Shadow Prey

by John Sandford

  He left her in a glow and headed home.

  Lucas lived in St. Paul. From his front-room window, he could see a line of trees along the Mississippi River gorge and the lights of Minneapolis on the other side. He lived alone, in a house he once thought might be too big. Over ten years, he’d spread out. The double garage took an aging Ford four-wheel-drive that he used for backcountry trips and boat-towing. The basement filled up with weights and workout pads, a heavy bag and a speed bag, shooting gear and a gun safe, tools and a workbench.

  Upstairs, the den was equipped with a deep leather chair for dreaming and watching basketball on television. One bedroom was for sleeping, another for guests. He’d converted a third bedroom into a workroom, with an oak drawing table and a bookcase full of references.

  Lucas invented games. War games, fantasy games, role-playing games. Games paid for the house and the Porsche and a cabin on a lake in northern Wisconsin. For three months, he had been immersed in a game he called Drorg. “Drorg” was an invented word, inspired by cyborg, which itself was a contraction of the words cybernetics organism. Cyborgs were humans with artificial parts. A drorg, in Lucas’ game, was a drug organism, a human altered and enhanced by designer drugs. To see in the dark, to navigate by sonar with enhanced hearing, to have the strength of a gorilla, the reflexes of a cat. The brain of a genius.

  Not all at once, of course. That’s where the game came in. And the drugs had penalties. Some lingered: Call for superstrength and it hung on when you needed superintelligence. Call for superintelligence and the drug pushed you to madness and suicide if you couldn’t acquire the antidote. Take the pan-effects drug and it flat killed you, period; but not before you achieved superabilities and eventually intolerable pleasure.

  It all took work. There was the basic plot to write—Drorg was essentially a quest, like most role-playing games. There were also scoring systems to build, opponents to create, boards to design. The publisher was excited about it and was pressing. He wanted to do a computer version of it.

  So five or six nights a week, for three months, Lucas had been in the workroom, sitting in a pool of light, plotting his patterns. He listened to classic rock, drank an occasional beer, but mostly laid out a story of information bureaucracies, corporate warfare, ’luded-out underclasses and drorg warriors. Where the story came from, he didn’t know; but every night the words were there.

  When he got home, Lucas put the car in the garage, went inside and popped a frozen chicken dinner into the microwave. In the five minutes before it was ready, he checked the house, got the paper off the front porch and washed his hands. He’d eaten all the french fries and three of the four chicken nibbles—he wasn’t exactly sure what part they were, but they did have bones—when Lily Rothenburg’s face popped into his mind.

  She came out of nowhere: he hadn’t been thinking about her, but suddenly she was there, like a photograph dropped on a table. A big woman, he thought. A little too heavy, and not his style; he liked the athletes, the small muscular gymnasts, the long sleek runners.

  Not his style at all.

  Lily.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Leo Clark was a drunk by the time he was fifteen. At forty, he had been twenty-two years on the street, begging nickels and dimes from the rich burghers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. A lifetime lost.

  Then one bitterly cold night in St. Paul, he and another drunk, a white man, were turned out of the mission after an argument with a clerk. They stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of rye whiskey. After some argument, they walked down to the railroad tracks. An old tunnel had been boarded up, but the boards were loose. They pried them back and crawled inside.

  Late that night, Leo went out, found sticks of creosote-covered scrap lumber along the tracks, dragged it back to the tunnel and started a fire. The two men finished the whiskey in the stinking smoke. Their cheeks, hands and stomachs felt like fire, but their legs and feet were blocks of ice.

  The white man had an idea. Up along the bluffs on the Mississippi, he said, were storm sewers that led into the tunnel system under the city. If they could crawl back there, they could lie up on steam pipes. The tunnels would be as warm as the mission and it wouldn’t cost them a dime. They could get a Coleman lantern, a few books . . . .

  When Leo Clark woke the next morning, the white man was dead. He was lying facedown on the cold ground and had taken a few convulsive bites of the earth as he died: his mouth was half full of oily dirt. Leo Clark could see one of his eyes. It was open, and as flat and silvery and empty as the dime that the steam tunnels wouldn’t cost him.

  “He died in a fuckin’ cave, man; they let him die in a fuckin’ hole in the ground,” Leo told the cops. The cops didn’t give a shit. Nobody else did either: the body went unclaimed, and was eventually dumped in a pauper’s grave. Dental X rays were filed with the medical examiner in the improbable case that somebody, someday, showed up looking for the dead man.

  After the white man died in the cave, Leo Clark stopped drinking. It didn’t happen all at once, but a year later he was sober. He drifted west, back to the res. Became a spiritual man, but with a twist of hate for people who would let men die in holes in the ground. He was forty-six years old, with a face and hands like oak, when he met the Crows.

  Leo Clark hid in a corner of a dimly lit parking ramp, between the bumper of a Nissan Maxima and the outer wall of the ramp. He was thirty feet from the locked steel door that led into the apartment building.

  A few minutes earlier, he had looped a piece of twelve-pound-test monofilament fishing line around the doorknob. He led the line to the bottom of the door, fastened it with a piece of Magic mending tape and trailed it on to the Maxima. In the low light, the line was invisible. He was waiting for somebody to walk through the door—going in, he hoped, but out would be okay, as long as it wasn’t to the Maxima. That would be embarrassing.

  Leo Clark lay bathed in the odors of exhaust and oil and thought about his mission. When he had killed Ray Cuervo, the overwhelming emotion had been fear—fear of failure, fear of the cops. He’d known Ray personally, had suffered from his greed, and anger and hate had been there too. But this judge? The judge had been bribed by an oil company in a lawsuit involving the illegal disposal of toxic wastes at the Lost Trees reservation. Leo Clark knew that, but he didn’t feel it. All he felt was the space in his chest. A . . . sadness? Was that what it was?

  He had thought his years on the street had burned all of that away: that he’d lost all but the most elemental survival emotions. Fear. Hate. Anger. He wasn’t sure whether this discovery, this renewal of feeling, this sadness, was a gift or a curse. He would have to think about that: Leo Clark was a careful man.

  As for the judge, it would make no difference. He had been weighed and he would die.

  Leo Clark had been waiting for twenty minutes when a car pulled into an empty space halfway down the garage. A woman. He could hear her high heels rapping on the concrete. She had her keys in her hand. She opened the door into the building, stepped inside. The door began to swing shut and Leo pulled in the line, popping off the Magic mending tape, putting tension on the line, easing the door shut . . . but not quite enough to latch. He kept up the tension, waiting, waiting, giving the woman time for the elevator, hoping that nobody else came out . . . .

  After three minutes, he slid from beneath the car. Keeping the line tight, he walked to the door and eased it open. Nobody in the elevator lobby. He stepped inside, walked past the elevator to the fire stairs, and went up.

  The judge was on the sixth floor, one of three apartments. Leo listened at the fire door, heard nothing. Opened the door, looked through, stepped into the empty hallway. Six C. He found the door, rapped softly, though he was sure it was empty. No answer. After another quick look around, he took a bar from his jacket, slipped it into the crack between the door and the jamb and slowly put his weight to it. The door held, held; then there was a low ripping sound and it popped open. Leo stepped in
side, into the dark room. Found a chair, sat down and let the sadness flow through him.

  Judge Merrill Ball and his girlfriend, whose name was Cindy, returned a few minutes after one in the morning. The judge had his key in the lock before he noticed the damage to the door.

  “Jesus, it looks like . . .” he started, but the door flew open, freezing him. Leo Clark was there, his long black braids down on his chest, his eyes wide and straining, his mouth half open, his hand driving up. And in his hand, the razor-edged stone knife . . .

  An hour later, in a truck stop off I-35 north of Oklahoma City, Leo Clark sat at the wheel of his car and wept.

  Shadow Love walked into the wind, his shoulders hunched, his running shoes crunching through the fallen maple leaves. The black spot floated out ahead of him.

  The black spot.

  When Shadow Love was a child, his mother had taken him to a neighbor’s home. The house smelled of cooking gas and boiled greens, and he could remember the neighbor’s fat white legs as she sat on a kitchen table, sobbing. Her husband had a black spot on his lungs. The size of a dime. Nothing to be done, the woman said. Make him comfortable, the doctors said. Shadow Love remembered his mother, gripping the other woman around the shoulders . . . .

  And now he had a name for the thing on his mind. The black spot.

  Sometimes the invisible people would talk to his mother, plucking at her arms and face and her dress and even her shoes, to get her attention, to tell her what Shadow Love had done. He couldn’t remember doing all those things, but the invisible people said he had. They were never wrong, Rosie Love said. They saw everything, knew everything. His mother would beat him with a broom handle for doing those things. She would chase him and pound him on the back, the shoulders, the legs. Afterward, when the invisible people had gone, she would fall on him weeping, begging forgiveness, trying to rub off the bruises as if they were shoe polish . . . .

  The black spot had come with the invisible people. When Shadow Love got angry, the black spot popped up in front of his eyes, a hole in the world. He never told his mother about the black spot: she would tell the invisible people and they would demand a punishment. And he never showed his anger, for the same reason. Defiance was the worst of all sins, and the invisible people would howl for his blood.

  At some point, the invisible people stopped coming. His mother killed them with alcohol, Shadow Love thought. Her bouts of drunkenness were bad enough, but nowhere near as bad as the invisible people. Although the invisible people were gone, the black spot stayed . . . .

  And now it floated in front of his eyes. The fuckin’ cop. Davenport. He treated them like dirt. He came in and pointed his finger. Made them sit. Like a trained dog. Sit, he said. Speak, he said. Arf.

  The black spot grew and Shadow Love felt dizzy with the humiliation of it. Like a dog. His pace picked up, until he was almost running; then he slowed again, threw his head back and groaned, aloud. Fuckin’ dog. He balled a fist and hit himself on the cheekbone, hard. The pain cut through his anger. The black spot shrank.

  Like a fuckin’ dog, you crawled like a fuckin’ dog. . . .

  Shadow Love was not dumb. His fathers were running their war and would need him. He couldn’t be taken by the cops, not for something as stupid as a fistfight. But it ate at him, the way Davenport had treated him. Made him be nice . . .

  Shadow Love bought a pistol from a teenaged burglar. It wasn’t much of a gun, but he didn’t need much of a gun. He gave the kid twenty bucks, slipped the pistol into his waistband and headed back to the Point. He would need a new place to stay, he thought. He couldn’t move in with his fathers: they were already jammed into a tiny efficiency. Besides, they didn’t want him in their war.

  A place to stay. The last time he was in town, he’d have gone to Ray Cuervo . . . .

  Yellow Hand’s day had been miserable. Davenport had started it, kicking him out of a stupor. A stupor he’d valued. The longer he was asleep, the longer he could put off his problem. Yellow Hand needed his crack. He rolled his upper lip and bit it, thinking about the rush . . . .

  After Davenport had gone, Shadow Love had put on his boots and jacket and left without a word. The old white woman had fallen back on her mattress and soon was snoring away with her man, who had never woken up. Yellow Hand had made it out on the street a half-hour later. He’d cruised the local K Mart, but left with the feeling he was being watched. It was the same way at a Target store. Nothing obvious, just white guys in rayon neckties . . .

  He wished Gineele and Howdy were still in town. If Gineele and Howdy hadn’t gone to Florida, they’d all be rich.

  Gineele was very black. When she was working, she wore her hair in corn rows and sported fluorescent pink lipstick. She had a nasty scar on her right cheek, the end product of an ill-considered fight with a man who had a beer can opener in his hand. The scar scared the shit out of everybody.

  If Gineele was bad, Howdy was a nightmare. Howdy was white, so white he looked as if he’d been painted. A quick glance at his eyes suggested that this boy was snorting something awful. Ether, maybe. Or jet fuel. Toxic waste. In any case, his eyes were always cranked wide, his mouth was always open, his tongue flicking out like a snake’s. To complement his insane face, Howdy wore steel rings around his neck, black leather cuffs with spikes, and knee-high leather boots. He was twenty years old—you could see the youth in his carriage—but his hair was dead-white and fine as spun silk. When Howdy and Gineele went into a K Mart, the white guys in the rayon neckties went crazy. While the two decoys caromed around the store, Yellow Hand took boomboxes out the front door by the cartload.

  Jesus. Yellow Hand really needed them . . . .

  An hour after he hit the street, he scored a clock-radio and three calculators at a Walgreen’s drugstore. He cashed them for a chunk, smoked it, floated away to never-never land. But it was a soiled trip, because even as he went out he was anticipating the cold reality of the crash.

  Early in the evening, he tried to steal a toolbox from a filling station. He almost made it. As he was turning the corner, a guy by the gas pumps spotted him and yelled. The box was too heavy to run with, so he dumped it and hauled ass through two blocks of backyards. The gas jockey called the cops and Yellow Hand spent an hour hiding under a boat trailer as a squad car cruised the neighborhood. By the time he started back to the Point, it was fully dark. He had to think. He had to plan. He had only two more days at the Point; then he’d need money for the rent. The nights were getting cold.

  Shadow Love was smoking a cigarette when Yellow Hand came in.

  “Loan me a couple bucks?” Yellow Hand begged.

  “I don’t have no money to spend on crack,” Shadow Love said. He reached for the hardpack of Marlboros. “I can give you a smoke.”

  “Aw, man, I wouldn’t buy no crack,” Yellow Hand whined. “I need to eat. I ain’t had nothin’ to eat all day.” He took the cigarette and Shadow Love held a paper match for him.

  “Tell you what,” Shadow Love said after a moment, fixing Yellow Hand with his pale eyes. “We can walk up to that taco joint by the river road. I’ll buy you a half-dozen tacos.”

  “That’s a long way, man,” Yellow Hand complained.

  “Fuck ya, then,” Shadow Love said. “I’m going. Thanks for lettin’ me stay.” He’d paid Yellow Hand three dollars to use the mattress.

  “All right, all right,” Yellow Hand said. “I’m coming. I’m so fuckin’ hungry . . . .”

  Walking slow, they took twenty minutes to get from the Point to the Mississippi. The river was a hundred feet below them and Shadow Love sidestepped down the slope.

  “Where are you going, man?” Yellow Hand asked, puzzled.

  “Down to the water. Come on. It’s not much further this way.” Shadow Love thought about Yellow Hand and Davenport. Yellow Hand had told the cop about the newspaper clipping: that was something. The black spot popped up.

  “We gotta climb back up, man,” Yellow Hand complained.

 
“Come on,” Shadow Love snapped. The black spot floated out in front of him. His heart was pounding, and the rising power flowed through his blood like gold. He wasn’t arguing anymore. Yellow Hand looked back toward the lights of the street, undecided, and finally followed, still bitching under his breath.

  They crossed a river access road and continued down to the water, where the riverbank was supported by a concrete wall. Shadow Love stepped onto the wall, drew in a breath of the river air and exhaled. Smelled real. He turned to Yellow Hand, who had climbed onto the wall behind him.

  “Lights look great from down here, don’t they?” Shadow Love asked. “Look at the reflections in the water.”

  “I guess,” Yellow Hand said, puzzled.

  “Look over there, under the bridge,” Shadow Love said.

  Yellow Hand turned to look. Shadow Love stepped closer, taking the pistol from his waistband. He put it behind Yellow Hand’s ear, waited a delicious second, then another and a third, thrilling to the darkness of the act; when he couldn’t stand it anymore, the glorious tension, he pulled the trigger.

  There was a sharp pop and Yellow Hand went down like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Shadow Love had intended that the body fall into the river. Instead it landed on the concrete wall. It took a minute to get it off the edge, into the water.

  Yellow Hand’s shirt ballooned up around his body, supporting it, a white lump in the current. Then there was a bubble, and another, and Yellow Hand was gone.

  A traitor to the people. The man who’d put the hunter cop onto the Bluebird picture.

  While Leo Clark sat at a truck stop and wept, Shadow Love sat in the taco stand eating ravenously, hunched over his food like a wolf. His body sang with the kill.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Lucas worked on Drorg until four in the morning, and Daniel called at eight. When the phone rang, Lucas rolled onto his side, thrashing at the nightstand like a drowning swim-mer. He hit the phone and the receiver bounced on the floor, and he took another moment to find it.