Rules of Prey

by John Sandford

  Then relax and shift to the knife.

  The elevator stopped and the doors opened. The maddog's stomach tightened, a familiar sensation. Pleasant, even. Footsteps. Key in the door. His heart was pounding. Door open. Lights. Door closed. The gun was hot in his hand, the grip rough. The woman passing...

  ***

  The maddog catapulted from his hiding place.

  Saw in an instant that she was alone.

  Wrapped her up, the gun beside her face.

  The grocery bag burst and red-and-white cans of Campbell's soup clattered down the wooden floor like dice, beige-and-red packages of chicken nibbles and microwave lasagna crunched underfoot.

  "Scream," he said in his roughest voice, well-practiced with a tape recorder, "and I'll kill you."

  Unexpectedly, the woman relaxed against him and the maddog involuntarily relaxed with her. An instant later, the heel of her foot smashed onto his instep. The pain was unbearable and as he opened his mouth to scream, she turned in his arms, ignoring the gun.

  "Aaaiii," she said, a low half-scream, half-cry of fear.

  Time virtually stopped for them, the seconds fragmenting into minutes. The maddog watched her hand come up and thought she had a gun and felt his own gun hand traveling away from her body, the wrong way, and thought, "No." He realized in the next crystalline fragment of time that she was not holding a gun, but a thin silver cylinder.

  She hit him with a blast of Mace and the time stream lurched crazily into fast-forward. He screeched and swatted her with the Smith and lost it at the same time. He swung his other hand and, more from luck than skill, connected with the side of her jaw and she fell and rolled.

  The maddog looked for the gun, half-blinded, his hands to his face, his lungs not working as they should-he had asthma, and the Mace was soaking through the ski mask-and the woman was rolling and coming up with the Mace again and now she was screaming:

  "Asshole, asshole..."

  He kicked at her and missed and she sprayed him again and he kicked again and she stumbled and was rolling and still had the Mace and he couldn't find the gun and he kicked at her again. Lucky again, he connected with her Mace hand and the small can went flying. Blood was pouring from her forehead where it had been raked by the front sight on the pistol, streaming from the ragged cut down over her eyes and mouth, and it was on her teeth and she was screaming:

  "Asshole, asshole."

  Before he could get back on the attack, she picked up a shiny stainless-steel pipe and swung it at him like a woman who'd spent time in the softball leagues. He fended her off and backed away, still looking for the gun, but it was gone and she was coming and the maddog made the kind of decision he was trained to make.

  He ran.

  He ran and she ran behind him and hit him once more on the back and he half-stumbled and turned and hit her along the jaw with the bottom of his fist, a weak, ineffective punch, and she bounced away and came back with the pipe, her mouth open, her teeth showing, showering him with saliva and blood as she screamed, and he made it through the door and jerked it shut behind him.

  "... asshole..."

  Down the hall to the stairs, almost strangling in the mask. She didn't pursue, but stood at the closed door screaming with the most piercing wail he'd ever heard. A door opened somewhere and he continued blindly down the stairs. At the bottom he stripped off the mask and thrust it in his pocket and stepped outside.

  Amble, he thought. Stroll.

  It was cold. Goddamn Minnesota. It was August and he was freezing. He could hear her screaming. Faintly at first, then louder. The bitch had opened the window. The cops were just across the way. The maddog hunched his shoulders and walked a little more quickly down to his car, slipped inside, and drove away. Halfway back to Minneapolis, still in the grip of mortal fear, shaking with the cold, he remembered that cars have heaters and turned it on.

  He was in Minneapolis before he realized he was hurt. Goddamn pipe. Going to have big bruises, he thought, shoulders and back. Bitch. The gun shouldn't be a problem, couldn't be traced.

  Christ it hurt.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The counterman was barricaded behind a wall of skin magazines. Cigarettes, candy bars, and cellophane sacks of cheese balls, taco chips, pork rinds, and other carcinogens protected his flank. Next to the cash register, a rotating stand was hung with white buttons; each button carried a message designed to reflect each individual purchaser's existential motif. Save the Whales-Harpoon a Fat Chick was a big seller. So was No More Mr. Nice Guy-Down on Your Knees, Bitch.

  The counterman wasn't looking at it. He was tired of looking at it. He was peering out the flyspecked front window and shaking his head.

  Lucas Davenport ambled out of the depths of the store with a Daily Racing Form and laid two dollars and twelve cents on the counter.

  "Fuckin' kids," the counterman said to nobody, craning his neck to see further up the street. He heard Lucas' money hit the counter and turned. His basset-hound face tried for a grin and settled for a wrinkle. "How's things?" he wheezed.

  "What's going on?" Lucas asked, looking past the counterman into the street.

  "Couple of kids on skateboards." The counterman had emphysema and his clogged lungs could manage only short sentences. "Riding behind a bus." Whistle. "If they hit a manhole cover..." Suck wind. "They're dead."

  Lucas looked again. There were no kids in the street.

  "They're gone," the counterman said morosely. He picked up the Racing Form and read the first paragraph of the lead article. "You check the sale table?" Wheeze. "Some guy brought in some poems." He pronounced it "pomes."

  "Yeah?" Lucas walked around to the side of the counter and checked the ranks of battered books on the table. Huddled between two hardback surveys of twentieth-century literature he found, to his delight, a slim clothbound volume of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Lucas never went hunting for poetry; never bought anything new. He waited to find it by chance, and surprisingly often did, orphan songs huddled in collections of texts on thermoelectrical engineering or biochemistry.

  This Emily Dickinson cost one dollar when it was printed in 1958 by an obscure publishing house located on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Thirty years later it cost eighty cents in a University Avenue bookstore in St. Paul.

  "So what about this pony?" Gurgle. "This Wabasha Warrior?" The counterman tapped the Racing Form. "Bred in Minnesota."

  "That's what I think," Lucas said.

  "What?"

  "Bred in Minnesota. They should whip its ass down to the Alpo factory. Of course, there is a silver lining..."

  The counterman waited. He didn't have the breath for repartee.

  "If Warrior gets any kind of favorite-son action," Lucas said, "it'll push up the odds on the winner."

  "That'll be..."

  "Try Sun and Halfpence. No guarantee, but the numbers are right." Lucas pushed the Emily Dickinson across the counter with the eighty-cent sticker price and five cents tax. "Let me get out of the store before you call your book, okay? I don't want to get busted for conspiracy to tout."

  "Whatever you say." Suck. "Lieutenant," the counterman said. He tugged his forelock.

  Lucas carried the Emily Dickinson back to Minneapolis and parked in the public garage across from City Hall. He walked around the wretchedly ugly old pile of liverish granite, across another street, past a reflecting pool, and into the Hennepin County Government Center. He took an escalator down to the cafeteria, bought a red apple from a vending machine, went back up and out the far side of the building to the lawn. He sat on the grass between the white birch trees in the warm August sunshine and ate the apple and read:

  ... but no man moved me till the tide

  Went past my simple shoe

  And past my apron and my belt

  And past my bodice too.

  And made as he would eat me up

  As wholly as a dew

  Upon a dandelion's sleeve

  And then I started too.<
br />
  Lucas smiled and crunched on the apple. When he looked up, a young dark-haired woman was crossing the plaza, pushing a double baby carriage. The twins were dressed in identical pink wrappings and swayed from side to side as their mother strutted them across the plaza. Mama had large breasts and a small waist and her black hair swung back and forth across her fair cheeks like a silken curtain. She wore a plum-colored skirt and silky beige blouse and she was so beautiful that Lucas smiled again, a wave of pleasure washing through him.

  Then another one walked by, in the opposite direction, a blonde with a short punky haircut and a revealing knit dress, tawdry in an engaging way. Lucas watched her walk and sighed with the rhythm of it.

  ***

  Lucas was dressed in a white tennis shirt, khaki slacks, over-the-calf blue socks, and slip-on deck shoes with long leather ties. He wore the tennis shirt outside his slacks so the gun wouldn't show. He was slender and dark-complexioned, with straight black hair going gray at the temples and a long nose over a crooked smile. One of his central upper incisors had been chipped and he never had it capped. He might have been an Indian except for his blue eyes.

  His eyes were warm and forgiving. The warmth was somehow emphasized by the vertical white scar that started at his hairline, ran down to his right eye socket, jumped over the eye, and continued down his cheek to the corner of his mouth. The scar gave him a raffish air, but left behind a touch of innocence, like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. Lucas wished he could tell young women that the scar had come from a broken bottle in a bar fight at Subic Bay, where he had never been, or Bangkok, where he had never been either. The scar had come from a fishing leader that snapped out of a rotting snag on the St. Croix River and he told them so. Some believed him. Most thought he was covering something up, like a bar fight East of Suez.

  Though his eyes were warm, his smile betrayed him.

  He once went with a woman-a zookeeper, as it happened-to a nightclub in St. Paul where cocaine was dealt to suburban children in the basement bathrooms. In the parking lot outside the club, Lucas encountered Kenny McGuinness, who he thought was in prison.

  "Get the fuck away from me, Davenport," McGuinness said, backing off. The parking lot was suddenly electric, everything from gum wrappers to discarded quarter-gram coke baggies springing into needle-sharp focus.

  "I didn't know you were out, dickhead," Lucas answered, smiling. The zookeeper was watching, her eyes wide. Lucas leaned toward the other man, hooked two fingers in his shirt pocket, and gently tugged, as though they were old companions trading memories. Lucas whispered hoarsely: "Leave town. Go to Los Angeles. Go to New York. If you don't go away, I'll hurt you."

  "I'm on parole, I can't leave the state," McGuinness stammered.

  "So go to Duluth. Go to Rochester. You've got a week," Lucas whispered. "Talk to your dad. Talk to your grandma. Talk to your sisters. Then leave."

  He turned back to the zookeeper, still smiling, McGuinness apparently forgotten.

  "You scared the heck out of me," the woman said when they were inside the club. "What was that all about?"

  "Kenny likes young boys. He trades crack for ten-year-old ass."

  "Oh." She had heard of such things but believed them only in the way she believed in her own mortality: a faraway possibility not yet requiring examination.

  Later, she said, "I didn't like that smile. Your smile. You looked like one of my animals."

  Lucas grinned at her. "Oh, yeah? Which one? The lemur?"

  She nibbled her lower lip. "I was thinking of a wolverine," she said.

  If the chill of his smile sometimes overwhelmed the warmth of his eyes, it didn't happen so frequently as to become a social handicap. Now Lucas watched the punky blonde turn the corner of the Government Center, and just before she stepped from sight, look back at him and grin.

  Damn. She had known he was watching. Women always knew. Get up, he thought, go after her. But he didn't. There were so many of them, all good. He sighed and leaned back in the grass and picked up Emily Dickinson.

  Lucas was a picture of contentment. More than a picture.

  A photograph.

  ***

  The photograph was being taken from the back of an olive-drab van parked across South Seventh Street. Two cops from internal affairs worked in sweaty confinement with tripod-mounted film and video cameras behind one-way glass.

  The senior cop was fat. His partner was thin. Other than that, they looked much alike, with brush-cut hair, pink faces, yellow short-sleeved shirts, and double-knit trousers from J. C. Penney. Every few minutes, one of them would look through the 300mm lens. The camera attached to the lens, a Nikon F3, was equipped with a Data Back, which had a battery-operated clock programmed for accuracy through the year 2100. When the cops took their photographs, the precise time and date were burned into the photo frame. If necessary, the photograph would become a legally influential log of the surveillance subject's activities.

  Lucas had spotted the pair an hour after the surveillance began, almost two weeks earlier. He didn't know why they were watching, but as soon as he saw them, he stopped talking to his informants, to his friends, to other cops. He was living in a pool of isolation, but didn't know why. He would find out. Inevitably.

  In the meantime, he spent as much time as he could in the open, forcing the watchers to hide in their hot, confining wagon, unable to eat, unable to pee. Lucas smiled to himself, the unpleasant smile, the wolverine's smile, put down Dickinson and picked up the Racing Form.

  "You think the motherfucker is going to sit there forever?" asked the fat cop. He squirmed uncomfortably.

  "Looks like he's settled in."

  "I gotta pee like a Russian racehorse," said the fat one.

  "You shouldn't of drank that Coke. It's the caffeine that does it."

  "Maybe I could slide out and take a leak..."

  "If he moves, I gotta follow. If you get left behind, Bendl will get your balls."

  "Only if you tell him, asshole."

  "I can't drive and take pictures at the same time."

  The fat cop squirmed uncomfortably and tried to figure the odds. He should have gone as soon as he saw Lucas settle on the lawn, but he hadn't had to pee so bad then. Now that Lucas might be expected to leave, his bladder felt like a basketball.

  "Look at him," he said, peering at Lucas through a pair' of binoculars. "He's watching the puss go by. Think that's why we're watching him? Something to do with the puss?"

  "I don't know. It's something weird. The way it come down, nobody sayin' shit."

  "I heard he's got something on the chief. Lucas does."

  "Must have. He doesn't do a thing. Wanders around town in that Porsche and goes out to the track every day."

  "His jacket looks good. Commendations and all."

  "He got some good busts," the thin cop admitted.

  "Lot of them," said the fat man.

  "Yeah."

  "Killed some guys."

  "Five. He's the number-one gunslinger on the force. Nobody else done more than two."

  "All good shootings."

  "Press loves him. Fuckin' Wyatt Earp."

  "Because he's got money," the fat man said authoritatively. "The press loves people with money, rich guys. Never met a reporter who didn't want money."

  They thought about reporters for a minute. Reporters were a lot like cops, but with faster mouths.

  "How much you think he makes? Davenport?" the fat one asked.

  The thin cop pursed his meager lips and considered the question. Salary was a matter of some importance. "With his rank and seniority, he probably takes down forty-two, maybe forty-five from the city," he ventured. "Then the games, I heard when he hits one, he makes like a cool hundred thou, depends on how well it sells."

  "That much," said the fat one, marveling. "If I made that much, I'd quit. Buy a restaurant. Maybe a bar, up on one of the lakes."

  "Get out," the thin one agreed. They'd had the conversation so often the responses were au
tomatic.

  "Wonder why they didn't bust him back to sergeant? I mean, when they pulled him off robbery?"

  "I heard he threatened to quit. Said he didn't want to go backwards. They decided they wanted to keep him-he's got sources in every bar and barbershop in town-so they had to leave him with the rank."

  "He was a real pain in the butt as a supervisor," said the fat man.