Shadow Prey

and he held her for an instant as he found the door, gripped the knob and then thrust the woman toward the place Lily’s voice had come from. He felt the maid go, stumbling, and he wrenched open the door. As he went through, he fired once, toward the two women, and then ran toward the stairs, waiting for the bite from the .45 . . . .
     
    Light from the hallway flooded the room, and Lily saw movement toward her and realized it was too small to be Shadow Love: maid.
    She pivoted to a shooting line past the falling woman and saw Shadow Love in the doorway, his gun arm out toward her. She was still turning past the woman, and then he was gone, his arm trailing behind, like a bat in a drag bunt. Lily was still following with the .45 when Shadow Love pulled the trigger.
    The bullet hit her in the chest.
    Lillian Rothenburg went down like a tenpin.

CHAPTER
25
    Lucas was chatting with a gambler outside a riverfront bar when his handset beeped. He stepped off the curb, reached through the open window of the Porsche and thumbed the transmit switch.
    “Yeah. Davenport.” The sun had set and a chill wind was blowing off the river. He stuck his free hand in his pants pocket and hunched his back against the cold.
    “Lucas, Sloan says to meet him at Hennepin Medical Center just as fast as you can get there,” the dispatcher said.
    “He says it’s heavy-duty. Front entrance.”
    “Okay. Did he say what it’s about?”
    After a second’s hesitation, the dispatcher said, “No. But he said lights and sirens and get your ass over there.”
    “Five minutes,” Lucas said.
    Lucas left the gambler standing on the sidewalk and pushed the Porsche across the bridge, south through the warehouse district to the medical center, wondering all the time. A break? Somebody nailed a Crow? There were three squad cars and a remote television truck at emergency receiving. Lucas wheeled around front, dumped the car in a no-parking space, flipped down the sunshade with the police ID and walked up the steps. Sloan stood waiting behind the glass doors, and Lucas saw a patrol captain and a womansergeant standing in the lobby. They seemed to be staring at him. Sloan pushed the glass door open, and when Lucas stepped inside he linked his arm through Lucas’.
    “Got your shit together?” Sloan asked. His face was white, drawn, deadly serious.
    “What the fuck you talking about?” Lucas said, trying to pull away. Sloan hung on.
    “Lily’s been shot,” Sloan said.
    For just a second, the world stopped, like a freeze frame in a movie. A guy being wheeled across the lobby in a wheelchair: frozen. A woman behind an information desk: caught with her mouth half open, staring carplike at Lucas and Sloan. All stopped. Then the world jerked forward again and Lucas heard himself saying, “My fuckin’ Christ.” Then bleakly, “How bad?”
    “She’s on the table,” Sloan said. “They don’t know what they got. She’s breathing.”
    “What happened?” Lucas said.
    “You okay?” asked Sloan.
    “Ah, man . . .”
    “A guy—Shadow Love—forced a maid to open her hotel room. Lily was taking a bath, but she got to her gun, and there was some kind of fight and he shot her. He got away.”
    “Motherfucker,” Lucas said bitterly. “We were over looking at Clay’s hotel security, we never thought about hers.”
    “The maid’s all shook up, but she’s looked at a picture and she thinks it was Shadow . . . .”
    “I don’t give a fuck about that, what about Lily? What are the docs saying? Is she bad? Come on, man.”
    Sloan turned away, shrugged, then turned back and gestured helplessly. “You know the fuckin’ docs, they ain’t gonna say shit because of the malpractice insurance. They don’t want to say she’s gonna make it, then have her croak. But one of the hotel guys was in combat in Vietnam. He says she was hit hard. He said if she’d of been in Vietnam, it would of depended on how fast they got her back to a hospital whether she made it . . . . He thinks the slug took a piece of lung, and he rolled her up on her side to keep her from drowning in blood . . . . The paramedics were therein two or three minutes, so . . . I don’t know, Lucas. I think she’ll make it, but I don’t know.”
    Sloan led the way through the hospital to the surgical suite. Daniel was already there with a Homicide cop.
    “You okay?” Daniel asked.
    “What about Lily?”
    “We haven’t heard anything yet,” Daniel said,