Sudden Prey Read Free

and both lungs on the way out the opposite ’pit . . . Never turn sideways.
    “Fuckin’ cold,” Sloan said. He was a narrow, sideways-looking man who today wore a rabbit-fur hat. “We live in fuckin’ Russia. The Soviet fuckin’ Union.”
    “Is no Soviet Union,” Lucas said. They were in a drugstore parking lot, Lucas and Sloan and Sherrill, and had gotten out of the slightly warm car to put on the vests. A loitering civilian watched them as his dog, wearing a blue jacket, sniffed up an ice-bound curb.
    “I know,” Sloan said. “It moved here.”
    Lucas pulled the sweater back over his head, then slipped back into his topcoat. He was a tall man, dark-haired, dark-complected with ice-blue eyes. A scar trailed through one brow ridge and expired on his cheek, a white line like a scratch across his face. As his head popped through the sweater’s neck hole, he was grinning at Sloan, an old friend: “Who was trying to start a departmental ski team?”
    “Hey, you gotta do something in the middle of the . . .”
    The radio broke in: “Lucas?”
    Lucas picked up the handset: “Yeah.”
    “On the 280 ramp,” Del said.
    “Got it . . . you get that, Franklin?”
    Franklin came back, his voice chilled. “I got it. I can see LaChaise and Cale, they’re still sitting there. They look like they’re arguing.”
    “Keep moving,” Lucas said.
    “I’m moving. I’m so fuckin’ cold I’m afraid to stop.”
    “On University . . .” Del said.
    “We better go,” Sherrill said. Her face was pink with the cold, and nicely framed by her kinky black hair. She wore a black leather jacket with tight jeans and gym shoes, and furry white mittens that she’d bought in a sale from a cop catalog. The mittens were something a high school kid might wear, but had a trigger-finger slit, like hunting gloves. “She’ll be picking them up.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas nodded, and they climbed into the city car, Sloan in the driver’s seat, Sherrill next to him, Lucas sprawled in the back.
    “Here she comes,” said Franklin, calling on the radio.
    “Check your piece,” Lucas said over the seat to Sherrill. He wasn’t quite sure of her, what she’d do. He wanted to see. He slipped his own .45 out of his coat pocket, punched out the magazine, racked the shell out of the chamber, then went through the ritual of reloading. In the front seat, Sherrill was spinning the wheel on her .357.
    As Sloan took the car through an easy U-turn and the three blocks toward the Midland Steel Federal Credit Union, Lucas looked out the window at the street, and felt the world begin to shift.
    The shift always happened before a fight, a suddenly needle-sharp appreciation of image and texture, of the smell of other bodies, of cigarette tar and Juicy Fruit, gun oil, wet leather. If your mind could always work like this, he thought, if it could always operate on this level of realization, you would be a genius. Or mad. Or both.
    Lucas remembered a stray thought from earlier in the day, picked up the handset and called dispatch.
    “We need two squads on University,” he said. “We’re tracking a stolen Chevy van and we want a uniform stop as soon as possible.”
    He recited the tag number and license and the dispatcher confirmed it. “We’ve got a car on Riverside,” the dispatcher said. “We’ll start them that way.”
     
     
     
    CANDY PULLED THE van to the curb outside Ham’s Pizza. Georgie and Duane were waiting, and she slid over to the passenger seat, and popped the back door for Georgie as Duane got in the driver’s seat.
    “Everything okay?” Duane asked.
    “Great, Duane,” Candy said. She gave him her cheerleader smile.
    Duane hungered for her, in his Duane-like way. They’d gone to school together, elementary through high school. They’d played on a jungle gym, smart Candy and not-so-smart Duane. She’d let him see her tits a couple of times—once down by Meyer’s Creek, skinny-dipping with Dick, when Dick hadn’t seen Duane