Phantom Prey

dropped the bottle of milk. If she hadn’t, he would have driven home, and he would have gotten out of the driver’s side of the car, in the garage, and he would have been helpless, assuming that Alyssa was still following him.
    He believed that she would have been. If she’d picked him up at the office, she had either been planning to kill him there, in the parking lot, or had been planning to follow him home.
    So, he thought, he owed his life to an unconscious choice, and a slippery plastic bottle of yellow-capped one-percent.
    Weather preferred to lay things out in terms of cause and effect. Lucas thought all of the happenstances that day were exactly that: happenstances. He was alive because he was lucky, because he rolled a seven instead of snake eyes. Weather saw some kind of controlling hand; the victory of good over evil. Though she thought of herself as a scientist, she also had a healthy slice of faith.
    Not that she wasn’t horrified by what had happened.
    Lucas normally wouldn’t have left the site of the bridge shooting in less than a couple of hours: the crime-scene people would have wanted to get everything nailed down, the St. Paul homicide guys would have wanted to dot some I’s and cross some T’s before he got out of their sight. But after talking for a while—and watching the TV trucks arrive—he pulled rank and told them that he was going home, at least long enough to talk to his wife.
    Weather was not going to see this on TV.
    After he shot Austin, and the bureaucratic stuff began, he’d neglected to call home. Weather had called him, wondering why he was so late.
    He lied: told her he’d run into a problem, he’d be a while. When she pressed, he snapped at her, said he’d call.
    He talked to St. Paul, then pulled rank.
    Weather was in the kitchen when he got home, wearing her ankle-length flannel nightshirt, one hand on her hip, irritated until she saw his eyes. Then her hands went to her face: “Ohmigod, what happened now?”
    He gave it to her straight, as though he were reading a newspaper report, in declarative sentences and short paragraphs, from the time he pulled into the SA store until the shoot-out on the bridge.
    She was reeling when he finished: “The whole family is gone. The whole family is dead,” she said. “How could this happen? How could this happen?”
    And the next stage: “What if I hadn’t asked you to talk to Alyssa? I saw her that one day, after my workout, bumped into her, if I hadn’t seen her, she’d be alive.”
    “More people might be dead,” Lucas said. “She killed at least three. Who knows how many were on her list?”
    “She tried to kill you,” Weather said. “She could have killed you. She didn’t kill you because . . .”
    “I got lucky. I got so fuckin’ lucky.”
    “Can’t just be luck, Lucas . . .”
    That would go on for a while; for two weeks.
    His ward, Letty, when Weather wasn’t around, wanted the details. He gave them to her while she was eating a handful of carrot sticks, and when he finished, she gave him a couple of sticks and said, “That was good shooting. I think maybe . . .”
    “What?”
    Her eyes were cold as a teenager’s could get: “I might have given her a double-tap. You’re lucky she didn’t get off another shot.”
    “You weren’t there, you didn’t see it,” Lucas said.
    “That’s true,” Letty said. She crunched on the last stick. “You done good.”
    Shrake and jenkins were freaked out, came and stood in his office door and peered at him the next morning. Jenkins asked, “You’re not thinkin’ too much, are you?”
    “Nope. Don’t believe so,” Lucas said.
    “Man, I looked at the paper,” Jenkins said. “That was as good a shooting as I’ve ever heard of. You had—no—fuckin’—choice.”
    Lucas nodded. “I know. It was a good shooting.”
    Shrake said, “You’re a brooder, though.”
    Lucas asked him, “Did you sleep last night?”
    “Like a baby,” Shrake said.
    Jenkins snorted. “Your goddamn eyes looked like coal pits this morning. If you got ten minutes, I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s front window.”
    “So we all gotta sit down and take it easy for a few days,” Lucas said.
    Shrake nodded. “Take it easy. Hard to stop thinking about it, though.”
    Over the next week, the Ricky Davis-Helen Sobotny problem became more complicated. Davis had completely and comprehensively spilled his guts. Wouldn’t stop talking. Wanted to get it off his chest. His story