Sudden Prey

You’ll be okay for a day or two, until we get set in the Cities. Martin’s down there today, waiting for some furniture to get there.”
    “You find a cop?”
    “Yep. Talked to a guy last night, me and Martin did. We got us a cop the name of Andy Stadic. He’s hooked up with a dope dealer named Harp. Harp took some pictures, and now we got the pictures.”
    “Good one.” They crossed a river with a frozen waterfall, and were out of town. “How’s Martin?”
    “Like always. But that Elmore is a hinky sonofabitch. We told him we needed a place to stay, me ’n Bill, and I had to back him up against the wall before he said okay on the trailer.”
    “Fuck him,” LaChaise said. “If he knew I was gonna be out there, he’d be peein’ his pants.”
    “Gonna have to keep an eye on Sandy,” Butters said.
    LaChaise nodded. “Yeah. She’s the dangerous one. We’ll want to get out of the trailer soon as we can.”
    Butters looked sideways at him. “You and Sandy ever . . .”
    “No.” LaChaise grinned. “Woulda liked to.”
    “She’s a goddamned wrangler,” Butters agreed.
    Butters drove them through a web of back roads, never hesitating. He’d driven the route a half-dozen times. Forty minutes after killing Sand, they made the trailer, without seeing another car.
    LaChaise said: “Free.”
    “Loose, anyway,” Butters said.
    “That’s close enough,” LaChaise said. He unconsciously rubbed his wrists where the manacles had been.
     
     
     
    LOGAN, THE FUNERAL director, ran into the chapel like a small, drunk tailback, knocked down a half-dozen metal folding chairs, staggered, nearly bowled over Amy LaChaise, struggled briefly with the door handle and was gone out the front door.
    Sandy looked at Amy LaChaise across the closed caskets.
    “What the hell was that?” Amy asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said, but she felt suddenly cold.
    Ten seconds later, the cop who’d been parked out front ran in the door with his pistol in a two-handed grip. He pointed the gun at Sandy, then at Amy, then swiveled around the room: “Hold it. Everybody hold it.”
    “What?” Amy asked. She clutched her purse to her chest.
    Logan peeked out from behind the deputy. “Mr. LaChaise is gone.”
    Amy screeched, like a crow killing an owl, a sound both pleased and intolerable. “Praise the Lord.”
    “Shut up,” the deputy screamed, pointing the pistol at her. “Where’s the prison guy? Where’s the prison guy?”
    Logan poked a finger toward the back. “In there . . .”
    “What’s wrong with him?” Sandy asked.
    The deputy ran through the door into the back, and Logan said, “Well, he’s dead. LaChaise cut his throat.”
    Sandy closed her eyes: “Oh, no.”
     
     
     
    A HIGHWAY PATROLMAN arrived five minutes later. Then two more sheriff’s deputies. The deputies split Amy LaChaise and Sandy, made them sit apart.
    “And keep your mouths shut,” one of the deputies said, a porky man with a name tag that said Graf.
    LaChaise, Sandy thought, was at Elmore’s daddy’s trailer, out at the hill place. Had to be. That whole story about Martin and Butters needing a place to stay—it sounded like bullshit as soon as Elmore had told her about it.
    But the problem was, she was Candy’s sister, LaChaise’s sister-in-law. She’d been present when LaChaise had escaped and murdered a man. And now LaChaise was up at a trailer owned by her senile father-in-law.
    She’d seen LaChaise railroaded by the cops for conspiracy to commit murder: they’d do the same to her, and with a lot more evidence.
    Sandy Darling sat and shivered, but not with the cold; sat and tried to figure a way out.
     
     
     
    THE TRAILER WAS a broken-down Airstream, sitting on the cold frozen snow like a shot silver bullet. Butters and LaChaise crunched through the sparse snow on four-wheel drive, then they got out of the truck into the cold and Butters unlocked the trailer. “I come by this morning and dropped off some groceries and turned on the heat . . . Can’t nobody see you in here, but you might want to keep the light down at night,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about smoke. Everything’s electric and it works. I turned the pump on and filled up the water heater, so you oughta be okay that way.”
    “You done really good, Ansel,” LaChaise said.
    “I owe you,” Butters said. And he turned away from the compliment: “And there’s a TV and a radio, but you can only get one channel—sort of—on the TV, and