Wicked Prey

closer to the house.
    They couldn’t afford a van equipped for handicapped drivers, and Whitcomb hadn’t been trained on one anyway. They did get one with a hydraulic ramp, bought used and cheap through CurbCut, a St. Paul charity. At the house, Briar parked next to a wooden ramp built by Make a House a Home, and Whitcomb dropped the ramp and rolled out of the van, used the remote to retract the ramp and close the van door. He hadn’t spoken a word since the airport, but his breath was coming in fast chuffs.
    Whitcomb was getting himself excited, though, of course, nothing would come of it. He’d taken the bullet low in the spine, and he’d not have another erection in this life.
    Now he spoke: “Inside.”
    “The light’s on,” Briar said. She stopped. She was sure she’d turned the lights off as they left. “I turned them off.”
    She was stalling, Whitcomb thought. “Ranch must be up.”
    “Ranch is not up.”
    Stalling. The crazy bitch had got the flight wrong, and now a pharmaceutical salesman was wondering why he couldn’t find his sample case, and somebody else was wondering why a green nylon bag was going round and round on a baggage carousel somewhere else. Eventually they’d look in it, and find the sample case, and put two and two together, and the whole goddamn racket could come down around their ears. She was stalling.
    “In the house,” he said.
    “The light . . .”
    He shouted at her now: “Get in the fuckin’ house . . .”
    She turned and climbed the ramp, unlocked the door and pushed inside, holding the door for him, and he bumped over the doorjamb and turned toward the living room and accelerated. Moving too fast to turn back. And there were the Pollish twins, Dubuque and Moline, sitting on the couch, big bulky black men with cornrowed hair, drop-crotch jeans, and wife-beater shirts.
    Ranch was lying in a corner on a futon, facedown, mouth open, a white stain under his chin, breathing heavily.
    Moline had one of Whitcomb’s beers in one hand and a piece-of-shit .22 in the other. The twins were managers in the sexual entertainment industry, and were known around the St. Paul railroad tracks as Shit and Shinola, because stupid people found them hard to tell apart. The cops and the smarter street people knew that Dubuque had lost part of his left ear in a leveraged buyout on University Avenue. Moline pointed the gun at Whitcomb’s head and said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you in the motherfuckin’ head.”
    “What are you talking about?” Whitcomb asked. “What are you doing in my house?” He rolled across the room to Ranch and jammed the foot-plate on the wheelchair hard into Ranch’s ribs: “You alive?”
    Ranch groaned, twitched away from the pain. The door slammed in the kitchen. Dubuque jumped and asked, “What was that?”
    “Woman runnin’ for the cops,” Whitcomb said. “She knows who you are. You’re fucked.”
    Moline looked at the front door, then asked, “Why you running Jasmine down my street?”
    “Jasmine?” Whitcomb sneered at him. “I ain’t seen her in two weeks. She’s running with Jorgenson.”
    “Jorgenson? You pullin’ my dick,” Moline said.
    “Am not,” Whitcomb said. “Juliet’s all I got left. Jasmine got pissed because I whacked her lazy ass with my stick, and she snuck out of here with her clothes. The next thing I hear, she’s working for Jorgenson. If I find her, she’s gonna have a new set of lips up her cheek.”
    Dubuque said to Moline, casually, “He lying to us.”
    “Juliet knows us, though,” Moline said. He was the thinker of the two.
    “I’m not lying,” Whitcomb said.
    Moline stood up, pulled up his shirt, stuck the .22 under his belt and said, “Get the door, bro.”
    Whitcomb figured he was good: “The next time you motherfuckers come back here . . .”
    Dubuque was at the front door, which led out to the front porch, which Whitcomb never used because of the six steps down to the front lawn.
    “We come back here again, they gonna find your brains all over the wall,” Moline said, and with two big steps, he’d walked around Whitcomb’s chair, and Moline was a large man, and he grabbed the handles on the back and started running before Whitcomb could react, and Dubuque held the door and Whitcomb banged across the front porch and went screaming down the steps, his bones banging around like silverware in a wooden box.
    The whole crash actually took a second or two, and he wildly tried to