Sudden Prey

drunk . . .
    The hall light was on, and one more in the living room. A half-dozen arrows stuck out of the target at the end of the hall, five feet away. But nobody was moving. She went down the hall on her tiptoes: the door to the master bedroom was open, and in the half-light, she could see LaChaise sprawled across the king-sized bed.
    Martin was wrapped in a blanket, lying on the floor by the front door. She tiptoed down toward him and whispered, “Bill?”
    He stirred, but his breathing remained even. She looked back down the hall toward the basement door. Martin’s voice, thick with sleep, said, “The door’s locked. I got the key in my pants.”
    She jumped: it was as though he’d snatched her thought from midair. “I wasn’t going to the door. I was just making sure that Dick’s sleeping it off,” she said.
    “Are you . . . ?” she was going to ask, all right ? Before the words could get out of her mouth, he’d rolled and was pointing a pistol at her head. She stepped back and said, “Please . . .”
    Drunk as he must be—he’d finished LaChaise’s bottle of Johnnie Walker and a half-dozen more beers—his hand seemed absolutely steady. “You’re gonna call the cops on us, aren’t you?”
    “No, honest to God . . .” She looked back at the bedroom; the black-and-white target loomed on the wall outside the door, next to the fire escape window.
    “Are you gonna fuck him?”
    Now, she thought, they were getting to the important issues. She crossed her arms: “Not if I can help it,” she said, looking at the hole in the end of the pistol. “If Dick does it to me, I’d have to be unconscious or dead.”
    The hole at the end of the pistol seemed as large as a basketball hoop, and held between her eyes. He kept it there, kept it, and she closed her eyes . . .
    “All right,” he said. She opened her eyes and the pistol was pointing at the ceiling. He grinned at her, a wet, sleepy, evil grin, she thought. “Hope nobody down in the laundry heard me and Dick wrestling around.”
    My God, she thought, he’s lying here thinking about it: Martin’s turned on. Out loud she said, “They’d have been here, if anybody called the cops.” Her eyes drifted toward the telephone: pick it up, 911, leave it off the hook, wait one minute . . .
    Impossible. She could handle LaChaise, she thought, but Martin . . . Martin seemed to see everything.
    The gun flashed back up and leveled at her forehead again, and Martin said, “Bang.” Then, “Go on back to bed.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS TRIED TO sleep, snuggled against Weather. Though he felt as if he’d been awake for days, his internal clock still said it was too early. And the bed was wrong, not his, and the pillow was no good: it crooked his neck at a bad angle. But most of all, he couldn’t stop his mind. He wasn’t putting the puzzle together, he was simply reliving the whole long episode, without profit.
    A few minutes after midnight, Weather finally spoke in the dark: “You’re vibrating,” she said.
    “Sorry.”
    “You need the sleep.”
    “I know,” Lucas said. “My brain’s all clogged up.”
    She half-rolled. Her voice was clear, and he realized she’d been lying awake: “How much longer, before you get them?”
    “Probably tomorrow, unless they just hide out. If they move, we’ll get them. Tomorrow or the next day, I’d say.”
    “What if they’re running?”
    “Their pictures have been on every TV in the country; they couldn’t stop to get gas. They really can’t go out in the open.”
    After another moment of silence, Weather said, “You think they’ll be taken alive?”
    “No.”
    “You guys’ll just shoot them?”
    “It’s not that—if they called up and said they wanted to come in, and they told us where they were, and they came out with their hands over their heads . . . We’d take them. But it’s not shaping up that way. The first guy, Butters, might as well have committed suicide. They figure they’re dead. They’ve already written themselves off. And that’s scarier’n hell.”
    “Gotta be their parents . . . you know, who made them like that.”
    “Always is,” Lucas said. “I’ve watched some kids grow up from little psychos into big psychos: it was always the parents that made them that way.”
    “If you could intervene early enough . . .”
    Lucas shook his head: “Never work. Nobody spends as much time with the kids as their parents, even if their parents don’t want them. And usually,