Silent Prey Read Free

like a maniac.

CHAPTER
2
    Lucas whipped down the asphalt backroads of Wisconsin, one hand on the wheel, one on the shifter, heel-and-toe on the corners, sunlight bouncing off the Porsche’s dusty windshield. He slow-footed across the St. Croix bridge at Taylor’s Falls into Minnesota, looking for cops, then dropped the hammer again, headed south into the sun and the Cities.
    He caught Highway 36 west of Stillwater, the midday traffic sparse and torpid, pickups and station wagons clunking past the cow pastures, barns and cattail sloughs. Eight miles east of Interstate 694, he blew the doors off a red Taurus SHO. Clear road, except for the occasional crows picking at roadkill.
    His eyes dropped to the speedometer. One hundred and seven.
    What the fuck are you doing?
    He wasn’t quite sure. The day before, he’d rolled out of his lake cabin late in the afternoon and driven eighty miles north to Duluth. To buy books, he thought: there were no real bookstores in his corner of Wisconsin. He’dbought books, all right, but he’d wound up drinking beer in a place called the Wee Blue Inn at eight o’clock in the evening. He’d been wearing a dark-blue dress shirt under a silk jacket, khaki slacks, and brown loafers, no socks. A laid-off ore-boatman, drunk, had taken exception to the bare feet, and for one happy instant, before the barkeeps arrived, it had looked like the boatman would take a swing.
    He needed a bar fight, Lucas thought. But he didn’t need what would come afterward, the cops. He took his books back to the cabin, tried to fish the next day, then gave it up and headed back to the Cities, driving as fast as he knew how.
    A few miles after blowing off the SHO, he passed the first of the exurban ramblers, outriders for the ’burbs. He groped in the glove box, found the radar detector, clipped it to the visor and plugged it into the cigarette-lighter socket as the Porsche screamed down the cracked pavement. He let his foot settle further; punched up the radio, Cities-97. Little Feat was playing hard hot boogie, “Shake Me Up,” the perfect sound to accompany a gross violation of the speed limit.
    The interstate overpass flicked past and the traffic got thicker. A hundred and eighteen. Hundred and nineteen. A stoplight he’d forgotten about, looming suddenly, with a blue sedan edging into a right-on-red turn. Lucas went left, right, left, heel-and-toe, blowing past the sedan; and past a station wagon, for a split second catching at the periphery of his vision the surprised and frightened face of a blond matron with a car full of blond kids.
    The image fixed in his mind. Scared. He sighed and eased off the gas pedal, coasting. Dropped through a hundred, ninety, eighty. Across the northern suburbs ofSt. Paul, onto the exit to Highway 280. When he’d been a cop, he’d always been sneaking off to the lake. Now that he wasn’t, now that he had time sitting on him like an endless pile of computer printout, he found the solace of the lake less compelling . . . .
    The day was warm, sunshine dappling the roadway, playing games with cloud-shadows on the glass towers of Minneapolis to the west. And then the cop car.
    He caught it in the rearview mirror, nosing out of Broadway. No siren. His eyes dropped to the speedometer again. Sixty. The limit was fifty-five, so sixty should be fine. Still, cops picked on Porsches. He eased off a bit more. The cop car closed until it was on his bumper, and in the rearview mirror he could see the cop talking into his microphone: running the Porsche’s tags. Then the light bar came up and the cop tapped his siren.
    Lucas groaned and rolled to the side, the cop fifteen feet off his bumper. He recognized him, a St. Paul cop, once worked with the Southwest Team. He used to come into the deli near Lucas’ house. What was his name? Lucas dug through his memory. Kelly . . . Larsen? Larsen was out of the car, heavy face, sunglasses, empty-handed. No ticket, then. And he was