Rules of Prey Read Free Page A

pistol, streaming from the ragged cut down over her eyes and mouth, and it was on her teeth and she was screaming:
    “Ass hole, ass hole. ”
    Before he could get back on the attack, she picked up a shiny stainless-steel pipe and swung it at him like a woman who’d spent time in the softball leagues. He fended her off and backed away, still looking for the gun, but it was gone and she was coming and the maddog made the kind of decision he was trained to make.
    He ran.
    He ran and she ran behind him and hit him once more on the back and he half-stumbled and turned and hit her along the jaw with the bottom of his fist, a weak, ineffective punch, and she bounced away and came back with the pipe, her mouth open, her teeth showing, showering him with saliva and blood as she screamed, and he made it through the door and jerked it shut behind him.
    “ . . . ass hole  . . .”
    Down the hall to the stairs, almost strangling in the mask. She didn’t pursue, but stood at the closed door screaming with the most piercing wail he’d ever heard. A door opened somewhere and he continued blindly down the stairs. At the bottom he stripped off the mask and thrust it in his pocket and stepped outside.
    Amble, he thought. Stroll.
    It was cold. Goddamn Minnesota. It was August and he was freezing. He could hear her screaming. Faintly at first, then louder. The bitch had opened the window. The cops were just across the way. The maddog hunched his shouldersand walked a little more quickly down to his car, slipped inside, and drove away. Halfway back to Minneapolis, still in the grip of mortal fear, shaking with the cold, he remembered that cars have heaters and turned it on.
    He was in Minneapolis before he realized he was hurt. Goddamn pipe. Going to have big bruises, he thought, shoulders and back. Bitch. The gun shouldn’t be a problem, couldn’t be traced.
    Christ it hurt.

CHAPTER
2
    The counterman was barricaded behind a wall of skin magazines. Cigarettes, candy bars, and cellophane sacks of cheese balls, taco chips, pork rinds, and other carcinogens protected his flank. Next to the cash register, a rotating stand was hung with white buttons; each button carried a message designed to reflect each individual purchaser’s existential motif. Save the Whales—Harpoon a Fat Chick was a big seller. So was No More Mr. Nice Guy—Down on Your Knees, Bitch.
    The counterman wasn’t looking at it. He was tired of looking at it. He was peering out the flyspecked front window and shaking his head.
    Lucas Davenport ambled out of the depths of the store with a Daily Racing Form and laid two dollars and twelve cents on the counter.
    “Fuckin’ kids,” the counterman said to nobody, craning his neck to see further up the street. He heard Lucas’ money hit the counter and turned. His basset-hound face tried for a grin and settled for a wrinkle. “How’s things?” he wheezed.
    “What’s going on?” Lucas asked, looking past the counterman into the street.
    “Couple of kids on skateboards.” The counterman had emphysema and his clogged lungs could manage only short sentences. “Riding behind a bus.” Whistle. “If they hit a manhole cover . . .” Suck wind. “They’re dead.”
    Lucas looked again. There were no kids in the street.
    “They’re gone,” the counterman said morosely. He picked up the Racing Form and read the first paragraph of the leadarticle. “You check the sale table?” Wheeze. “Some guy brought in some poems.” He pronounced it “pomes.”
    “Yeah?” Lucas walked around to the side of the counter and checked the ranks of battered books on the table. Huddled between two hardback surveys of twentieth-century literature he found, to his delight, a slim clothbound volume of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Lucas never went hunting for poetry; never bought anything new. He waited to find it by chance, and surprisingly often did, orphan songs huddled in collections of texts on thermoelectrical engineering