Buried Prey

He had no car, no keys, not much money, and no clothes but the ones he was standing in. His side, which seemed to be healing okay, nevertheless burned like fire. He saw them come out of the motel, and he turned and walked back through the store, past the restrooms, and out the back entrance, through a door marked “Not an Exit” and heard the counterman call, “Hey,” as he went out.

He went through the back door only because he couldn’t go through the front, but he had no idea where he was going. When he got out the back, he saw two things: the counterman’s parked truck, and a small house, probably fifty yards away across the parking lot, with another car, an old Corolla, parked next to it. He ran that way. If he could get some keys . . .

Then what?

How far could he get?

He didn’t think about it: he ran, and he thought, Keys.

He just ran.

LUCAS SAW A FLASH of what looked like daylight through the store window and it crossed his mind that somebody had just run out the back. He, Del, and Jenkins were lined up at the edge of the highway, waiting to run across, when he saw the flash, and Lucas took the chance and ran straight through the traffic, causing one car to swerve and another to hit the brakes so hard that they screamed, and Del shouted, “Hey,” but Lucas was across the highway and running hard.

Del and Jenkins were slowed by more cars, but got across, now fifty yards behind Lucas, and instead of going into the front of the store Lucas went left, around the far end of it, saw the little shabby house out back and the fat black-haired man running toward it, and he half turned and windmilled an arm at Jenkins and Del, and shouted, “This way,” and kept running.

Ahead of him, Hanson kicked through a half-closed gate on a hurricane fence, ran across a concrete-block porch and half turned and saw Lucas coming, only twenty-five or thirty yards back, yanked open the screen door and crashed through the inner door into the house’s living room.

A woman was standing in the kitchen and she screamed at him and he saw a butcher knife on the kitchen counter and she back-pedaled away from him, and then threw a towel at him, and he dodged the towel and grabbed the knife with one hand, and the woman by the hair with the other, and she twisted and screamed and then Lucas crashed through the door behind them.

Hanson tried to shout something—“I’ll kill her,” or “I’vE got a knifE”—but Lucas never gave him time, simply vaulting across a couch, reaching for Hanson’s throat. His body smashed into Hanson’s left side, the impact pushing the fat man back against the kitchen sink. He slashed at Lucas’s face with the knife and the woman came free and fell on the floor, and Lucas tried to catch Hanson’s knife hand but missed, snagged a shirtsleeve, but he felt the knife slash across his shoulder and the back of his neck, and he twisted away from the knife and the woman’s body hit him behind the ankles and he went down, losing his grip on Hanson and then,

BOOM.

The gunshot, the sound not the slug, was like a bolt of lightning, and then another BOOM and Lucas, confused and half blinded by blood, scrambled across the supine woman, tried to pull her away from Hanson, and then realized Hanson was going down.

Jenkins said, “Stay down, stay down . . .” and he pushed Lucas down with his hand. The woman was squealing, and Del was saying, “. . . ambulance down at a place called Pit Stop right now. We’ve got a seriously injured police officer. . . .”

Jenkins looked down at him and Lucas said, “I’m not seriously injured.”

Jenkins said, “Maybe not, but you’re bleeding like you’re seriously injured. So just stay down.”

Del loomed over him: “Dumb shit.”

“What about Hanson?” Lucas asked.

Jenkins looked behind himself, at the form on the floor, and Lucas realized he still had his gun in his hand, a big .357 revolver that he’d bought from a highway patrolman.

“You got what you wanted,” Jenkins said. “He’s stonecold dead.”

25

Del pushed Lucas flat and said, “Let me look at it.”

Lucas let him look: Del used a paper towel to wipe the blood off Lucas’s forehead, and then looked at his shoulder through a slash in Lucas’s jacket, and said, finally, “It’s not that bad. You’ve got a nasty cut right along your hairline, but I don’t see any bone. It’s bleeding like crazy, though. There’s another cut on your shoulder, but your coat took most of the damage. You need to get sewn up.”

They pressed more paper towels to his head, trying to stop the flow of blood, and he stayed on the floor, waiting for the ambulance. Carver County sheriff ’s deputies showed up two minutes after the shooting, and were handled by Jenkins. Then the ambulance came, and Lucas walked out to it on his own, stepping over Hanson’s facedown body as he left the house. The woman who owned the house was unhurt, but in shock, and was taken out to the ambulance with Lucas.