Silent Prey

wouldn’t be looking at joggers.
    Davenport. The thought stopped him. If Davenport was out there, had come to see the verdict, Bekker was a dead man.
    No help for that. He threw off the thought, took a breath. Ready. He stepped inside the stall with Shaltie, locked it, dropped to his back, slid under the door, stood up again.
    “Motherfucker.” He said it out loud, had learned it in jail: the standard, all-purpose curse. He dropped back on the floor, slid halfway under the stall, groped for Shaltie’s wallet. Found it, checked it. Twelve dollars. One credit card, a Visa. Not good. Money could be a problem . . . . He slipped the wallet into his underpants, went to the door, listened.
    Could hear Shaltie breathing, bubbling. Bekker thought about going back into the stall, strangling him with his belt. All the humiliations of the past weeks, the torture when they took away his chemicals . . . Not enough time. Time was hurting him now. Had to move.
    He left Shaltie living, turned the lock knob, peered into the hallway. The internal corridor was empty. Went to the next door—public hall. Half-dozen people, all down at the public end, near the elevators, talking. He wouldn’t have to walk past them. The stairs were the other way: he could see the exit sign, just beyond the fire hose.
    Another breath. And move. He stepped out into thehall, head down. A lunchtime bureaucrat-jogger on his way outside. He walked confidently down the hall to the stairs, away from the elevators. Waiting for a shout. For someone to point a finger. For running feet.
    He was in the stairway. Nobody took the stairs, not from this high up . . . .
    He ran down, counting the floors. As he passed six, a door slammed somewhere below and he heard somebody walking down ahead of him. He padded softly behind, heard another door open and shut, and stepped up the pace again. At the main level, he stopped and looked out. Dozens of people milled through the reception area. Okay. This was the second floor. He needed one more. He went down another level, and found an unmarked steel door. He pushed it open. He was outside, standing on the plaza. The summer sun was brilliant, the breeze smelled of popcorn and pigeons. A woman sitting on a bench, a kid next to her. She was cutting an apple with a penknife, her kid waiting for the apple.
    Head down, Bekker jogged past her. Just another lunchtime fitness freak, weaving through the traffic, knees up, sweating in the sunshine.
    Running like a maniac.

CHAPTER
2
    Lucas whipped down the asphalt backroads of Wisconsin, one hand on the wheel, one on the shifter, heel-and-toe on the corners, sunlight bouncing off the Porsche’s dusty windshield. He slow-footed across the St. Croix bridge at Taylor’s Falls into Minnesota, looking for cops, then dropped the hammer again, headed south into the sun and the Cities.
    He caught Highway 36 west of Stillwater, the midday traffic sparse and torpid, pickups and station wagons clunking past the cow pastures, barns and cattail sloughs. Eight miles east of Interstate 694, he blew the doors off a red Taurus SHO. Clear road, except for the occasional crows picking at roadkill.
    His eyes dropped to the speedometer. One hundred and seven.
    What the fuck are you doing?
    He wasn’t quite sure. The day before, he’d rolled out of his lake cabin late in the afternoon and driven eighty miles north to Duluth. To buy books, he thought: there were no real bookstores in his corner of Wisconsin. He’dbought books, all right, but he’d wound up drinking beer in a place called the Wee Blue Inn at eight o’clock in the evening. He’d been wearing a dark-blue dress shirt under a silk jacket, khaki slacks, and brown loafers, no socks. A laid-off ore-boatman, drunk, had taken exception to the bare feet, and for one happy instant, before the barkeeps arrived, it had looked like the boatman would take a swing.
    He needed a bar fight, Lucas thought. But he didn’t need what would come afterward, the cops. He took his books back to the cabin, tried to fish the next day, then gave it up and headed back to the Cities, driving as fast as he knew how.
    A few miles after blowing off the SHO, he passed the first of the exurban ramblers, outriders for the ’burbs. He groped in the glove box, found the radar detector, clipped it to the visor and plugged it into the cigarette-lighter socket as the Porsche screamed down the cracked pavement. He let his foot settle further; punched up the radio,