Hidden Prey Read Free Page A

of the surrounding darkness, and felt again, in her mind, the sensation of thickness at the man’s waist.
    Looked around; a nervous cat.
    Stole back, knelt again, fumbled at the dead man’s belt buckle, uncinched it, unzipped his pants, felt . . . there. Another strap, elastic. She pulled it through her hands. She couldn’t see it, but she could visualize it—she’d once had a belt like this of her own, given to her by her father for a postcollege trip to Italy. She found another buckle, freed it, and pulled hard. The man was heavy, but the money belt was made of slippery nylon, and she felt it coming free . . .
    Got it. She was surprised by the weight of it. Couldn’t be money, must be papers of some kind. The ship was Russian . . .
    She moved away, carrying the belt and briefcase, slipping back into the dark. She was forty yards from the body when she heard somebody call from the top of the elevator: Hey. HEY! An American voice, not a Russian. She kept moving, faster now, deeper into the dark, choking back the panic.
     
    H ER SPOT WAS in an abandoned shed off Garfield, six hundred yards from the grain terminal, across the street from the Goodwill store. The shed’s door and windows were heavily boarded. Two months earlier, she’d walked around the place, interested, but unsure of how she could get in without attracting the cops.
    Then she’d seen the loose concrete blocks in the foundation on the back side of the building. She’d levered the blocks out, pulled herself beneath the shed, and found herself looking at the underside of a board floor. She’d gone back out, scouted the tracks until she found a convenient length of re-rod, and had come back and pried and pounded on the floor boards until she’d gotten inside.
    Inside was perfect: empty, dry, and safe. Everything but a phone. The place smelled of creosote, like old railroad ties or phone poles, but she no longer noticed it.
     
    N OW SHE PULLED her blocks out and crawled under the shed, up and inside. She had a pack, and inside the pack, an REI candle lantern. She lit it with a book match, then opened the wallet.
    Holy shit. She fumbled the bills out, looked at them in wonder: tens, twenties, more than a dozen fifties. She counted: nine hundred and sixty dollars. She was rich.
    She pried at other parts of the wallet, but it was full of cards in Russian, and a few photos, small color snaps of a dark-haired woman who looked like she came from a different time, from the fifties or sixties. But then, she thought, maybe that was what Russian women looked like.
    And the money belt: papers of some kind, she thought.
    She unzipped it and turned it, and thin bricks of cash began falling out. Holy shit. Holy shit. Hundreds. They were all hundreds, still in bank wrappers. She snapped the wrapper off one brick, and counted the bills in the pale yellow light of the candle. Fifty. She counted the bricks: ten. She had fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.
    She sat motionless for a moment. People would be coming. They’d want the money. But no fuckin’ way. Finders keepers. Her jaw tightened: the money was hers.
    Trey looked around at her snug little spot, suddenly unattractive in the flickering candlelight. She’d been happy enough here, but now she had things to do, places to go. This place was history. Somebody might have seen her, the cops might be coming . . .
    But she could handle all that, if she had a few minutes. She was a lawyer, for Christ’s sake; she’d lived with criminals, and she’d worked with cops. She knew what to do. She was cleaning frantically when, far away, a siren started.
    Please God: Just a few minutes . . . just do this one thing for me.

     2 
    F RIDAY AFTERNOON , a workday off, thunderstorms rumbling to the southwest, the lawn already cut, the soft, pleasant odor of freshly mown grass and gasoline and clean sweat lying on his T-shirt . . .
    Lucas Davenport sprawled on the couch, at peace, his head