Silken Prey

out.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “Whatever,” Lucas said. “You got my phone number. The deal is open until Dannon talks to me. At that point, you’re done.”
    “Double fuck you,” Carver said.
    “Keep your eye on the TV. You could be a star,” Lucas said.
    Carver walked away.

CHAPTER 23
    K idd finally boiled it down to a single line: he said, “I think it’s moronic.”
    “I know what I’m doing,” Lauren said.
    “I’m not sure of that. As far as you know, they’ll have a dozen extra guards around the place to keep the starfuckers away,” Kidd said.
    “They’d be out front. I’ll be going in from the dark side, right down the neighbor’s tree line,” Lauren said. She’d been studying satellite pictures all day, including several taken within the past week, with resolution good enough to see the hubcaps on cars. “I’ll have my starlights. The security alarms will be off, the dogs will be locked up, all kinds of people will be walking around the place, and most of them will be either rich or important, so nobody will be inclined to question them.”
    “Jesus.” Kidd dragged his fingertips through his eye sockets.
    “One last time,” Lauren said. “I swear to God, I do this, and I’m done. I’ll go back to being the little housewife.”
    “You’re not a little housewife.”
    “Yes, I am. I’m not a famous painter. I’m not a famous computer hacker,” Lauren said. “People say, ‘You’re
that
Kidd’s wife? You lucky woman.’ You know—get your cookies in the oven and your buns in the bed, while Kidd takes care of the important stuff.”
    Kidd had to laugh, and she said, “Now you’re laughing.”
    “I’m laughing because it’s so fucking stupid. Why can’t you be a rock climber or something? A scuba diver? You’re smart—go to college, get a degree, become a famous . . . whatever.”
    “Right. Whatever. Even the Famous Kidd can’t think exactly what that might be.”
    They were in the living room, in a couple of easy chairs overlooking the Mississippi. The weather was changing: not only from one day to the next, but from autumn to winter. The sky was gray, overcast, with thick clouds the color of aluminum, not a hint of the sun. Cold. On really bad days, Kidd sat in front of the window and drew the scene, with a pencil or a crayon and a sketchbook, and the scene changed every time. Lauren pushed herself out of her chair and walked to the window, pressed her forehead against the cool glass.
    After a moment, Kidd walked up behind her and draped an arm over her shoulder. “All right. Let’s do it.”
    “Thank you. You can’t tell me this doesn’t light you up, at least a little bit,” Lauren said.
    “The biggest problem is Jackson,” Kidd said. “We can’t both get caught. If they grab you . . .”
    “You have to run,” Lauren said. “But they won’t grab me. . . . I absolutely will not push. I’ll go in with my finger on the abort switch. The first second that trouble shows up, I’ll go right back down the tree line. You get me, and we roll.”
    “One last time,” Kidd said.
    She turned back to him, her face bright. “I’m really stoked, Kidd. I’m high as a kite.”
    •   •   •
    D ANNON WAS DRIVING, T ARYN was in the backseat. Schiffer, the campaign manager, was in the front passenger seat with two cell phones, three ballpoint pens, one red, one green, and one black, and a blue-cloth three-ring binder. Inside the binder was an inch-thick stack of paper, much of it given over to a listing of every voting precinct in Minnesota, all 4,130 of them, with the results of the last Senate campaign, which had been won by Porter Smalls.
    Thirty precincts had been designated as critical signposts. For those precincts, the far right column was kept in red, green, or black ink; red for those precincts where exit polls suggested Smalls would exceed his total in the last campaign, green for those in which he was running behind, and black for those in which there was no discernible change.
    Of the thirty, as of three o’clock in the afternoon, he was running behind his previous total in seventeen of the twenty-six where they had been able to gather enough responses to report. In the other nine, there was no discernible change. He was running ahead in none of them. All by itself, that would have been good; but what was happening was actually better than good. People who voted before five o’clock tended to be more conservative than those who