Sudden Prey

said.
    The way he said it chilled her. Probably wouldn’t shoot her. Probably kill her with a knife, she thought. Martin liked the knife.
    “So put your coat on . . .”
    She put her coat on, afraid to say anything at all. She was standing on a knife edge. She went ahead of LaChaise, down the stairs, where Martin was waiting like Old Man Death. He was holding the chain.
    “Sorry about this,” he said, but he didn’t sound sorry.
    They’d put the chair back next to the post, and they chained her into it again, snapping the padlocks. “You’ll be okay,” LaChaise said.
    “What if you don’t come back?” she blurted.
    He said, “You better hope we do—you’d have to get pretty damn skinny to get out of that chain.” He grinned at his own wit, then said, “We’ll leave the keys over on the steps.”
    He dropped the keys on the steps, far out of reach, and then they got in the car, ran the garage door up, backed out, and dropped the door, Sandy disappearing behind it.
    “Glad we didn’t do her,” LaChaise said.
    “Yeah?”
    “When we do her, I want to fuck her first. She always sorta treated me like I wasn’t . . . good enough.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS FOLLOWED WEATHER to a parking ramp a block from the University Hospitals, a slippery slog through the heavy, wet snow. On the way, he checked with Del, who was staying at the hospital, to see if he was awake yet.
    “Just barely,” Del said. “I’m thinking about brushing my teeth.”
    “Cheryl’s still asleep?”
    “Like a baby.”
    “I’m heading into the office,” Lucas said. “I’ll walk over later.”
    “Is it snowing yet?”
    “Look out the window,” Lucas said. “It’s gonna be a nightmare.”
    Lucas followed Weather into the parking ramp, waited until she’d parked her car, then drove her back out of the ramp to the hospital entrance, and saw her as far as the front desk.
    “This is a little ridiculous,” she said.
    “I’ll feel funny about it when I hear LaChaise is dead,” he said.
    Inside, he said, “Call me before you head home.” She waved a hand as she headed toward the elevators, turned the corner out of sight.
    Lucas headed back to the car. He’d had the shotgun between the seats, and now he put it on the floor in front of the backseats, out of sight. He had to use the wipers to clear the window, and he horsed the Explorer out of the parking circle and headed toward the office.

23
    LACHAISE LOOKED AT Martin: “This is it, Dude.”
    Martin nodded. “Could be.”
    “We could drive north up to Canada, run out of the snow, head west . . .”
    Martin said, “The Canadians got computers at the border. We’d set them off like a skyrocket.”
    LaChaise was silent for a minute: “Probably couldn’t get out of the snow anyway.” They slowed at a cross street, and a single orange plow truck, its blade raised off the roadway, went banging by: “Look at that asshole. Doing nothing, probably getting overtime.” LaChaise’s mouth was running: “You scared?”
    Martin seemed to think for a minute. “No,” he said.
    “Tense?”
    “I’m . . . thinking.”
    “Somebody ought to,” LaChaise joked.
    “We gotta be ready to ditch the car,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll get in and out without running into somebody—we can take them if we’re fast enough, that won’t be a problem, but in maybe two or three minutes, we’ll have cops coming in from the outside, ready for us. If we’ve got them hot on our trail, you go left and I’ll go right. But remember, they can track us: try to stay in the street where you can. That’ll slow them down . . .”
    “That’s just if we have trouble.”
    “Yeah.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS CROSSED THE Mississippi on the Washington Avenue bridge, rolled through a couple of turns in Cedar-Riverside and eased the Explorer into the loop. He could make thirty miles an hour, but even in four-wheel drive, the truck’s wheels kept breaking loose. The driver’s-side windshield wiper, which had never worked right, left a frozen streak just at his eye level. He had the radio going, and the morning show guy on ’CCO said there’d be a foot of snow on the ground when the storm ended.
    “We’ve got school closings all over southwest and east-central Minnesota, and the Minneapolis and St. Paul systems will be making a call in the next ten minutes. The governor’ll probably shut down state government, since he does it every time somebody sees a snowflake . . . don’t get me started