Sudden Prey

“You shut up, huh? Quit whinin’. I haven’t been outside in years, and goddamnit, I’m gonna enjoy myself one afternoon. Just one fuckin’ afternoon, and you’re coming along. So shut up.”
     
     
     
    LA CHAISE COULDN’T FOLLOW the movie: buildings blew up, cars got wrecked, and the cops seemed to have antitank missiles. All bullshit. Martin fell asleep halfway through, although he was awake when it ended.
    “Let’s get out of here,” LaChaise muttered.
    On the way out, they passed an electronics store with a bank of TVs lit up along one wall. As they were passing, the chief of police came up: they knew her face from the hours of news. “Hold it,” Martin said. They watched through the glass, and suddenly Martin’s face came up.
    “Shit,” he said. “They got me.”
    “That means they got the truck,” LaChaise said.
    “We knew they would,” Martin said.
    LaChaise looked him over, then looked back at the TV, and said, “You know, nobody’d recognize you in a million years. Nobody.”
    Martin looked at Sandy, who looked at the TV picture, back to Martin, and nodded in reluctant agreement.
    Martin watched until his picture disappeared, and then said, briskly, “Let’s get a beer.”
    LaChaise nodded. “We can do better’n that. Let’s find a bar.” And he turned to Sandy and said, “Not a fuckin’ word.”
     
     
     
    THEY FOUND A place across from the airport, a long, low, yellow log cabin with a Lite Beer sign in the window, showing a neon palm tree. The sign looked out over a pile of dirty snow, freshly scraped from the parking lot. Above the door, a beat-up electric sign said either Leonard’s or Leopard’s, but the lightbulbs in the fourth letter had burned out, along with the neon tubes on one side. Seven or eight cars and a few pickups, all large, old and American, were nosed toward the front door. Inside, they found a country jukebox, tall booths, a couple of coin-op pool tables and an antisocial bartender.
    The bartender was drying glasses when they walked in, and twenty people were scattered around the bars, mostly in clumps, with a few lonely singles. Two men circled the pool table, cigarettes hanging from their lips. They checked LaChaise and Martin for a long pulse, and then started circling again.
    LaChaise said, “Hey, let’s get some money in the jukebox, goddamnit. Sounds like a tomb in here.” He held up his arms and wiggled his hips: “Something hot.”
    Martin muttered, “You’re an old man.”
    LaChaise said, “Yeah, well . . . let’s get a beer.”
    LaChaise got Waylon Jennings going on the jukebox, while Sandy found a booth. LaChaise slipped in beside her, and Martin across from them. A waitress stopped, and LaChaise ordered three bottles of Bud and two packages of Marlboros and gave the waitress a twenty.
    When the beer came back, LaChaise shoved one at Sandy and said, “Drink it.”
    She didn’t care for beer, but she took it, and looked out of the booth, thinking: Most ladies’ rooms had telephones nearby. After a couple of beers, she’d have to pee. She could call . . .
    She was trying to work it through when the waitress came by again, and LaChaise ordered another round. She tried to tune in on the conversation: LaChaise and Martin started talking about some black dude in prison who spent all his time lifting weights.
    “. . . they thought something must’ve popped in his brain ’cause they found him layin’ on this mat, nothing wrong with him except he was dead,” LaChaise said. “Somebody said there was a hit on him and somebody stuck an ice pick in his ear.”
    “Sounds like bullshit,” Martin said.
    “That’s what I say. How’re you gonna stick an ice pick in the ear of a guy who can press four hundred pounds or whatever it was? I mean, and not make a mess out of it?”
    Martin thought it over: “Well, you could spot for him, maybe. You’re right there by his head if he’s doin’ presses, and when he finishes he sits up, and you’re right there . . .”
    LaChaise nodded. “Okay, that gets it in his ear, but how come there’s no blood? That’s the thing . . .”
    Sandy closed her eyes. She was in a booth with two men trying to work out a way to kill a guy who’d wring your head off if the attempt failed—and how you’d do it with a weapon you’d have to sneak into the weight room.
    Martin was tapping the table with the Bud bottle: “The suspicious thing is, he was found alone. How many times do you see the weight