Night Prey

thought: Wait. Did the window at the end of the hall look out at Jensen’s building?
    It did.
    Koop stood in the window, looking up, and a bare two stories above, Sara Jensen came to the window in a robe and looked down. Koop stepped back, but she was looking at the street and hadn’t noticed him in the semi-dark window. She had a drink in her hand. She took a sip and stepped away, out of sight.
    Jesus. A little higher, and he’d be virtually in her living room. She never pulled the drapes. Never. . . . Koop was aflame. A match; a killer.
    He needed a key. Not sometime. He needed one now. He’d picked up his philosophy at Stillwater: power comes out of the barrel of a gun; or from a club, or a fist. Take care of number one. The tough live, the weak die. When you die, you go into a hole: end of story. No harps, no heavenly choir. No hellfire. Koop resonated with this line of thought. It fit so well with everything he’d experienced in life.
    He went back to his truck for equipment, not thinking very much, not on the surface. When he needed something—anything—that thing became his: the people who had it were keeping it from him. He had the right to take it.
    Koop was proud of his truck. It might have belonged to anyone. But it didn’t. It belonged to him, and it was special.
    He didn’t carry much in the back, in the topper: a toolbox, a couple of bags of Salt ’N Sand left over from winter, a spade, a set of snow tires, a tow rope that had been in the truck when he bought it. And a few lengths of rusty concrete reinforcement rod—the kind of thing you might find lying in the dirt around a construction site, which was, in fact, where he had found it. The kind of thing a workingman would have back there.
    Most of the stuff was simply a disguise for the big Sears toolbox. That’s where the action was. The top tray contained a few light screwdrivers, pliers, a ratchet set, a half-dozen Sucrets cans full of a variety of wood screws, and other small items. The bottom compartment held a two-pound hammer, a cold chisel, two files, a hacksaw, a short pry-bar, a pair of work gloves, and a can of glazier’s putty. What looked like an ordinary toolbox was, in fact, a decent set of burglary tools.
    He put the gloves in his jacket pocket, took out the glazier’s putty, dumped the screws from one of the Sucrets cans into an empty compartment in the top tray, and scooped a gob of putty into the Sucrets tin. He smoothed the putty with his thumb, closed the tin, and dropped it into his pocket.
    Then he selected a piece of re-rod. A nice eighteen-inch length, easy to hide and long enough to swing.
    He still wasn’t thinking much: the room key was his. This asshole—some asshole—was keeping it from him. That made him angry. Really angry. Righteously angry. Koop began to fume, thinking about it— his fuckin’ key —and headed back to the apartment building.
    He walked down to the apartment entrance, pulling on the work gloves, the re-rod up his jacket sleeve. Nobody around. He stepped into the lobby, pushed up the glass panel on the inset ceiling light, and used the re-rod to crack both fluorescent tubes. Now in the dark, he dropped the panel back in place and returned to the truck. He left the driver’s-side door open an inch and waited.
    And waited some more. Not much happening.
    The passenger seat was what made the truck special. He’d gotten some work done in an Iowa machine shop: a steel box, slightly shallower but a bit longer and wider than a cigar box, had been welded under the seat. The original floor was the lid of the box, and from below, the bottom of the box looked like the floor of the passenger compartment. To open the box, you turned the right front seat support once to the right, and the lid popped up. There was enough room for any amount of jewelry or cash. . . . Or cocaine.
    Half the people in Stillwater were there because they’d been caught in a traffic stop and had the cocaine/stolen stereo/gun on the backseat. Not Koop.
    He watched the door for a while longer, then popped the lid on the box, pulled out the eight-ball, pinched it, put it back. Just a little nose, just enough to sharpen him up.
    Two mature arborvitae stood on either side of the apartment’s concrete stoop, like sentinels. Koop liked that: the trees cut the vision lines from either side. To see into the outer lobby, you had to be standing almost straight out from the building.
    A couple came down the walk, the man jingling