Silken Prey

absurd, and sometimes terrifying. He told them well.
    As he walked toward the door, he scratched his crotch. His dick felt sort of . . . bent. Chafed. A little swollen.
    The latest irregular woman was more irregular than most. They’d had a strenuous workout earlier that evening, a day that had left Tubbs exhausted. Hours of cruising the media outlets, talking to other operators all over the state, assessing the damage; a tumultuous sexual encounter; and finally, the biggest blackmail effort of his life, the biggest potential payoff . . .
    He was beat, which was why, perhaps, he wasn’t more suspicious.
    Tubbs checked the peephole. Nobody there.
Probably Mrs. Jefferson,
he thought, who hadn’t been five-two on her tallest day, and now was severely bent by osteoporosis.
    He popped open the door, and,
    Surprise!
    •   •   •
    T UBBS REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS on the floor of a moving car, an SUV. He was terribly injured, and knew it. He no longer knew exactly how it had happened, if he ever had, but there was something awfully wrong with his head, his skull. His face and hands were wet with blood, and he could taste blood in his mouth and his nose was stuffed with it. He would have gagged if he had the strength.
    He could move his hands, but not his feet, and with a little clarity that came after a while, he knew something else: he was lying on a plastic sheet. And he knew why: so the floor of the car wouldn’t get blood on it.
    The images in his mind were confused, but deep down, in a part that hadn’t been impacted, he knew who his attackers must be, and he knew what the end would be. He’d be killed. And he was so hurt that he wouldn’t be able to fight it.
    Tubbs was dying. There wasn’t much in the way of pain, because he was too badly injured for that. Nothing to do about it but wait until the darkness came.
    The car was traveling on a smooth road, and its gentle motion nevertheless suggested speed. A highway, headed out of St. Paul. Going to a burial ground, or maybe to the Mississippi. He had no preference. A few minutes after he regained consciousness, he slipped away again.
    Then he resurfaced, and deep down in the lizard part of his brain, a spark of anger burned. Nothing he could do? A plan formed, not a good one, but something. Something he could actually do. His hands were damp with blood. With much of his remaining life force, he pushed one wet hand across the plastic sheet, and tried as best he could to form the letters
TG.
    That was it. That was all he had. A scrawl of blood on the underside of a car seat, where the owner wouldn’t see it, but where a crime-scene technician might.
    He pulled his hand back and then felt his tongue crawl out of his mouth, beyond his will, the muscles of his face relaxing toward death.
    He was still alive when the car slowed, and then turned. Still alive when it slowed again, and this time, traveled down a rougher road. Felt the final turn, and the car rocking to a stop. Car doors opening.
    His killers pulled him out of the backseat by pulling and lifting the plastic tarp on which he lay. One of them said, “Skinny fuck is heavy.”
    The other answered, “Hey. I think he’s breathing.”
    “Yeah? Give me the bat.”
    Just before the darkness came, Tubbs sensed the fetid wetness of a swamp; an odor, a softness in the soil beneath his body. He never heard or felt the crunch of his skull shattering under the bat.
    Nothingness.

CHAPTER 2
    L ucas Davenport was having his hockey nightmare, the one where he is about to take the ice in an NCAA championship game, but can’t find his skates. He knows where they are—locker 120—but the locker numbers end at 110 down one aisle, and pick up at 140 on the next one.
    He knows 120 is somewhere in the vast locker room, and as the time ticks down to the beginning of the match, and the fan-chants start from the bleachers overhead, he runs frantically barefoot up and down the rows of lockers, scanning the number plates. . . .
    He knew he was dreaming even as he did it. He wanted nothing more than to end it, which was why he was struggling toward consciousness at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and heard Weather chortling in the bathroom.
    Weather, his wife, was a surgeon, and on working days was always out of the house by six-thirty. Even on sleep-in days, she hardly ever slept until eight. Lucas, on the other hand, was a night owl. He was rarely in bed before two o’clock, except for recreational