Shadow Prey

me here,” Shadow Love said.
    “That’s right,” Aaron said.
    “You assholes,” Shadow shouted. “You fuckin’ assholes.”
    “Wait, wait, wait . . .” Sam said, pointing at the television.
    Clay and his gun: “ . . . to Brookings and will establish a temporary national headquarters in Minneapolis. This is the third time . . .”
    The mood changed in an instant:
    “The sonofabitch is coming,” Sam whooped. “The cocksucker’s on his way.”
     
    They had a quiet lunch, the three of them sitting around a rickety table eating cold-cut sandwiches with mustard and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.
    “So what now?” Shadow asked. “There are cops all over the place, and the FBI. In a few more days, we won’t be able to go on the streets.”
    Aaron glanced at Sam. “I’ll call Barbara. Tell her we may be coming. I don’t want to go in too soon; we’d fuck up, go outside, somebody’d see us.”
    “If you’re not going out to Bear Butte, you ought to come over to Barbara’s,” Sam told Shadow Love. “She talks like you were her kid.”
    Shadow Love nodded. “Yeah. I saw her before I went to L.A. I don’t know . . . we’ll be a danger to her.”
    “She knows that,” Aaron said. “We’ve been on the run before. She says we’ll be welcome, no matter what.”
    “She didn’t know exactly what you were planning to do . . . .”
    “She’ll take us,” said Sam.
    “Not a bad piece of ass either,” Aaron said with a grin.
    Sam snorted and even blushed. He and Barbara had been lovers. Nothing had been said when he talked to her on the telephone a month before, but he knew it would start again. He looked forward to it. “Jealousy. It’s an ugly sight,” he said into his soup.
    Shadow Love stepped to the couch, picked up the cardboard box and opened it. Inside was a flat black assault rifle. He took it out of the box. “M-15,” he said. He pointed it out the window at a streetlight.
    “Where’d you get it? What’s it for?” asked Sam.
    “I got it on the street. It’s for the cop, maybe. Or Hart.”
    Aaron had stepped toward the stove, reaching for the teapot. He stopped in mid-stride and whirled toward his son. “No. Not Hart. You don’t kill the people,” he said furiously.
    Shadow Love looked at him with a cold glint in his eye. “I do what I think best. You and Sam disagree all the time, but you still act.”
    “We always agree before we do anything,” said Aaron.
    “That’s a luxury you won’t have much longer. You can argue. You can sit and think. You can fuck up. I’ll try to buy you some time.”
    “We don’t want that,” Aaron said furiously.
    Shadow Love shook his head, aimed out the window again and squeezed the trigger. The click hung in the air between them.

CHAPTER
14
    Hart worked through an Indian-dominated housing project while Sloan did background on John Liss. Lucas, fighting a blinding hangover, made the rounds of barbershops, bars, fast-food joints and rooming houses.
    A little after noon, Lucas called the dispatcher to check on Lily and was told that she was still meeting with the county attorney. He stopped at an Arby’s, ordered a roast beef sandwich and carried it outside. He was leaning on his car when his handset squawked and the shotgun touched him behind the ear again. He almost dropped the sandwich. He stood paralyzed, and the cold metal pressed against his head and Hood’s apartment rose up in front of his eyes, the circle of squad cars, the radios squawking . . . A few seconds later, it all faded and Lucas staggered from the car and half fell onto a mushroom-shaped concrete stool. He sat sweating for a few moments, then got up and walked shakily to the car and started off again.
    A half-hour later, the dispatcher gave him a number to call. Lily’s hotel. Lucas called from a street booth across from a leather shop, staring at a Day-Glo-green sign advertising hand-tooled belts.
    “Lunch?” Lucas asked, when Lily said hello.
    “I can’t,” she said. There was a second’s silence, and then she said, “I’m going home.”
    Lucas considered it, staring at the Day-Glo sign, then down at the telephone receiver in his hand. After a few seconds he said, “I thought you might stay over, see what happens.”
    “I thought about it, but then . . . I finished with the county attorney and called to see when I could get a flight out. I was thinking tonight, but they said they could get me on a flight at one-thirty. I’ve