Rules of Prey

and two houses down.
    “It was the best we could do, and it ain’t bad,” the surveillance chief said. “We can see both doors and all windows. With the freeway on the south, he can only get out of the neighborhood to the north, and we’re north of him. And he ain’t going to see us anyway.”
    “What’s that glow? Is he reading in bed?”
    “Night-light, we think,” the surveillance chief said.
    Lucas nodded. He recalled seeing one in the bedroom but couldn’t say so. “He’s trying to keep away the nightmares,” he said instead.
    “He’d have them if anybody did,” said the surveillance chief. “Are you going to work a regular schedule with us?”
    “I’ll be here every night,” Lucas said. “If he breaks off his regular work pattern during the day, I want you to beep me. I’ll come running. He hasn’t ever hit anybody in the early morning, so I’ll head home after he goes to bed. Get some sleep. I’ll check with the surveillance team first thing in the morning.”
    “Stay close. When it goes down, it could go fast.”
    “Yeah. I was at the Fuckup, remember?”
    Lucas looked out the window at the maddog’s apartment, at the steady dim glow from the second floor. This time there wouldn’t be a fuckup.

CHAPTER
28
    The maddog should never have spotted the surveillance. It was purely an accident.
    He left a late-afternoon real-estate closing at a bank in the Mississippi River town of Hastings, twenty-odd miles south of the Twin Cities. It was dark. He crossed the Mississippi at the Hastings bridge and drove north on Highway 61, through the suburban towns of Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, and Newport. As he passed through St. Paul Park he found himself behind an uncovered gravel truck. Pieces of gravel bounced out of the back of the truck and along the highway. A big one could star a windshield.
    The maddog, thinking of the shiny finish on his new Thunderbird, moved into the left lane and accelerated around the truck. The close-surveillance car behind him caught the truck a moment later. Since the maddog appeared to be in no particular hurry, intent only on staying ahead of the truck, the surveillance car fell in behind it.
    Gravel bounced around the surveillance car, but the cops inside didn’t care. The car was mechanically sound, but, like most surveillance cars, was not much to look at, just a plain vanilla Dodge. A few dings more or less wouldn’t make any difference. And the gravel truck made excellent cover.
    None of it would have mattered if one particularly large rock hadn’t bounced off the highway and knocked half the plastic lens off the amber left-turn light. The cops inside heard the thump, but couldn’t see the broken lens.
    “We oughta give this asshole a ticket,” one of the surveillance cops said as the rock bounced off.
    “Right,” the driver answered. “Go ahead and stick the light on the roof.”
    “Could you see Daniel’s face? We say, ‘Well, we was following him when we ran into this incredible asshole with a truck full of rocks . . .’ ”
    “He’d put us in prison,” the first cop said. “He’d find a way.”
    The maddog decided to stop at a fast-food restaurant off the Interstate loop highway, I-494. The loop intersected with Highway 61 just north of the town of Newport. When the maddog pulled onto the circular entrance ramp for I-494, he glanced into the rearview mirror and noted, with no particular interest, the unusual turn signal on a car a hundred yards back. The signal flashed a peculiar combination of amber and unshielded white.
    The close-surveillance car was tighter on the maddog’s tail than it normally would have been. The lead car had continued up Highway 61 through the I-494 interchange and would now have to find a place to turn around and catch up from behind. In the meantime, until one of the trailing surveillance cars could move up into the lead position, the cops in the close-surveillance car couldn’t take chances. They stuck close.
    They were still close when the maddog turned off on the Robert Street exit, heading for one of the restaurants just north of the interchange. As he came down the ramp and slowed to a stop at the bottom, the maddog again noticed the car with the odd turn light. Something was wrong with it, he thought. A broken lens or something. The car was slow in coming down the ramp behind him.
    When the traffic signal turned green, the maddog forgot about it and took a left, went up the hill, and pulled