Sudden Prey

muscular, blunt, a onetime Navy pilot in Vietnam, and Lucas liked him.
    “We don’t know,” Lucas said. “The call was weird, but we can’t take any chances. You’re gonna have to move.”
    “I can’t quit working,” Jennifer said. “This is too large.”
    Lucas said, “That pushes the threat quite a bit higher.”
    “We’ll keep her behind security, inside the building,” Small said. “We’ll make sure she doesn’t leave at any expected time. We can use different cars.”
    “That’ll all help,” Lucas said. “But we still haven’t figured out their capability. We know there are several of them, and we’ve only got the ID on LaChaise. The other two—we just don’t know.”
    Jennifer looked at Small. “Do you think you could get off?”
    Small shook his head: “I’m not going anywhere; I gotta be here.” He turned to Lucas. “How safe is this hotel you’re putting people into?”
    “Safe,” Lucas said. “That’d be the best place. We don’t really know how much these guys know about us. I don’t know how they found out about Jen and Sarah . . .”
    “Sloan’s wife,” Jennifer said.
    Small and Lucas looked at her, and she said, “Sloan’s wife. She’d take care of the kids—she loves kids. And she’s in the hotel, right?”
    Lucas nodded. “Give her a call.”
    Jen headed for the phone, and Lucas turned to Small: “If we can get you guys in the hotel tonight, we’d like to put a few guys in here . . . I’d be with them . . .”
    “Use the house as a trap,” Small said.
    “Yeah.”
    Small nodded: “All right. So let’s get the kids out.”
    Jennifer came back: “She says she’ll be glad to take them.”
    Small said, “Pack a suitcase. You go with the kids for tonight. Lucas is gonna set up an ambush here . . . and I’m going to stick around. Make sure the cops don’t steal anything.”
    Del looked him over. “You gotta gun someplace?”
    Small nodded: “Yeah. I do. I don’t like people fucking with my kids.”
    My kids . . .
    Lucas never flinched, but as he stepped over to a telephone, he caught Jennifer’s reflection in a windowpane. Behind his back, she’d brought a finger to her lips, and Small nodded. Lucas picked up the phone and called downtown: “Sherrill and Franklin are around somewhere,” he said. “Get them on the line.”
    A high-pitched voice said something from back in the house, and Jennifer hurried that way. Lucas stepped into the hall, and saw Sarah standing halfway down the stairs in her fuzzy pink pajamas, rubbing her sleepy eyes. Lucas cleared his voice and said into the phone, “We’re making some changes down here.”
     
     
     
    SARAH WOULD GROW up to be tall and willowy and blond like her mother—like Lucas’s mother—but with her father’s tough smile and deep eyes. Jennifer let her go and she wandered over to Lucas and took his index finger in her hand, and when he dropped the phone back on the hook, said, “What’s going on?”
    Lucas squatted, so he could look straight into her eyes. “We have some problems. You have to stay at a hotel tonight. With Mom. And Mrs. Sloan will be there.”
    “What kind of problems?”
    “There are some really bad men . . .” he was explaining when the phone rang. Small picked it up, then handed it to Lucas: “It’s Chief Roux. I’ll take Sarah,” he said.
    Lucas nodded. “Yeah,” he said into the phone.
    “ Nightline ’s coming on: watch it,” Roux said. Her words came in a spate. “We picked up a thumbprint off that door in Roseville and damned if the FBI didn’t come up with a name that fits. A man named Ansel Butters, from Tennessee, an old friend of LaChaise’s. We’ve got a photo from Washington and we’ve released it, and it oughta be on Nightline in about a minute.”
    “Anything on Butters? Local contacts?”
    “Not as far as I know, but Anderson’s working the computers,” Roux said. “Nothing happening down there?”
    “Not yet,” he said. “I’ll go turn on the TV.”
    “The word’s out about the money you put on the street, the ten thousand,” Roux said. “Channel Three has it, and if they’ve got it, everybody else will in an hour. I’m not sure it’s a good precedent.”
    “There aren’t any precedents for this,” Lucas said.
    “All right. I hope it dredges something up,” Roux said. “By the way, this Butters—his nickname is ‘Crazy.’ Crazy Ansel Butters.”
    “That’s what I want to hear,” Lucas said.
     
     
     
    LUCAS,