Night Prey

sob.
    “Fuck you!” Koop screamed back.
    Then a flash: the woman had taken a picture of him. Koop panicked, turned to run. The woman on the sidewalk looked at him, still screaming, pulling away.
    Christ: she’d seen him close, from two inches.
    Another flash.
    Man’s voice: “Get away from that woman, police are coming, get away.”
    And another light, steady this time: somebody was making movies.
    The rage roared out of him, like fire; the knife with a mind of its own.
    Koop grabbed the woman by the throat, lifted her off the sidewalk, the woman kicking like a chicken.
    And the knife took her. She slipped away from him, onto the sidewalk, almost as though she had fainted.
    Koop looked down. His hands were covered with blood; blood ran down the sidewalk, black in the streetlight. . . .
    “Get away from that woman, get away. . . .”
    No need to be told. Panic was on him, and he ran to the truck, climbed in, gunned it.
    Around the corner, around another.
    Two minutes, up the interstate ramp. Cop cars everywhere, down below lights flashing, sirens screeching. Koop took the truck off the interstate, back into the neighborhoods, and pushed south. Side streets and alleys all the way.
    He stayed inside for ten minutes, then jumped on the Crosstown Expressway for a quick dash to the airport. Took a ticket, went up the ramp, parked. Crawled in the back.
    “Motherfucker,” he breathed. Safe for the moment. He laughed, drank the last mouthful from the pint bottle.
    He got out of the truck, hitched his pants, walked around behind, and climbed in.
    Safe, for the time being.
    He rolled up his jogging jacket to use as a pillow, lay down, and went to sleep.
    Eloise Miller was dead in a pool of black blood before the cops got there.
    In St. Paul, a patrol cop looked at Ivanhoe the dog and wondered who in the fuck would do that. . . .

26
    “WE GOT PICTURES of him,” Connell said. Lucas found her on the sixth floor, in the doorway of a small apartment, walking away from a gray-haired woman. Connell was as cranked as Lucas had ever seen her, a cassette of thirty-five-millimeter film in her fist. “Pictures of him and his truck.”
    “I heard we got movies,” Lucas said.
    “Aw, man, come on . . .” Connell led him down the stairs. “You gotta see this.”
    On four, two cops were talking to a thin man in a bathrobe. “Could you run the tape?” Connell asked.
    One of the cops glanced at Lucas and shrugged. “How’s it going, chief?”
    “Okay. What’ve we got?”
    “Mr. Hanes here took a videotape of the attack,” the older of the two cops said, pointing a pencil at the man in the bathrobe.
    “I didn’t think,” the man said. “There wasn’t any time.”
    The younger cop pushed the button on the VCR. The picture came up, clear and steady: a picture of a bright light shining into a window. At the bottom of it, what appeared to be two sets of legs doing a dance.
    They all stood and watched silently as the tape rolled on: they could see nothing on the other side of the window except the legs. They saw the legs only for a few seconds.
    “If we get that downtown, we should be able to get a height estimate on the guy,” Lucas said.
    The bathrobe man said, mournful as a bloodhound, “I’m sorry.”
    The older cop tried to explain. “See, the light reflected almost exactly back at the lens, so whatever he pointed it at is behind the light.”
    “I was so freaked out. . . .”
    In the hallway, Lucas said, “How do we know we don’t have the same thing on the film?”
    “ ’Cause she went out on her terrace and shot it,” Connell said. “There was no window to reflect back at her . . . There’s a one-hour development place at Midway, open all night.”
    “Isn’t there a better—”
    She was shaking her head. “No. I’ve been told that the automated processes are the most reliable for this Kodak stuff. One is about as good as another.”
    “Did you see enough of the woman on the street?” Lucas asked.
    “I saw too much,” Connell said. She looked up at Lucas. “He’s flipped out. He started out as this sneaky, creepy killer, really careful. Now he’s Jack the Ripper.”
    “How about you?”
    “I flipped out a long time ago,” she said.
    “I mean . . . are you hanging in there?”
    “I’m hanging in,” she said.
     
     
     
    TH EQUICK-SHOT OPERATOR was by himself, processing film. He could stop everything else, he said, and have prints in fifteen minutes, no charge.
    “There’s no way