Night Prey

see.
    He started away at a fast walk, sticking the re-rod in his pocket. Jesus, what was this: there was blood on his jacket. He wiped at it with a hand, smeared it. If a cop came . . .
    The anger boiled up: the goddamned bitch, coming up like that.
    He swallowed it, fighting it, kept moving. Gotta keep moving . . . He glanced back, crossed the street, almost scurrying, now with the smell of warm human blood in his nose, in his mouth. Didn’t mind that, but not here, not now. . . .
    Maybe, he thought, he should walk out. He was tempted to walk out and return later for the company truck: if somebody saw him hit the woman and followed him to the truck, they’d see the badge on the side and that’d be it. On the other hand, the cops would probably be taking the license numbers of cars in the neighborhood, looking for witnesses.
    No. He would take it.
    He popped the driver’s-side door, caught a glimpse of himself in the dark glass, face twisted under the ball cap, dark scratches across it.
    He fired up the truck and wiped his face at the same time: more blood on his gloves. Christ, it was all over him. He could taste it, it was in his mouth. . . .
    He eased out of the parking space. Watched in the rearview mirror for somebody running, somebody pointing. He saw nothing but empty street.
    Nothing.
    The stress tightened him. He could feel the muscles pumping, his body filling out. Taste the blood . . . And suddenly, there was a flush of pleasure with a rash of pain, like being hand-stroked while ants crawled across you. . . .
    More good than bad. Much more.

6
    WEATHER WASN’T HOME. Lucas suppressed a thump of worry: she should have been home an hour earlier. He picked up the phone, but there was nothing on voice mail, and he hung up.
    He walked back to the bedroom, pulling off his tie. The bedroom smelled almost subliminally of her Chanel No. 5; and on top of that, very faintly of wood polish. She’d bought a new bedroom set, simple wooden furniture with an elegant line, slightly Craftsman-Mission. He grumbled. His old stuff was good enough, he’d had it for years. She didn’t want to hear it.
    “You’ve got a twenty-year-old queen-sized bed that looks like it’s been pounded to death by strange women—I won’t ask—and you don’t have a headboard, so the bed just sits there like a launching pad. Don’t you read in bed? Don’t you know about headboard lights? Wouldn’t you like some nice pillows?”
    Maybe, if somebody else bought them.
    And his old dresser, she said, looked like it had come from the Salvation Army.
    He didn’t tell her, but she was precisely correct.
    She said nothing at all about his chair. His chair was older than the bed, bought at a rummage sale after a St. Thomas professor had died and left it behind. It was massive, comfortable, and the leather was fake. She did throw out a mostly unused second chair with a stain on one arm—Lucas couldn’t remember what it was, but it got there during a Vikings-Packers game—and replaced it with a comfortable love seat.
    “If we’re going to watch television in our old age, we should sit next to each other,” she said. “The first goddamn thing men do when they get a television is put two E-Z Boys in front of it and a table between them for beer cans and pizzas. I swear to God I won’t allow it.”
    “Yeah, yeah, just don’t fuck with my chair,” Lucas had said. He’d said it lightly, but he was worried.
    She understood that. “The chair’s safe. Ugly, but safe.”
    “Ugly? That’s genuine glove . . . material.”
    “Really? They make gloves out of garbage bags?”
     
     
     
    WEATHER KARKINNEN WAS a surgeon. She was a small woman in her late thirties, her blondish hair beginning to show streaks of white. She had dark-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide mouth. She looked vaguely Russian, Lucas thought. She had broad shoulders for her size, and wiry muscles; she played a vicious game of squash and could sail anything. He liked to watch her move, he liked to watch her in repose, when she was working over a problem. He even liked to watch her when she slept, because she did it so thoroughly, like a kitten.
    When Lucas thought of her, which he might do at any moment, the same image always popped up in his mind’s eye: Weather turning to look at him over her shoulder, smiling, a simple pearl dangling just over her shoulder.
    They would be married, he’d thought. She’d said, “Don’t ask yet.”
    “Why? Would you say