Sudden Prey

by John Sandford

  ``You think I'd help them peckerwoods?'' Harp asked indignantly. ``I been inside with those motherfuckers. Daymon Harp ain't helping them no way, no place, no time.''

  ``How'd you know they were peckerwoods?'' Sloan asked. ``We didn't say they were peckerwoods.''

  ``They all over the TV,'' Harp said. ``They're Seeds, right? I know all about it-you can't get nothin' but TV news. They canceled Star Trek.''

  ``Who's your cop friend?'' Lucas asked.

  Harp's eyelid flickered, a quick twitch. ``What kind of bullshit you talkin'?''

  They pushed him for twenty minutes, but he wouldn't move. He knew nothing, saw nothing, had heard nothing. On the way out the door, Lucas said to Jasmine, ``Take care of the hand.''

  OUTSIDE, THEY HURRIED ALONG TO THE TRUCK, blown by the breeze. Sloan said, ``I don't know what he knows, but I think he's got a corner on something.''

  ``I'll talk to Narcotics. We'll shut him down,'' Lucas said. He looked back up at the apartment lights. ``Twenty-four hours, maybe he'll be ready.''

  Del shook his head: ``He can't talk. Too many dead people, now. If he's got a connection, he'll do everything he can to bury it.'' He looked back at the apartment: ``I'll bet you anything he books it.''

  LACHAISE HAD CALLED STADIC WITH THE NUMBER OF his new cell phone: Stadic had been in the office, and he scribbled it down, stuck the paper in his wallet.

  Two hours later, the shit hit the fan. He tried calling the number, but there was no answer. Then he was swept up in the chaos of the response, and eventually found himself wearinga doorman's uniform, working the door at the hotel where the families were hidden. No time to call...

  At ten o'clock the night of the attacks, the bank time and temperature sign down the block said -2ø. Stadic traded his doorman's uniform for street clothes and hurried down the street to his car. The ferocity of the attacks had stunned him. Near panic, he'd spent the evening pacing in and out of the Sandhurst, wondering whether he should run for it. He had almost enough money...

  But he realized, with a little thought, that it was too late. Cops' families had been attacked. That was worse than killing the cops themselves. If anyone found out that he'd been involved, there'd be no place to hide. If he were to be saved now, salvation would come in one form: the death of La-Chaise and all of his friends. Which wasn't impossible...

  He sat in his car, took out his cellular phone, punched in his home number. Two calls on the answering machine. The first was Daymon Harp, who said two words: ``Call me.'' The second call was nothing.

  Stadic erased the tape, hung up, found LaChaise's number in his wallet and punched it in. The phone was answered on the first ring.

  ``Hello?'' A man's voice, a southerner.

  ``Let me speak to Dick,'' Stadic said.

  LaChaise came on a second later: ``What?''

  ``You're fucked now. You can't walk a block without bumping into a cop.''

  ``We can handle it. What we need is their location. We heard on the radio they were all being moved.''

  ``They're at the Sandhurst Hotel in Minneapolis,'' Stadic said. ``They're sequestered in interior rooms. There are cops all through the place. Snipers on the roof. The streets are being dug up outside, so you can't get a car close.''

  After a moment of silence, LaChaise said, ``We'll think of something.''

  ``No, you won't. There's no way in. And who got shot? One of you is hit, they found blood down Capslock's sidewalk.''

  ``I got scratched,'' LaChaise said. ``It's nothing. We need to know more about this hotel.''

  ``There's no way in,'' Stadic said. ``But there are some people outside you might be interested in-and I don't think there's a watch on them.''

  ``Who's that?'' LaChaise asked.

  ``You know Davenport?'' Stadic asked. He looked down the street at the hotel. Another cop paraded the lobby, behind the glass doors, in the doorman's uniform. Stadic was due back in the uniform in the morning. ``He runs the group that shot your women.''

  ``We know Davenport. He's on the list,'' LaChaise said.

  ``He's got a daughter that almost nobody knows about, because he never married the mother,'' said Stadic. ``She's not on any insurance forms.''

  ``Where is she?''

  ``Down on Minnehaha Creek-that's in south Minneapolis. I got the address and phone number.''

  ``Let me get a pencil...'' LaChaise was back in a minute, and scribbled down the address. ``Why're you doing this?'' LaChaise asked.

  `` 'Cause I want you to finish and get out of here. You got three of them. You get Davenport's daughter, we set something up on Franklin, and you're outa here.''

  LaChaise said nothing, but Stadic could hear the hum of the open line. Then LaChaise said, ``Sounds like bullshit.''

  ``Listen, I just want you to get the fuck out of here,'' Stadic said. Then, ``I gotta go. I'll call you about Franklin.''

  Stadic hung up, and dialed Harp's unlisted number. Harp picked it up on the first ring.

  ``What?'' Stadic asked.

  ``Cops were here. Capslock and Davenport and another guy. Somebody saw you and LaChaise in the laundromat. They think I know something about LaChaise.''

  ``Just hang on,'' Stadic said.

  ``I don't know, man. I'm thinking about taking a vacation.''

  Stadic thought a minute, then said, ``Listen, how much trouble would it cause the business, if you were gone for a week?''

  ``Not much,'' Harp said. ``I make a couple of big deliveries, we'd be all right. You think I should walk?''

  ``Yeah,'' Stadic said. ``Go somewhere they wouldn't expect. Not Las Vegas. Not Miami.''

  ``Puerto Rico?''

  ``That'd be the place,'' Stadic said. ``They'd never think of it.''

  ``Great pussy. No pussy like Puerto Rico pussy,'' Harp said.

  ``Forget the pussy. Just get your ass down there so Davenport can't get right on top of you. Take Jas.''

  ``What for? She ain't doing me no good,'' Harp said. ``She been weepin' around about this finger.''

  ``You need a witness. There's some heavy shit coming down. You might want to prove that you weren't here. Take a credit card, and buy some stuff down there. Keep the receipts, so you can prove it.''

  ``Yeah, okay. Good idea,'' Harp said.

  ``Stay in touch. Call my place, leave a hotel name on the tape. Nothing else, just the hotel name.''

  ``We're outa here,'' Harp said, and he hung up.

  Harp's disappearance would simplify things, Stadicthought: one less problem to worry about. LaChaise would be gone in a week, and in two weeks, nobody would be coming back to Harp.

  LUCAS CALLED A MEETING FOR TEN O'CLOCK: AT nine-fifteen he shut himself in his office and closed his eyes, feet up on the desk, and worked parts of it out. At nine-thirty, he started going through LaChaise's file, everything that Harmon Anderson had managed to put together from Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and the FBI.

  LaChaise's criminal career had begun when he was a teenager, with game-law violations in Wisconsin, followed by timber rustling off state forestlands-cutting and selling walnut trees out of the hardwood forests in the southern part of the state. He'd been convicted twice of taking deer out of season, and twice on the tree rustling.

  Somewhere along the line he'd joined the Seed-called the Bad Seed at the time-a motorcycle club with ties to drug smuggling, pornography and prostitution. Then he'd apparently gone into business: he'd been convicted of failing to remit sales taxes to the state of Wisconsin, and the contents of a motorcycle shop had been seized.

  A year later, operating another shop, he'd been closed again, and again, his motorcycle stock was seized, apparently to cover the remaining principal and outstanding interest on the late sales taxes from the first shop.

  Two months after that, he was charged with underreporting his income for three years, but was acquitted. The next charges, illegal dumping of industrial waste, were filed in Michigan. Then there were charges of threatening a game warden, trespassing, two assaults that were apparently bar
fights and two drunken driving convictions.

  The murder count was weak, as Sandy Darling had said it was.

  When Sandy Darling's name popped into his head, Lucasdropped the file folder against his chest, thinking: if nothing turned up, he should make a quick run up to Darling's place. She wasn't all that far, and she knew LaChaise about as well as anyone alive. He had to be hiding somewhere...

  He went back to the file: there was a sheaf of newspaper accounts of LaChaise's arrest and trial, and the reporters noted the difficulty of conviction-and the jubilation of the prosecutors and local lawmen when the guilty verdict came in.

  A county sheriff was quoted as saying, ``Sooner or later he was going to kill an honest citizen or a law enforcement officer. Putting Dick LaChaise in prison is a public service.''

  But the conviction smelled-and he thought of Sandy Darling again.

  At nine-fifty, Del showed up, and in the next few minutes, Sloan, Franklin and Sherrill. Kupicek was out of it, for the time being: lost his shit, as Franklin put it, but he said the words with sympathy.

  Sherrill was holding tighter than Lucas expected.

  ``I didn't think there was any feeling left, until I saw him dead,'' Sherrill said, slumped in her chair. Her face was deadpale against her dark hair and eyes. ``I served the papers on him two months ago, but Jesus, I didn't want him dead.''

  ``You can handle it?'' Lucas asked.

  ``Oh, yeah,'' she said. She was ten years older in five hours, Lucas thought. She had a little harsh wrinkle running from the left side of her nose to the corner of her mouth, and it was not a smile line. ``Yeah, I'll tell you what: I'm in on this.''

  Lucas looked at her for a moment, then nodded and looked at the others. ``I don't know what Del and Sloan have told you, but we think LaChaise and friends of LaChaise might be involved somehow with Daymon Harp, a dealer around town. We're gonna start pushing him. But what we need isto start working through Harmon's paper on LaChaise, and all the paper we can find on Daymon Harp, and see if we get any crossover. LaChaise had to have a good contact here, because they got a list of our relatives. And it's possible that the contact is a cop.''

  ``A cop,'' Sherrill said. She looked at Franklin, who shook his head once, as though he couldn't believe it.

  ``Could be,'' said Sloan.

  ``We need to chain LaChaise's known associates into the Cities, looking for their associates. There must be some. And we start busting ass. And I mean, like, tonight. One more thing: I want everybody to call each and every street contact you've got, and you tell them that there's big money for anyone who calls me with a location. Big money-ten grand. Ten grand, no questions asked, any way they want it.''

  ``Where's that coming from?'' Franklin asked.

  ``Outa my pocket,'' Lucas said, looking across the desk at him. Lucas had the money, all right: they never talked about it, but they all knew it.

  ``Way to go,'' Del said. He looked at the others: ``That's what'll get them. We'll buy the motherfuckers out.''

  The phone rang on Lucas's desk.

  ALTHOUGH COPS WERE EVERYWHERE AROUND THE HOTEL, there were still a few working the neighborhoods, doing the routine.

  Barney's Old Time Malt Shoppe pulled in a lot of cops because Barney used to be one, before he retired, and because he rolled free coffee to any cops who stopped in, and always had a booth open. A single patrol car sat in Barney's lot. Stadic noted the number, 603, then cruised the place, peering through the windows. A tall, slender, pink-cheeked sergeant with pale hair and a much darker mustache: Arne Palin, two years behind Stadic at Central High.

  Stadic pulled to the curb, kept an eye on the cops through the window. Harp had written down the plates on the truck LaChaise had taken to the laundromat for the meeting. Stadic took the piece of notepaper out of his pocket and called Dispatch on his handset: ``Yeah, six-oh-three, run a Chevy S-10, Wisconsin Q-dash-H-O-R-S-E.''

  ``Hang on...''

  A moment later it came back: the truck was registered to an Elmore Darling, on a rural route in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin.

  ``Thanks for that...''

  He looked through the window into Barney's. The cops inside hadn't heard their car number going out. He moved down the street, to a stop signal.

  Now. One more call.

  He brooded about the idea through the green light: the streets were empty, and he sat staring at nothing, the redyellow-green bouncing unseen across his face. He knew the phone number, all right. If he had the guts... but then, it was hardly a matter of guts anymore. It was a matter of urgent necessity. And he'd already set it up.

  If Davenport thought LaChaise was going after his daughter, LaChaise was a dead man: and that's what he needed. Dead men. Stadic pulled himself together and punched in the number. Christ, if they recognized his voice...

  The phone rang once, then Davenport's voice said, ``Yeah?''

  ``I don't want to say who this is-I don't want to get involved-but you gave me your card, once.'' He pitched his voice up, made it smooth, syrupy.

  ``OKAY,'' LUCAS SAID, AN EDGE OF IMPATIENCE IN HIS tone. He was staring at Sherrill, who was chewing on a cuticle. Lucas didn't need tips about loan sharks, cigarettesmuggling, credit card dealing, dope factories.

  ``I live down by Richard Small and Jennifer Carey.'' The voice was curiously soft. ``That's your little girl with Jennifer, right?''

  There was a hard moment of silence, then Davenport said, ``Jesus.''

  ``There's been a truck driving around. I saw him twice when I was out walking my dog. Wisconsin plates. I thought I should call.''

  And the caller was gone.

  Lucas exploded out of the chair and ran from the office and through the building to Dispatch. The other four, not understanding, went after him.

  A PATROL CAR SQUATTED IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE, EXHAUST curling up into the falling snow. Another was parked across the street, and the two cops from the car waited in the back of the house. Lucas arrived fifteen minutes after his dash to Dispatch, carrying his black wool overcoat and a briefcase. Del trailed a few steps behind, like a destitute bodyguard, watching the windows up and down the street. A cop met them at the door.

  ``We kept everybody away from the windows,'' the cop said. ``There's been nothin' on the street. Nothin' moving.''

  ``Good. And thanks. Keep an eye out,'' Lucas said.

  Jennifer Carey and Richard Small waited for him in the dining room, the blinds pulled.

  ``Where's Sarah?'' Lucas asked, without preamble.

  ``Upstairs, in bed,'' Jennifer said. She was still the willowy blonde, but with a few more wrinkles than when Sarah had been conceived. Lucas had wanted-had offered, in any case-to marry her, but though she'd wanted the baby, she hadn't cared for the prospects of marriage to Lucas. Now she and Small, a vice-president at TV3's parent corporation, hadput together a family: Jennifer's daughter, his son. Jennifer looked past Lucas at Del, and a tiny smile caught her lips. ``How're you doing, Del?''

  Del shrugged. ``Cheryl's gonna make it.''

  ``What's the threat level?'' Small asked. He was short, muscular, blunt, a onetime Navy pilot in Vietnam, and Lucas liked him.

  ``We don't know,'' Lucas said. ``The call was weird, but we can't take any chances. You're gonna have to move.''

  ``I can't quit working,'' Jennifer said. ``This is too large.'' Lucas said, ``That pushes the threat quite a bit higher.''

  ``We'll keep her behind security, inside the building,'' Small said. ``We'll make sure she doesn't leave at any expected time. We can use different cars.''

  ``That'll all help,'' Lucas said. ``But we still haven't figured out their capability. We know there are several of them, and we've only got the ID on LaChaise. The other two-we just don't know.''

  Jennifer looked at Small. ``Do you think you could get off?''

  Small shook his head: ``I'm not going anywhere; I gotta be here.'' He turned to Lucas. ``How safe is this hotel you're putting people into?''

  ``Safe,'' Lucas said. ``That'd be the best place
. We don't really know how much these guys know about us. I don't know how they found out about Jen and Sarah...''

  ``Sloan's wife,'' Jennifer said.

  Small and Lucas looked at her, and she said, ``Sloan's wife. She'd take care of the kids-she loves kids. And she's in the hotel, right?''

  Lucas nodded. ``Give her a call.''