Sudden Prey

be: they now hadn’t heard from LaChaise for thirty-six hours. Del, Sloan, Sherrill came and went and returned. They were running out of conversational gambits, sitting in dark rooms, out of sight, waiting . . .
    Lester called. “Lucas: LaChaise, Martin and Darling just hit a credit union in Kansas City. Not more than an hour ago—four twenty-five.”
    “Kansas City?” The news came like a punch, left him unsteady. “Are they sure?”
    “Yeah, they say there’s no doubt. We’re getting a videotape relayed through TV3. The Kansas City cops gave it to everybody in sight.”
    “How soon will you have the tape?”
    “Ten or fifteen minutes, I guess. TV3’s putting it on the air soon as they get it. We’re gonna tape it off them.”
    Lucas hung up and looked at Sherrill and Sloan: “You ain’t gonna believe it,” he said.
     
     
     
    THE ROBBERY WAS smooth, professional. Martin was in first with an AR-15. He was shouting the moment he came through the door, leveling the rifle, pointing at people.
    LaChaise pushed Sandy Darling through the door behind Martin, then vaulted up on the counter. There were only two customers in the place, and three people behind the counter. LaChaise looted the cash drawers, said something to one of the younger women, smacked her on the ass with the palm of his hand and crossed through the counter gate. The camera, taking in the whole office, showed Sandy Darling pressed against the wall, her hands over her ears.
    “They ain’t no cherries,” Del said. They were in homicide, fifteen guys and four women standing around a small TV.
    “You’ve seen it before,” Lucas said. “It’s the same goddamn robbery that we broke up, all over again.”
    “Except for the grenade,” Sherrill said.
    As they were backing out the door, Martin gave a little speech. “We want everybody into the manager’s office, on the floor, behind the desk. We’re gonna roll a hand grenade in here . . . now I don’t want to scare anyone, ’cause they’re nothing like you see in movies. There’ll just be a little pop. You’ll be fine if you’re behind the desk . . .”
    Martin held up what looked like a grenade, and the office staff and customers jammed into the manager’s office, out of sight. Martin called, “Here we go,” and rolled the grenade into the room, and disappeared. The grenade turned out to be a hand-carved lump of green soap that didn’t look too much like a grenade, when you looked at it close.
    “No plates,” Lucas grunted, watching. “They didn’t want anybody to run out and see the car and get the plates.”
    “Darling didn’t look too happy to be there. No gun, she looked scared, they had to push her in and out,” Sloan said.
    “They got eight grand,” said somebody else.
    “So he says to this chick,” Lester began, and then corrected himself, “. . . this woman, the teller, he says, ‘You oughta make it to Acapulco sometime, honey.’ ”
    “Sounds like bullshit,” said Del.
    “I don’t know,” Lester said. “He’s the kind of guy who’d say something like that.” He looked around the room: “I wish we’d taken him here, goddamnit.”
     
     
     
    LATE THAT NIGHT, Sandy sat in the backseat. Unmoving, wide awake, not quite believing it. The lights of Des Moines were fading in the rear window. They were headed back to Minneapolis, ahead of what the all-night stations were saying was a major storm coming up from the Southwest. Already blizzard conditions in Nebraska.
    They’d be in the Cities by dawn, back in the apartment. The whole thing had been a game, to loosen up the targets.
    “A stroke of fuckin’ genius,” LaChaise said, pounding Martin on the back. “I just wish we had someplace to spend the cash.”

22
    LUCAS SAT AWAKE, trying to make sense of it. If LaChaise and Martin were on a suicide run—and it had appeared that way from the beginning—what had changed their minds? They couldn’t believe that escape was as simple as running to Mexico. The Mexicans would ship them back to the States as quickly as they were found; or kill them.
    Maybe it was simpler than he was making it: maybe their nerve failed.
    He got up, hands in his pockets, and stared out the window across his snow-covered lawn. In the distance, on the other side of the Mississippi, he could see Christmas lights red, green and white along somebody’s roofline. A silent night.
    And he was restless. He hadn’t wanted Weather to come back to the house—one more night in