Sudden Prey

down with you.”
    “We needed a place to ditch,” LaChaise said defensively. “We didn’t know what the situation would be. If the cops were right on our ass, we needed some place we could get out of sight in a hurry. I thought of this place.”
    “Well, I want you out,” Sandy said. She poked a finger at him. “If you’re not out, I’ll have to take the chance and go to the police myself. When you get out, I’ll come out here and wipe everything you’ve touched . . . and I hope to hell if you get caught, you’ll have the decency to keep your mouth shut about this place.”
    “I won’t get caught,” LaChaise said. “I’m not going back inside. If I get killed, that’s the way it is: but I’m not going back.”
    “But if you do get caught . . . you know, shot and you wake up in a hospital . . .”
    “No way I’d tell them about this,” LaChaise said, shaking his head. “No way.”
    “All right.” She glanced at her watch. “I better get going, in case those deputies check back. I’ll tell you something, though: one of the Minneapolis cops was this Davenport guy. The guy who’s in charge of the group that killed Candy and Georgie.”
    “I know who he is,” LaChaise said. “So?”
    “He’s awful hard,” she said.
    “I’m awful hard, too,” LaChaise said.
    She nodded: “I’m just telling you,” she said.
    When Sandy left, she walked head-down to her car, and sat inside for a moment before she started it. Now she was guilty of something, she thought. As a hardworking, taxpaying Republican rancher, she should be in favor of sending herself to prison for what she’d just done. But she wasn’t. She’d do anything to stay out—the idea of a prison cell made her knees weak. If Dick had landed anywhere else, she’d have turned him in. But the trailer hide-out would be impossible to explain, and she’d had the experience, in LaChaise’s earlier trial, of seeing what vindictive cops could do.
    Damn. She thought about the weapons in the hall closet back home, a .22, a deer rifle, a shotgun. She’d never considered anything like this before, but she could go home, get Elmore’s deer rifle, come back out here . . .
    Get Dick outside.
    Boom.
    She could dump his body in a cornfield somewhere, and nobody would know anything until spring. And if the coyotes got to him, probably not even then. She sighed. She couldn’t do anything like that. She’d never wanted to hurt anyone in her life. But she wasn’t going under. She’d swim for it.
     
     
     
    WEATHER AND LUCAS ate handmade ravioli from an Italian market while Lucas told her about the trip to Colfax. Weather said, “Tell me that last part again. About the eye-for-an-eye.”
    Lucas shrugged. “We have to take a little care. The guy won’t be running around for long, there’re too many people looking for him. But everybody involved in the shooting . . . I’ve told them to keep an eye out.”
    “You think he’d come here, looking for you?” she asked.
    “I don’t think so,” Lucas said. Then he said, “I don’t know. Maybe. He’s nuts. We’ve got to take a little care, that’s all.”
    “That’s why you’ve got the gun under your chair. A little care.”
    Lucas stopped with a forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s no big deal—and it’s just for a little while.”

5
    EARLY MORNING AT the Black Watch.
    Andy Stadic pushed through the front door, took his gloves off and unbuttoned his overcoat as he walked around the bar and through the double swinging doors into the kitchen. Opening the coat freed up his weapon: not that he’d need it, but he did it by habit.
    Stadic was short, bullet-headed, with close-cropped hair and suspicious, slightly bulging eyes. In the kitchen, he nodded to the cook, who was chopping onions into twenty pounds of raw burger, ignored the Chicano dishwasher, turned the corner past the pan rack and pushed through another set of doors.
    The back room was cool, lit with overhead fluorescent, furnished with cartons of empty beer bottles, boxes of paper towels and toilet paper, cans of ketchup, sacks of potatoes—the whole room smelled of wet paper and potatoes and onions and a bit of cigar smoke.
    Daymon Harp sat in one of two red plastic chairs at a rickety round table, chewing gum, his feet stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He wore a bomber jacket, faded Levi’s and purple cowboy boots with sterling-silver toes.
    “What’d