Sudden Prey

the hotel, he’d said, just until we find their trail again—but she’d insisted. She wanted to sleep in her own bed. She was in it now, and sleeping soundly.
    Lucas was sitting up with a pistol and a twelve-gauge Wingmaster pump. He looked at a clock: four in the morning.
    He picked up a TV remote, pointed at a small TV in the corner of the room, and called up the aviation weather service. All day, the weather forecasters had been talking about a huge low-pressure system that was pin-wheeling up from the southern Rockies. Snow had overrun all of the southwestern and south-central parts of the state, and now the weather radar showed it edging into the metro area.
    If they were coming back, he thought—if this thing was no more than a shuck—and if they’d fallen behind the snow line, they might be stalled for a day. If they’d stayed ahead of it, they’d be coming into town about now.
    Nobody thought they’d be coming back. The network TV people were getting out of town as fast as they could pack up and find space on an outgoing plane. Nobody wanted to be stuck out in flyover country the week before Christmas, not with a big storm coming.
    The cops were the same way: going home, filing for overtime. Lucas called Kansas City cops, and the Missouri and Kansas highway patrols every hour, looking for even the faintest sniff of LaChaise. Nobody had gotten one: they’d vanished.
    Just as if they’d taken country roads east and north, instead of west and south, where the search was focused, Lucas thought. He looked out the window again, then self-consciously went and closed the wooden blinds.
    After killing the TV, he wandered through the dark house, moving by touch, listening, trailing the shotgun. He checked the security system, got a drink of water and went back to the living room where he dropped on a couch. In a few minutes, he eased into a fitful sleep, the .45 in a belly holster, the shotgun on the coffee table.
     
     
     
    THEY STAYED AHEAD of the snow.
    They drove through southern Iowa in the crackling cold, millions of stars but no moon, following the red and yellow lights of the freighter trucks heading into Des Moines, and after Des Moines, up toward Minneapolis-St. Paul. They stopped once at a gas station, the bare-faced LaChaise pumping the gas and paying a sleepy attendant, the hood of his parka covering his head, a scarf shrouding his neck.
    “Colder’n a witch’s left tit,” the attendant said. He looked at a thermometer in the window. “Six below. You want some Heat to put in the gas?”
    “Yeah, that’d be good,” LaChaise said. A compact television sat in a corner, turned to CNN. As the attendant was ringing up the sale, a security-camera videotape came up, replaying the Kansas City robbery.
    “What’s that shit?” LaChaise asked.
    The attendant glanced at the TV. “Ah, it’s them assholes that were up in the Cities. They’re making a run for Mexico.”
    “Good,” LaChaise said.
    “Wisht I was going with them,” the attendant said, and he counted out the change.
    As they continued up I-35, the nighttime radio stations came and went, playing Christmas music. Clouds began to move in, like dark arrows overhead; the stars winked out.
    “Christmas, four days,” Sandy said, sadness in her voice.
    “Don’t mean a fuckin’ thing to me,” LaChaise said. “My old man drank up our Christmases.”
    “You must of had a few,” Sandy said.
    LaChaise sat silent for a moment, then said, “Maybe a couple.” He thought about his sister and her feetsie pajamas.
    Martin said, “We had a couple of good ones, when my old man was alive. He got me a fire engine, once.”
    “What happened to him?” Sandy asked.
    “He died,” Martin said. “Throat cancer.”
    “Jeez, that’s awful,” Sandy said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Hard way to go,” Martin said. “Then it was me and my ma, and we didn’t have no Christmases after that.”
    LaChaise didn’t like the subject matter and fiddled with the radio: the scanner locked on “O Holy Night.”
    “I know this song; my old man used to sing it,” Martin said.
    And he sang along in a creditable baritone,
    O holy night, the stars are brightly shining, this is the night of the birth of Our Lord.
    Sandy and LaChaise, astonished, glanced at each other: then Sandy looked out the windows, at the thin snowflakes now streaking past, and felt like she was a long way from anywhere.
    They drove in silence for a long time, and Sandy slept off and on.