Sudden Prey

by John Sandford

  ``Drive,'' Georgie said from the back. And to Candy: ``You set?''

  ``I'm set.''

  ``This should be a good one,'' Georgie said.

  ``Should be great,'' Candy said. Ten o'clock on a payday morning. The paychecks were issued at eleven. The first employees would be sneaking out to cash their checks by elevenohone. That'd be an hour too late.

  ``There's the nigger again,'' Duane said, distractedly.

  A giant black man had come into Ham's before Candy had gotten there, ordered a slice, asked if he could pay with food stamps. When told that he couldn't, he'd reluctantly taken two crumpled dollar bills out of his pocket and pushed them across the counter.

  ``Food stamps,'' Georgia said in disgust. ``He's one ofthose screwballs. Look at him talk to himself.''

  Franklin, shambling along the street, said, ``One block, fifteen seconds.''

  DUANE SAID, ``THERE IT IS,'' AND HIS VOICE MAY HAVE trembled when he said it. Georgie and Candy turned away from the black man and looked down the street at the yellow brick building with the plastic sign, and the short stoop out front.

  ``Remember what I said, Duane. We'll be in there for one minute,'' Georgie said. She leaned forward and spoke softly into his ear, and when Duane tried to turn his head away, she caught his earlobe and tugged it back, pinched it between her nails. Duane flinched, and she said, ``If you drive away, one of us will hunt you down and kill you. If you drive, Duane, you're dead. Isn't that right, Candy?''

  ``That's right,'' Candy said, looking at him. She let some ice show, then switched to her God-Duane-I'd-Love-to-Fuck-You-But-I-Gotta-Be-True-to-Dickie look. ``But he won't drive. Duane's okay.'' She patted his thigh.

  ``Oh, I'll do it,'' Duane said. He looked like a trapped rat. ``I mean, I'll do it. I did it in Rice Lake, didn't I?''

  He pulled the van to the curb and Georgie gave him a look, then the two women pulled nude nylon stockings over their faces and took the pistols out of their coat pockets.

  ``Let's go,'' Georgie said. She climbed out, and Candy followed a step behind; it passed through Georgie's mind that Candy looked radiant.

  ``I feel like I might pop one,'' Candy said to Georgie, as they climbed the four steps to the Credit Union door.

  FRANKLIN WAS HALFWAY DOWN THE BLOCK WHEN they went inside and he said, ``The two women are inside. Pulled the nylons over their heads. It's going down.''

  Five seconds later, Del and Kupicek stopped at the corner behind him, then eased forward so they could see the back of the Chevy van and Cale's head. They were forty yards away.

  Sloan stopped at the next corner up, and eased forward until he could see the front of the truck. ``You set?'' Lucas asked. He cracked the back door.

  ``Yeah.'' Sloan nodded, looked almost sleepy and yawned. Tension.

  ``Let's go,'' Lucas said. And in the handset he said, ``Go.''

  GEORGIE AND CANDY WENT IN HARD, VERY LARGE, very loud, screaming, masks, guns, Georgie first:

  ``On the wall,'' she screamed, ``on the wall,'' and Candy behind her, vaulting to the top of the cash counter, screaming, the gun big in her hand, the hole at the muzzle looking for eyes. ``On the wall...''

  Four women employees and a single customer, a man in a black ski jacket and tinted eyeglasses, were inside the credit union. The woman closest to Candy looked like a carp, her mouth opening and closing, opening and closing, hands coming up, then waving, as though she could wave away a bullet. She wore a pink sweater with hand-darned blue flax blossoms in a line across the chest. Another woman curled up and turned away, looking back at them over her shoulder, and stepped against the back wall, next to a filing cabinet. She wouldn't look at Candy. A younger woman, a cashier, jumped back, yelped once, put her hands over her mouth, backed away, knocked a phone off a table, jumped again, froze. The fourth woman simply backed away, her hands at her shoulders.

  Georgie said, rapid-fire, a vocal machine gun: ``Easy, easy, everybody take it easy. Everybody shut up, shut up, shut up,and stand still. Stand still, everybody shut up... This is a holdup, shut up.''

  They'd been inside for ten seconds. Candy dropped behind the counter and pulled a pillowcase out of her waistband and started dumping cash drawers.

  ``Not enough,'' she shouted over Georgie's chant. ``Not enough, there's more somewhere.''

  Georgie picked out the woman with the best clothes, the woman with the flax blossoms, pointed her finger at her and shouted, ``Where is it, where's the rest of it?''

  The woman said, ``No-no-no...''

  Georgie pointed her pistol at the man in the ski jacket and said, ``If you don't say, in one second I'm gonna blow his fuckin' head off, his fuckin' head.''

  Georgie was posed in a two-handed TV-cop position, the pistol pointing at jacket-man's head, never wavering. The flax-blossom woman looked around for somebody to help her, somebody to direct her, but there wasn't anybody. She sagged and said, ``There's a box in the office.''

  Candy grabbed her, roughed her, shoved her toward the tiny cubicle in the back. The woman, scuttling ahead, pointed at a box on the floor in the footwell of the desk. Candy shoved her back toward the door, picked up the box, put it on the desk, and popped the top: stacks of currency, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds.

  ``Got it,'' she shouted. She dumped it in the pillowcase.

  ``Let's go,'' Georgie shouted. ``Let's go...''

  Candy twisted the top of the pillowcase and threw it over her shoulder, like Santa Claus, and hustled around the cash counter toward the door. The man in the ski jacket had backed against the wall at a check-writing desk, his hands over his head, a twisted, trying-to-please smile on his face, his eyes frightened white spots behind the amber-tinted specs.

  ``What are you laughing at?'' Candy screamed at him. ``Are you laughing at us?''

  The smile got broader, but he waved his fingers and said, ``No, no, I'm not laughing...''

  ``Fuck you,'' she said, and she shot him in the face.

  The blast in the small office was a bomb: the four women shrieked and went down. The man simply dropped, a spray of blood on the tan wall behind his head, and Georgie spun and said, ``Go.''

  They were out the door in seconds...

  ``DO IT,'' DEL SAID, AND KUPICEK FLOORED IT.

  Sloan was coming in from the front. Duane saw him coming, had no time to wonder. The car swerved and screeched to a stop three inches from the van's front bumper, wedging him to the curb. From behind, in a flash in his rearview mirror, he saw another car wedge in behind him. In the next halfsecond, the passenger door flew open and the big black pizza guy was there, and a gun pointed at the bridge of Duane's nose.

  ``Don't even fuckin' scratch,'' Franklin said, in his pleasant voice, which wasn't very pleasant. ``Just sit tight.'' He reached across, flipped the shift lever into park, killed the engine, pulled the keys from the ignition and let them fall on the floor. ``Just sit.''

  And then there were more guys, all on the passenger side of the car. But Duane, as interested as he was in the muzzle of Franklin's gun, turned to look at the door of the credit union.

  He'd heard the shot: the sound was muffled, but there wasn't any doubt.

  ``Shit,'' said the black man. He said, loudly, ``Watch it, watch it, we got a shot.''

  ``GO,'' SCREAMED GEORGIE. SHE WAS SMILING, LIKE A South American revolutionary poster-girl, her dark hair whipping back, and she covered the inner door while Candy exploded through the outer door onto the stoop and then Georgie was through behind her and the van was right there.

  And the cops.

  They heard the shouting, though Candy never could isolate a word. She was aware of Georgie's gun coming up behind her and she felt her hand loosen on the bag and the bag falling off to the left, and her own gun coming up. She started squeezing the trigger before the gun was all the way up and she saw the thin slat-faced man, and his nose might have been about the size of a Campbell's soup-can lid and her pistol came up, came up...

  LUCAS HEARD THE SHOT INSIDE AND HE WENT SIDEWAYS and saw F
ranklin reflexively crouch. Off to the left, Sherrill was propped over the top of Kupicek's car, her pistol leveled at the door and Lucas thought, Hope they don't look out the window...

  Then the door flew open and the two LaChaise women were on the stoop and their guns were coming up and he shouted, ``No, don't, no, don't,'' and he heard Del yelling, and Candy LaChaise started firing and he saw Sherrill's gun bucking in her hand...

  CANDY SAW THE MAN WITH THE YELLOW TEETH AND the black hole at the end of his pistol and the woman with the dark hair and maybe-if she had time-she thought, Too late...

  She felt the bullets go through, several of them, was aware of the noise, of the flash, of the faces like wanted posters, all straining toward her, but no pain, just a jostling feel, like rays of light pushing through her chest... then her vision went,and she felt Georgie falling beside her. She was upside down, her feet on the stoop, her head on the sidewalk, and she waited for the light. The light would come, and behind it...

  She was gone.

  LUCAS WAS SHOUTING, ``HOLD IT, HOLD IT,'' AND FIVE seconds after the two women burst from the credit union, there was no reason to fire his own weapon.

  In the sudden silence, through the stink of the smokeless powder, somebody said, ``Jesus H. Christ.''

  TWO

  THE MINNEAPOLIS CITY HALL IS A RUDE PILE OF LIVERISH stone, damp in the summer, cold in the winter, ass-deep in cops, crooks, politicians, bureaucrats, favor-seekers, reporters, TV personalities and outraged taxpayers, none of whom were allowed to smoke inside the building.

  The trail of illegal cigarette smoke followed Rose Marie Roux down the darkened marble halls from the chief's office to Homicide. The chief was a large woman, getting larger, her face going hound-dog with the pressure of the job and the passing of the years. She stopped outside homicide, took a drag on the cigarette, and blew smoke.

  She could see Davenport inside, standing, hands in his pockets. He was wearing a blue wool suit, a white shirt with a long soft collar and what looked like an Herme`s necktie- one of the anal numbers with eight million little horses prancing around. A political appointee, a deputy chief, his sideline software business made him worth, according to the latest rumors, maybe ten million dollars. He was talking to Sloan and Sherrill.

  Sloan was thin, pasty-faced, serious, dressed all in brown and tan-he could lean against a wall and disappear. He could also make friends with anyone: he was the best interrogator on the force. Sloan hadn't taken his gun out that afternoon and was still on the job.

  Sherrill, on the other hand, had fired all six shots from her revolver. She was still up, floating high on the release from the fear and ecstasy that sometimes came after a gunfight. Roux, in her few years on the street, before law school, had never drawn her pistol. She didn't like guns.

  Roux watched the three of them, Lucas Davenport and his pals. Shook her head: maybe things were getting out of control. She dropped the cigarette on the floor, stepped on it and pushed through the door.

  The three turned to look at her, and she looked at Lucas and tipped her head toward the hall. Lucas followed her back through the door, and shut the door against the inquiring ears of Sloan and Sherrill.

  ``The request for a uniform stop-when did you think of that?'' Roux asked. Her words ricocheted down the marble halls, but there was nobody else to hear them.

  Lucas leaned against the cool marble wall. He smiled quickly, the smile here and then gone. The smile made him look hard, even too hard: mean. He'd been working out, Roux thought. He went at it hard, from time to time, and when he'd really stripped himself down, he looked like a piece of belt leather. She could see the shape of his skull under his forehead skin.

  ``It seemed like a no-lose proposition,'' he said, his voice pitched low. They both knew what they were talking about.

  She nodded. ``Well, it worked. We released the voice tape from Dispatch and it's taking the heat off. You're gonna hear some firing-squad stuff from the Star Tribune , the editorial page. Questions about why they ever got inside-why youwaited that long to move. But I don't think... no real trouble.''

  ``If we'd just taken them, it would have come to a couple of witnesses with bad records,'' Lucas said. ``They'd be back on the street right now.''

  ``I know, but the way it looks...'' She sighed. ``If the LaChaises hadn't shot this guy Farris, there'd be a lot more trouble.''

  ``Big break for us, Farris was,'' Lucas said, flashing his grim smile again.

  ``I didn't mean it that way,'' Roux said, and she looked away. ``Anyway, Farris is gonna make it.''

  ``Yeah, a little synthetic cheekbone, splice up his jaw, give him a bunch of new teeth, graft on a piece of ear...''

  ``I'm trying to cover you,'' Roux said sharply.

  ``Sounds like you're giving us shit,'' Lucas snapped back. ``The Rice Lake bank people looked at the movies from the credit union security cameras. There's no doubt-it was the LaChaises that did it over there. They looked the same with the panty hose, said the same things, acted the same way. And it was Candy LaChaise who killed the teller. We're waiting to hear back from Ladysmith and Cloquet, but it'll be the same.''

  Roux shook her head and said, ``You picked a hard way to do it, though: a hard way to settle it.''

  ``They came out, they opened up, we were all right there,'' Lucas said. ``They fired first. That's not cop bullshit.''

  ``I'm not criticizing,'' Roux said. ``I'm just saying the papers are asking questions.''

  ``Maybe you oughta tell the papers to go fuck themselves,'' Lucas said. The chief was a politician who had at one time thought she might be headed for the Senate. ``That'd be a good political move right now, the way things are.''

  Roux took an old-fashioned silver cigarette case out of herpocket, popped it open. ``I'm not talking politics here, Lucas. I'm a little worried about what happened.'' She fumbled a cigarette out of the case, snapped the case shut. ``There's a feel of... setup. Of taking the law in our own hands. We're okay, because Farris was shot and you made that call for a stop. But there were six or seven holes in Candy LaChaise. It's not like you weren't ready to do it.''

  ``We were ready,'' Lucas agreed.

  ``... So there could be another stink when the medical examiner's report comes out.''

  ``Tell them to take their time writing the report,'' Lucas said. ``You know the way things are: In a week or so, nobody'll care. And we're still a couple of months from the midwinter sweeps.''

  ``Yeah, yeah. And the ME's cooperating. Still.''

  ``The LaChaises started it,'' Lucas persisted. ``And they were sport killers. Candy LaChaise shot people to see them die. Fuck 'em.''

  ``Yeah, yeah,'' Roux said. She waved at him and started back toward the chief's office, shoulders slumped. ``Send everybody home. We'll get the shooting board going tomorrow.''

  ``You really pissed?'' Lucas called after her.

  ``No. I'm just sorta... depressed. There've been too many bodies this year,'' she said. She stopped, flicked a lighter, touched off the fresh cigarette. The tip glowed like a firefly in the semidark. ``Too many people are getting killed. You oughta think about that.''

  WEATHER KARKINNEN WAS DOING PAPERWORK IN THE study when Lucas got home. She heard him in the kitchen, and called down the hall, ``In the study.''

  A moment later, he leaned in the door, a bottle of beer in his hand. ``Hey.''

  ``I tried to call you,'' she said.

  Weather was a small, athletic woman with wide shoulders and close-cut blond hair. She had high cheekbones and eyes that were dark blue and slightly slanted in the Lapp-Finnish way. Her nose was a bit too large and a little crooked, as if she'd once lost a close fight. Not a pretty woman, exactly, but men tended to drift toward her at parties. ``I saw a TV story on the shooting.''

  ``What'd they say?'' He unscrewed the beer cap and took a sip.

  ``Two women were shot and killed after a robbery. They say it's a controversial shooting.'' She was anxious, brushing hair out of her eyes.

  Lucas shoo
k his head. ``You can't pay any attention to TV.''

  He was angry.

  ``Lucas...''

  ``What?'' He was defensive, and didn't like it.

  ``You're really steamed,'' she said. ``What happened?''

  ``Ah, I'm taking heat from the media. Everybody seems to worry about whether it was a fair fight. Why should the fight be fair? This isn't a game, it's law enforcement.''