Sudden Prey

good wino that I could’ve become one.”
    “Made for each other,” Lucas said, with a wry undertone cops affected when they were getting too close to sincerity.
    “Yeah. Jesus, I want to kill that motherfucker . . .”
    Then the handset:
    “Lucas. Got one coming.” A surveillance voice. Lucas grabbed the radio and stepped to the front door. He could see out the inset glass windows without being seen himself.
    “White male in a pickup, moving slow. He’s not delivering papers.”
    “Can you see the plates?”
    “I can’t, but Tommy can, he’s got the night scope . . . Tommy? He’ll be there in a minute.”
    “Right, I got him coming . . .”
    “Lucas, he’s coming up to the house now.”
    Lucas could see the headlights on the snow, then the slowly moving pickup. “Get the plate, get the plate.”
    “He’s going by, but he was looking. Jeff, what’d you think?”
    “He was looking, all right.”
    “We don’t want to shoot a goddamn reporter, take it easy . . .”.
    Lucas said, “Tommy, you got that plate?”
    “Front plate’s dirty, I can get CV. It’s Minnesota . . .”
    “Tommy, c’mon . . .”
    “I got it, I got it . . .” He read the license out, and Dispatch acknowledged. “He’s going around the corner . . .”
    “Which way?”
    “South. Wait a minute, he’s stopping. He’s stopping.”
    “Dick, you guys get down here in the car,” Lucas said into the handset. “Come around the block from the back.”
    “Didn’t think it’d happen,” Del said. He was wide awake, breathing hard.
    “Take it easy,” Lucas said.
    Small called down the stairs: “What’s happening?”
    “Nothing,” Lucas called back, and then Del led out through the front and down the sidewalk, moving with the wintertime short-step duckwalk of a man on ice.
    Lucas still had the handset. Tommy: “He’s getting something out of the back. He’s got the dome light on and he’s doing something in the back.”
    Lucas brought the radio up: “Everybody take it easy, he could have anything in there.”
    Dick came back: “We’re coming in, we’re coming around the corner.”
    Lucas said, “Let’s go,” and they started running, moving off the sidewalk into the snow, high-stepping. At the corner, they rounded an arbor vitae, and saw the truck fifty feet away, across the street, the door open now. The driver was turning toward them, he had something in his arms . . .
    “Hold it,” Lucas shouted. Del was sprinting ahead, and Tommy came in from the side, his long coat whipping around his legs, and Dick came in with the car . . .
     
     
     
    BUTTERS HAD SPIRALED in toward the house from a half-mile out, quartering the neighborhood, watching faces in the few cars he’d encountered, looking for lights, looking for motion. In the woods, he’d learned to look not for the animal, but the disturbance in the animal’s wake. Deer sometimes sounded like they were wearing jackboots, pounding through the woods; squirrels made tree limbs jiggle and jerk in a way that wasn’t the wind; even a snake, if it was big enough, parted the grass like a ship’s prow cutting through water.
    He watched for the odd motion; and saw none.
    Still, there was something not right about this. He understood that the cop might think that the kid was safe, but why would he take the chance? Putting the kid in the hotel would have been the natural thing to do.
    Butters saw nothing, but he smelled something: the kid felt like bear bait, a bucket of honey and oatmeal, meant to pull them in. They had to check, because the kid might be one of their last chances to really get even. And that, he thought, made the kid even better bait.
    But he turned toward the house, spiraling, moving closer . . .
     
     
     
    THE UNMARKED CAR caught the truck in its high beams, and the man turned, hearing Lucas’s scream, saw the running men . . . put his back to the truck and said, “What? What?”
    Del was twenty feet away and coming in, and the man raised his hands and Del almost popped him: almost . . .
    “Freeze. Right where you are.” Lucas behind Del, Tommy on the edge, the doors popping on the blocking car.
    “What?” The guy was white-faced, shocked, his mouth dropping open. He stepped back away from the van.
    There was movement in the van, and Tommy swiveled toward it, his shotgun raised. A blond head. Then a child’s voice, tired and frightened: “Daddy?”
     
     
     
    SPIRALING: AND CATCHING, down a street that led almost straight into