Sudden Prey

Karkinnen and she’s a doctor over there. In surgery.”
    “Who else? Who’s leaving the hotel?”
    “Jennifer Carey, the TV news reporter. She’s the mother of Davenport’s daughter . . . She’s going back to work, but there’ll be guards all over her and they’ve got locked security doors and stuff. She’d be hard to get at.”
    “All right. Find out about Elmore, if you can.”
    LaChaise hung up, pulled at his lip again, thinking. After a minute, Sandy said, “What?”
    “Davenport killed Butters . . . and the women are gettin’ unhappy about being locked up. They may be going back to work.”
    “Probably got guards all over the place,” Martin said. “Tell you what: let’s get Harp’s car, and go on out to a supermarket and buy some food. Maybe dump the truck: hate to see it go, but I think we better.”
    Sandy was sitting in the chair, folding into herself, not hearing any of it.
    Elmore was dead.
    The guilt was almost too much to bear.

13
    WEATHER KARKINNEN LAY on the hotel bed and fumed: the television had gone into a news loop. The anchorpeople leaned into the cameras with the usual end-of-the-world intensity, but had nothing new to say. Weather looked at her watch: two o’clock.
    Lucas had said he’d drop by at noon, then called to cancel. He told her about the laughing incident, which she hadn’t yet seen when he called, but saw later. The television stations were showing it every twenty minutes or so, and it had been picked up by the national news channels.
    Lucas said the laughter had been hysterical, or on that order. She only half-believed it. She’d lived with him long enough to feel the satisfaction he got from confrontation, and the deadlier the confrontation, the better. A death wish, maybe; sometimes when he talked about his world, she could barely recognize it as the same place she lived. They would drive across town, and she’d see good houses and nice gardens and kids on bikes. He’d see whores and dopers and pedophiles and retired cat burglars.
    At first, it had been interesting. Later, she wondered how he could put up with it, the constant stench of the perverse, the lunatic, the out-of-control. Even later, she understood that he sought it out . . .
    She looked at her watch again: two-oh-three. Screw it. She wasn’t going to sit around anymore. This LaChaise might be extraordinarily bad, but he could hardly have an intelligence system that would tell him where she was—if he even knew to look for her, which she doubted.
    And even if he did know where to look for her, once she was in a crowd, she’d be just one of a million and a half women wrapped in heavy winter coats, faces obscured by scarves. Then nobody could find her—not the FBI, not the Minneapolis cops, nobody—much less some backwoods gunman.
    “All right,” she said. She looked at her watch a third time. She’d had to delay a surgery scheduled that morning, but there was a staff meeting at four, and she could make that. And she could set up for tomorrow. The operation in the morning wasn’t much—remove some cancerous skin, and patch the wound with a graft—but it would get her going again.
    She found her sweater, pulled it over her head, and was checking her purse for money when the knock came at the door. She opened it, and instantly recognized the blonde in the hall, and the small girl with her.
    The blonde smiled: “Hi. I’m Jennifer Carey . . .”
    “I know who you are,” Weather said, smiling back. “Lucas has talked about you. Come in. And hi, Sarah.” She and Sarah were old friends.
    Jennifer was tall, lanky, a surfer girl with degrees in economics and journalism. She noticed Weather’s sweater: “Breaking out?”
    “Definitely. I can’t stand it here anymore,” Weather said. “I’m going crazy.”
    “I’ll give you a ride, if you want one,” Jennifer said. “Unless you’ve got a car.”
    “Lucas brought me in, I’d like a ride. I understand you’re working outside.”
    “Yeah. Sloan’s wife is here, she’s taking care of Sarah for me. But there’s no point in letting Lucas have all the fun, chasing around with his gun.”
    “Daddy shot a man,” Sarah said solemnly, looking up at Weather.
    Weather sat on the bed so her eyes were level with Sarah’s. “I don’t think so, honey. I talked to him a couple of hours ago, and he said another policeman did the shooting.”
    “On TV, they said he did,” Sarah said. Her wide eyes were the same mild blue as Lucas’s