Sudden Prey

laughing about anything. Christ, we just finished carrying a shot cop down to a car.”
    “The cop died,” Del said, putting the magazine down.
    “And I didn’t kill anyone,” Lucas said. He hopped off the exam table where he’d been sitting, and loomed over the doctor.
    “That’s not what they’re saying on television,” the doctor said, giving no ground. She glanced at Del, pulled off her latex gloves with a snap !
    “Don’t believe everything you see in the movies,” Lucas said.
    “This wasn’t the movies—it was videotape, and I saw it,” she insisted.
    “The only difference between TV news and the movies,” Del said, “is that movies don’t lie about what they are.”
    “Oh, bullshit,” the doctor said.
    “If you operated on a cancer patient, and the patient died, and when you came out of the operating room, you saw a friend and smiled at him . . . if somebody took a picture of you, would that represent the way you felt about the patient dying?”
    She studied him for a minute, then said, “No.”
    “I hope not,” Lucas said. “I don’t remember laughing. Maybe I did. But that doesn’t have anything to do with what happened.”
     
     
     
    ON THE WAY out, Del said, wonderingly, “are we in trouble or something?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. They tracked through the endless hallways to the back, where they’d ditched the car away from the reporters in the lobby. “More and more, with TV, it’s like we fell down the fuckin’ rabbit hole.”
     
     
     
    ANDERSON CALLED: HE’D been tracking the various investigations. “The Dunn County cops hit the Darling place. They found the husband . . . uh, Elmore Darling . . . was shot to death in the kitchen. His wife is missing. His truck is up there, so she’s down here, somewhere, if she’s still alive.”
    Lucas shook his head: “Huh. Family feud?”
    “Hard to tell what’s going on,” Sloan said. “They got a charge slip from yesterday—from last night—at an Amoco station off I-94 over in St. Paul, so he was over there, probably at that house. And then he gets shot up there. There’s no doubt he was shot in place, there’s splatter all over the kitchen. Short range with a shotgun.”
    Lucas repeated the story to Del, who scratched his chin: “That don’t compute.”
    Lucas said into the phone, “They’re printing everything, right?”
    “I guess. They’ve got their crime-scene guy up there.”
    “Be nice to know who all was in that house,” Lucas said. “If Sandy Darling was there with the rest of them.”
    “I’ll push them on it,” Anderson said.
     
     
     
    LACHAISE, MARTIN AND Sandy had been heading back to the house with a bag of supermarket doughnuts and two quarts of milk, when Stadic had called and told them to get out.
    “Shit.” LaChaise was stunned. “They got us, they got the house.”
    “Maybe something happened with Ansel,” Martin said slowly. “Maybe they spotted him scoutin’ out the Davenport house, and followed him back.”
    He pulled the truck to the curb, reached out and poked the “power” button on the radio, got old-time rock ’n’ roll, and started working down the buttons.
    Sandy looked from one of them to the other: “Now what?”
    “I’m trying to think,” LaChaise said.
    “Let me go back home,” Sandy said.
    “Fuck that,” Martin said. To LaChaise: “We gotta get out of sight.”
    “How about the trailer? We could probably lay low in the trailer for a while.”
    “If they’ve got Elmore’s truck, they’ll bag Elmore for sure, and he’ll tell them about the trailer,” Martin said. “If they put any pressure on him, he’ll talk his ass off.”
    He was still playing with the car buttons, and finally switched over to AM. They found a news station almost instantly, but no news—nothing but blather.
    “Let’s get turned around, and get out of here,” LaChaise said finally. “If Stadic’s right, we’re too close.”
    “If he’s right, we ought to hear something on the radio,” Martin said.
    But he swung the truck around, and they headed west toward Minneapolis. At that moment, a helicopter roared overhead, cutting diagonally across the city blocks, headed for Frogtown.
    “Goddamnit,” Martin said. “They’re doing it.”
    LaChaise punched the radio buttons again, still found nothing. “Let’s get over to Minneapolis. We can figure it out there.”
    “Maybe it wasn’t Butters led them in—maybe it was Elmore,” Martin said.