Sudden Prey

steel cylinder, which disappeared into a heavy steel base, fixed with two collars held by wing nuts. She loosened the wing nuts and pulled the cylinder out of the base. The cylinder was a chromed-steel pipe four feet long, an inch and a half in diameter. She grabbed it like a baseball bat, hefted it.
     
     
     
    STADIC FROZE AFTER firing at Davenport: stunned. He’d just killed a cop, for Christ’s sake. He stood for a second, looking at his pistol. Maybe he could tell them Davenport was the one, that Davenport had set him up.
    Glassy-eyed, he turned back to the trail the woman had left. Blood trail . . .
     
     
     
    LUCAS’S HEAD CRACKED one of the blue plastic chairs as he went over the side. The bullet had missed—he didn’t have time to think about it, but he was whole, dizzy, disoriented, struggling to get up . . .
     
     
     
    THE BLOOD TRAIL ran toward a door on a TV booth, then away from the door and up toward the window.
     
     
     
    “ANDY, ANDY . . . ” THE uniformed cops, still half a stadium away, were firing at him. Stadic looked up at the window, climbed on the chair back, pulled himself up. A bullet clipped his coat, another the back of his neck, and he fell.
    “Andy . . .”
    That was Davenport? He popped up, gun in hand, and saw Lucas again, fired quickly, saw Lucas duck, go down.
    He looked up. Christ, the window was right there. Blood on his hand, on his neck, blood on everything, slippery . . .
    He went straight up, leaping, caught the window and hauled himself up, heard the cops yelling, “Andy, Andy, Andy,” a regular football cheer, doing the wave for Andy Stadic.
    He hauled himself up, hands slippery with blood . . .
    Sandy was there, looking down at him.
     
     
     
    SANDY HEARD HIM scrabbling at the booth. Saw his hand catch the edge, saw him fall. There were more shots, and then he was up again, bullet-headed, like a gorilla, like King Kong, climbing up the outside of the booth.
    Back home, Sandy had always been the one who split wood for the wood stove. She liked doing it, feeling the muscles work.
    Now here was this blood-covered man coming to kill her. A man she didn’t know, with a gun, crawling up the wall . . .
    She swung the steel cylinder with everything she had: for Elmore, for the times Martin and LaChaise had knocked her down, for the fear during the ledge walk, for all the blood. She swung the pipe like a wood-splitting maul.
     
     
     
    STADIC LOOKED UP. Saw it coming. Had just enough time left in the world to let go of the window.
     
     
     
    LUCAS WAS ON his knees, his gun coming up, thinking, Vest; he’s wearing a vest . . .
    The gunsight tracked up Stadic’s back to his neck, just as Stadic’s head went over the lip of the window, and Sandy loomed in front of him. Lucas snapped the barrel upright, afraid to touch off the shot . . .
    He saw the steel cylinder come down.
    Heard the crack.
    Saw Stadic drop like a rag.
    THERE WAS NO sound in the stadium. Everything had stopped: the workmen, the running cops. Lucas. Sandy. Stadic’s body upside-down in the blue chairs.
    After a long, long beat, the world started again. “You can come down,” Lucas said to Sandy as the other cops ran toward them. “You’ll be all right now.”

31
    SANDY DARLING LAY in the hospital bed, tired, dinged up, but not seriously injured. Her most pressing problem was her left foot, which was cuffed to the bed frame. She could sit up, she could move, but she couldn’t roll over. The simple presence of the cuff gave her the almost uncontrollable urge to roll, and a powerful sense of claustrophobia when she couldn’t.
    She’d spoken to a lawyer. He said the Hennepin County District Attorney might come up with a charge, but there wasn’t a case if what she said was true. She was a victim, not a perpetrator.
    Sandy had told the truth, generally, with a few critical lies. She hadn’t seen them, she said, until Butters came to get her, to patch up LaChaise. After Butters showed up, she hadn’t been free to leave. She’d tried to get free every way she could.
    There remained the problem of LaChaise’s fingerprints and other traces in the Airstream trailer: but nobody but Sandy knew he’d been there—nobody alive—and probably not more than five other people in the world were aware of the Airstream. If they did find the trailer, and bothered to fingerprint it, she could attribute any cooperation to Elmore. Otherwise, when she got out, she’d wait a few days, and then go out to