Sudden Prey

in the fuckin’ city,” Lester said. “The question is, who was a good enough friend that they’d put up with this shit? Maybe he’s staying with . . . you know.”
    He didn’t say it, but he meant, “the cop.”
    Lucas shook his head and said, “My brain isn’t working right. I need to lie down for a while.” Then he said to Roux, “There is one thing. We should talk to Sandy Darling. She’s freaked out about lawyers, she thinks we’re gunning for her with the rest of them . . .”
    “So what do we say? Without giving her away?”
    Lucas rubbed his chin. “Suppose we say that we had a source who has been useful, but now is apparently afraid and has gone into hiding. We’re asking her to come back out, that we’ll protect her and offer her immunity.”
    “I don’t know about immunity,” Roux said doubtfully. “What if she’s deep into it, and she’s just playing an angle?”
    “All right, so we just say, ‘Protect her.’ I mean, there’s three ways we can get them: we can take them on the street, we can find the cop who’s pulling our dick or we can get Darling to give them up. We’re doing everything we can on the street, but we’re getting nowhere with the cop . . .”
    Roux nodded. “All right. I’ll put this out. They’re using everything we give them, so it’ll be on the air in ten minutes.”
    Sherrill walked up, carrying a tape recorder, and said, “Something else. What they’re doing—they’re not gonna back off. I think we’ve got to set up a combat team anywhere they might show. Everybody’s house. The hotel’s already covered. But maybe we should set up at the hospital to cover Franklin and Cheryl and whoever.”
    Sloan said, “And I don’t think anybody ought to be running around loose.” He looked at Lucas and said, “Weather and Jennifer. Somebody is feeding these guys everything . . .”
    Roux said, “Lucas, get those goddamn women under control, will you? Can you do that?”
    Lucas said, “I’ll talk to them.”
     
     
     
    SHERRILL PLAYED THE tape, and Lucas listened, eyes closed. The voice wasn’t right: too smooth, too high-pitched: faked. Whoever it was would have fooled the Dispatch people, because the unit number was right and the request was routine.
    “I think—I can’t swear to it—but I think that’s the guy who called me and warned me that Butters was cruising Jennifer and Sarah,” Lucas said.
    “Why?”
    “I’ll tell you why,” Lucas said. “Because that fuckin’ LaChaise is blackmailing him, and he figures that if we take them alive, they’ll deal him. And they probably will. So he’s got to have them dead.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS HEADED OUT to TV3 in a city car, monitoring the radio, his cell phone in his pocket. This was like nothing he’d ever heard of: this was like a war. He didn’t have the usual intervals of quiet, when he could sit and think about patterns, and the way the opponents were working. Puzzle pieces were slipping past him; he could feel it. Maybe if he got some sleep . . .
    The TV3 lobby was locked. When he approached the glass doors, four men ranged behind two reception desks waved him off. He stood next to the glass, held up his ID. One of the men, large, in a heavy, dark suit, crossed the lobby to the door. Lucas realized that he was wearing a vest and carried a pistol on his hip. The man looked at the ID, looked at him, then turned the knob on the lock.
    “I thought that was you,” the man said, looking over Lucas’s shoulder as Lucas came through.
    “Who’re you?”
    “Thomason Security,” the man said. “We’re on all the doors.”
    Lucas nodded. “Good.” Thomason was a heavy-duty security firm, used mostly for moving money at sports events and rock concerts, but also as a source of armed guards and bodyguards for celebrities. He asked for Jennifer.
    “We’ll call up,” the man said. Lucas waited, leaning on a countertop. As the man called, he noticed that the other guard on his side of the lobby had a Winchester Defender twelve-gauge at his feet. Even better.
    The first guard turned to Lucas and said, “Go on up. You know the way?”
    “Yeah.”
    Jennifer met him at the elevators: “What’s going on?”
    “We’ve decided that we’ve got to pull everybody in tight—back at the hotel,” Lucas said. “These guys are suicidal.”
    Jennifer shook her head: “I know, but you saw our security. There’s no way they can get at me. I’m as safe here as I’d be at the hotel. I’ve