Sudden Prey

you’d come a half hour later.”
    LaChaise was standing, holding the door open just a crack, peering down the long hall to the double doors. Davenport, when he arrived, should be coming around the corner just in front of the doors, a thirty- or forty-foot shot. But he was half listening to Weather, and he said, “Yeah?”
    “She’s a farm kid,” Weather said. “If she loses that thumb, she’ll have a tough time of it. I don’t know how you work around a farm without a right thumb. I know I couldn’t.”
    “What do you know about farms?” LaChaise snapped, looking at her now.
    “I grew up in northern Wisconsin—I’m a country kid,” Weather said. She didn’t say, like your wife and sister. “Other doctors start out dissecting frogs or something; I started out taking Johnson twenty-fives apart, and putting them back together again.”
    “I had a Johnson twenty-five once,” LaChaise said. “Hell, I guess everybody did, who had a boat up north.”
    “Just about,” she agreed. “My old man . . .”
    She went on for a bit, talking about her family. She got LaChaise to talk about Colfax and the UP, and she told him about ski trips to the UP, and it turned out that they both knew some of the same bars in Hurley. “From Hayward to Hurley to Hell,” she said.
    He laughed abruptly, winced and said, “Ain’t that the truth.”
    “Are you hurt bad?” she asked.
    “I got some shit in my legs . . . Cop at the other hospital got me with a shotgun.”
    “Want me to look?”
    “No.”
    She was about to push him on it, when the phone rang. “That’s him,” LaChaise said. His eyes flicked over to her.
    Not yet , she thought. Please, not yet. She had him going . . .
     
     
     
    LUCAS MUTTERED TO the cop, “Remember about Martin . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    He dialed and LaChaise picked it up.
    “Chief Davenport is on the way. He was in the ambulance with your friend, the Martin guy.”
    “Martin’s alive?”
    “Yeah, but he’s hurt,” the cop said. “He got hit in the legs and he surrendered. He’ll be okay.”
    “Martin?” There was wonderment in LaChaise’s voice. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”
    “You got a radio or TV? They’ll be carrying him into the hospital.”
    “Ain’t got no TV,” LaChaise said, looking around the office. “What about Sandy?”
    “Who?”
    “Sandy Darling, she was with us.”
    “Oh. Yeah. I guess they can’t find her,” the cop said. Then, “Anyway, Chief Davenport wants you to know that he’s coming. He’ll be here in five minutes.”
    “Don’t call back until he gets here,” LaChaise said.
     
     
     
    LACHAISE TURNED TO Weather and said, “They say Martin made it.”
    “Good.”
    “I don’t believe them.”
    “You can’t tell what a person’ll do when he’s hurt bad enough. I’ve had all kinds of weird confessions when I was working in an emergency room. A person thinks he’s going to die in the next couple of minutes . . . something changes,” Weather said. She looked at his gun. “I wish you wouldn’t keep that pointed at me. I’m not going to beat you up.”
    He shifted the muzzle of the gun, just slightly, and she said, “Thanks,” and thought, Maybe.
     
     
     
    THE ERU TEAM included a young blond Iowan who was carrying a Sako Classic .243 with a fat black Leupold scope. Lucas stepped away from the medical people, who were working out a floor plan, and said, “How good are you?”
    “Very,” he said.
    “You ever shoot anyone?”
    “Nope, but I got no problem with it,” the Iowan said, and his flat blue eyes suggested that he was telling the truth.
    “You’ll be shooting just about sixty feet, close as we can tell.”
    “At sixty feet I won’t be more than a quarter-inch off my aim-point.”
    “You’re sure?”
    The kid nodded. “Absolutely.”
    “We need him turned off. He may be pointing a gun at Weather or me.”
    “I got a low-power, wide-view scope. I’ll be able to see his move—if he’s got the gun right at her head, if the hammer’s down, I can take him, and your wife’s okay. If the hammer’s cocked . . . then it’s not so good, maybe fifty-fifty. If he’s got the gun at her head, if you can get him to take it away, I’ll be able to see it and I’ll take him. You need to get him to take it away just a second, just an inch.”
    “He can’t have any time to recover—not even a millionth of a second.”
    The kid shook his head. “I’m shooting Nosler ballistic tips—I didn’t want