Shadow Prey

by John Sandford

  “I wish we would hear from Billy,” said Sam Crow.

  “We know he’s there,” Aaron Crow said quietly.

  “But what’s he doing? Three days now, and nothing.”

  “You worry that he’s gone back to drinking. You shouldn’t, ’cause he hasn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  Sam nodded. When his cousin said he knew, he knew. “I’m worried about what’ll happen when he goes for the hit. The New York cops are good on a thing like this.”

  “Trust Billy,” said Aaron. Aaron was thin, but not frail: wiry, hard, like beef jerky. He had a hundred hard planes in his face, surrounding a high-ridged nose. His eyes were like black marbles. “He’s a smart one. He’ll do right.”

  “I hope so. If he’s caught right away, the television coverage will come and go too fast.” Sam had a broad face, with smile lines around a wide, soft chin. His hair was salt-and-pepper, his eyes deep and thoughtful. He had a belly, which bore down on a wide belt with a turquoise buckle.

  “Not if Leo moves. He should be in Oklahoma City tomorrow, if his car holds out,” said Aaron. “If the two . . . attacks . . . come right on top of each other, the TV’ll go nuts. And the letters are ready.”

  Sam paced down to the water’s edge, watched it for a moment, then turned and spoke back up the sand spit.

  “I still think the first two were a mistake. We wasted Bluebird, doing that second one. Those killings won’t have the impact we need . . . .”

  “We needed some low-risk attacks to start . . . .”

  “Wasn’t low-risk for Bluebird . . .”

  “We knew he might have a problem . . . but we had to set a tone. We had to make it a war. We can’t just have a couple of assassinations. We have to make the media think . . . War. We have to pump this motherfucker up. It has to be big, if we want to get . . .”

  “The Great Satan,” Sam snorted. “It’ll be for nothing if we can’t get him out here.”

  “It wouldn’t be for nothing—the ones we’ve already taken are bad enough. But he’ll come,” Aaron said confidently. “We know he comes out here. We know why. We know where. And we can get at him.”

  “No,” said Sam. “We know he used to come here. But maybe no more. He’s got the media watching. He wants to be president . . . . He’s careful . . . .”

  “But once he’s here, he won’t stay away. Not with the monkey he’s got on his back.”

  “Maybe,” said Sam. He thrust his hands into his pockets. “I still think the first two were bullshit killings.”

  “You’re wrong,” Aaron said flatly.

  Sam stared out at the water. “I don’t want to waste anybody, that’s all.” He bent, picked up a flat rock and tried to skip it across the river. Instead of skipping, it cut into the surface like a knife and was gone. “Shit,” he said.

  “You never were any good at that,” Aaron said. “You need more of a sidearm.”

  “How many times have you told me that?” Sam asked, hunting up another rock.

  “About a million.”

  Sam flipped the second rock out at the water. It hit and sank. He shook his head, thrust his hands back into his jean pockets, stood quietly for a moment, then turned to his cousin. “Have you talked to Shadow Love?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you still planning to send him to Bear Butte?”

  “Yeah. I want him out of here,” Aaron said.

  “Shadow Love is a weapon,” Sam Crow said.

  “He’s our kid.”

  “Every man comes to earth with a purpose. I’m quoting the famous Aaron Crow himself. Shadow Love is a weapon.”

  “I won’t use him,” said Aaron, walking down to the water’s edge to stand by his cousin.

  “Because he’s our kid,” Sam said. “Don’t let that fuck you up.”

  “It’s not that. The fact is, Shadow scares the shit out of me. That’s the real problem.” Aaron kicked off his battered sneakers and took a half-step so his toes were in the water. It felt cool and healing. “I fear for what we did to that boy, when we left him with Rosie. We had work to do, but . . . She wasn’t quite right, you know. She was a lovely woman, but she had some wrong things in her mind. You say we made a weapon. I think we made a crazy man.”

  “Remember, once, a Crazy Horse . . . ?”

  “Not the same. Crazy Horse loved a kind of life. A warrior life. Shadow’s not a warrior. He’s a killer. You’ve seen him; he hungers for pain and the power to create it.”

  The two men fell silent for a moment, listening to the water ripple past the sandbar. Then Aaron said, in a lighter tone, “How long before we fuck up, do you think?”

  Sam threw back his head and laughed. “Three weeks. Maybe a month.”

  “We’ll be dead, then,” Aaron said. He made it sound funny.

  “Maybe not. We could make it up to Canada. Sioux Valley. Hide out.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “What? You think we don’t have a chance? We’re just a couple of dead flatheads?” asked Sam.

  “People who do this kind of thing . . . don’t get away. They just don’t.” Aaron shrugged. “And there’s always the question, Should we try?”

  Sam ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “Exactly,” Aaron said, with a quick, barking laugh. “If we go down . . . it’d make the point. Everybody knows Sitting Bull, because he died. Everybody knows Crazy Horse, because he died. Who knows about Inkpaduta? He was maybe the greatest of them all, but he went to Canada and got old and died. Not many remember him now. We’re going to . . . war . . . to wake up the people. If we just sneak off, I don’t think that’ll be the same.”

  Sam shook his head but said nothing. He found another flat rock and sidearmed it at the water. It sank instantly. “Asshole,” he called after the rock.

  Aaron looked down at the sandbar at his cousin, sighed and said, “I’m going back to town with you. I hear too many voices tonight. I can’t handle it.”

  “You shouldn’t come here so often. Even I can feel them, groaning under the sand.” He made a brushing motion that took in the sandbar, the river and the hillside. The land around the island had once been a concentration camp. Hundreds of Sioux died in it, most of them women and children.

  “Come on,” Aaron said. “Let’s load the truck and get our ass out of here.”

  Billy Hood lay on the Jersey motel bed and stared at the ceiling. He’d made a preliminary reconnaissance, across the river into Manhattan, and concluded that he could do it. He could kill the man. The stone knife weighed on his chest.

  To cut a man’s throat . . . Hood’s own throat tightened. Last year, hunting out of Mille Lacs in central Minnesota, he’d taken a deer. He’d spotted it walking through a grove of birches, a tan wraith floating through the white-on-white of trees and snow. It had been a doe, but a big one. The .30- .30 had knocked it down and it hadn’t gotten up again. It hadn’t died, either. It had lain there on its side in the shallow snow, its feet making feeble running motions, its visible eye blinking up at him and his brother-in-law Roger.

  “Better cut her throat, brother,” Roger had said. Roger was smiling. Turned on? Feeling the power? “Put her out of her misery.”

  Hood had taken his hunting knife from its sheath, a knife he’d honed to a razor sharpness. He’d grabbed the doe by an ear and lifted its head and cut its throat with a quick, heavy slash. Blood had spurted out on the snow and the doe had kicked a few times, its eye still blinking up at him. Then the death film crossed it and the doe went.

  “It’s the only place you ever see red blood, you know?” Roger had said. “In the snow. You see blood out in the woods in the fall, or in the summer, it always looks black. Boy, in this snow, it sure does look red, don’t it?”

  Andretti’s blood would look black on the beige carpet of his office. That’s how far Hood had gotten on his recon run. Andretti was famous for his long hours. The hall all around his office was cl
osing down, but his “team” stayed on the job. Andretti called it a team. A photograph on an employee bulletin board outside his office showed Andretti and his staff gathered around a cake, wearing basketball jerseys. Andretti, of course, wore number 1.

  “Mother,” Hood said, closing his eyes to dream and maybe to pray. The stone pressed on his chest. Andretti’s blood would be black on the carpet. He would do it tomorrow, just after the hall closed.

  The night was dark and filled with visions, even in the suffocating motel room. Hood woke at one o’clock, and three, four and five. At six, he got up, weary but unable to sleep. He shaved, cleaned up, put on his best suit, feeling the stone weight around his neck, the small pistol in his pocket.

  He walked to the train station, caught a ride across the river, walked to Central Park. Checked the zoo and the Metropolitan Museum. Cruised the van Goghs and the Degas, lingered with the Renoirs and Monets. He liked the outdoor lushness of the Impressionists. His own country, out along the Missouri in South Dakota, was all brown and tan for most of the year. But there were times, in the spring, when you’d find small mudflats overflowing with wildflowers, where side creeks ran down to the river. He could peer at the Monets and smell the hot prairie spice of the black-eyed Susans . . . .

  It took forever for the time to come. When it did, he rode downtown on the subway, pinching out his emotions, one by one. Thinking back to his hours on Bear Butte, the arid, stoic beauty of the countryside. The distant scream of the Black Hills, raped by the whites who promoted each natural mystery with a chrome-yellow billboard.

  By the time he reached the hall, he felt as close to stone as he ever had. A few minutes before five, he walked into the hall and took the stairs to the fifth floor.

  Andretti’s welfare department took up twelve floors of the hall, but his personal office consisted of a suite of four rooms. Hood had calculated that six to eight people regularly worked in those rooms: Andretti and his secretary; a receptionist; three aides, one male and two female; and a couple of clerks on an irregular basis. The clerks and receptionist fled at five o’clock on the dot. He shouldn’t have more than five people to deal with.

  On the fifth floor, Hood checked the hallway, then walked quickly down to the public rest room. He entered one of the stalls, sat down and opened his shirt. The obsidian knife hung from his neck on a deerhide thong, taken from the doe killed the year before. He pulled the thong over his neck and slipped the knife into his left jacket pocket. The gun was in his right.

  Hood looked at his watch. Three minutes after five. He decided to wait a few more minutes and sat on the toilet, watching the second hand go ’round. The watch had cost twelve dollars, new. A Timex; his wife had bought it when it looked as if he might get a job with a state road crew. But the job had fallen through and all he had left was the Timex.

  When the Timex said 5:07, Hood stood up, his soul now as hard as the knife. The hallway was empty. He walked quickly down to Andretti’s office, looking to his right as he passed the main hall. A woman was waiting for the elevator. She glanced at him, then away. Hood continued to Andretti’s office, paused with his hand on the knob, then pushed it open. The receptionist had gone, but he heard laughter from the other side of the panel behind her desk.

  Putting his hand in his jacket pocket, on the gun, he stepped around the panel. Two of the aides, a man and a woman, were leaning on desks, talking. Through an open door, he could see Andretti, working in shirtsleeves behind a green goosenecked lamp. There was at least one more person in his office with him.

  When he came around the panel, the woman didn’t notice him for a moment, but the man saw him and frowned slightly. Then the woman turned her head and said, “I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

  Hood took his hand from his pocket, with the gun in it, and said, “Don’t say a word or make a sound. Just walk into Mr. Andretti’s office.”

  “Oh, no,” said the woman. The man clenched his fists and slipped off the desk.

  Hood pointed the gun at his head and said, “I don’t want to kill you, but I will. Now walk.” He had now moved out of Andretti’s line of sight. “Move,” he said.

  They moved reluctantly, toward Andretti’s office. “If you do anything, if you touch a door, if you say anything, I will shoot you,” Hood said quietly as they approached Andretti’s office.

  The man stepped inside, followed by the woman. Hood said, “Off to the side.” The man said, “Boss, we’ve got a problem.” Andretti looked up and said, “Oh, shit.”

  A woman was slumped in a chair in front of Andretti’s desk, her face caught in a smile which seeped away when she saw Hood; Hood thought the word seeped, because of the slowness with which it left. As though she didn’t want to disturb him. As though she wanted to think it was a joke.

  “Where’s the secretary?” Hood asked Andretti.

  “She went home early,” Andretti said. “Listen, my friend . . .”

  “Be quiet. We’ve got some business to do, but I have to arrange these people first. I don’t want them rushing me while we talk.”

  “If you’ve got a problem . . .”

  “I’ve got a problem, all right,” Hood interrupted. “It’s how to keep from shooting one of these people if they don’t do what I say. I want you to all lay down, facedown, on the rug against that wall.”

  “How do we know you won’t shoot us?”

  “Because I promise not to. I don’t want to hurt you. But I promise I will shoot you if you don’t get down on the floor.”

  “Do it,” Andretti ordered.

  The three backed away toward the wall, then sat down.

  “Roll over, facedown,” Hood said. They flattened themselves out, one of the women craning her neck to see him. “Look at the rug, lady, okay?”

  When they were staring at the rug, Hood moved slowly around Andretti’s desk. Andretti was a big man, and young; early thirties. No more than thirty-five.

  “Let me explain what I’m about to do, Mr. Andretti,” Hood said as he moved. He and Bluebird and the others had thought this out, and decided that lying would be best. “I’m going to put some cuffs on you and then I’m going to make some phone calls downtown on behalf of my people. I’m going to put the cuffs on because I don’t want you causing trouble. If everybody cooperates, nobody gets hurt. Do you understand?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand what you want.”

  “We’ll talk that out,” Hood said reassuringly. He was behind Andretti, and he reached out and touched him on the temple with the barrel of the pistol. “Put your hands behind your back, clasp them.”

  When Andretti had done that, Hood said, “Now, look straight back. No, arch your back and tilt your head back. I want to show you this before I do it.”

  “What?” Andretti asked, dropping his head straight back.

  “This,” Hood said. He’d changed the gun for the knife, caught Andretti’s hair in his left hand and slashed him with the stone, cutting deeper, much deeper, much fiercer, than he had with the doe.

  “Ahh,” he grunted as the blood spurted from Andretti’s neck. Andretti’s hands pounded on his desk and he began coughing, choking, looking for Hood. One of the women half sat, saw Andretti and screamed. Hood fired a single shot at her white face and she dropped down. He didn’t know whether he had hit her or not, but the man now rolled and the other woman began scrambling across the rug. Hood hollered “Stop” and fired a shot into the man’s back. The man arched and Hood was out the door, down the hallway and in the stairwell, running, the screams fading as doors closed.

  Gun in pocket, knife in pocket, first landing down. He looked at his hands. Clean. Looked at his pants. Clean. Blood on his shirt, a spot on his jacket. He pulled the jacket shut, third landing down. Ground floor. Into the lobby. Guard at the desk, looking up. Past the guard, into the street. Down a block. Into the subway. The token. Wait. Wait. Wait for running feet, shouts, cops, but nothing but the damp smell of the subway and the clatter of an app
roaching train.

  It took him an hour to get back to Jersey. A half-hour after that, he was in his car, heading west into the setting sun.

  In Oklahoma City, Leo Clark stood outside the federal courthouse and looked up. Scouting. The stone blade hung heavy around his neck.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Jennifer came out of the bathroom, still naked. She was tall, slender, small-breasted and blonde; she had dark eyebrows under her champagne bangs and blue eyes that sometimes, when she was angry, went the color of river ice. Lucas hooked her with his arm as she passed the bed, and pulled her stomach into his face.

  “That was nice,” he said. “We should do it more often.”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  Lucas nuzzled her stomach and she pushed his head away.

  “You’re messing with my flab.”

  “It’s all gone.”

  “No, it’s not.” Jennifer flipped on the room light, pushed the door shut and pirouetted in the full-length mirror mounted on the back. “I’ve got tummy-stretch and butt-hang. I can handle the butt. The tummy is tough.”

  “You goddamn yuppie women have the weirdest enthusiasms,” Lucas said lazily, lying back on the bed, watching her. “You look perfect.”

  She skipped past him, eluding his arm, and took a cotton nightgown off the dresser. “I can’t decide whether you’re just naturally full of shit or unnaturally horny,” she said as she slipped it over her head.

  Lucas shrugged, grinned and leaned back on the oversize pillow. “Whichever it is, it works. I get laid a lot.”