Gathering Prey Read Free

fact, I might come there just to get the sandwiches.”
    “I’ll look for you,” Letty said, and she slid out of the booth and added, “Take it easy, Henry. And if you get in the shower with the devil, don’t pick up the soap.”
    Skye laughed and Henry nodded, his mouth too full to reply. When Letty was gone, he swallowed and said, “Man, this turned out good. That killing stuff, though, I mean, what a bunch of bullshit.”
    “I don’t think it was,” Skye said. After a moment, “You weren’t looking in her eyes.”
    •   •   •
    SKYE AND HENRY spent June in San Francisco, then Eugene, and the Fourth of July in Seattle. Later that month they caught a ride to Spokane and made a little money before the cops started hassling them. They got lucky at a truck stop and a trucker hauled them all the way to Billings, Montana.
    •   •   •
    IN BILLINGS THEY TOOK a big risk—or Henry did, but if there’d been trouble, they both would have gone to jail.
    The trucker dropped them off on the edge of I-90, a few blocks before he’d have to turn off to his terminal. “They wouldn’t want to see me giving people a ride,” he told them, and they thanked him, and he went on his way. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and they found themselves in an industrial area on the edge of town, with some farm fields and brushy areas mixed in.
    Three hundred yards away, a dark building stood under a dozen orange security lights, which illuminated a bunch of farm equipment—tractors, trailers, combines, as well as a few bulldozers and graders. They went that way, walking along the frontage road, because it seemed to be more toward the center of town.
    As they were walking along, a man pulled into the parking lot of the farm-equipment dealership, got out, locked his car—the car was small and swoopy and expensive-looking. The man went to a glass door on the side of the building, unlocked it, went inside.
    They continued to walk along the frontage road, moving slowly in the dark, and were fifty yards away when the man came back out of the building. He’d left a light on inside and they could see he was now wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He took off running, or jogging, away from them, along the frontage road, moving fast.
    Henry said, “Take my pack.”
    “What?”
    “Get off the road and take my pack. Get back in the weeds,” he said. “Wait for me.”
    “What?”
    He didn’t say anything else, but wrenched the walking stick off her pack and ran toward the building. Skye watched him cross the parking lot, crouch by the door, and a minute later, heard the distant sound of breaking glass. Henry disappeared inside, and a minute later, crawled back out and ran toward her.
    As he came up, he said breathlessly, “C’mon—we got to go. We got to go.”
    “What’d you get?”
    “Got his billfold.”
    “Oh, Jesus, Henry.”
    They jogged until Henry got a stitch in his side, and then they walked for a while, swerving off the frontage road whenever a car came along, going down in the ditch, crouching, catching their breath, then running some more. They were a mile south when they heard sirens and saw the flashing lights of the cop cars back the way they’d come.
    They kept going, another mile, and another, and then a cop car went by on the frontage road, as they lay in some weeds in the ditch. When the cop was gone, they ran some more, the best they could, nearly panicked, until after midnight, when Skye couldn’t go any farther. She told Henry, and they swerved off into a farm field, dark as pitch, and eventually stumbled into a copse of trees.
    They spread out their bags, broke out a flashlight, and looked in the wallet.
    Eight hundred forty dollars. They couldn’t believe it: more money than they’d ever had at one time.
    “They’ll be coming for us,” Henry said. “They’ll be all over us. I never thought it’d be this big.”
    “So we hide out,” Skye said. “Maybe right here. Tomorrow night, we