Sudden Prey

for the first time in four years, and breathed the freedom. Or looseness. Later, he made some coffee, some peanut-butter-and-Ritz-cracker sandwiches, listened to the radio. He heard five or six reports on his escape and the killing of Sand, excited country reporters with a real story. One said that police believed he might be on foot, and they were doing a house-by-house check in the town of Colfax.
    That made him smile: they still didn’t know how he’d gotten out.
    He could hear the wind blowing outside the trailer, and after a while, he put on a coat and went outside and walked around. Took a leak in the freezing outhouse, then walked down to the edge of the woods and looked down a gully. Deer tracks, but nothing in sight. He could feel the cold, and he walked back to the trailer. The sun was nearly gone, a dim aspirin-sized pill trying to break through a screen of bare aspen.
    He listened to the radio some more: the search in Colfax was done. The Dunn County sheriff said blah-blah-blah nothing.
    Still, nightfall was a relief. With night came the sense that the search would slow down, that cops would be going home. He found a stack of army blankets and draped them across the windows to black them out. After turning on the lights, he walked once around the outside of the trailer, to make sure he didn’t have any light leaks, came back inside, adjusted one of the blankets, and climbed back to the bed. The silence of the woods had been forgotten, submerged in his years in a cell, and for a while he couldn’t sleep.
    He did sleep, but when he heard the tires crunching on the snow, he was awake in an instant. He sat up and took the Bulldog off the floor. A moment later, he heard footsteps, and then the door rattled.
    “Who is that?” he asked.
    A woman’s voice came back: “Sandy.”
     
     
     
    HER FACE WAS tight, angry. “You jerk,” she said. He was looking down at her, the gun pointed at her chest. Coldly furious, she ignored it. “I want you out of here. Now.”
    “Come in and shut the door, you’re letting the cold in,” he said. He backed away from her, but continued to look out over her head. “You didn’t bring the cops?”
    “No. I didn’t bring the cops. But I want you out of here, Dick . . .”
    “Tomorrow,” he said. “We’re heading for Mexico.”
    “At the funeral home, they said you were gunning for these cops that killed Candy and Georgie.”
    “Yeah, well . . .” He shrugged.
    “Why’d you kill the prison guard?” she asked.
    His eyes shifted, and she felt him gathering a reason, an excuse: “He was the meanest sonofabitch on the floor. If you knew what he’d done . . .”
    “But now they’re looking for you for murder. ”
    He shrugged: “That’s what I was in for.”
    “But you didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said.
    “Didn’t make no difference to them,” he said.
    “My God, Dick, there is a difference . . .”
    “You didn’t know this guy,” LaChaise said. “If you’d known what Sand put my friends through back in the joint . . .” He shook his head. “You couldn’t blame us. No man oughta go through that.”
    He was talking about rape, she knew. She didn’t buy it, but she wouldn’t press him, either. She wanted to believe and if she pressed him, she was afraid she’d find out he was lying.
    “Whatever,” she said. “But now you’ve got to move. Martin was bragging about how good his truck is: If you leave tomorrow, you can be in Arizona the day after, driving straight through. You can be in Mexico the day after that, down on the Pacific Ocean.”
    “Yeah, we’re figuring that out,” LaChaise said, but again, his eyes shifted fractionally. “What happened at the funeral home?”
    “The police kept us there for a couple of hours—and two detectives from Minneapolis talked to us—and then they took us down to Menomonie, to the courthouse. We had to sign statements, and then they let us go. A couple of deputies came around again, about dinnertime, and checked the house.”
    “They have a warrant?”
    “No, but I let them in, I thought it was best,” she said. “They looked around and left.”
    “What about Elmore?”
    “Elmore was at work,” Sandy said. “They already talked to him.”
    “Would Elmore turn us in?” LaChaise said.
    “No. He’s as scared as I am,” Sandy said, and the anger suddenly leaped to the surface: “Why’d you do it, Dick? We’ve never done anything to you, and now you’re dragging us