Sudden Prey

was a flash of white. Rib bone.
    “Just touched a rib,” she said to Martin.
    “I see,” he said, peering into the hole. He was interested in bullet wounds.
    After a final wash, she repaired the razor cut with a long series of rolling stitches with black nylon thread, then painted the area around the wound with antiseptic. LaChaise wiggled a few times, but kept his mouth shut.
    When she’d finished the stitching, Sandy’s hands were red with blood. She went to the kitchen, washed, then returned to LaChaise and put a heavy bandage over the wound. She fixed the bandage in place with round-the-chest wraps of gauze, and then tape.
    At the end of it, LaChaise sat up.
    “Maybe you shouldn’t move,” she said.
    He was feeling the pills, and smiled weakly and said, “Shit, I been hurt worse than this by sissies.”
    “That’s the codeine. You’re gonna hurt later on,” Sandy said.
    “I can live with it,” he said. He got shakily to his feet and looked down at the bandaging job. “Jesus, good job. Really good job. You’re a little honey,” he said.
     
     
     
    DEL AND LUCAS were on the way out of the building when Sloan caught up: “I’m coming,” he said. “Keep you out of trouble.”
    All the way out to the laundromat, they argued about the shootings, and the response. Del said the season was open.
    “Wouldn’t be murder,” Del said stubbornly. “I wouldn’t just shoot them cold.”
    “. . . and the thing is,” Lucas continued, “you’d take all of us down with you. We’d all go out to Stillwater together. Nobody’d believe it was just you.”
    An unwanted grin popped up on Del’s face: “Hell, we know half the guys out there. Be like old home week.”
    Sloan said, “Lucas is right. I don’t even think you should be riding with us. If you pop somebody now, after Cheryl, the media’d crucify us, and the grand jury’d be on us like a hot sweat: the politics would kill us.”
    “Well, who in the hell’s side is everybody on?” Del asked. “What about Cheryl?”
    “Don’t ask that question,” Lucas said. “The answer’ll piss you off.”
    They were in Lucas’s Explorer, Lucas driving, beating through the desolate streets to the near south side. Lights showed on the laundromat’s second floor. Below them, behind the storefront windows of the laundromat, five women, all of them black, folded clothes, read magazines or sat and stared at the dirty pink plaster walls.
    Lucas stopped in a bus zone on the corner, twenty yards up the street from the windows. “When I talked to Lonnie, he said if you go up the main stairway, you get to the top and there’s a bunch of junk, cardboard boxes and stuff, all piled up. You can’t get through to the door, not in a hurry, anyway,” Del said, peering up at the second-story windows. “There’s a back stairs that comes down inside the garage. But the garage door’s locked, and you can’t get through that.”
    “So you go up the stairs and make a lot of noise—kick the boxes out of the way, bang away on the door,” Sloan said to Del. “We’ll wait out back. If he opens up the front door, you call us; and if he runs, we’ll be the net.”
    “All right,” Del said, “but I think we might be barking up the wrong tree. I can’t see Harp having anything to do with a bunch of . . .” He stopped in midsentence, pointed through the windshield. “Hey—look there.”
    A woman was walking toward them, half skating on the slippery sidewalk, holding what appeared to be a small white bakery sack. She passed under a streetlight and then into the brighter lights from the laundromat window.
    “That’s Jas Smith, Daymon’s old lady,” Del said.
    Lucas said, “Let’s take her. Maybe she’ll invite us up.”
    “Yeah.” Del and Sloan hopped out of the right side, while Lucas walked around the nose of the truck, converging on Jasmine. She was wearing a brimmed hat, and her head was down against the snow: she didn’t see them coming until they were on top of her.
    Then she jumped, and put her hand across her heart: “Goddamn, Capslock, give me some warning.”
    “Sorry . . .”
    “If I was carrying a little piece or something, I might of shot you outa self-defense, popping out like that.”
    She looked at Lucas and Sloan, worried, and Del said, “This is Chief Davenport and Detective Sloan. We got something we need to talk to Daymon about. Not bust him; just talk.”
    “Whyn’t you call him up?”
    “Because we didn’t want him