Sudden Prey

They’d had her, they’d let her go, and here was her truck.
    The truck produced gas charge slips, maps, empty soda cans, and dozens of prints. The guns at the house had produced nothing but fragments of prints: they’d all been carefully polished with cleaning rags. There were a few good prints on a hunting bow, and more on some hunting arrows. The prints were on the way to the FBI.
    St. Paul crime-scene guys had shrouded the truck’s license plate from cameras, and asked the local media not to mention it, but the word was going to leak, and probably soon. If the Dunn County cops got to the Darlings’ place soon enough, they might surprise them, and anyone staying with them. Lucas had to smother an impulse to run over to Wisconsin, to be in on the raid. The Wisconsin cops would do well enough without him.
    As Lucas ran through the bits and pieces of paper coming out of the van, all carefully cased in Ziploc bags, Del wandered up.
    “How’s Cheryl?” Lucas asked.
    “Hurtin’. They were giving her another sedative when I left. Christ, I heard about this, I couldn’t believe it.”
    “It was interesting,” Lucas said.
    “What happened to your head?”
    “Cut, somehow. Nothing much.”
    “You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”
    “Nah . . .” He wiped at his hair, and got fresh blood on the palm of his hand.
    “Did you hear about the St. Paul cop that got shot? Waxman?” Del asked.
    Lucas was trying to find a place to wipe the blood, stopped, and asked, “I didn’t know his name . . . What?”
    “Just came on the radio: he died.”
    “Ah, shit.” Lucas looked down the street. Everywhere, the St. Paul cops were clustering. The word was getting out.
    “Radio says they never got him to the table,” Del said. “He was barely alive when he went in the door. They say he was gone thirty seconds later.”
     
     
     
    ROUX CAME THROUGH with the St. Paul chief and found Lucas and Del eating cinnamon mini-doughnuts at the house. The guns from the closet had been carefully laid out on the living-room floor, waiting for a ride downtown.
    “Jesus,” Roux said to Lucas, shocked. “You were hit . . .”.
    “Naw, just cut.” He pawed gently at his scalp. The cut was beginning to itch, and when he touched it, a burning sensation shot through his scalp, and he winced. “The bleeding’s stopped . . .” He took his hand away and looked at it; blood dappled his fingertips.
    “Lucas,” she said, “I’m telling you, not asking you. Go get it fixed.”
    “Yeah . . .”
    “Now,” she said. Then, looking at the guns: “They brought an arsenal with them. We lucked out.”
    “Look, you gotta talk to the patrol people,” Lucas said. “LaChaise is on the street, now. He’ll be looking for a friend—old bikers, dopers, somebody like Dexter Lamb. In fact, we ought to stake out the Lamb place, they could turn up there.”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    “And you gotta get the patrol guys pushing the street people. Put some more money out there. The money worked. If we start running the assholes around, and there’s some money in it, we’ll find them.”
    Roux said, “ We’ll do that. You get your head fixed.”
     
     
     
    DEL DROVE LUCAS a few blocks to Ramsey Medical Center, where a doctor anesthetized, cleaned and stitched the scalp wound.
    “Souvenir,” the doctor said.
    She handed Lucas a scrap of silver metal, like a fragment of Christmas-tree tinsel, but stiff—maybe a scrap of car aerial.
    “How many stitches?” Lucas asked.
    “Twelve or thirteen, I imagine,” she said, sewing carefully.
    Del was reading a two-year-old copy of Golf Digest , looking up every once in a while to see how it was going. When she finished, the doctor said “Okay,” and tidied gauze and disinfectant-soaked cotton away into a steel basket, and then paused and asked, “Why were you laughing after you killed that man?”
    “What?” Lucas didn’t understand the question. Del dropped the top of the magazine and stared at the doctor.
    “I saw it on television,” she said. “You were standing there laughing, right over his body.”
    “I don’t think so,” Lucas said, trying to remember.
    “I saw it,” she snapped. “I thought it was pretty . . . distasteful, considering what just happened. So’d the anchorpeople: they said it was shocking.”
    “I don’t know.” Lucas shook his head, reached toward his scalp, which now felt dead, then dropped his hand. “I mean, I believe you—but I can’t remember