Sudden Prey

escape risk—with good behavior, he’d be out in a couple of years. They put him in leg irons and cuffs and LaChaise and Wayne O. Sand, the escort, flew into Eau Claire as the sun was going down, eight days after the shootings in Minneapolis.
    During the flight, Wayne O. Sand read The Last Mammoth by Margaret Allan, because he liked that prehistoric shit and magic and all. If he’d lived back then, he thought, he’d probably be a clan chief, or something. He’d be in shape, anyway.
    LaChaise read a tattoo magazine called Skin Art. LaChaise had full sleeves: tattoos running up and down both arms, a comic-book fantasy of superwomen with football-sized tits and lionish hair tangled around his bunched-up weight-room muscles, interspersed with eagles, tigers, knives, a dragon. His arms carried four names: Candy and Georgie on the right, and Harley and Davidson on the left.
    The sleeves had been done on the outside, by commercial tattoo artists. The work on his back and legs was being done on the inside. Prison work, with a sewing needle and ballpoint ink. Though the figures lacked the finish of the commercial jobs, there was a nasty raw power to them that LaChaise liked. An aesthetic judgment.
    When the plane’s wheels came down, LaChaise put the magazine away and looked at Sand: “How about a Mc-Donald’s? A couple of Big Macs?”
    “Maybe, you don’t fuck me around,” Sand said, still in the book. Sand was a flabby man, an authoritarian little prison bureaucrat who’d be nice enough one day, and write you up the next, for doing nothing. He enjoyed his power, but wasn’t nearly the worst of them. When they landed, Sand marched LaChaise off the plane, and chained him to the seat post in the back of a rental Ford.
    “How about them McDonald’s?” LaChaise asked.
    Sand considered for a second, then said, “Nah. I wanna get a motel ’fore it’s too late. There’s a game tonight.”
    “Hey, c’mon . . .”
    “Shut up,” Sand said, with the casual curtness of a prison guard.
    Sand dropped LaChaise at the Eau Claire County Jail for the night. The next morning, he put LaChaise back in the car and drove him through the frozen landscape to the Logan Funeral Home in Colfax. LaChaise’s mother was waiting on the porch of the funeral home, along with Sandy Darling, Candy’s sister. A sheriff’s car was parked in the street, engine running. A deputy sat inside the car, reading a newspaper.
     
     
     
    AMY LACHAISE WAS a round, oily-faced country woman with suspicious black eyes, close-cropped black hair and a pencil-thin mustache. She wore a black dress with a white collar under a blue nylon parka. A small hat from the 1930s sat nervously atop her head, with a crow’s wing of black lace pulled down over her forehead.
    Sandy Darling was her opposite: a small woman, slender, with a square chin and a thin, windburned face. Crow’s-feet showed at the corners of her eyes, though she was only twenty-nine, four years younger than her sister, Candy. Like Candy, she was blond, but her hair was cut short, and she wore simple seed-pearl earrings. And while Candy had that pure Wisconsin milkmaid complexion, Sandy showed a scattering of freckles over her windburned nose and forehead. She wore a black wool coat over a long black dress, tight black leather gloves and fancy black cowboy boots with sterling silver toe guards. She carried a white cowboy hat.
    When the rental car pulled up, Amy LaChaise started down the walk. Sandy Darling stayed on the porch, turning the cowboy hat in her hands. Wayne O. Sand popped the padlock on the seat-chain, got out, stood between Amy LaChaise and the car door and opened the door for LaChaise.
    “That’s my ma,” LaChaise said to Sand, as he got out. LaChaise was a tall man, with heavy shoulders and deep-set black eyes, long hair and a beard over hollowed cheeks. He had fingers that were as thick and tough as hickory sticks. With a robe, he might have played the Prophet Jeremiah.
    “Okay,” Sand said. To Amy LaChaise: “I’ll have to hold your purse.”
    The deputy sheriff had gotten out of his car, nodded to Sand, as Amy LaChaise handed over her purse. “Everything okay?” he asked.
    “Yeah, sure.” Sand drifted over to chat with him; LaChaise wasn’t going anywhere.
     
     
     
    AMY LACHAISE PLANTED a dry lizard’s kiss on her son’s cheek and said, “They was shot down like dogs.”
    “I know, Mama,” LaChaise said. He looked past her to Sandy Darling on the porch,