Sudden Prey

by John Sandford

  But Martin's efforts to calm him down only made LaChaise angrier. Already full of beer, he got Harp's Johnnie Walker and started drinking it off, carrying a water tumbler full of ice cubes, pouring the whiskey over them, gulping it downlike Coca-Cola. He paced as he drank, watching the television.

  A blond newscaster from TV3-``She's the one we want to get,'' Martin said, ``Davenport's woman''-reported that ``Police are searching for an informant who provided critical information earlier this week, but who has disappeared. They ask that you call the department on the 911 line, as you did the last time, or any police line and ask for Chief Lucas Davenport. Police said they would offer the informant absolute protection from retaliation from Richard LaChaise or any of his accomplices.''

  ``Yeah? How are you gonna do that?'' LaChaise brayed at the screen. Then: ``I'd like to fuck her,'' and then: ``Who could be talking to them? We don't know anybody.''

  Sandy shrank back: she knew.

  ``Probably whoever told them about the house we was in,'' Martin said. ``Ansel had to ask around, talking to a bunch of dopers. Somebody probably gave him up.''

  ``Yeah... Goddamn, ol' Ansel. I miss that sonofabitch.''

  LaChaise's face crinkled, and Sandy thought he'd begun to weep. He turned abruptly, marched down the hall into Harp's stereo room and began tearing the vinyl record albums out of their covers and smashing them, three and four at a time.

  Martin looked at Sandy, but showed no sign of disapproval-or approval, either. He showed nothing, she thought.

  To the sound of the breaking records, Sandy went back to the bedroom and shut the door. Martin was nuts, but he was controlled. But the booze had pushed LaChaise over the edge, and the very air of the apartment carried the smell and taste of insanity, of the expectation that something crazy was about to happen.

  She had to get out.

  A moment later, she heard Martin's arrows start to whack into the target outside her door. Martin had put the target nextto the window at the end of the main hall. If he pulled an arrow to the right, she thought, it'd go right through the window shade and glass, out over the fire escape and into the roof of the next building...

  She was sitting on the bed when LaChaise stopped breaking records. A moment later, LaChaise and Martin were shouting at each other, and she heard the thumping of heavy bodies colliding in the front room. She ran to the door and down the hall again, and found Martin on the floor, on top of LaChaise, with a heavy arm around LaChaise's neck. LaChaise was facedown, and trying to get to his hands and knees.

  ``Let me up, you motherfucker,'' LaChaise roared.

  ``Can't do that; can't do that,'' Martin was saying urgently. ``We need the goddamn TV...''

  He saw Sandy and said, ``Tried to kick in the TV.''

  ``Fuckers don't do nothing but lie,'' LaChaise said, but he sounded calmer.

  ``But we need to see what they're saying, and what happens with the cops,'' Martin said.

  After a moment of silence, LaChaise said, ``Let me up. I won't kick it.''

  Martin nodded. ``All right.''

  Martin stood up, between LaChaise and the television, and LaChaise grunted as he stood up, a tight grin: ``You kicked my ass.''

  ``You're drunk as a skunk.''

  ``Well, that's true,'' LaChaise said. ``But you're pretty fuckin' drunk yourself.'' Sandy moved away, stepping back toward the bedroom, but LaChaise turned and saw her and said, ``What're you lookin' at?'' and then, ``Hey, wait a minute.''

  Sandy padded back toward the room, looking for a place to hide, and heard LaChaise say to Martin, ``If I can't kickthe TV, might as well jump me a little puss.''

  Sandy turned around inside the bedroom: looking for a way out. There wasn't any. LaChaise came to the doorway and leaned in, and she said, ``Dick, don't.''

  ``Bullshit,'' he said.

  ``I won't fuckin' move. I'll lie there like a brick. And if I get a chance to kill you, I will.''

  He stepped toward her and she thought he'd hit her. Instead, his eyes wavered, and he said, ``Fuck you,'' and staggered away.

  She shut the door. Had to get out. Had to.

  LUCAS AND SLOAN BROUGHT WEATHER INTO THE BACK of the hotel, while Sherrill and Del brought in Jennifer and a TV3 crew. Weather went to fix her hair and check makeup, and Jennifer, standing aside with Lucas, muttered, ``I wouldn't let Weather look at this Sherrill chick too long.''

  ``What?''

  ``Give me a break, Davenport. Never in your life would you fail to appreciate the young woman's qualities.''

  ``Well, I do appreciate them,'' Lucas said stiffly. He suddenly felt like an asshole, broke down and grinned. ``But I'd never do anything about it.''

  Jennifer looked at him in an appraising way, and said, ``Maybe you really have changed.''

  ``Yeah, well...''

  Weather came back out and they went down to the lobby for the interview, a two-minute no-brainer on the cops' families suffering from cabin fever, how it felt to be barricaded inside. Jennifer did another quick interview with Sloan's flustered wife, and then went out the back door with her protection.

  ``That should do it,'' Weather said, when they got back to her room.

  ``I hope so. I hope they're watching television,'' Lucas said. ``Jen says they'll run the tape every time they do the updates.''

  ``Are you still angry with me?'' Weather asked. She sounded slow, depressed.

  ``No. I never was as much angry as I was... cranked up,'' Lucas said.

  She patted the bed: ``You need to get some sleep, I can see caffeine leaking out of your eyes.''

  ``Maybe a few hours,'' he agreed.

  SANDY COULD HEAR LACHAISE TALKING TO MARTIN, both of them still drinking. She got up twenty times to go to the window, to look at the ledge. Long way down. Higher than the hayloft in the barn. She'd lie on the bed, close her eyes, try to rest. Nothing worked.

  Eventually, the talk in the living room stopped, and the television was turned off. She went to the window, looked out again. Then a sudden THUMM-whack outside her door. Martin was at it again, shooting the bow down the hall. He fired it twenty times, then quit.

  The apartment was quiet for a half hour, an hour, the hands creeping around her watch. She went back to the door, listened, cracked it, looked out. If she could get sheets-or if she could just get out the door, for that matter. The men had been very drunk...

  The hall light was on, and one more in the living room. A half-dozen arrows stuck out of the target at the end of the hall, five feet away. But nobody was moving. She went down the hall on her tiptoes: the door to the master bedroom was open, and in the half-light, she could see LaChaise sprawled across the king-sized bed.

  Martin was wrapped in a blanket, lying on the floor by thefront door. She tiptoed down toward him and whispered, ``Bill?''

  He stirred, but his breathing remained even. She looked back down the hall toward the basement door. Martin's voice, thick with sleep, said, ``The door's locked. I got the key in my pants.''

  She jumped: it was as though he'd snatched her thought from midair. ``I wasn't going to the door. I was just making sure that Dick's sleeping it off,'' she said.

  ``Are you... ?'' she was going to ask, all right ? Before the words could get out of her mouth, he'd rolled and was pointing a pistol at her head. She stepped back and said, ``Please... ''

  Drunk as he must be-he'd finished LaChaise's bottle of Johnnie Walker and a half-dozen more beers-his hand seemed absolutely steady. ``You're gonna call the cops on us, aren't you?''

  ``No, honest to God...'' She looked back at the bedroom; the black-and-white target loomed on the wall outside the door, next to the fire escape window.

  ``Are you gonna fuck him?''

  Now, she thought, they were getting to the important issues. She crossed her arms: ``Not if I can help it,'' she said, looking at the hole in the end of the pistol. ``If Dick does it to me, I'd have to be unconscious or dead.''

  The hole at the end of the pistol seemed as large as a basketball hoop, and he
ld between her eyes. He kept it there, kept it, and she closed her eyes...

  ``All right,'' he said. She opened her eyes and the pistol was pointing at the ceiling. He grinned at her, a wet, sleepy, evil grin, she thought. ``Hope nobody down in the laundry heard me and Dick wrestling around.''

  My God, she thought, he's lying here thinking about it: Martin's turned on. Out loud she said, ``They'd have beenhere, if anybody called the cops.'' Her eyes drifted toward the telephone: pick it up, 911, leave it off the hook, wait one minute...

  Impossible. She could handle LaChaise, she thought, but Martin... Martin seemed to see everything.

  The gun flashed back up and leveled at her forehead again, and Martin said, ``Bang.'' Then, ``Go on back to bed.''

  LUCAS TRIED TO SLEEP, SNUGGLED AGAINST WEATHER. Though he felt as if he'd been awake for days, his internal clock still said it was too early. And the bed was wrong, not his, and the pillow was no good: it crooked his neck at a bad angle. But most of all, he couldn't stop his mind. He wasn't putting the puzzle together, he was simply reliving the whole long episode, without profit.

  A few minutes after midnight, Weather finally spoke in the dark: ``You're vibrating,'' she said.

  ``Sorry.''

  ``You need the sleep.''

  ``I know,'' Lucas said. ``My brain's all clogged up.''

  She half-rolled. Her voice was clear, and he realized she'd been lying awake: ``How much longer, before you get them?''

  ``Probably tomorrow, unless they just hide out. If they move, we'll get them. Tomorrow or the next day, I'd say.''

  ``What if they're running?''

  ``Their pictures have been on every TV in the country; they couldn't stop to get gas. They really can't go out in the open.''

  After another moment of silence, Weather said, ``You think they'll be taken alive?''

  ``No.''

  ``You guys'll just shoot them?''

  ``It's not that-if they called up and said they wanted tocome in, and they told us where they were, and they came out with their hands over their heads... We'd take them. But it's not shaping up that way. The first guy, Butters, might as well have committed suicide. They figure they're dead. They've already written themselves off. And that's scarier'n hell.''

  ``Gotta be their parents... you know, who made them like that.''

  ``Always is,'' Lucas said. ``I've watched some kids grow up from little psychos into big psychos: it was always the parents that made them that way.''

  ``If you could intervene early enough...''

  Lucas shook his head: ``Never work. Nobody spends as much time with the kids as their parents, even if their parents don't want them. And usually, nobody knows anything is wrong until the kid's already bent. Maybe you could set up an army of fascist social workers who'd go around to every house once a month and cross-examine every kid, but that'd probably be worse than what we've got. Look what happened with all these mass child-abuse things. They're all bullshit, and it's the social workers who've done it.''

  Another silence.

  Then Weather said, ``I don't believe that more violence is the way to solve the problem. I don't think shooting these people will do it.''

  Lucas said, ``That's 'cause you're a doctor.''

  ``Hmm?''

  ``Doctors think in terms of illness and cures. The problem is, when one of these guys gets sick, somebody else gets hurt. So we've got two problems, not one. First we've got to protect innocent people. Then we've got to do whatever we can with these guys-cure them or whatever. But first we've got to stop them.''

  ``That doesn't seem to be what you're doing...'' Thenshe added, hastily, ``Sometimes it doesn't, anyway.''

  ``Yeah, I know. Sometimes we play it a little too much like a game. That's just a way to deal with it... but that's not the way it really is. It ain't football, even if TV thinks so.''

  They talked a bit longer, then Weather said, ``I've got to get some sleep. I'm working in the morning.''

  Lucas kissed her good-night again, and lay on his back, watching the outside light trace feather patterns across the ceiling, and some time later, finally fell asleep.

  SANDY MOVED THE WINDOW AN INCH AT A TIME, AND the cold air flooded in. That was a problem. Once she committed herself, she could hardly go back. The room would be cold, and if Martin or LaChaise came in, they'd know...

  But she pushed the window up anyway. Then leaned out, brushed snow off the ledge with her hand. The ledge didn't seem too slippery, but she wouldn't be able to walk it with boots. She dropped to the bed, took off her boots and socks, put the socks in the boots and the boots in her parka pockets, the heels sticking out. Couldn't drop those...

  She looked down. I'm going to kill myself

  . She took a breath and stepped out on the ledge: and the shock of the cold on her feet almost pitched her off. She held to the inside of the window frame, then edged to her right. The ledge was plenty wide, almost as though it had been designed to get her to the fire escape. Probably had been, she thought.

  She slid another step, and then another, refusing to look down again. She let go of the edge of the window frame, and now was balanced on nothing but her painfully chilled feet, the outside wall pushing against her back. She looked straight out, feeling more balanced that way. Two more steps. Two more.

  Reaching out with her right hand, she groped for the steel of the fire escape. Another step. Christ, she was afraid to look to her right, another step, groping... and she felt it. Now she turned her head, saw it, grabbed the railing and stepped over to it.

  She stopped to check the window above the fire escape. The shade was down, but there was a crack at the bottom between the shade and window frame, and she could see down the hall. In the semidark, Martin looked like an enormous cocoon, rolled up on the floor at the end of the hall.

  She stepped over the railing onto the fire escape, breathing hard: she was excited and frightened to death. She took two steps down, onto the drop platform, and bounced gently, to see if that was enough to make it drop. It didn't move. She tried again, harder. Nothing. Hard, this time. There was a metallic clank to the left, but the platform stayed up.

  This wasn't the way it was supposed to work, but in the dark, she couldn't see why the platform wasn't dropping. Something was stuck somewhere...

  She thought about hanging from the bottom, and dropping. But even with a two-step platform drop, and the six feet she'd get by hanging, it'd be a twelve- or thirteen-foot drop onto an uncertain alley surface...

  She'd break a leg.

  But she thought about it, the cold in her feet growing to pain.

  THEN SHE FELT THE VIBRATION.

  She didn't know what it was, but she went to her knees under the window, and put her eye to the crack under the shade. Martin was on his feet, walking down the hall toward her room. He stopped at LaChaise's room, looked in, then went into the bathroom. Sandy took a breath-but Martin wasback in three or four seconds, and now he was moving softly down the hall toward Sandy's door.

  He stopped at her door, and she ducked, unable to watch, afraid he'd sense her eyes. She waited, then forced herself to look. Martin was at her door, one hand on her knob. Unmoving, listening.

  Sandy's feet were burning: she had to move them, but she couldn't. She was afraid that he'd sense anything, any movement.

  Then Martin left her door, came down the hall to the fire escape window, pulled arrows out of his target. Then he turned and went back down the hall, looked around once, put the arrows on a shelf and dropped back on the sleeping bag.

  Sandy, still holding her breath, ducked below the window again, sat, lifted her feet off the fire escape and cradled them. They hurt, and for a while there was nothing in her world but her heartbeat and her feet. Had to move. She looked through the crack again. Martin was on the sleeping bag again, but awake, twitching. Twitching? She watched: Jesus, he was masturbating.

  Now Sandy was breathing like a locomotive, great gouts of steam puffing out into the cold night air: her feet wer
e freezing, the pain excruciating. She looked at the drop, looked at the ledge, and painfully stepped back over the rail onto the ledge.

  Back to the bedroom. She moved faster going back, the pain pushing her. She caught the window ledge and crawled back through. Her feet felt as though she were walking on broken bottles, but she ignored them for the moment and focused on closing the window, carefully, not making a sound.

  All right. The room was cold, but there was nothing she could do about that, not right away. She couldn't open the door: Martin might catch a draft. She pulled off her coat, tookthe boots out, sat on the bare bed, and used the inside of her coat sleeves to wipe her feet.