Sudden Prey

the back of his head, and most were superficial cuts from glass. When he first took off his pants and shirt, he appeared to be shredded. But blood was actively flowing from only one wound, and when Sandy dabbed at the rest of him, she said, “I don’t think you’re too bad. Get to a hospital, and you won’t die.”
    “Kiss my ass,” LaChaise groaned. “Wipe it up or something.”
    “On the other hand,” she said, looking at the one wound that was bleeding, “you’ve got a bullet hole in the back of your arm.” She rolled his arm, and found a lump under the skin near the front. “And that’s the bullet, I think.”
    “Cut it out,” LaChaise said.
    “It’s pretty deep.”
    “I don’t give a fuck, cut it out.”
    “Dick, I’d just hurt you worse.”
    “All right, all right . . .”
    Martin stretched out on the floor and lay silent and motionless as she poured a glass of water over the wound, probed at it, shook her head and said, “All I can do is put some more pads over it and bind it up. You need a doctor. You’re going to get infected.”
    Martin’s stomach heaved and she realized he was laughing: hysterical, she thought. Then again, maybe he thought it was funny. “Infection’ll take a couple days. We ain’t got a couple days.” He looked at LaChaise. “We gotta keep moving, boy.”
    “I’m really fuckin’ hurtin’, man.”
    “They’ll wonder where we went, and sooner or later, they’ll kick their way in here. If we’re gonna do any more damage, we gotta move.” He looked at the windows. “Before light.”
    LaChaise groaned, but got to his hands and knees, looked sideways at Sandy and said, “Tape me up where you can.”
    “I don’t have that much tape.”
    “Well, get the worst ones,” he said. To Martin: “That fuckin’ shotgun. Somebody had a fuckin’ shotgun and he had me dead, but that first shot missed. That fuckin’ glass was like a hurricane . . . Second shot hit me in the vest.”
    Sandy said, “I’ll get a towel.”
    As she ran back to the bathroom LaChaise crawled across the floor to the bulletproof vest he’d taken off. A ragged pattern of pellet holes punctured the nylon back panel. “Probably shooting triple-ought,” he said. “Christ, if he’d been a little worse shot and a little high, I wouldn’t have a head.”
    Martin was on the phone, dialing.
    “Surgery, please . . . Thanks.” Then, after a moment, “This is Chief Davenport, is my wife Weather there?” He listened as LaChaise watched, then said, “No, that’s okay. Tell her to call when she gets done, okay?”
    “She’s not his fuckin’ wife,” LaChaise said, when Martin hung up. “Was she there?”
    “She’s scrubbing for surgery.”
    “That’s where we’re going, then,” LaChaise said. “That motherfucker Davenport set the whole thing up. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was him up in the hallway. Jesus, that was something . . .”
     
     
     
    SANDY CAME BACK from the bathroom, and overheard the last part of the conversation. “Where’re you going?”
    “Hospital where Davenport’s old lady works,” LaChaise said.
    “You gonna let me go?”
    “Something like that,” LaChaise said, and he grinned at her. Her heart lurched: they were going to kill her.
    “Turn over,” she said. She dabbed his back with the wet towel, cleaning him up as best she could, isolating the biggest cuts, pulling a few pieces of glass out of his back and legs. “I can’t patch the ones under your hair,” she said.
    “Just get the rest.”
    Martin had slid over to his travel bag, got a pair of camo jeans out, and pulled them on as he sat on the floor. “We wait an hour, and then we head out: if we go right straight across to Washington Avenue . . .”
    “Around that curve and down that ramp and across the bridge and the hospital’s right there,” LaChaise finished, remembering the recon.
    “Five minutes from here,” Martin said. He pulled on his boots and looked at Sandy. “You about done with him?”
    “About as much as I can do,” Sandy said.
    “We could use some coffee and eggs,” Martin said. He found the TV remote and clicked it on. An announcer was barking something into the screen, and he fumbled a minute to get the sound up. “. . . just a few minutes ago. They have been positively identified as . . .”
    “I better get the rifles, in case they show up,” LaChaise said. He stood carefully, groaned and started down the hall. “Coffee and eggs,” he said to