Wicked Prey

stumbled off the ramp and Letty turned the knife at him, and Ranch ran at her and she ducked away and he kept going in a straight line and then stumbled over his own feet and fell facedown.
    Letty turned back to Whitcomb, who was screaming at Briar, “Push me, get her,” and unsatisfied with the progress, turned and slashed at Briar with the butt of his punishment stick. The butt caught her on the end of the nose and she went down, bleeding from the nose, and he screamed at her, “Get up, you bitch; you fuckin’ . . . gonna cut you a new goddamn nose . . .”
    She got to her feet and Letty shouted, “Juliet, go back, go back in the house, the police are coming,” but Briar pulled the wheelchair around in a circle and Whitcomb slashed at her again and screamed, “Not that way, you cunt, not that way . . .”
    She’d aimed the chair at the back of the yard. The last renters had had a bad dog which they kept staked out at the back of the house, and the dog had worn the grass down to hard dirt; and behind that was the bluff that led down into Swede Hollow.
    Briar said, “I loved you, Randy,” and then she began pushing the chair toward the bluff, faster and faster, Letty calling, “Juliet, Juliet . . .” Ranch staggered to his feet and Letty turned toward him, pointing the knife at his chest, but he staggered around her, after Briar, as though he were trying to catch them—no chance of that; one of his legs was working harder than the other and he couldn’t keep going in a straight line, but tended off in circles.
    Whitcomb was still trying to thrash back at Briar with his stick, and tried to brake with one hand, but Briar was stronger than he was and at the end of the yard he grabbed both wheels and shouted, “Oh, shit,” and she ran him right off the edge and Randy Whitcomb went screaming sixty miles an hour down a seventy-degree slope into a wall of trees.
    He hit it with the impact of a small car driving into a brick wall. Briar stood, looking down, stunned by what she’d done. Letty came up and looked over the edge; then Ranch got there, well away from Letty, and he peered down the bluff and then said to Briar, “You fuck.”
    Letty heard a siren: still a way out, but not too far. She said to Briar: “Juliet, don’t tell them I was here. Lie. Okay? Don’t tell them.”
    Briar nodded dumbly, and Letty ran across the yard, folded the switchblade, climbed on her bike, bumped back across the yard, across the street, and headed down the hill. The cop car was a block over, on Seventh, as they passed, so she managed to get down the hill unseen, pedaling furiously, through the backstreets, to the Capitol. There, she stopped to turn her phone on, and found a dozen calls from home, and two more from Lucas’s cell.
    * * *
     
    LUCAS HAD gotten a fragmentary story from Carey, who’d been called by Weather when Letty hadn’t gotten home on time. “I don’t want her to think I’m betraying her, but I’m really worried,” Carey said. Lucas had tracked down Whitcomb’s address in a matter of a few minutes, and had broken off from the apartment surveillance.
    Letty had always taken matters into her own hands, whatever the matters might be—she tended to believe that nobody could handle things quite as well as she could. Events had never proven her to be wrong. But messing with Whitcomb and one of Whitcomb’s hookers, for whatever reason—and Carey had filled him in on the reason—could be an irretrievable error.
    Whitcomb was a psychotic; people who got too close to him suffered because they did not—could not—understand the sheer uncontrolled malevolence of the man. Lucas believed that Whitcomb’s condition was far beyond Whitcomb’s own control. He’d been broken at some point, perhaps at birth, perhaps as a child, but he was simply wrong, a devil’s child. There was really nothing to be done about it, other than to put him in jail forever, or kill him. Lucas thought that one or the other of those things was inevitable, a matter of time.
    Now, as he rushed through the night toward Whitcomb’s place, banging down onto the interstate, then almost immediately off again at the Sixth Street exit, he saw the flashers on a St. Paul squad running parallel to him, a block over on Seventh, heading up the hill past the university. He ran the red light and turned the corner and accelerated down the block, turned onto Seventh and saw the squad make the turn over toward Whitcomb’s and he knew with a