spewing its garbage.
    “Her fuckin’ hand,” he said to Del. “Her fuckin’ hand looks like it’s almost cut in half.”
    “What about the chest? Was she shot in the chest?”
    “She was pretty alert for anything deep,” he said. Then: “I gotta get inside.”
    “I’ll park the car . . . ”
    Lucas stopped at the door and looked back: “You getting pissed yet?”
    “Yeah. I’m pissed.”
    A YOUNG RESIDENT had been hustled out of bed when Lucas called in, and he was looking at Letty when Lucas pushed his way into the examination room. “How is she?”
    Letty tried to push up, and the doc turned, looked at Lucas over his mask: “Who’re you?”
    “I’m a cop. How is she?”
    The resident turned back to Letty, and as an aside to a nurse, in exactly the wrong tone, said, “Get that guy out of here.”
    Lucas snarled, “Listen, asshole, I’m not going into all the background, but if you want to keep your