Night Prey

by John Sandford

  After the Army, he'd spent a year working on the Mississippi, a barge hand. He'd eventually gotten off in St. Paul, drifted through a series of crappy jobs, finally got smart and used his veteran's preference for something a little better. A year after that, he'd picked up a woman at a Minneapolis bookstore. He'd gone for a lifter's calendar and the woman had come to him. He'd recognized her immediately: she had the wool suit and the clack-clack high heels.

  She'd asked him something about exercise, he couldn't remember what, it'd obviously been a pickup....

  He hadn't thought to take her off, but he had, and that had been better than pounding on hookers. There had been a quality to the woman, the nylons and the careful makeup, the well-rounded sentences. She was one of those women so distinctly better than his mother.

  And they were everywhere. Some were too smart and tough to be taken.

  He stayed away from that kind. But there were also the tentative ones, awkward, afraid: not of death or pain or anything else so dramatic, but of simple loneliness. He found them in a Des Moines art gallery and in a Madison bookstore and a Thunder Bay record shop, a little older, drinking white wine, dressed carefully in cheerful colors, their hair done to hide the gray, their smiles constant, flitting, as though they were sparrows looking for a place to perch.

  Koop gave them a place to perch. They were never so much wary as anxious to do the right thing....

  Koop picked up Jensen when she left her office, escorted her to a Cub supermarket. Followed her inside, watching her move, her breasts shifting under her blouse, her legs, so well-muscled, the way she brushed the hair out of her eyes.

  Her progress through the produce section was a sensual lesson in itself. Jensen prowled through it like a hunting cat, squeezing this, sniffing at those, poking at the others. She bought bing cherries and oranges and lemons, fat white mushrooms and celery, apples and English walnuts, grapes both green and red, and garlic. She made a brilliant salad.

  Koop was in the cereals. He kept poking his head around the corner, looking at her. She never saw him, but he was so intent that he didn't see the stock kid until the kid was right on top of him.

  "Can I help you?" The kid used a tone he might have used on a ten-year-old shoplifter.

  Koop jumped. "What?" He was flustered. He had a cart with a package of beef jerky and a jar of dill pickles.

  "What're you looking for?" The kid had a junior-cop attitude, and he was burly, too-white, with pimples, crew cut, and small pig-eyes.

  "I'm not looking. I'm thinking," Koop said.

  "Okay. Just asking," the kid said. But when he moved away, he went only ten feet and began rearranging boxes of cornflakes, ostentatiously watching Koop.

  Sara, at the very moment that the kid asked his first question, decided she'd gotten enough produce. A moment later, as the kid went to work in the cornflakes, she came around the corner. Koop turned away from her, but she glanced up at his face. Did he see the smallest of wrinkles? He turned his back and pushed his cart out of the aisle The fact is, she might have seen him twenty times, if she'd ever scanned the third layer of people around her, if she'd noticed the guy on the bench on the next sidewalk over as she jogged. Had she remembered him?

  Was that why her forehead had wrinkled? The kid had seen him watching her.

  Would he say anything?

  Koop thought about abandoning his cart, but decided that would be worse than hanging on. He pushed it to the express lane, bought a newspaper, paid, and went on to the parking lot. While he was waiting to pay, he saw the kid step out of an aisle, his fists on his hips, watching.

  A wave of hate washed over him. He'd get the little fucker, get him in the parking lot, rip his fucking face off... Koop closed his eyes, controlling it, controlling himself. When he fantasized, the adrenaline started rolling through his blood, and he almost had to break some trung.

  But the kid just wasn't worth it. Asshole....

  He left the supermarket parking lot, looking for the kid in his rearview mirror, but the kid had apparently gone back to work. Good enoughþbut he wouldn't be going back there. Out of the lot, he pulled into a street-side parking space and waited. Twenty minutes later, Jensen came by.

  His true love....

  Koop loved to watch her when she was moving. He loved her on the streets, where he could see her legs and ass, liked to see her body contorting as she leaned or bent or stooped, liked to watch her tits bobbling when she went for a run around the lake. Really liked that.

  He was aflame.

  Monday was a warm night, moths batting against the park lights.

  Jensen finished her run and disappeared inside. Koop was stricken with what might have been grief, to see her go like that. He stood outside, watching the door. Would she be back out? His eyes rolled up the building. He knew her window, had known from the first night....

  The light came on.

  He sighed and turned away. Across the street, a man fumbled for keys, opened the lobby door to his apartment building, walked through, then used his key to unlock the inner door. Koop's eyes drifted upward.

  The top floor was just about even with Jensen's.

  With a growing tingle of excitement, he counted floors. And crashed.

  The roof would be below her window, he thought. He wouldn't be able to see inside. But it was worth checking. He crossed the street, moving quickly, stepped into the apartment lobby. Two hundred apartments, each with a call button. He slapped a hundred of them: somebody would be expecting a visitor. The intercom scratched at him, but at the same moment the door lock buzzed, and he pushed through, leaving behind the voice on the intercom: "Who's there?

  Who's there?"

  This would work twice, but he couldn't count on it more often than that. He turned the corner to the elevators, rode to the top.

  Nobody in the hall. The Exit sign was far down to the left. He walked down to the Exit sign, opened the door, stepped through it. A flight of steps went down to the left, and two more went up to the right, to a gray metal door. A small black-and-white sign on the door said, "Roof AccessþRoom Key Necessary to Unlock and to Re-enter."

  "Shit." He pulled at the door. Nothing. Good lock.

  He turned to the steps, thinking to start back down. Then thought: Wait. Did the window at the end of the hall look out at Jensen's building?

  It did.

  Koop stood in the window, looking up, and a bare two stories above, Sara Jensen came to the window in a robe and looked down. Koop stepped back, but she was looking at the street and hadn't noticed him in the semidark window. She had a drink in her hand. She took a sip and stepped away, out of sight.

  Jesus. A little higher, and he'd be virtually in her living room.

  She never pulled the drapes. Never....

  Koop was afiame. A match, a killer.

  He needed a key. Not sometime. He needed one now.

  He'd picked up his philosophy at Stillwater power comes out of the barrel of a gun, or from a club, or a fist. Take care of number one.

  The tough live, the weak die. When you die, you go into a hole: end of story. No harps, no heavenly choir. No helLfire. Koop resonated with this line of thought. It fit so well with everything he'd experienced in life.

  He went back to his truck for equipment, not thinking very much, not on the surface. When he needed somethinpanythingþthat thing became his: the people who had it were keeping it from him. He had the right to take it.

  Koop was proud of his truck. It might have belonged to anyone. But it didn't. It belonged to him, and it was special.

  He didn't carry much in the back, in the topper: a toolbox, a couple of bags of Salt N Sand left over from winter, a spade, a set of snow tires, a tow rope that had been in the truck when he bought it.

  And a few lengths of rusty concrete reinforcement rodþthe kind of thing you might find lying in the dirt around a construction site, which was, in fact, where he had found it. The kind of thing a workingman would have back there.

  Most of
the stuff was simply a disguise for the big Sears toolbox.

  That's where the action was. The top tray contained a few light screwdrivers, pliers, a ratchet set, a half-dozen Sucrets cans full of a variety of wood screws, and other small items. The bottom compartment held a two-pound hammer, a cold chisel, two files, a hacksaw, a short pry-bar, a pair of work gloves, and a can of glazier's putty. What looked like an ordinary toolbox was, in fact, a decent set of burglary tools.

  He put the gloves in his jacket pocket, took out the glazier's putty, dumped the screws from one of the Sucrets cans into an empty compartment in the top tray, and scooped a gob of putty into the Sucrets tin.

  He smoothed the putty with his thumb, closed the tin, and dropped it into his pocket.

  Then he selected a piece of re-rod. A nice eighteen-inch length, easy to hide and long enough to swing.

  He still wasn't thinking much: the room key was his. This assholeþsome assholeþwas keeping it from him. That made him angry. Really angry.

  Righteously angry. Koop began to fume, thinking aboutþhis fuckin' keyþand headed back to the apartment building, driving the truck.

  He parked half a block away, walked down to the apartment entrance, pulling on the work gloves, the re-rod up his jacket sleeve. Nobody around. He stepped into the lobby, pushed up the glass panel on the inset ceiling light, and used the re-rod to crack both fluorescent tubes. Now in the dark, he dropped the panel back in place and returned to the truck. He left the driver's-side door open an inch and waited.

  And waited some more. Not much happening.

  The passenger seat was what made the truck special. He'd gotten some work done in an Iowa machine shop: a steel box, slightly shallower but a bit longer and wider than a cigar box, had been welded under the seat.

  The original floor was the lid of the box, and from below, the bottom of the box looked like the floor of the passenger compartment. To open the box, you turned the right front seat support once to the right, and the lid popped up. There was enough room for any amount of jewelry or cash.... Or cocaine.

  Half the people in Stillwater were there because they'd been caught in a traffic stop and had the cocaine/stolen stereo/gun on the backseat.

  Not Koop.

  He watched the door for a while longer, then popped the lid on the box, pulled out the eight-ball, pinched it, put it back. Just a little nose, just enough to sharpen him up.

  Two mature arborvitae stood on either side of the apartment's concrete stoop, like sentinels. Koop liked that: the trees cut the vision lines from either side. To see into the outer lobby, you had to be standing almost straight out from the building.

  A couple came down the walk, the man jingling his keys. They went inside, and Koop waited. A woman was next, alone, and Koop perked up.

  But she was walking straight down the sidewalk, distracted, and not until the last minute did she swerve in toward the building. She would have been perfect, but she hadn't given him time to move. She disappeared inside.

  Two men, holding hands, came down the walk. No. Two or three minutes later, they were followed by a guy so big that Koop decided not to risk it.

  Then Jim Flory turned the corner, his keys already in his hand.

  Flory scratched himself at his left sideburn and mumbled something, talking to himself, distracted. He was five-ten and slender. Koop pushed open the car door and slipped out, started down the sidewalk.

  Flory turned in at the building, took his keys out of his pocket, fumbled through them, pulled open the outer door, went inside.

  Koop was angry: he could feel the heat in his bowels. Fucker has my key. Fucker....

  Koop followed Flory up the walk, Koop was whistling softly, an unconscious, disguising tactic, but he was pissed. Has my key..

  . Koop was wearing a baseball cap, jeans, a golf shirt, and large white athletic shoes, like a guy just back from a Twins game. He kept the hat bill tipped down. The steel re-rod was in his right pocket, sticking out a full foot but hidden by his naturally swinging arm.

  Goddamned asshole, got my key... Zip-a-dee-doo-dali, he whistled, Zip-a-dee-ay, and he was getting angrier by the second. My key....

  Through the glass outer door, he could see Flory fumbling in the dark at the inner lock. Key must be in his hand. Koop pulled open the outer door, and Flory, turning the key on the inner door, glanced back and said, "Hi."

  Koop nodded and said, "Hey," kept the bill of his hat down. Flory turned back to the door and pulled on it, and as he did, Koop, the cocaine right there, slipped the re-rod out of his pocket.

  Flory might have felt something, sensed the suddenness of the movement: he stopped with the key, his head coming up, but too late.

  Motherfucker has my key/key/key....

  Koop slashed him with the re-rod, smashed him behind the ear. The re-rod hit, pak metal on meat, the sound of a butcher's cleaver cutting through a rib roast.

  Flory's mouth opened and a single syllable came out: "Unk." His head bounced off the glass door and he fell, dragging his hands down the glass.

  Koop, moving fast now, nothing casual now, bent, glancing ferretlike outside, then stripped Flory of his wallet: a robbery. He stashed the wallet in his pocket, pulled Flory's key from the lock, opened the Sucrets tin, and quickly pressed one side and then the other into the glazier's putty. The putty was just firm, and took perfect impressions.

  He shut the tin, wiped the key on his pants leg, and pushed it back into the lock.

  Done.

  He turned, still half crouching, reached for the outer doorþand saw the legs.

  A woman stumbled on the other side of the door, trying to backpedal, already turning.

  She wore tennis shoes and a jogging suit. He'd never seen her coming.

  He exploded through the door, batting the glass out of his way with one hand, the other pulling the re-rod from his pocket.

  "No." She shouted it. Her face was frozen, mouth open. In the dim light, she could see the body on the floor behind him, and she was stumbling back, trying to make her legs move, to run, shocked....

  Koop hit her like a leopard, already swinging the re-rod.

  "No," she screamed again, eyes widening, teeth flashing in fear.

  She put up her arm and the re-rod crashed through it, breaking it, missing her head. "No," she screamed again, turning, and Koop, above her and coming down, hit her on the back of the neck just where it joined her skull, a blow that would have decapitated her if he'd been swinging a sword.

  Blood spattered the sidewalk and she went down to the stoop, and Koop hit her again, this time across the top of her undefended skull, a full, merciless swing, ending with a crunch, like a heavy man stepping on gravel.

  Her head flattened, and Koop, maddened by the interference, by the trouble, by the crisis, kicked her body off the step behind the arborvitae. "Motherfucker," he said. "Motherfucker." He hadn't intended this.

  He had to move.

  Less than a minute had passed since he'd hit Flory. No one else was on the walk. He looked across the street, for motion in the windows of Sara Jensen's apartment building, for a face looking down at him.

  Nothing that he could see.

  He started away at a fast walk, sticking the re-rod in his pocket.

  Jesus, what was this: there was blood on his jacket. He wiped at it with a hand, smeared it. If a cop came...

  The anger boiled up: the goddamned bitch, coming up like that.

  He swallowed it, fighting it, kept moving. Gotta keep moving..

  . He glanced back, crossed the street, almost scurrying, now with the smell of warm human blood in his nose, in his mouth. Didn't mind that, but not here, not now....

  Maybe, he thought, he should walk out. He was tempted to walk out and return later for the company car: if somebody saw him hit the woman and followed him to the car, they'd see the badge on the side and that'd be it. On the other hand, the cops would probably be taking the license numbers of cars in the neighborhood, looking for witnesses.


  No. He would take it.

  He popped the driver's-side door, caught a glimpse of himself in the dark glass, face twisted under the ball cap, dark scratches across it.

  He fired up the truck and wiped his face at the same time: more blood on his gloves. Christ, it was all over him. He could taste it, it was in his mouth....

  He eased out of the parking space. Watched in the rearview mirror for somebody running, somebody pointing. He saw nothing but empty street.

  Nothing.

  The stress tightened him. He could feel the muscles pumping, his body filling out. Taste the blood... And suddenly, there was a flush of pleasure with a rash of pain, like being hand-stroked while ants crawled across you....