Shadow Prey

by John Sandford

  “Bad medicine,” the Indian man said.

  A man at the back of the bar yelled, “Nine-ball?” and the Indian man called, “Yeah, I’m coming,” took the beer and wandered back. The bartender wiped the spot he’d been leaning on with a wet rag and shook his head.

  “The CIA. Man, that’s bad business,” he said to Shadow Love.

  “That’s bullshit, is what it is,” Shadow Love said.

  He finished his beer, slid off the stool and walked outside. The sun was shining and he stopped, squinting against the bright light. He thought for a moment, then turned west and ambled down Lake Street toward the apartments.

  Bell’s Apartments were an ugly remnant of a sixties housing program. The architect had tried to disguise an underlying prison-camp barrenness by giving each apartment a different-colored door. Now, years later, the colored doors together looked like a set of teeth with a few punched out.

  Behind the building, an abandoned playground squatted in a rectangle of dead weeds. The hand-push merry-go-round had broken off its hub years before and had rusted into place, like a bad minimalist sculpture. The basketball court offered pitted blacktop and bare hoops. The swing sets had lost all but two swings.

  Shadow Love sat in one of the swings and watched Larry Hart working his way down to the first floor of the building. Hart would look at a piece of paper in his hand, knock on a door, talk to whoever answered, then move on. Sometimes he talked for ten seconds, sometimes for five minutes. Several times he laughed, and once he went inside and came back out a few minutes later, chewing something. Frybread.

  The problem, Shadow Love thought, was that there were too many people in on the Crows’ secret. Leo and John and Barbara, and a bunch of wives who might know or have guessed something.

  The Crows had been proselytizing for years. Though they had stayed resolutely in the background, their names were known, as was the extreme nature of their gospel. Once those names popped up on a police computer as suspects, they’d go right to the top of the hunters’ list. That normally wouldn’t be too much of a problem. The cops’ resources in the Indian community were minimal.

  Hart was something else. Shadow Love had known him in high school, but only from a distance, in the days when the boys in one grade didn’t mix with the boys in the grades above. Hart had been popular then, with both Indians and whites. He still was. He was one of the people and he had friends and he had money.

  Shadow Love watched him working down through the building, heard him laughing, and before Hart reached the bottom level, Shadow Love knew that something would have to be done.

  • • •

  Hart saw Shadow Love sitting in the swing as he walked toward the steps that would take him to the bottom floor, but he didn’t recognize him. He watched the man swinging, then dropped into a blind section of the stairwell. Five seconds later, when he came out of the stairwell, the man was gone.

  Hart shivered. The man must have simply gotten off the swing, walked around the bush at the edge of the playground and gone down the street. But that was not the effect Hart felt. The man was there when he went into the stairwell and gone a few seconds later. He had vanished, leaving behind a swing that still rocked back and forth from his energy.

  It was as though he had disappeared, as Mexican wizards were said to do, changing into crows and hawks and jumping straight up in the air.

  Indian demons.

  Hart shivered again.

  A block away, Shadow Love was on the phone.

  “Barb? Could you pick me up?”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Lucas woke in the dark, listening, and finally identified the sound that had woken him. He reached across the bed and touched her.

  “Crying?”

  “I can’t help it,” she squeaked.

  “A little guilt, maybe.”

  She choked, unable to answer for a moment. Then came a muffled “Maybe.” She rolled over to face him, her knees pulled up in fetal position. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “You told me that,” he said into the dark. He groped around for a moment, found the switch on the bedside lamp and turned it on. Her head was down, her face concealed.

  “The thing is, I knew I would be. Unfaithful. That one night, in my room, I almost didn’t stop you. I shouldn’t have. But it was . . . too quick. I couldn’t handle it,” she said. “Then when Hood went down and I was freaked out and you were freaked out and I got out of town . . . . On the way to New York, on the plane, I cried. I thought I wouldn’t see you again, wouldn’t get to sleep with you. But I was relieved, you know. When they told me I had to come back, I was crying again. David thought I was crying because I didn’t want to come back. But I was crying because I knew what would happen. I was so . . . hungry.”

  “Hey, look. I’ve been through this,” Lucas said. “I feel bad about it sometimes, but I can’t stay away from women. A shrink would probably find something weird is wrong with me. But I just . . . want women. It’s like you said, I get hungry. I can’t stop it. It’s a drug, you crave it.”

  “Just the sex?” She rolled over a bit, her head cocked toward him, watching his eyes.

  “No. The woman. The back-and-forth. Hanging around. The sex. Everything.”

  “You’re a relationship junkie. Always need something new.”

  “No, that’s not quite right. There’s a woman in Minneapolis, I think I’ve gotten in bed with her once or twice a year since I was a rookie. Sixteen, eighteen years. I see her and I want her. I call her up, she calls me up, I want her. It’s not newness. It’s something else.”

  “Is she married?”

  “Yeah. For fifteen years, must be. Has a couple of kids.”

  “That is strange.” There was a moment of silence, then she said, “Part of the guilt is that I don’t feel worse than I do. You know what I mean? I liked it. I haven’t had sex that good since . . . I don’t know. Ever, I think. It was like a blackout. With David, it’s soft and gentle and the orgasms come, most of the time anyway, but nothing feels . . . driven. Everything is always under control. David is thin and doesn’t have much hair. You’re hard, and you’ve got all this body hair. It’s like . . . it’s so different.”

  “Too much analysis,” Lucas said after a moment. She reached out and touched his face. “I just wanna fuck,” he said in a gravelly parody of lust.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. She pulled herself closer to him, snuggled on his arm. “Do you think the guilt will go away?”

  “I’m pretty sure of it,” he said.

  “That’s what I think too,” she said.

  They left early, Lucas grumpy in the morning sunlight, but touching her often, on the elbow, the cheek, the neck, brushing hair out of her face. “Let’s go for a while. We can stop on the road for breakfast. I can’t eat when I’m up this early,” he grumbled.

  “Your internal clock is screwed up,” Lily said as they settled into the Porsche. “You need to get reoriented.”

  “Nothing happens in the morning, so why get up?” Lucas said. “All the bad people are out at night. And most of the good ones, as far as that goes.”

  “Let’s just try to make it back to the Cities in one piece,” she said as he spun the drive wheels and left the motel parking lot. “If you want me to drive . . .”

  “No, no.”

  They drove straight into the morning sun. Lily was feeling chatty and craned her neck at the oddities of the prairie.

  “I’m going back a different way, a little further south,” Lucas said. “I like to see as many roads as I can. I don’t get out here very often.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “It won’t add much time,” he said.

  The day started cold but rapidly warmed up. A few minutes after they crossed the Minnesota line, Lucas pulled into a roadside diner. They were the only customers. A fat woman worked in the kitchen behind a chest-high stainless-steel counter. They saw only her head. The counterman was a thin, big-eyed man wea
ring a dirty apron. He had two days of beard and rolled a Lucky Strike, half smoked and now unlit, between his thin lips. Lucas ordered two hard-fried eggs and bacon.

  “I’d recommend that,” he said to Lily.

  “I’ll have the eggs, anyway,” she said. The waiter yelled back to the cook and then stumped off to a chair and picked up the local weekly.

  “Have you been here before?” Lily asked quietly when the waiter’s back was turned.

  “No.”

  “So how can you recommend the bacon and eggs?”

  Lucas looked around the diner. Paint was peeling off the ceiling and a black mold was attacking the seams of the aging wallpaper. “Because they’ve got to fry it and that ought to sterilize it,” he said under his breath.

  She glanced around and suddenly giggled, and Lucas thought he might be in love.

  After breakfast, when they were back in the car, the talk slowed and Lily moved her seat to a reclined position. Her eyes fell shut.

  “A nap?” asked Lucas.

  “Relaxing,” she said. Her breathing grew steady, and Lucas drove on. Lily dozed but didn’t sleep, opening her eyes and sitting forward at turns and stops. After a while, she found the steady soft vibration of the car had become arousing. She opened her eyes just a crack. Lucas had put on sunglasses and was driving with a steady, relaxed watchfulness. Now and then he turned his head to look at passing attractions that she couldn’t see from her low position. She reached out and put a hand on his leg.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. He glanced at her and grinned. “The animal is alive.”

  “Just thinking,” she said. She stroked his thigh, her eyes closed again, letting herself feel the coarse weave of his jeans.

  “Dammit,” Lucas said after a few more minutes. “My dick is going to break off.” He pushed himself up in the seat, reached down the front of his pants and changed things around. She laughed, and when he sat down, she put her hand back in his lap. He was erect, his penis reaching up beneath his fly to his belt.

  “Ooo, too bad we’re in a car,” she said.

  He looked over at her, grinned and said, “You’ve played this game before?”

  “What game?” She stroked and he pushed her hand away.

  “You’re done,” he said. “It’s my turn. Take off your panty hose.”

  “Lucas . . .” she said. She sounded shocked, but she sat upright and looked out the car windows. They were alone on the rural highway.

  “Come on, chicken. Off with the pants.”

  She looked at the speedometer. A steady sixty miles per hour. “You could kill us.”

  “Nope. I’ve played before.”

  “Mr. Experience, huh?”

  “Come on, come on, you’re bullshitting now. Off with the pants. Or live with the consequences.”

  “What consequences?”

  “Deep in your heart, you’ll know that I know you’re chicken.”

  “All right, Davenport.” She pushed herself off the seat, and with some difficulty pulled off her panty hose.

  “Now the pants.”

  She pushed herself up again and took off her underpants.

  “Here, I’ll take them,” Lucas said. Without thinking, she handed him the pants; he quickly dropped his window and threw them out.

  “Davenport, for Christ’s sakes . . .” She was looking back down the highway where the underpants had disappeared into a roadside ditch.

  “I’ll buy you new ones.”

  “Goddamn right,” she said.

  “So now you lean back and close your eyes.” She looked at him and felt a blush crawling up her face. “Come on,” he said.

  She leaned back and his hand touched her thighs, the fingers just trailing along, from the joint of her hip to her knee, and back again. It was warm in the car and she felt the blood moving to her groin. Her mouth dropped open and the warmth continued to build.

  “Oh, boy,” she said after a few minutes. “Boy . . .”

  “Moan for me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Moan for me. One good moan and Davenport stops the car.”

  She reached over and touched him. He felt huge under the jeans and she giggled. “I’ve got to stop giggling,” she said lazily. She reached out again; then Lucas hit the brake and she rocked forward.

  “What?” She looked wildly out the window.

  “Jeffers petroglyphs,” he said. “I’ve heard about them, but I’ve never seen them.”

  “What?” Lily was gasping, like a fish out of water. The car rocked as Lucas pulled into a grass-covered parking area. She pulled her skirt down.

  “Indian carvings on some exposed rock,” Lucas said. There were two other cars in the parking area, although a sign said the petroglyph monument was closed for the season. Lucas hopped out of the car and Lily got out on her side. In the distance, across a fence, they could see a half-dozen people looking down at a slab of reddish rock.

  “Must have climbed the fence,” Lucas said. “Come on.”

  Lucas vaulted the gate, then helped Lily clamber over.

  “Christ, this is the last time I wear a dress on the road. And I feel so bare . . . you and your fucking games,” she said. “From now on, it’s tennis shoes and pants.”

  “You look good in a dress,” he said as they walked up a graveled path. “You look terrific. And you look great without the underpants.”

  The petroglyphs were scratched into the flat surfaces of exposed red rock. There were outlines of hands, drawings of animals and birds, unknown symbols.

  “Look how small their hands were,” Lily said. She stooped and placed her own hand over one of the glyphs. Her hand was larger.

  “Maybe it was a kid or a woman,” Lucas said.

  “Maybe.” She stood straight and looked around at the rolling prairie and the adjoining cornfield. “I wonder what in the hell they would have been doing out here. There’s nothing here.”

  “I don’t know.” Lucas looked around. The sky seemed huge, and he felt as though he were standing on the point of the planet. “You’ve got this rise, you can see forever. But I suppose it was really the rock. Further out west, there’s an Indian quarry. It’s old. The Indians would take out a soft red rock called pipestone. They made pipes and other stuff out of it.”

  The petroglyphs were carved on a gently sloping hillside and Lucas wandered with Lily down the slope, passing the other visitors. The others were on their hands and knees, tracing out the glyphs with their fingers. One woman was doing a charcoal rubbing on brown paper, transferring the designs. Two of them said hello. Lucas and Lily nodded.

  “We’ve got to get going pretty soon if we want to make that meeting,” Lucas said finally, glancing at his watch.

  “Okay.”

  They walked slowly back to the car, the prairie wind blowing Lily’s hair around her face. At the fence, she put one foot on the wire, and Lucas caught her from behind and squeezed.

  “One small kiss,” he said.

  She turned and tipped up her face. The kiss started small and turned warmer, until they were dancing around slowly in the tall grass. She pushed him away after a moment and, breathing hard, looked down.

  “These shoes . . . these heels, I’m going to twist my ankle.”

  “All right. Let’s go.” He helped her over the fence, then followed. As they walked to the car, he slipped his arm around her waist.

  “I’m still turned on from fooling around in the car,” he said.

  “Hey. It’s only three hours back to the Cities,” she said playfully.

  “And about two meetings after that.”

  “Tough luck, Davenport . . .”

  He led her around the car, opened the passenger-side door, caught her by the arm, sat in the car and pulled her on top of him. “Come on.”

  “What?” She struggled for a moment, but he pulled her in.

  “They can’t see us from the road, and those other people are looking at the rocks,” he said. “Face me.”

  “
Lucas . . .” But she turned to face him.

  “C’mon.”

  “I don’t know how . . .”

  “Just bend your knees up and sit, that’s good, that’s good.”

  “The car’s too small, Lucas . . . .”

  “That’s fine, you’re fine. Jeez, has anybody ever told you that you’ve got one of the great asses in Western history?”

  “Lucas, we can’t . . .”

  “Ah . . .”

  She sat astride him, facing him, her knees apart, just enough room to move a half-dozen inches, and he began to rock, and she felt the morning’s play coalescing around her. She closed her eyes, and rocked, and rocked, and the orgasm gathered and flowed and washed over her. She came back only when she heard Lucas say, “Oh, man, man . . .”

  “Lucas,” she said, and she giggled again and caught herself. She never giggled and now she was giggling every fifteen minutes.

  “I needed that,” he said. He was sweating and his eyes looked distant and sated. The door was partway open, and Lily looked out the window, then pushed it open with a foot and eased out onto the grass and pulled her skirt down. Lucas followed awkwardly, zipped up, then leaned forward and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed against his chest. They swayed together for a moment, then Lucas released her, looking dazed, and half staggered around the car.

  “We better get going,” he said.

  “Right . . . okay.” She got into the car, and Lucas started it and found the reverse gear. He slowly eased out onto the roadway, watching for traffic. The road was empty, but Lucas was preoccupied, so Lily saw them first.

  “What are they doing?” she asked.

  “What?” He looked in the same direction she was. The people who had been looking at the petroglyphs were lined up along the fence, facing them, repeatedly slapping their hands together.

  Lucas stared for a moment, perplexed, then caught it and threw back his head and laughed.

  “What?” asked Lily, still puzzled, looking at the line of people across the fence. “What are they doing?”