Night Prey

by John Sandford

  More good than bad. Much more.

  CHAPTER

  Heather wasn't home. Lucas suppressed a thump oi worry: F she should have been home an hour earlier. He picked up the phone, but there was nothing on voice mail, and he hung up.

  He walked back to the bedroom, pulling off his tie. The bedroom smelled almost subliminally of her Chanel No. 5, and on top of that, very faintly of wood polish. She'd bought a new bedroom set, simple wooden furniture with an elegant line, slightly Craftsman-Mission. He grumbled.

  His old stuff was good enough, he'd had it for years. She didn't want to hear it.

  "You've got a twenty-year-old queen-sized bed that looks like it's been pounded to death by strange womenþI won't askþand you don't have a headboard, so the bed just sits there like a launching pad. Don't you read in bed? Don't you know about headboard lights? Wouldn't you like some nice pillows?"

  Maybe, if somebody else bought them.

  And his old dresser, she said, looked like it had come from the Salvation Army.

  He didn't tell her, but she was precisely correct.

  She said nothing at all about his chair. His chair was older than the bed, bought at a rummage sale after a St. Thomas professor had died and left it behind. It was massive, comfortable, and the leather was fake.

  She did throw out a mostly unused second chair with a stain on one armþLucas couldn't remember what it was, but it got there during a Vikings-Packers gameþand replaced it with a comfortable love seat. "If we're going to watch television in our old age, we should sit next to each other," she said. "The first goddamn thing men do when they get a television is put two E-Z Boys in front of it and a table between them for beer cans and pizzas. I swear to God I won't allow it."

  "Yeah, yeah, just don't fuck with my chair," Lucas had said. He'd said it lightly, but he was worried.

  She understood that. "The chair's safe. Ugly, but safe."

  "Ugly? That's genuine glove... material."

  "Really? They make gloves out of garbage bags?"

  Heather Harkinnen was a surgeon. She was a small woman in her late thirties, her blondish hair beginning to show streaks of white. She had dark-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide mouth. She looked vaguely Russian, Lucas thought. She had broad shoulders for her size, and wiry muscles, she played a vicious game of squash and could sail anything. He liked to watch her move, he liked to watch her in repose, when she was working over a problem. He even liked to watch her when she slept, because she did it so thoroughly, like a kitten.

  When Lucas thought of her, which he might do at any moment, the same image always popped up in his mind's eye: Heather turning to look at him over her shoulder, smiling, a simple pearl dangling just over her shoulder.

  They would be married, he thought. She'd said, "Don't ask yet."

  "Why? Would you say no?"

  She'd poked him in the navel with her forefinger. "No. I'd say yes.

  But don't ask yet. Wait a while."

  "Until when?"

  "You'll know."

  So he hadn't asked, and somewhere, deep inside, he was afraid, he was relieved. Did he want out? He'd never experienced this closeness.

  It was different. It could be... frightening.

  Lucas was down to his underpants when the phone rang in the kitchen.

  He picked up the silent bedroom extension and said, "Yeah?"

  "Chief Davenport?" Connell. She sounded tight.

  "Meagan, you can start calling me Lucas," he said.

  "Okay. I just wanted to say, uh, don't throw away your files. On _

  the case." There was an odd thumping sound behind her. He'd heard it before, but he couldn't place it.

  "What?"

  said, don't throw away your files."

  "Meagan, what're you talking about?"

  "I'll see you tomorrow. Okay?"

  "Meagan... ?" But she was gone.

  Lucas looked at the telephone, frowned, shook his head, and hung it up.

  He dug through the new dresser, got running shorts, picked up a sleeveless sweatshirt that he'd thrown on top of a hamper, pulled it on, and stopped with one arm through a sleeve. The thumping sound he'd heard behind Connellþkeyboards. Wherever she was, there were three or four people keyboarding a few feet away. Could be her office, though it was late.

  Could be a newspaper.

  Could be a television station.

  His line of thought was broken by the sound of the garage door going up.

  Heather. A small rock rolled off his chest. He pulled the sweatshirt over his head, picked up his socks and running shoes, and walked barefoot back through the house.

  "Hey." She'd stopped in the kitchen, was taking a Sprite out of the refrigerator. He kissed her on the cheek. "Do anything good?"

  watched Harrison and MacRinney do a free flap on a kid with Bell's palsy," she said, popping the top on the can.

  "Interesting?" She put her purse on the kitchen counter and turned her face up to him: her face was a little lopsided, as though she'd had a ring career before turning to medicine. He loved the face, he could remember reacting the first time he'd talked with her, in a horror of a burned-out murder scene in northern Wisconsin: she wasn't very pretty, he'd thought, but she was very attractive. And a little while later, she'd cut his throat with a jackknife....

  Now she nodded. "Couldn't see some of the critical stuffþmostly clearing away a lot of fat, which is pretty picky. They had a double operating microscope, so I could watch Harrison work part of the time.

  He put five square knots around the edge of an artery that wasn't a heck of a lot bigger than a broom straw."

  "Could you do that?"

  "Maybe," she said, her voice serious. He'd learned about surgeons and their competitive instincts. He knew how to push her buttons.

  "Eventually, but... You're pushing my buttons."

  "Maybe."

  She stopped, stood back and looked at him, picking something up from his voice. "Did something happen?"

  He shrugged. "I had a fairly interesting case for about fifteen minutes this afternoon. It's gone now, but... I don't know."

  "Interesting?" She worried.

  "Yeah, there's a woman from the BCA who thinks we've got a serial killer around. She's a little crazy, but she might be right."

  Now she was worried. She stepped back toward him. "I don't want you to get hurt again, messing with some maniac."

  "It's over, I think. We're off the case."

  "Off?"

  Lucas explained, including the strange call from Connell. Heather listened intently, finishing the Sprite. "You think she's up to something," she said when he finished.

  "It sounded like it. I hope she doesn't get burned. C'mon. Let's run."

  "Can we go down to Grand and get ice cream afterwards?"

  "We'll have to do four miles."

  "God, you're hard."

  After dark, after the run and the ice cream, Heather began reviewing notes for the next morning's operation. Lucas was amazed by how often she operated. His knowledge of surgery came from television, where every operation was a crisis, undertaken only with great study and some peril.

  With Heather, it was routine. She operated almost every day, and some days, two or three times. "You've got to do it a lot, if you're going to do it at all," she said. She'd be in bed by ten and up by five-thirty.

  Lucas did business for a while, then prowled the house, finally went down the basement for a small off-duty gun, clipped it under his waistband and pulled his golf shirt over it. "I'm going out for a while," he said.

  Heather looked up from the bed. "I thought the case was over."

  "Ehh. I'm looking for a guy."

  "So take it easy," she said. She had a yellow pencil clenched between her teeth, and spoke around it, she looked cute, but he picked up the tiny spark of fear *n her eyes.

  He grinned and said, "No sweat. I'll tell you straight out when there might be a problem."

  "Sure."

  Lucas's hou
se was on the east bank of the Mississippi, in a quiet neighborhood of tall dying elms and a few oaks, with the new maples and g*nkgoes and ash trees replacing the disappearing elm. At night, the streets were alive with middle-class joggers working off the office flab, and couples strolling hand in hand along the d*nly lit walkways.

  When Lucas stopped in the street to shift gears, he heard a woman laugh somewhere not too far away, he almost went back inside to Heather.

  Instead, he headed to the Randolph Lake Bridge, crossed the Mississippi, and a mile farther on was deep into the Lake Street strip.

  He cruised the cocktail lounges, porno stores, junk shops, rentalfurniture places, check-cashing joints, and low-end fast-food franchises that ran through a brutally ugly landscape of cheap lighted signs.

  Children wandered around at all times of day and night, mixing with the suburban coke-seekers, dealers, drunks, raggedy-hip insurance salesmen, and a few lost souls from St. Paul, desperately seeking the shortcut home. A pa* of cops pulled up alongside the Porsche at a stoplight and looked him over, thinking Dope dealer. He rolled down his window and the driver grinned and said something, and the passenger-side cop rolled down his window and said, "Davenport?"

  "Yeah."

  "Great car, man."

  The driver called across his partner, "Hey, dude, you got a little rock? I could use a taste, mon."

  Franklin Avenue was as rugged as Lake Street, but darker. Lucas pulled a slip of paper from his pocket, turned on a reading light, checked the address he had for Junky Doog, and went looking for it. Half the buildings were missing their numbers. When he found the right place, there was a light in the window and a half-dozen people sitting on the porch outside.

  Lucas parked, climbed out, and the talk on the porch stopped. He walked halfway up the broken front sidewalk and stopped. "There a guy who lives here?"

  A heavyset Indian woman heaved herself out of a lawn cha*. "Not now.

  All my family live here now."

  "Do you know him?" "No, I don't, Mr. Police." She was polite.

  "We've been here almost four months and never heard the name."

  Lucas nodded. "Okay." He believed her.

  Lucas started crawling bars, talking to bartenders and customers.

  He'd lost t*me on the street, and the players had changed. Here and there, somebody picked him out, said his name, held up a hand: the faces and names came back, but the *formation was sparse.

  He started back home, saw the Blue Bull on a side street, and decided to make a last stop.

  A half-dozen cars were parked at odd attitudes around the bar's tiny parking lot, as though they'd been abandoned to avoid a bombing run.

  The Blue Bull's windows were tinted, so that patrons could see who was coming in from the lot without being seen themselves. Lucas left the Porsche at a fire hydrant on the street, sniffed the night airþ creosote and tarþand went inside.

  The Blue Bull could sell cheap drinks, the owner said, because he avoided high overhead. He avoided it by never fixing anything. The pool table had grooves that would roll a ball though a thirty-degree arc into a corner pocket. The overhead fans hadn't moved since the sixties.

  The jukebox had broken halfway through a Guy Lombardo record, and hadn't moved since.

  Nor did the decor change: red-flocked whorehouse wallpaper with a patina of beer and tobacco smoke. The obese bartender, however, was new.

  Lucas dropped on a stool and the bartender wiped his way over.

  "Yeah?"

  "Carl Stupella still work here?" Lucas asked.

  The bartender coughed before answering, turning his head away, not bothering to cover his mouth. Spit flew down the bar. "Carl's dead," he said, recovering.

  "Dead?"

  "Yeah. Choked on a bratwurst at a Twins game."

  "You gotta be kidding me."

  The bartender shrugged, started a smile, thought better of it, and shrugged again. Coughed. "His t*me was up," he said piously, running his rag in a circle. "You a friend of his?"

  "Jesus Christ, no. I'm looking for another guy. Carl knew him."

  "Carl was an asshole," the bartender said philosophically. He leaned one elbow on the bar. "You a cop?"

  "Yup."

  The bartender looked around. There were seven other people *n the bar, five sitting alone, looking at nothing at all, the other two with the* heads hunched together so they could whisper. "Who're you looking for?"

  "Randolph Leski? He used to hang out here."

  The bartender's eye shifted down the bar, then back to Lucas. He leaned forward, dropping his voice. "Does this shit bring in money?"

  "Sometimes. You get on the list...."

  "Randy's about eight stools down," he muttered. "On the other side of the next two guys."

  Lucas nodded, and a moment later, leaned back a few inches and glanced to his right. Looking at the bartender again, he said quietly, "The guy I'm looking for is big as you."

  "You mean fat," the bartender said.

  "Hefty."

  The bartender tilted his head. "Randy had a tumor. They took out most of his gut. He can't keep the weight on no more. They say he eats a pork chop, he shits sausages. They don't digest."

  Lucas looked down the bar again, said, "Give me a draw, whatever."

  The bartender nodded, stepped away. Lucas took a business card out of his pocket, rolled out a twenty and the business card. "Thanks.

  What's your name?"

  "Earl. Stupella."

  "Carl's..."

  "Brother."

  "Maybe you hear something serious sometime, you call me," Lucas said.

  "Keep the change."

  Lucas picked up the glass of beer and wandered down the bar.

  Stopped, did a double take. The thin man on the stool turned his head: loose skin hung around his face and neck like a basset hound's, but Randy Leski's mean little pig-eyes peered out of it.

  "Randy," Lucas said. "As I live and breathe."

  Leski shook his head once, as though annoyed by a fly in a kitchen.

  Leski ran repair scams, specializing in the elderly. Lucas had made him a hobby. "Go away. Please."

  "Jesus. Old friends," Lucas said, spreading his arms. The other talk in the bar died. "You're looking great, man. You been on a diet?" "Kiss my ass, Davenport. Whatever you want, I don't got it."

  "I'm looking for Junky Doog."

  Leski sat a little straighter. "Junky? He cut on somebody?"

  just need to talk to him."

  Leski suddenly giggled. "Christ, old Junky." He made a gesture as if wiping a tear away from his eyes. "I tell you, the last I heard of him, he was working out at a landfill in Dakota County."

  "Landfill?"

  "Yeah. The dump. I don't know which one, I just hear this from some guys. Christ, born in a junkyard, the guy gets sent to the nuthouse.

  When they kick him out of there, he winds up in a dump. Some people got all the luck, huh?" Leski started laughing, great phlegmsucking wheezes.

  Lucas looked at him for a while, waiting for the wheezing to subside, then nodded.

  Leski said, "I hear you're back."

  "Yeah."

  Leski took a sip of his beer, grimaced, looked down at it, and said, "I heard when you got shot last winter. First time I been in a Catholic church since we were kids."

  "A church?"

  was praying my ass off that you'd fuckin' croak," Leski said.

  "After a lot of pain."

  "Thanks for thinking of me," Lucas said. "You still run deals on old people?"

  "Go hump yourself."

  "You're a breath of fresh air, Randy... Hey." Leski's old sport coat had an odd crinkle, a lump. Lucas touched his side. "Are you carrying?"

  "C'mon, leave me alone, Davenport."

  Randy Leski never carried: it was like an article of his religion.

  "What the hell happened?"

  Leski was a felon. Carrying could put him inside. He looked down at his beer. "You seen my neighborhood?"
<
br />   "Not lately."

  "Bad news. Bad news, Davenport. Glad my mother didn't live to see it.