Phantom Prey

the hill, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky . . .” but Davis had thrown himself into his truck.
    “Shit,” Lucas said, and pulled the .45.
    Davis fired up the truck and hit the gas, backing straight toward them, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky,” and pointed the pistol, and Del, who was exposed, ran around behind Lucas’s truck, and Davis accelerated, backward, past them, down the hill, all the way to the gravel road, across the gravel road, into the ditch on the other side.
    Neither Lucas nor Del had fired a shot; they both climbed back into Lucas’s truck and Lucas whipped it around in a circle. Davis was moving forward, but couldn’t climb the steep bank of the ditch for a hundred yards or so, and bounced and ricocheted over the rough turf on the edge of the ditch, and finally coaxed the truck up the side and hit the gravel road. Lucas was a hundred feet behind him when they cleared the top of a hill, past a farmhouse where there was a woman standing on the lawn with a golden retriever. They were going way too fast.
    Gravel dust made it impossible to see for more than forty or fifty yards. Every time Lucas moved to the side, to get out of the dust, Davis moved over in front of him.
    “Gotta hard right coming up,” Del yelled. “Coming up . . . Coming up close!”
    Lucas hit the brakes and dropped back, the stability-control lights flashing on his dashboard, but Davis plowed into the intersection, too fast to hold. The back end of the pickup started to slide, the rear wheels frantically throwing rocks and dirt, and the truck almost went into the ditch again, but Davis at least got it straight, with two wheels down in the ditch and two on the shoulder. Then the ditch wall got steeper and he tried to stop; did stop. Sat for a moment, and then the truck slowly rolled sideways. Davis tried to steer into it, but failed, and the truck rolled, and stopped upside down.
    “Hard right,” Del said, climbing out behind the muzzle of his Beretta 9mm.
    Lucas said, “Might be a gun in the truck. Watch it.”
    They boxed the truck, easing up behind it. There was no visible piece of sheet metal on the vehicle that hadn’t been dented in the roll. All the windows were cracked, and when Lucas came up on the driver’s side, he could hear Davis weeping.
    He risked a peek: Davis was hanging upside down in his safety belt, his face contorted, tears running down his forehead into his hair. Lucas asked, “Are you hurt?”
    Davis, out of control, asked “Wha-wha-what’s gonna happen to the birds?”
    “Are you hurt?” Del asked.
    “No, I’m just upside down.”
    “Gotta gun?” Lucas asked.
    “No.”
    “Let’s get you out of there.”
    They’d gotten him out, and Del had cuffed him, when a sheriff’s car cut around a corner a half-mile away, out from behind the shelter of a stand of trees, and Del looked back at the farmhouse where the woman had been and said, “She must have called it in.”
    Lucas said, “Hang on,” and climbed in the truck and hit the switch that activated the two red-LED flashers on his grill. The cop car slowed a bit, but came on, stopped thirty yards away and the cop got out with a shotgun, pointed to the sky, and Lucas shouted, “BCA—BCA,” and he and Del held up their IDs.
    “I’m so fucked,” Davis said.
    With the Goodhue deputy standing there, they read Davis his rights, and Lucas asked if he understood them, and then Del said, “You scared the shit out of us, back there, man. What the hell was that all about?”
    “I knew you were coming, someday,” Davis said. “I knew you’d find out.” He began to weep again, and the deputy seemed about to say something, but Lucas gave him a quick head shake.
    “You almost shot me in the balls, Ricky,” Lucas said. “Two inches over, and I’d be Nutless Davenport, wonder cop.”
    That made Davis smile, momentarily, shakily, and he said, “I didn’t want to do it. That crazy bitch made me do it. We weren’t trying to kill you.”
    Lucas was a little pissed: “Man, you shoot a gun at somebody.”
    “I was trying to wound you or something. Get you off the case. Didn’t try to hit you in the nuts, though,” he said, miserably. Then. “Look at my truck. Jesus, look at my truck. What’s gonna happen to my birds? What’s gonna happen to the farm?”
    “Did you buy the farm with the fifty thousand?”
    “Yeah . . . paid it off, anyway,” he said. “We couldn’t afford the mortgage when it rolled over. It was some kind of A-T-M or