Naked Prey Read Free

groaning stopped. He managed to pull her up another four inches, then tied the rope off on the trunk.
    He watched them for a few minutes, swinging in the snow, in the dim light, their heads bent, their bodies violently elongated like martyrs in an El Greco painting . . .
    Then he turned and left them.
    They may have been dead then, or it might have taken a few minutes. He didn’t care, and it didn’t matter. He rolled slowly, carefully, out of the side road, down through Broderick and on south. He was miles away before he became aware of the pain in his wrist, and the blood flowing down his sleeve toward his elbow. When he turned his arm over in the dim light of the car, he found that she’d bitten a chunk of flesh out of his wrist, a lemon-wedge that was still bleeding profusely.
    If a cop stopped him and saw it . . .
    He pulled over in the dark, wrapped his wrist with a pad of paper towels and a length of duct tape, stepped out of the truck, washed his hand and arm in snow, tossed the bloody jacket in the back of the truck and dug out a lighter coat from the bag in back.
    Get home, he thought. Burn the coat, dump the truck.
    Get home.

2
    W EATHER D AVENPORT CRAWLED sleepily out of bed. The kid was squalling, hungry in his bedroom down the hall, and she started that. Lucas woke up as the housekeeper called, “I got him, Weather. I’m up.”
    “Ah, great,” Weather said. She came back to the bed, sat down, looked at the clock.
    “Getting up?” Lucas asked.
    “Alarm’s going off in fifteen minutes anyway,” she said. She yawned, inhaled, exhaled, pushed herself off the bed and headed for the bathroom, pulling off her cotton nightgown as she went. Lucas, lying half awake under the crazy quilt, could see nothing but darkness on the other side of the wood slats that covered the window. January in Minnesota: the sun came up at 11:45 and went down at noon, he thought.
    He shifted his head around on the pillow, tried to get comfortable, tried to get back to sleep. Sleep was unlikely: He’d been feeling down for a month or more, anddepression was the enemy of decent sleep. The marriage was fine, the new kid was great. Nothing to do with that—his sense of the blue was a chemical thing, but the chemicals made sleep impossible. If he went down further, he’d check with the doc. On the other hand, it might just be the winter, which this year had started in October.
    He heard the shower start, and then Ellen, the housekeeper, banging down the stairs with the kid. The kid was named Samuel Kalle Davenport, the “Kalle” a Finnish name, for Weather’s late father. The housekeeper was a fifty-five-year-old ex-nurse who loved kids. The four of them together had a deal they all liked.
    After a few minutes, the shower stopped and Lucas sat up. He was awake now, no point in struggling against it. He climbed out of bed, remembered the clock, picked it up and turned off the alarm. As he did, Weather came out of the bathroom, rubbing her hair with a towel.
    “You getting up?” she asked cheerfully. She was a small woman, and an early bird. She liked nothing better than getting up before the sun, to begin the hunt for worms.
    “Uh,” Lucas said. He started for the bathroom, but she smelled so warm and good as he passed her that he slipped an arm around her waist and picked her up and gave her a warm sucking kiss on the tummy below her navel.
    She squirmed around, laughed once, and then said, severely, “Put me down, you oaf.”
    “Mad rapist attacks naked housewife in bedroom.” Lucas carried her back to the bed and threw her on it and landed on the bed next to her, hands running around where they shouldn’t be.
    “Get away from me,” she said, rolling away. “Come on, Lucas, goddamnit.” She whacked him on the ear, and it hurt, and he collapsed on the bed. She got out and startedscrubbing at her hair again and said, “You men get hard-ons in the morning and you’re so proud of them, just swishing around in the