Sudden Prey

knew it. And LaChaise knew that he knew, and didn’t care. “Gimme the goddamned papers.”
    “Jesus, LaChaise, anything else . . .”
    “I’m outa here,” LaChaise said, turning toward the doors.
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute . . .” Stadic said, “I’m gonna stick my hand in my coat.”
    LaChaise’s hand went back to his pistol and he nodded. Stadic took the papers out of his breast pocket and held them out at arm’s length. LaChaise took them, didn’t look, and backed away. “Better be the real thing,” he said, and he turned to go.
    “Wait,” Stadic said. “I gotta know how to get in touch with you.”
    “We’ll get in touch with you,” LaChaise said.
    “Think about it,” Stadic said, his voice tight, urgent. “I want you outa here—or dead. I don’t want you caught. Anything but that. If they figure out where you’re at, and they’re coming to get you . . . I oughta be able to call.”
    “Got no phone,” LaChaise said. “We’re trying to get one of them cellulars.”
    “Call me, soon as you get one,” Stadic said. He took an index card from his pocket, groped for a pen, found one, scribbled the number. “I carry the phone all the time.”
    “I’ll think about it,” LaChaise said, taking the card.
    “Do it,” Stadic said. “Please.”
    Then LaChaise was gone, out the door, pulling the hat down over his eyes, around the corner. Harp came through the back door two minutes later.
    “I think three is all of them,” Harp said. “I saw the cracker on the street, then a pickup pulls up and this peckerwood gets out—he’s new—and the pickup goes off; the driver was probably that other dude.”
    “Get the plates?”
    “Yeah. I did.”
    “See anybody else? Anybody who looked like a cop?” Harp shook his head. “Just a couple of kids and some old whore.”
     
     
     
    LACHAISE FLIPPED THROUGH a computer printout of the police department’s insurance program. Some of it was gobbledygook, but buried in the tiny squares and rectangles were the names of all the insured, their addresses and phone numbers.
    “Modern science,” LaChaise said.
    “What?” Martin turned to look at him.
    “I’m reading a computer printout; I’m gonna get a cell phone,” LaChaise said. “You go along and things get easier.”
    He started circling names on the printout.

6
    WEATHER KARKINNEN WORE a white terry-cloth robe, with a matching terry-cloth towel wrapping her hair. Through the back window she was a Vermeer figure in a stone house, quiet, pensive, slow-moving, soft with her bath, humming along with a Glenn Gould album.
    She got a beer from the refrigerator, popped the top, found a glass and started pouring. The phone rang, and she stepped back and picked it up, propped it between her ear and her shoulder, and continued pouring.
    “Yes, he is,” she said.
    Lucas was sitting in his old leather chair, eyes closed. He was working on a puzzle—a tactical exercise involving both a car chase and a robbery.
    Lucas had once written strategy board games, had moved them to computers, then, pushed temporarily off the police force, had started a company doing computer simulations of police problems.
    He’d made the change at just the right time: His training software did well. Now the company was run by a professional manager, and though Lucas still held the biggest chunk of the stock, he now worked mostly on conceptual problems. He was imagining a piece of software that spliced voice and data transmissions, that would layer a serious but confused problem beneath an exciting but superficial one, to teach new dispatchers to triage emergency calls.
    Triage. The word had been used by the programmers putting together the simulation, and it had been rattling around his brain for a few days, a loose BB. The word had a nasty edge to it, like cadaver.
    “Lucas?”
    He jumped. Weather was in the doorway, a glass of dark beer in her hand. She’d brewed it herself in a carboy in the hall closet, from a kit that Lucas had bought her for her birthday.
    “You’ve got a phone call . . .”
    Lucas shook himself awake, heaved himself out of the chair. “Who is it?” he asked, yawning. He saw the beer. “Is that for me?”
    “I don’t know who it is. And get your own,” she said.
    “We sound like a TV commercial.”
    “You’re the one who was snoring in the chair after dinner,” she said.
    “I was thinking,” he said. He picked up the phone, ignoring her dainty snort. “Yeah?”
    The