Sudden Prey

if I could only stop the music . . .”
    From where he stood, he could see the golden spire atop the state capitol; under the December overcast it looked like a bad piece of brass. Fucking Minnesota. He put the bottle to his lips, and this time let a little of the wine trickle down his throat. The harsh grape-juice taste cut into his tongue, but there was no warmth in the alcohol.
    What in the hell was she doing?
    She’d cruised Sears Brand Central, taking her time, looking at refrigerators, buying nothing. Then she strolled through the ladieswear department, where she’d looked at blouses. Then she walked back through Brand Central, checking the cellular telephones.
    Again she walked away: he’d been inside at the time, and she’d almost trapped him in the television display. He hit the doors, went through, outside into the wind . . . but she’d swerved toward the lingerie. Had she spotted him? A TV salesman had. Picking up his ragged coat and rotten shoes, the salesman had posted himself near the Toshiba wide-screens, and was watching him like a hawk. Maybe she . . .
    There. She was on her way out.
    When Candy walked out of Sears, he didn’t look at her. He saw her, but he didn’t move his head. He simply stood against the outside wall, rocked on his heels, mumbled into his parka and took another nip of the MD 20-20.
     
     
     
    CANDY NEVER REALLY saw him, not then. She half-turned in his direction as she left the store, but her eyes skipped over him, like they might skip over a trash barrel or a fire hydrant. She bopped down the parking lot, not quite in a hurry, but not dawdling, either. Her step was light, athletic, confident, the step of a cheerful woman. She was pretty, in a thirty-something high-school cheerleader way, with natural blond hair, a round Wisconsin face and a clear Wisconsin complexion.
    She walked halfway down the lot before she spotted the Chevy van and started toward it.
    The man who might kill her, who still stood by the doors, said, “She just walked past her car.”
    A Republican state legislator in a wool Brooks Brothers overcoat heard the words and hurried into the store. No time for dialogue with a street schizo: you see them everywhere, mumbling into their wine-stained parkas.
    “I think she’s going for that van, dude.”
     
     
     
    CANDY LIKED COUNTRY music and shirt pockets that had arrows at the corners. She liked line-dancing and drinking Grain Belt. She liked roadhouses on country blacktop, pickup trucks and cowboy boots and small blue-eyed children and guns. When she got to the Chevy van, she took out a two-inch key ring filled with keys and began running them through the lock. She hit it on the twelfth one, and popped the door.
    The van belonged to a slightly ragged Sears washing machine salesman named Larry. The last time she’d seen Larry, he was standing next to a seven-hundred-dollar Kenmore washer with Quiet Pak and Automatic Temperature Control, repinning his name tag. He was about ten minutes late—late enough that she’d started to worry, as she browsed the blouses and underwear. Had the van broken down? That would be a major problem . . .
    But then, there he was, breathing hard, face pink from the cold, leaning against the Kenmore. Larry was a wise guy, she knew, and she didn’t care for wise guys. She knew he was a wise guy because a bumper sticker on the back of his van said, in large letters, AGAINST ABORTION? And below that, in smaller letters, Then Don’t Have One. Abortion was not a topic for bumper-sticker humor.
     
     
     
    THE MAN WHO might kill her mumbled into his parka: “She’s in the van, she’s moving.”
    The voice that spoke back to him was not God: “I got her.”
    Great thing about parkas: nobody could see the commo gear, the microphones and earplugs. “She’s gonna do it,” Del said. He put the bottle of Mogen David on the ground, carefully, so it wouldn’t spill. He wouldn’t need it again, but somebody might.
    “Franklin says LaChaise and Cale just went into that pizza joint behind the parking ramp,” said the voice in his ear. “They went out the back of the ramp, through a hole in a hedge.”
    “Scoping it out, one last time. That’s where they’ll dump the van,” Del said. “Get Davenport on the road.”
    “Franklin called him. He’s on the way. He’s got Sloan and Sherrill with him.”
    “All right,” Del said, noncommittally. Not all right , he thought. Sherrill had been shot a little more than four