Easy Prey Read Free Page B

caught a little dust under a fingernail, and inhaled.
    “What do you think of that Clark guy?” the assistant asked.
    Alie’e, whose eyes had been closed, the better to experience the rush, now opened one eye, cocked her head, and thought about it: “He’s not bad, for a pickup.”
    “What I meant was, he looked like he had a zucchini stuffed in his pants during that last sequence.”
    Alie’e smiled her wan, coked-up smile and said, “Then it must have been a good sequence.”
     
 
DIETER KOPP HAD seen it; so had Plain.
    “I was afraid I’d lose it.” Plain laughed, brushing the hair back from his eyes. “I was over there waggling that snoot around, trying to get some light on him, hoping it wouldn’t go away, hoping he wouldn’t figure out what I was doing.”
    “Not for the American magazines, I don’t think?” Kopp said. But it was a question.
    “Oh, I think so,” Plain said. “You couldn’t say anything about it. You couldn’t make it too obvious. But a little work on the computer, taking it up or down. We’ll get it in. And people will notice. . . .”
    Kopp bobbed his head, flashed his thin, hard grin. At another time, he might’ve been driving a tank into Russia instead of selling underwear. But that was then, and this was now. He was in underwear.
    THEY ALL WENT to the party that night, at Silly Hanson’s home: Alie’e, Jax, Plain, Kopp, Corbeau, the photo assistants, Alie’e’s parents, even Clark the welder. Alie’e looked spectacular. She wore the green dress from the photo shoot, and hung with Jael Corbeau and Catherine Kinsley, the heiress, the three women like the three fates in the Renaissance paintings, all tangled together.
    Techno-pop rolled from small black speakers spotted around Silly Hanson’s public rooms and Alie’e images flashed across movie-aspect flat-screen monitors. The crowd danced and sweated and drank martinis and Rob Roys and came and went.
    Silly herself got drunk and physical with Dieter Kopp, who left thumb bruises on her breasts and ass. A gambler drifted through the crowd, and met a cop who was astonished to see him.
    And the killer was there. In the corner, watching.

2
    LUCAS DAVENPORT GOT up that morning at five o’clock, long before the sun had come over the treetops. He ate a bowl of oatmeal, drank a cup of coffee, filled a Thermos with the rest of the coffee, and drove into Hayward. His friend had the boat loaded. Lucas left his Tahoe on the street, and they drove together out to Round Lake on the year’s last muskie fishing trip.
    Cold weather; no wind, but cold. They had to break through a fifteen-foot line of quarter-inch ice at the landing. In another day, the ice would be an inch thick, and out fifty or eighty feet. All along the country roads, guys were pulling ice-fishing houses out of their backyards, getting ready for winter.
    On this day, though, most of the water was still soft. They found a spot off a sunken bar and dropped their baited sucker hooks off the side and waited. Lucas’s friend didn’t talk much, just stood like a moron and bounced a lure called a Fuzzy Duzzit off the bottom, and kept one eye on the sucker rods. Lucas dozed—a quiet, peaceful, unstressed sleep that always left him oddly refreshed.
    They didn’t catch anything—they rarely did, although Lucas’s friend was an authority on muskie fishing—and by noon, stiff with the cold, they headed back to town. Lucas pulled the battery out of the boat, for winter storage in his friend’s basement, while his friend carried nets, oars, a cooler, a piss jug, and other gear into the garage. When it was all done, Lucas said, “See you in the spring, fat boy,” and headed back to his cabin.
    He could have taken a nap. He’d had only four hours of sleep the night before. But he’d been drinking coffee to keep warm, and the caffeine had him jangled; and the nap in the boat had helped. Instead of sleeping, he got tools out of the truck and started working on his new