Sudden Prey

She woke with the sense that it was much later, sat up, and looked out. They’d slowed: the snow was now coming at the front of the car like a tornado funnel, but they were passing through a bridge of light.
    “Where are we?” she asked.
    “Just south of the Cities,” Martin said. “We’ll be in town in twenty minutes.”
    “Lots of snow.”
    “Started hard about ten minutes ago,” Martin said. He looked at LaChaise.
    “What do you think?”
    “Let’s do it. Get back, drop Sandy and do it.” He looked out the window. “This storm is perfect. We won’t get a better shot than this.”
    “What?” Sandy asked.
    LaChaise looked back over the seat. “We’re gonna take the hospital.”
     
     
     
    LACHAISE CAME TO him in a dream. Lucas was on the couch, struggling to wake up, but he couldn’t. He was too tired, and whenever he tried to open his eyes, he’d immediately fall back into a deep sleep—and then struggle out again. He had to wake up, because LaChaise and Martin and Darling were sneaking through the garage, coming up to the kitchen door, guns in their hands, laughing, while Lucas struggled to wake . . .
    “Lucas. Lucas . . .”
    He bolted up, and Weather jumped back. “Whoa,” he said. “Sorry.”
    “That’s okay. You wanted me to wake you . . .”
    “Time to go?”
    She was dressed in slacks and a long-sleeved blouse, operating clothes, and was carrying a plastic bag with one of her simple black Donna Karan suits from Saks. Faculty meetings. “Pretty soon. I’ll put some coffee on. It’s snowing like crazy out there.”
     
     
     
    MARTIN SKETCHED OUT the layout of the Eighth Street entry of the Hennepin County Medical Center, from the earlier recon.
    “Two doors: the main emergency room is locked. We could fake that we’re hurt, and they’d let us in, but there’ll be a bunch of people there . . .” He tapped the second door. “This one leads back to the main lobby, right past the emergency room—the emergency room is off to the left, down this hall. There’s a guard desk just inside. If we was hurt, he’d let us in, I seen hurt people come in that door. But we’d have to take him out . . .”
    “No problem.”
    “. . . Then we go on down the hall and the elevators are over to the left. We want the second-floor surgical care . . .”
    They worked through it: get the room numbers at the front desk, get up, hit the place, get out.
    Martin said, “It’s six blocks or so: if we really got in trouble, we could run back here in five minutes, on foot. That snow’d help: can’t see shit in the snow, not until dawn. We got almost two hours yet.”
    “Let’s do it.”
    Sandy didn’t want to hear about it. She paced in the bedroom, stared at the walls: but not dumbly. Her mind was a torrent, a jumble of suppositions and possibilities. She looked at the window and thought, I should have jumped.
    In the front room, Martin and LaChaise geared up—each with two pistols and an AR-15, each wearing a bulletproof vest. “Wish I could take the bow,” Martin said.
    “Makes no sense,” LaChaise grunted.
    “What about Sandy?” Martin asked, dropping his voice. “Chain her up again?”
    “If we don’t, she’ll split,” LaChaise said.
    “Which wouldn’t be that terrible, if she didn’t tip off the cops.”
    “She would,” LaChaise said. “She’s been thinking about how to get out—how to save her ass.”
    Martin nodded. “Yeah. Well. We could do her.”
    LaChaise said, “Yeah, we could.”
    “Can’t take her with us,” Martin said.
    LaChaise pulled on his long winter coat, slipped his arm out of one sleeve, and held the AR-15 beneath it. “How do I look?” he asked Martin.
    “Okay, as long as you’re a little ways off.”
    “Huh.” LaChaise turned the weapon in his hands, looked back toward the bedroom and said, “If you want to do her, you could. Or we could just chain her up again.”
    Martin thought for a minute, and said, “If we do this right—if we faked them out—we could be coming back. We might need her.”
    “So we chain her up,” LaChaise said.
    “Well—unless you really want to do her.”
     
     
     
    LACHAISE CAME INTO the bedroom and said, “we’re gonna have to chain you up again.”
    “Dick, for God’s sakes . . .”
    “Hey, shut up. Listen. We can’t let you go to the cops. And you would. So we’re gonna chain you up. It’s either that, or . . .” He shrugged.
    “You shoot me.”
    “Probably wouldn’t shoot you,” he