Sudden Prey

Sandy said.
    “He’d do it anyway.”
    “Gotta go . . . and thanks. I won’t forget it.”
    She hung up and LaChaise said, “Still think you might get out of it, huh?”
    “I’ll put the phone back in your coat,” she said coldly. She did, and went back to the bedroom, flopped on the bed.
    Tried to think. Got up after a while and poked around the room: this was a guest bedroom, and had been used as storage. LaChaise had torn the place apart, looking for money, and found nothing of interest. She went to the window, lifted the blind and looked out. The snow had quit, and distant streetlights seemed to sparkle in the suddenly clear air. Must be an inch of snow, she thought. She leaned forward to peer at the ledge . . .
    And thought: Out the window.
    Bedsheets—but she didn’t have any bedsheets. The bed had been folded and pushed against the wall when they got there. She could get sheets, there were sheets in a closet down the hall, that’d be natural enough: but that goddamn Martin would think about the sheets and the window.
    She looked back out, then to her right. And the fire escape was there, one window down, at the end of the long hall. Ten feet, no more. The ledge was a foot wide . . . and snow-covered. The fall was twenty feet or more. Enough to kill her.
    Still. The snow could be brushed away . . .
    The window had a swivel lock, and she twisted it: after some resistance, it went. She tried the window. Didn’t budge. She looked closely at it, but it didn’t seem to be painted shut. She tried again, squatting to push up with stiff arms . . . and it gave, just an inch, but it’d go.
    She looked back at the door. This would be a bad time, with both of the men drinking, both of them awake. As she thought it, LaChaise screamed from the front room.
    “Motherfucker . . .”
    The police?
    Sandy pulled the window back down, locked it, pulled the shade and then quickly tiptoed to the door. Then she opened it and peered down the hall.
    “. . . can’t get it right,” LaChaise roared. “Why’d he wear a vest to go home . . .”
    The television brought the news that Franklin wasn’t dead—that he wasn’t even in particularly dangerous condition, that he’d been saved by a bulletproof vest.
    “What do I gotta do?” LaChaise shouted at Martin. “What the fuck do I gotta do?”
    “You did right,” Martin said. “You hit him four times in the chest, is what the news says.”
    But Martin’s efforts to calm him down only made LaChaise angrier. Already full of beer, he got Harp’s Johnnie Walker and started drinking it off, carrying a water tumbler full of ice cubes, pouring the whiskey over them, gulping it down like Coca-Cola. He paced as he drank, watching the television.
    A blond newscaster from TV3—“She’s the one we want to get,” Martin said, “Davenport’s woman”—reported that “Police are searching for an informant who provided critical information earlier this week, but who has disappeared. They ask that you call the department on the 911 line, as you did the last time, or any police line and ask for Chief Lucas Davenport. Police said they would offer the informant absolute protection from retaliation from Richard LaChaise or any of his accomplices.”
    “Yeah? How are you gonna do that?” LaChaise brayed at the screen. Then: “I’d like to fuck her,” and then: “Who could be talking to them? We don’t know anybody.”
    Sandy shrank back: she knew.
    “Probably whoever told them about the house we was in,” Martin said. “Ansel had to ask around, talking to a bunch of dopers. Somebody probably gave him up.”
    “Yeah . . . Goddamn, ol’ Ansel. I miss that sonofabitch.”
    LaChaise’s face crinkled, and Sandy thought he’d begun to weep. He turned abruptly, marched down the hall into Harp’s stereo room and began tearing the vinyl record albums out of their covers and smashing them, three and four at a time.
    Martin looked at Sandy, but showed no sign of disapproval—or approval, either. He showed nothing, she thought.
    To the sound of the breaking records, Sandy went back to the bedroom and shut the door. Martin was nuts, but he was controlled. But the booze had pushed LaChaise over the edge, and the very air of the apartment carried the smell and taste of insanity, of the expectation that something crazy was about to happen.
    She had to get out.
    A moment later, she heard Martin’s arrows start to whack into the target outside her door. Martin had put the