Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  The sheriff opened the house by the simple expedient of punching out the window on the front door, reaching inside, and unlocking it. He told the four shirts to hang around, but wouldn't let them inside.

  The sheriff, Lucas, Del, and one other deputy went into the house. The house smelled bad from the first step, "like he's been skinning some mink in here," the sheriff said. They went back to the shrine and looked in. From the outside, they could see only the wall opposite; from the inside, they could see that all four walls, plus the ceiling, had been done in Alie'e's face.

  The sheriff shook his head. "This gives me the creeps," he said. "If he'd showed me this on a nice summer day with Alie'e running around alive, it'd give me the creeps."

  "It's a little too much," Lucas agreed.

  Green shirt was up on the porch. "Us guys just want to come in and take a quick look, or go back to McLeod's. It's too goddamn cold out here to be hanging around."

  The sheriff looked at Lucas, who shrugged. "I don't care… maybe they'll see something we don't."

  So the sheriff let them come in as Del and Lucas probed Scott's bedroom and kitchen; they found a box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells—skeet shot—in a bedroom closet, but no shotgun; a scoped .300 Winchester Magnum; and a Ruger .22 semiauto carbine.

  "So maybe he's got a shotgun with him, too," Lucas said.

  "I'll call it in," Del said.

  A small living room had black velvet curtains to block the light; a love seat was pushed against one wall; opposite the couch was a projection TV, a Sony, with a screen five feet wide; and next to the TV, a rack of tuning and sound equipment. A Nintendo console sat on the floor next to the couch, with a dozen game boxes—and next to that, a Dreamcast console with even more games. Five small speakers were spotted around the room, with a subwoofer the size of a trash can next to the TV.

  "Nine hundred and ninety-nine channels of shit on the TV to choose from," Del said, sounding like he might be quoting someone.

  In the kitchen, they found nothing at all. The last of the shirts had taken a look at the shrine, and gold shirt came out in the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a beer, and screwed off the top.

  "What the hell are you doing?" the sheriff asked.

  "He ain't gonna need it," gold shirt said. "Gonna go to waste."

  "Gimme one of those," Friar said. Gold shirt opened the refrigerator, handed him a beer. As he unscrewed the cap, Friar said, "The thing about Martin is, he always thought he'd be famous. That might be all he thought about. He thought he could do it by starting small here in Burnt River, and if he worked hard and kept his nose clean, Coke would take care of him. He's been working his ass off, driving that goddamned truck for ten years, and I'd have to say he ain't made much progress up the corporate ladder." He took a pull on the bottle, then added, "Such as the corporate ladder is around here."

  "You think he could kill a guy?" Lucas asked.

  "Nobody'll go huntin' with him," blue shirt said. "He likes them guns a little too much. One time this guy I know was walking in from his deer stand—"

  Gold shirt jumped in. "Ray McDonald."

  Blue shirt continued. "—and he bumps into Martin, and Martin goes, 'You smoke cigarettes and the deer'll smell it a mile away' So Ray goes on home and he's laying in bed that night about to go to sleep, thinking about nothing, and then all of a sudden he realizes that he was about a half-mile away when he stripped that butt and threw it away."

  Blue shirt looked at Lucas, Del, and the sheriff, a look that said, This is of significance. Lucas took a minute to decipher the look. "He'd been watching him through his scope."

  "Yup. Ray said he almost shit in his pants, laying there in bed. Martin Scott had been looking at him smoking, through a scope on that .300 Magnum."

  "Didn't shoot him," Del said.

  "But I bet he was thinking about it," blue shirt said. "Martin is fuckin' loony tunes, and he was a loony tunes when I met him in kindergarten."

  Late that night, when Lucas and Del and a pensive Tom Olson were a hundred miles out of the Sheridan airport, on the way back to the Twin Cities, the sheriff called. "I got some sorta bad news," he said.

  "Ah, God, I don't need any," Lucas said. "No time for it."

  "We didn't find Scott, but we found his truck," the sheriff said. "It's parked next to the Coke truck, at the distribution center. We talked to Randy Waters again, and he said that Scott parks it there on nights he thinks will be extra cold, because his garage doesn't have heat."

  "It's not gonna be that cold tonight," Lucas protested. "What's it gonna be?"

  "Maybe ten below," the sheriff said.

  "That's nothing," Lucas said. "Nothing."

  "Yeah, I know. And we can't find Scott—I don't think he's in town. But even if he is in the Twin Cities, looking for his truck won't do you any good."

  "Keep an eye out," Lucas said. "If we don't find Scott, maybe he'll show up for work."

  Lucas told Del, who shook his head. "Gotta be him, though," Del said. "You saw the room."

  "But what do you think? He's hitchhiking down to the Cities?"

  "No, he just got down, somehow. Be nice to know the car, though."

  Halfway back, Lucas said, "I just thought of something else. You know that Oriental chick at the Matrix? She saw the guy we think was the shooter—only for a second or two—but she thought it was the vending machine guy. She also thought he looked a little porky, and so did Jael, when a guy tried to break into her house that night… But when St. Paul picked up the vending machine guy, he wasn't porky. He was skinny."

  "Yeah?"

  "I bet this asshole Martin Scott was wearing his Coke coveralls. One of those guys said he wore them twenty-four hours a day. I bet that's what this chick was reacting to—the coveralls, the kind a vending machine guy would wear."

  "That's thin," Del said.

  "But it's there," Lucas said.

  "My ass is kicked," Del said, just before they landed. "You gonna drop me?"

  "Yeah. But I'm gonna cruise up and take a look at Jael's place, make sure they've spread out that perimeter."

  "I'll ride along for that," Del said.

  They'd left Lucas's car at the motel, because it could only handle two, and had ridden over in Olson's rattletrap Volvo. "I'm going back to the valley," Olson said as he drove them back to the motel. "Back to Fargo. Tomorrow. Have somebody call me when you're gonna release the bodies. I'll come and bury them, but I won't wait here anymore. This place is a suburb of hell."

  "Oh, bullshit. It's a pretty nice place," Del said irritably.

  "Think about the last week," Olson said. His voice was mild, quiet. "Ten days ago, I had a family—now I don't. But it's not so much individual people who did this: They're just souls trying to get through life. It's the culture that does it. It's a death culture, and it's here, right now. It comes out of TV, it comes out of magazines, it comes out of the Internet, it comes out of video games. Look at that television set that poor Martin Scott had. The biggest, most expensive thing he owned, except for his truck. And all those video games. And he was a hard-working man; worked hard. But the culture burned him out, reached out through that satellite dish and grabbed him. We see it in Fargo, but you can still fight it there. Here… this place is gone. Too late for this place. Too late. You'll see."

  "Shut the fuck up," Del said.

  Chapter 29

  « ^ »

  Sunday. Day nine.

  Six o' clock in the morning.

  Olson parked at the hotel and said, "Call me when the bodies are ready."

  Lucas said he would.

  As they got in Lucas's car, Del said, "He could still have a finger in it."

  "Nah. There's no conspiracy here, Del. A bullshit drug murder and then a nutcase on the loose."

  "Where do you think Scott is?"

  "Here," Lucas said.

  "In the suburb of hell?"

  "Yup. Somewhere."

  There were two guys in Jael's yard. "We get a car abou
t once every five minutes," one of them said. "They're getting a little more traffic up at the Kinsley place, but man, there's just nothing going on."

  "All right." They went inside, quietly as they could. A cop was sitting on an easy chair in a hallway, watching a TV on the floor. "We didn't want to get any TV flicker on the windows," he explained.

  "Is Jael asleep?"

  "Yeah."

  "Where's the perimeter?"

  "Two blocks out on every side; we got every street covered. He's gonna have to parachute in, if he's coming."

  "What I'm worried about, if he comes, is a suicide run," Lucas said. "He's got that shotgun."

  "I just wish he'd come," the cop said. "This is boring my goddamned brains out."

  Back in the car, Lucas said, "I'd like to go up to Kinsley's, if you don't mind. Take ten minutes, look around."

  "It's all right with me."

  Two blocks from Jael's at a four-way stop, a crossing car paused as Lucas approached, then pulled slowly across the intersection. "Old goat," Del said.

  "Yeah…" Lucas crossed the street, going straight ahead, then said, "Wait a minute." He swerved, did a quick U-turn, and said, urgently, "We're going after the goat. Get your goddamn pen out, write down the tag, number, call it in." They were back at the intersection, the old slow-moving GTO already at the end of the block. Lucas went after him.

  The GTO paused at a stop sign; the driver seemed unsure of his destination, looked both ways. Lucas closed up behind, putting his headlights on the license plate of the other car. Del said, "Got it."

  "Call it in, tell them we want an answer right fuckin' now."

  "What… ?"

  "Remember back in the motel, when we called in Lynn Olson's driver's license and asked them to run down his vehicle registrations? He had a Volvo, an Explorer, and an old collector GTO. I bet that fuckin' Scott parked his truck with the Coke truck and walked over to the Olsons' place and took the GTO. How many GTOs do you see around anymore—at six o'clock in the morning?"

  Del was already talking on his cell phone, getting switched. Reading the number he'd written on his arm. The GTO went straight ahead. Lucas turned left, did another U-turn and switched off his lights, crept to the end of the block. The GTO took a left at the next corner. Lucas accelerated around the corner, lights off, ran as hard as he could almost to the end of the block, jammed on the brakes, and crept forward again.

  The GTO was halfway down the block. At the end of the block, it stopped, then turned right. "He's just weaving around," Lucas said as he accelerated at the corner. "That's gotta be him."

  Del was listening. "All right." He looked at Lucas. "Its him."

  "Get everybody here… Get everybody on the street."

  They began vectoring squad cars toward the GTO, trying to stay out of sight. But four or five minutes after the cat-and-mouse game began, the driver of the GTO realized he was being tracked. Lucas again crept to the end of the block, and saw the GTO already turning the next corner. And when he got to that corner, and crept forward, the GTO was two blocks away and accelerating.

  "Goddamnit, he must've seen us," Lucas said.

  He jumped on the accelerator, and the Porsche whipped around the corner and they were flying along the narrow street; too fast to do it without lights, if anybody was out walking, and Lucas switched the lights on and up ahead, the GTO busted a stop sign and was out of sight and Del was screaming street names into the telephone; they made the corner and the GTO was already turning at a streetlight.

  "West on Lake," Del shouted. "He's headed west on Lake Street." He stopped talking to brace himself as Lucas downshifted and the engine screamed, they drifted through the intersection, and Lucas began running up through the gears and Del started with the phone again. "He's at fifteenth… fourteenth… thirteenth… twelfth… Where is everybody?"

  "Behind us," Lucas said. He could see flashing lights in the rearview mirror. No time for his flashers; he didn't even think about them. Then Del shouted, "He's making a turn under the interstate!"

  "He goes on the interstate, we got him," Lucas said. "Its a concrete trough."

  Del braced himself again as Lucas drifted the turn; they'd closed some distance on the GTO, which was now only a few hundred yards ahead. The GTO driver busted another traffic light, but Lucas was forced to slow and lost ground; and then the GTO was on the on-ramp and out of sight. Lucas accelerated after him, spotted him as they came off the ramp and started eating up the ground between them. Del stopped shouting into his phone long enough to ask, "What're we gonna do when we catch up with him?"

  "I haven't figured that out yet," Lucas said. "Maybe… not pull up beside him."

  "That would be a bad idea," Del said. "Unless you got your own shotgun hidden in this car somewhere."

  "We'll just get on his ass and push him," Lucas said. "He'll either lose it, or we'll pen him."

  There were four or five other cars on the roadway; there was still an hour before the morning traffic would start. After fifteen seconds, with the Porsche trailing by two hundred yards, the GTO crossed in front of a slower-moving Ford and swerved onto the shoulder lane.

  Immediately, the air was full of gravel; a small rock bounced off the Porsche's pristine hood, and Lucas groaned and said, "I'm gonna shoot your ass for that." He moved far left, and the GTO plowed along the shoulder lane for another ten seconds and then suddenly hooked into an upcoming exit.

  Del had time to say "Jesus" before Lucas cut across the highway and barely made the ramp approach. At the top, the GTO was moving way too fast to make the corner; the driver tried, but the big car slid out of control, hit a curb while skidding backwards, bounced across a bus bench, and spun sideways into the pump pad of an Amoco station. Lucas had both the brakes and the clutch pinned to the floor, bounced across the intersection, narrowly missed a flying piece of bus bench, and finally stopped in time to see a man humping out of the GTO. He was carrying a long gun, and was headed for the gas station.

  Lucas killed the engine, and he and Del were out on the street, Del still screaming into the phone. Through the plate-glass window of the station, they could see the GTO driver pointing his gun at a woman who had her hands over her head. But he was screaming at somebody else, and a moment later, the man inside the cashiers booth pushed the door open.

  The driver pushed the woman inside the booth and closed the door behind them all.

  In ten minutes, half of the on-duty Minneapolis police department was there. Lucas talked to the man in the booth by telephone: "We know who you are, Mr. Scott. You can't get out of there. I don't think you want to hurt yourself or those innocent people. That's not what you're all about."

  "I don't want to talk to you," Scott said.

  "We think it's best to keep the lines of communication open," Lucas began.

  "I want to talk to your negotiator."

  Lucas looked at the phone, unsure that he'd heard it right. But he had. "Whatever you say, Mr. Scott."

  The negotiations began just before seven o'clock. Because of Scott's fixation on a woman, Alie'e, somebody decided that they should try a woman negotiator first. That seemed to work. The negotiator and Scott had a friendly chat to establish trust, and then Scott listed his demands: a Northwest Airlines jet at the airport with enough fuel to get them to Cuba, or he'd start killing his hostages.

  "Aw, Jesus Christ," Lucas said. He went to look at the paint job on his Porsche.

  The TV trucks began showing up at 7:10; Rose Marie was there at 7:12, with Lester two seconds behind. "That the guy?" Lester asked, looking toward the gas station.

  "That's him," Lucas said. "You owe me some money for a Porsche paint job, by the way."

  "How're we gonna get him out of there?" Rose Marie asked.

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "He's locked in a bulletproof booth with about six hundred Cokes, a hundred pounds of corn chips and Hostess cupcakes, a thousand bucks' worth of cigarettes, and a TV."

  "Sounds like a good weekend," Lester said.


  "As long as he doesn't kill the hostages," Rose Marie said. She looked around at the line of TV trucks. "You think we could get any more coverage than this?"

  "I don't know. We might be missing the Russians or the Chinese, but that's about it," Lucas said.

  The negotiator was sweating. On the monitor, Scott was saying, "I know what you're doing. You're stalling. I'm not going to put up with it. I've seen this same deal twenty times; I know you're supposed to stall. But I'll tell you what: I know there are planes that fly out of here every day for Los Angeles and San Francisco and Hawaii, and any of those will get to Cuba. Don't give me any of that shit about reprogramming the computers or getting gas, let's just get me down to the airport and on the plane before I have to kill this lady here."

  "I think we got a problem," the negotiator said to Rose Marie.

  Del, standing next to Lucas, said, "More than one. Look at this."

  Jael Corbeau, trailed by three unhappy cops, was marching down the street toward them. A cop at the perimeter moved to stop her, but she pointed at Lucas, and Lucas said, "Aw, jeez," and waved her through.

  "That's him?" she asked. She was dressed in black from head to foot: a black woolen coat, black slacks, black boots, and small black pearls at her ears. She was luminous.

  "That's him. He's a guy from Burnt River named—"

  "Scott. Yeah, the guys told me. Martin Scott. So how're you gonna get him outa there?"

  The negotiator said, "Listen, he's gonna set a deadline, and I wouldn't be surprised if he did it. Killed the hostages. If he's suicidal…"

  "I don't think he's suicidal," Lucas said. "He's just nuts. He tried to cover his tracks on a couple of these things… I don't think he wanted to be caught."

  "Yeah, well, maybe. On the other hand, he may pop that woman," the negotiator said.

  Rose Marie said, "What do we do?"