Sudden Prey

after Cheryl and Franklin, and Franklin’s old lady’s been over there . . . Shit, where’s the telephone?”
     
     
     
    STADIC HEARD ABOUT the scramble out to Minnetonka, and called LaChaise, while LaChaise, Martin and Sandy were still driving back downtown.
    “They’re out there now,” he said, with thin satisfaction. “They were about five minutes off your ass.”
    “What happened to Winter?” LaChaise asked, prompted by Martin.
    “They’re talking to him. The way I heard it, he’s cooperating.”
    “Fucker must’ve called them the minute we were gone,” LaChaise said. “They got the car?”
    “I don’t know,” Stadic said.
    “We better get out of sight.”
    “Yeah: and one more thing. Me and a half-dozen other guys are supposed to be on the way to Hennepin General. They think you might be on the way there.”
    “What? Why?”
    “I don’t know, but we’re on the way over there. They talked to Winter, and he must’ve said something.”
    “I gotta think,” LaChaise said. “Something’s screwy.”
     
     
     
    STADIC SAT BEHIND a desk in the emergency room, a shotgun by his feet, while Lester and another cop named Davis talked about ways of blocking off the drive without being too conspicuous about it. Lucas and Del showed up, cold, damp, hurried.
    “You get the new composites on the street?” Lucas asked Lester.
    “Yeah, and we got the car out,” Lester said. As they talked, they drifted toward a group of chairs a few feet from Stadic. “Big brown car. What the fuck does that mean? What we got to do is break out where they’re hiding.”
    “Until we do that . . .”
    Davenport went on talking but Stadic blanked. All he could think of was, Big Brown Car. And he thought, Oh, shit, they’re at Harp’s.
    At noon, he was relieved of duty. He stopped at the office just long enough to pick up a pair of 8 × 50 naval binoculars, then drove down toward Harp’s place. He stopped a block and a half away and put the glasses on the windows above the laundromat. He hadn’t been watching for more than five minutes when he saw the blinds move—somebody looking out at the street.
    All right, he had them again. Same deal? He could wait in the street until they came out—they’d be in the car, that’d be a problem. He could maybe park across the street, and wait: and when he saw the garage door going up, he could run over to the driver’s side, blow it up from one foot away—press the muzzle of the shotgun against the glass and pull the trigger. That would take out the driver, then the other guy . . . He’d need his vest.
    He chewed his thumbnail nervously. A lot could go wrong. There’d be questions, later, too. But he could talk those away. He kept thinking about the death of Sell-More, he’d say, and how Harp seemed to tie into it. He ran Harp’s name on the computer and came up with a Lincoln . . . but why wouldn’t he tell everybody at that point? Why would he go in by himself?
    He tried to work it through, but his mind wasn’t right: too tired. He drove past the apartment to a liquor store with a pay phone, and dialed LaChaise again.
    “We’re looking for a big brown car, a Lincoln or a Buick.”
    “That’s it? No tags?”
    “No tags. But they’ve got a new composite out on you—it won’t be on TV until the late news, they want to see if you hit the hospital. But they say you’ve got gray hair, and gray beards, and you look like old men.”
    “That fuckin’ Winter,” LaChaise said. Then, “What’s it like at the hospital. Security?”
    “Tighter than a drum.”
    “Goddamnit . . .”
    “If I was you, I’d think about packing up and getting out,” Stadic said. “Your time’s running out.”
    After a moment, LaChaise said, “Maybe.”
    Stadic could hear him breathing; five seconds, ten. Then Stadic said, “Really?”
    “We’re talking about it,” LaChaise said. “Mexico.”

21
    THE WHOLE DAY dragged, the hours squeezing by: every cop in the department was on the street: there were rumors that the local gangs were filling up the Chicago-bound buses, just to get out of the pressure.
    Lucas had run out of ideas, and spent half the day at the hospital, with dwindling expectations.
    Night came, but no LaChaise ...
     
     
     
    THE HOSPITAL WAS quiet, dark. Nurses padded around in running shoes, answering calls from individual rooms, pushing pills. Lucas, Del and a narcotics cop named McKinney hung out in an office just off the main lobby. There was no