Sudden Prey

man’s voice was oily, a man who gave and took confidences like one-dollar poker chips. “This is Earl. Stupella. Down at the Blue Bull?”
    “Yeah, Earl. What’s happening?”
    “You was in that shoot-out a week or so ago, in the papers. The credit union.” He wasn’t asking a question.
    “Yeah?”
    “So this chick came in here tonight and said she’d seen the husband of one of these girls, who like supposedly busted out of prison and killed somebody. It was like La Chase?”
    Lucas was listening now. “LaChaise,” he said. “That’s right. Where’d she see him?”
    “A laundromat down on Eleventh. She said she saw him going in and he talked to a guy in the window for a minute and then he left.”
    “Huh. Who’s the chick?” Lucas asked.
    “Don’t tell her I talked to you,” Stupella said.
    “No problem.”
    “Sally O’Donald. She lives somewhere up the line, by the cemetery, I think, but I don’t know.”
    “I know Sally,” Lucas said. “Anything else?”
    “Nope. Sally said she didn’t want to have nothing to do with LaChaise, so when she saw him, she turned right around and walked away.”
    “When was all this?”
    “Sally was in about an hour ago,” Stupella said. “She saw the guy this morning.”
    “Good stuff, Earl. You’ll get a note in the mail.”
    “Thanks, dude.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS DROPPED THE phone on the hook: LaChaise. So he was here. And out in the open. Lucas stood staring at the phone for a second, then picked it up again.
    “Going out?” Weather asked from the hallway.
    “Mmm, yeah. I think.” He pushed a speed-dial button, listened to the beep-beep-boop of the phone.
    Del answered on the second ring. “What?”
    “I hope that’s not a bedside phone you’re talking on.”
    “What happened?” Del asked.
    “Nothing much. I thought we might go for a ride, if you’re not doing anything.”
    “You mean, go for a ride and get an ice cream? Or go for a ride and bring your gun?”
    “The latter,” Lucas said, glancing at Weather. She had a little rim of beer foam on her upper lip.
    “Latter, my ass,” Del said. “Give me ten minutes.”
     
     
     
    THE BACK STREETS were ruts of gnarled ice. The Explorer’s heater barely kept up, and Del, who didn’t like gloves, sat with his hands in his armpits. The good part was, the assholes and freaks got as cold as anyone else. On nights like this, there was no crime, except the odd domestic murder that probably would have happened anyway.
    When the radio burped, Del picked it up: “Yeah.”
    “O’Donald is the third house on the left, right after you make the turn off Lake,” the dispatcher said.
    “All right. We’ll get back.”
    Lucas cruised the house once, rattling the white Explorer down the ruts. The house showed lights in the back, where the kitchen usually was, and the dim blue glow of a television from a side window. “The thing is,” Lucas said, “she has a terrible temper.”
    “And she’s about the size of a fuckin’ two-car garage,” said Del. “Maybe we should shoot her before we talk to her.”
    “Just a flesh wound, to slow her down,” Lucas agreed. “Or shoot her in the kneecap.”
    “We shot the last one in the kneecap.”
    “Oh yeah; well, that’s out, then.” Lucas parked and said, “Don’t piss her off, huh? I don’t want to be rolling around in the yard with her.”
     
     
     
    SALLY O’DONALD WAS in a mood.
    She stood on the other side of a locked glass storm door, her hair in pink curlers, her ample lips turned down in a scowl, her fists on her hips. She was wearing a thread-bare plaid bathrobe and fuzzy beige slippers that looked like squashed rabbits.
    “What do you assholes want, in the middle of the night?”
    “Just talk, no problem,” Lucas said. He was standing on the second step of the stoop, looking up at her.
    “Last time I talked to that fuckin’ Capslock, I thought I was gonna have to pull his nuts off,” she said, not moving toward the door lock. She stared over Lucas’s shoulder at Del.
    Del shivered and said, “Sally, open the goddamn door, will you? We’re freezing out here. Honest to God, all we want to do is talk.”
    She let them in after a while, and led them back to a television room so choked with smoke that it might have been a bowling alley. She moved a TV dinner tray out of the way, pointed at a corduroy-covered chair for Lucas and sat down in another. Del stood.
    “We know you saw Dick LaChaise—you only told about a