Sudden Prey

He’s coming after you, all right. Eye for an eye.”
    She frowned suddenly, then said, “That guy he was talking to—at the laundromat. I think he was a cop.”
    Lucas said, “What?”
    “I don’t know who, but I recognized the attitude. You know how you can always tell a cop? I mean, except for Capslock here, he looks like a wino . . . Well, this guy was like that. A cop-cop.”
    “Would you recognize a mug shot?”
    She shrugged: “Probably not. I didn’t really look at him, I was sort of looking past him, at Dick. It was the way he stood that made me think cop.”
    Del looked down at Lucas and said, “That’s not good.”
    “No. That’s not good.” Lucas looked back through the dark house, the smoke-browned wallpaper, the crumpled Chee-tos bags on the floor, the stink of a cat, and he said, half to himself, “Eye for an eye.”

7
    MARTIN HAD BROUGHT a foam target with him, a two-foot-square chunk of dense white plastic with concentric black circles around the bull’s-eye. He’d nailed it to a wall beside the refrigerator, and was shooting arrows diagonally across the living room, into the kitchen. The shooting made a steady THUMM-whack from the bow-string vibration and the arrows punching into the target.
    Form practice, he called it; he didn’t care where the arrow went, if the form was correct. As it happened, the arrow always went into the bull’s-eye.
    LaChaise had been watching a game show. When it ended, he yawned, got to his feet and went to a window. The light had died. He looked out into the gloom, then let the curtains fall back and turned to the room. He cracked a smile and said, “Let’s saddle up.”
    Martin was at full draw, and might not have heard. He held, released: THUMM-whack.
    Butters had been playing with their new cell phone. They’d bought it from a dealer friend of Butters’s, who’d bought it from one of his customers, a kid with a nose for cocaine.
    “Good for two weeks,” the dealer had promised. Butters had given him a thousand dollars for the phone, and the dealer had put the money in his jeans without counting it. “The kid’s ma is a Realtor. She’s in Barbados on vacation, left him just enough money to buy food. The kid said his ma made fifty calls a day, so you can use it as much as you want; I wouldn’t go calling Russia or nothing.”
    They’d used it twice, once to call Stadic, once to call a used-car salesman.
    When LaChaise said “Saddle up,” Butters put the phone down, opened the duffel by his foot, and took out two pistols. One was a tiny .380, the other a larger nine-millimeter. He popped the magazines on both of them, thumbed the shells out and restacked them. Then he took a long, thin hand-machined silencer out of the duffel and screwed it into the nine-millimeter: excellent. He unscrewed the silencer, picked up his camo jacket and dropped the silencer in the side pocket.
    “Ready,” he said simply. Butters had a thick blue vein that ran down his temple to his cheekbone: the vein was standing out in the thin light, like a scar.
    “How about you?” LaChaise asked Martin.
    Martin was at full draw again, focused on form: THUMM-whack. “Been ready,” he said.
    LaChaise parted the drapes with two fingers, looked out again. The streetlights were on and it was snowing. The snow had started at noon, just a few flakes at first, the weather forecasters saying it wasn’t much. Now it was getting heavier. The closest streetlight looked like a candle.
    LaChaise turned back into the room, stepped to a chair, and picked up three sheets of paper. The papers were Xerox copies of a newspaper article from the Star Tribune. He’d outlined the relevant copy with a pen:
    Officers Sherrill, Capslock, Franklin and Kupicek were removed from active duty pending a hearing before a weapons review board, a routine action always taken after a line-of-duty shooting incident. Deputy Chief Davenport and Officer Sloan did not discharge their weapons and will continue on active duty.
    So Sherrill, Capslock, Franklin and Kupicek were the shooters.
    “What?” asked Martin. He opened his eyes and looked up at LaChaise.
    “Eye for an eye,” LaChaise said.
    “Absolutely,” Martin said. He was pulling on his coat. “So let’s go.”
     
     
     
    MARTIN DROVE HIS truck to West End Buick-Oldsmobile. He’d called earlier, and asked for the salesman by name: “I talked to you a couple of days ago about a ’91 Pontiac, that black one . . .”
    “The Firebird?”