Sudden Prey

size of a dinner plate.
    “Better cut that,” Butters muttered.
    “Yeah.” Martin took out his knife, and the Jockey T-shirt split like tissue paper. “Roll up here, Dick . . .”
    LaChaise tried to roll onto his left side and lift his arm; he was sweating heavily, and groaned again, “Goddamn, that hurts.”
    Martin and Butters were looking at the wound. “Don’t look like too much,” Butters said. “Don’t see no bone.”
    “Yeah, but there’s an in-and-out . . .”
    “What?” LaChaise asked.
    “You just got nicked, but there’s a hole, in-and-out, besides the groove. Maybe cut you down to the ribs, that’s the pain. The holes gotta be cleaned out. They’d be full of threads and shit from the coat.”
    “Get Sandy down here,” LaChaise said. “Call her—no, go get her. I don’t know if she’d come on her own . . . She can do it, she used to be a nurse.”
    Martin looked at Butters and nodded. “That’d be best, she might have some equipment.”
    “Some pills,” Butters said.
    “Get her,” LaChaise moaned.

9
    THE SANDHURST WAS a yellow-brick semiresidential hotel on the west edge of the business district. The building was three stories higher than anything else for two blocks around, and easily covered. The clients were mostly itinerant actors, directors, artists and museum bureaucrats, in town visiting the Guthrie Theater or the Walker Art Center.
    Lucas and Sloan brought Weather in through the back, down an alley blocked by unmarked cars. Two members of the Emergency Response Team were on the roof with radios and rifles.
    “. . . everything I’ve been trying to do,” Weather was saying. Lucas’s head was going up and down as he half-listened. He scanned each face down the alley. His hand was in his pocket and a .45 was in his hand. Sloan’s wife was already inside.
    “It won’t be long,” Lucas said. “They can’t last more than a couple of days.”
    “Who? Who can’t last?” Weather demanded, looking up at him. “You don’t even know who they are, except this LaChaise.”
    “We’ll find out,” Lucas said. “They’re gonna pay, every fuckin’ one of them.” His voice left little doubt about it, and Weather recoiled, but Lucas had her arm and marched her toward the hotel.
    “Let go of my arm,” she said. “You’re hurting me.”
    “Sorry.” He let go, put his hand in the small of her back, and pushed her along.
    The two hotel entries, front and back, met at the lobby: Franklin and Tom Black, Sherrill’s former partner, sat behind a wide rosewood reception desk, shotguns across their thighs, out of sight. The largest cop on the force, a guy named Loring, read a paperback in one of the lobby’s overstuffed chairs. He was wearing a pearl-gray suit and an ascot, and looked like a pro wrestler who’d made it small.
    In the entry, a uniformed doorman turned and looked at them when he saw movement down the back hall. Andy Stadic raised a hand, and Lucas nodded at him and then they were around a corner and headed down toward the elevators.
    “You know, anybody could find out where we are,” Weather said.
    “They can’t get in,” Lucas said. “And they can’t see you.”
    “You said they were Seed people, and Seed people are supposed to be in these militias,” Weather said. Weather was from northern Wisconsin, and knew about the Seed. “What if they brought one of those big fertilizer bombs outside?”
    “No trucks are coming down this block,” Lucas said. “We got the city digging up the streets right now, both sides.”
    “You can’t hold it, Lucas,” Weather said. “The press’ll be here, television . . .”
    Lucas shook his head: “They’ll know you’re here, but they won’t get inside. If they try, we’ll warn them once, then we’ll put their asses in jail. We’re not fucking around.”
    He took her up to the top floor, and down the hall to a small two-room suite with walls the color of cigar smoke; the rooms smelled like disinfectant and spray deodorant. Weather looked around and said, “This is awful.”
    “Two days. Three days, max,” Lucas said. “I’d send you up to the cabin but they know about us, somehow, and I can’t take the chance.”
    “I don’t want to go to the cabin,” she said. “I want to work.”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said distractedly. “I gotta run . . .”
     
     
     
    FOR TWO HOURS after the killings, Rose Marie Roux’s office was like an airport waiting room, fifty people rolling through, all of them