Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  "I like it," he said simply. He didn't smile. He'd been told that his smile sometimes frightened people.

  She seemed both embarrassed and pleased. "Leave your coat in the closet and your boots by the door. I just started cooking. Steak and shrimp. We'll both need heart bypasses if we eat it all."

  Lucas kicked off his boots and wandered through the living room in his stocking feet. He hadn't seen it in the dark, the night before, and in the morning he'd rushed out, thinking about Bergen....

  "How'd the operation go?" he called to her in the kitchen.

  "Fine. I had to pin some leg bones back together. Nasty, but not too complicated. This woman went up on her roof to push the snow off, and she fell off instead. Right onto the driveway. She hobbled around for almost four da s before y she came in, the damn fool. She wouldn't believe-the bone was broken until we showed her the X rays."

  'Huh." Silver picture frames stood on a couch table, with hand-colored photos of a man and woman, still young. Sailboats figured in half the photographs. Her parents. A small ebony grand piano sat in an alcove, top propped up, sheet music for Erroll Gamer's "Dreamy" on the music stand.

  He went back into the kitchen. Weather was wearing a dress, the first he'd seen her in, simple, soft-shouldered; she had a long, slender neck with a scattering of freckles along her spine. She said, smiling, "I'm going to make stuff so good it'll hurt your mouth."

  "Let me help," he said.

  She had him haul a grill from the basement to the back deck, which she'd partially shoveled off. He stacked it with charcoal and started it.

  At the same time she put a pot of water on the stove. A bag of oversized, already-shelled shrimp went into a colander, which she set aside. Herbs and a carton of buttermilk became salad dressing; a lump of cheese joined a pile of mushrooms, celery, walnuts, watercress, and apples on the cutting board. She began slicing.

  "I won't ask if you like mushrooms; you've got no choice," she said.

  "Ohget the wine going. It's supposed to breathe for a while."

  The outside temperature had been rising through the afternoon, and was now approaching zero. A breeze had sprung up and felt almost damp compared to the astringent dryness of the air at twenty below. Lucas put his boots back on and tended the charcoal; the cold felt good on his skin, taken only a few seconds at a time.

  The salad was tart and just right. The shrimp were killers.

  He ate a dozen of them, finally tearing himself away from the table long enough to put the steaks on.

  "I haven't eaten like this since... I don't know when.

  You must like cooking," Lucas said as he stood inside the glass doors, looking out at the grill.

  "I don't, really. I took a class at the high school called Five Good Things," she confessed. "That's what they taught me. How to make five good things. This is one of them."

  "That's a class I need," Lucas said, slipping back outside with a plate. The steaks were perfect, she said. Red inside, a little char on the outside.

  "No Mueller kid?" she asked.

  He shook his head, and the feel of the evening suddenly warped. "I can't think about it right now," he said.

  "Fine," she said hastily, picking up his mood. "It's a terrible business anyway."

  "Let me tell you a couple of things," he said. "But it can't go any further."

  "It won't."

  He outlined what had happened. The priest and the time problem, the homosexual question and Harper, the Schoeneckers' search.

  She listened solemnly and finally said, "I don't know Phil Bergen very well, but he never struck me as gay. The few times I've talked to him, he seemed almost shy. He was reacting to me."

  "Well, we don't know for sure," Lucas said. "But it would explain a lot."

  "So what's happening with the Schoeneckers?"

  "Carr's meeting with the sexual therapist right now to see if they can match any callsvith the Schoeneckers' kids-the kids never actually came in, but they get a lot of anonymous calls that never develop into anything.

  The calls are taped, so there might be something. And d71 we're checking credit cards, trying to find out where they are They just took off, supposedly to Florida."

  7 4* @Rlivp" :If all this is true, the town'll be a mess," Weather said.

  'The town'll handle it. I've seen this kind of thing happen before," Lucas said. "The big question is, how out-of-control is the killer?

  What is he doing?"

  "Hey, you'll give me nightmares," she said. "Eat, eat."

  Lucas gave up halfway through his steak and staggered off to an overstuffed couch in front of the fireplace. Weather put an ounce of cognac in each of two glasses, pulled open the drapes that covered the sliding glass doors to the deck, and dropped into an E-Z Boy that sat at right angles to the couch' They both put their feet on the scarred coffee table that ran the length of the couch.

  ::Blimp," Lucas said.

  Moi?" she said, raising an eyebrow.

  "No, me. Christ, if somebody dropped a dictionary on my gut, I'd blow up. Look at that." Lucas pointed out the doors, where a crescent moon was just edging up over the trees across the lake.

  "I feel like..." she started, looking out at the moon.

  "Like what?"

  "Like I'm starting out on an adventure."

  4ARA "I wish I was," Lucas said. "All I do is lay around."

  "Well, writing games... You said the money was pretty good.

  "Yeah, like you came up here to make a lot of money."

  "Not quite the same thing," she said.

  "Maybe not," Lucas said. "But I'd like to do something useful.

  That's what I'm finding out. When I was a cop, I was doing something.

  Now I'm just making money."

  "For now you're a cop again," she said.

  "For a couple of weeks."

  "How about going back to Minneapolis?"' "I've been thinking about it," Lucas said. He swirled his cognac in the glass, finished it. "I had a case last summer, in New York. Now this. I sometimes think I could make something out of it, just picking up work. But when I get real, I know it'll never happen. There's just not enough to do."

  "Ah, well... nobody said life'd get easier."

  "Yeah, but you always think it will," Lucas said. "The next thing you know, you're sixty-five and living in a rundown condo on Miami Beach, wondering how you're going to pay for your next set of false teeth."

  Weather burst out laughing and Lucas grinned in the dark, listening to her, delighted that he'd made her laugh.

  "The man is an incorrigible optimist," she said.

  They talked about people they knew in common, both in Grant and in the Cities.

  "Gene Climpt doesn't look like a tragedy, but he is," she told him.

  "He married his high school sweetheart right after he got in the Highway Patrol-he was in the patrol before Shelly, way back, this was when I was in junior high school. Anyway, they had a baby girl, a toddler. One day Gene's wife was running a bath for the baby, running just hot water and planning to cool it later, when the phone rang. She went to answer it, and the kid climbed on the toilet and leaned over the tub and fell in."

  "My God."

  "Yeah. She died from the scalding. Then, when Gene was at the funeral home, his wife shot herself. Killed herself. She couldn't stand the baby dying. They buried them both together."

  "Jesus. He never remarried?"

  She shook her head. "Nope. He's fooled around with a few women over the years, but nobody's ever got him.

  Quite a few tried."

  Weather had worked nights at St. Paul-Ramsey General for seven years while she was doing her surgical residency at the University of Minnesota, and knew eight or ten St. Paul cops. Did she like them?

  "Cops are like everybody else, some of them are nice -and some of them are assholes.

  They do have a tendency to hustle you," she said.

  "A hospital's a good place to hang around if you're on patrol, and if the person you've brought
in isn't a kid or your partner," Lucas said.

  "It's warm, you're safe, you can get free coffee. There are pretty women around. Most of the women you see, when you're working, are either victims or perpetrators. Nothing like having a good-looking woman tell you to stick your speeding ticket in your ass to chill off your day."

  "The y're right, cops should stick the tickets," Weather declared.

  "Yeah?"' He raised an eyebrow.

  "Yes. It always used to amaze me, seeing cops writing tickets. The Cities are coming apart; people are getting killed every night and you can't walk downtown without a panhandler extorting money out of you.

  And half the time when you see a cop, he's giving a ticket to some poor jerk who was going sixty-five in a fifty-five zone. The whole world is going by at sixty-five even while he's writing the ticket. I don't know why cops do it, it just makes everybody mad at them."

  "Sixty-five is breaking the law," Lucas said, tongue in cheek.

  "Oh, bullshit."

  "All right, it's bullshit."

  "Don't they have quotas for tickets?" she asked. "I mean, really?"

  "Well, yeah, but they don't call it that. They have performance standards. They say an on-the-ball patrolman should write about X number of tickets in a month. So a patrol guy gets to the end of the month and counts his tickets and says, 'Shit, I need ten more tickets."

  So he goes out to a speed trap and spends an hour getting his ten tickets." at's a quota."

  "Shhh. It's a hell of a lot more lucrative for the city than busting some dumb-ass junkie burglar." wouldn't tell me what the guy wanted, she was just too shy, and about fifteen minutes out of nursing school.

  It turned out he wanted his foreskin restored, He'd heard that sex felt better with a foreskin and he figured we could just take a stitch here and put a hem over there."

  Weather had a cop's sense of humor, Lucas decided, laughing, probably developed in the emergency room; someplace where the world got bad enough, often enough, that you learned to separate yourself from the bad news.

  "There's just a thimbleful of cognac left and I get it," Weather said, bouncing out of the chair.

  "You can have it," Lucas said.

  When she came back, she sat next to him on the couch, instead of in the chair, and put a hand behind his head, on his opposite shoulder.

  "You didn't drink hardly any of the wine. I drank two-thirds of the bottle, and now I'm finishing the cognac."

  "Fuck the cognac," Lucas said. "Wanna neck?"' "That's not very romantic," she said severely.

  "I know, but I'm nervous."

  "I still have a right to some romance," she said. "But yes, necking would be appropriate, I think."

  A while later she said, "I'm not going to be coy about this; I go for the aging jock-cop image."

  "Aging?"

  "You've got more gray than I do-that's aging," she said.

  "Mmmm."

  "But I'm not going to sleep with you yet," she said. "I'm gonna make you sweat for a while."

  "Whatever's right."

  After a while she asked, "So how do you feel about kids?"' "We gotta talk," he said.

  A the guest room was cool because of the northern exposure, a d Lucas put on pajamas before he crawled into the bed.

  n He lay awake for a few minutes, wondering if he should try her room, but he sensed that he should not. They'd ended the evening simply talking. When she left for her bedroom, She'd kissed him-he was sitting down--on the lips, and then the forehead, tousled his hair, and disappeared into the back of the house.

  "See you in the morning," she'd said.

  He was surprised when, almost asleep, he heard her voice beside the bed: "Lucas." Her hand touched his shoulder and s he whispered, "There's someone outside."

  "What?" He was instantly awake. She'd left a hallway light on in case he had to get up in the night to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, and he could see her squatting beside the bed. She was carrying the.22. He i pushed back the blankets and swung his feet to the floor.

  The.45 was sitting on the nightstand and he picked it up.

  "How do you know?"

  "I couldn't sleep right away."

  "Neither could L" "I've got a bath off my bedroom and I went for a glass of water. I saw a snowmobile headlight angling in toward the house from out on the lake. There's no trail that comes in like that.

  So I watched and the headlight went out-but I could see him in the moon, still coming. The neighbors have a roll-out dock and it's on their lawn. He stopped behind it, I think. They don't have a snowmobile. There's a windbreak down there, those pines. I didn't see him again."

  She was calm, reporting almost matter-of-factly.

  "How long ago?"

  "Two or three minutes. I kept watching, thinking I was crazy. Then I heard something on the siding, scratchinglike."

  "Sounds like trouble," Lucas said. He jacked a shell into the.45

  "What'll we do?" Weather asked.

  "Call in. Get some guys down here, on the lake and on the road. We don't want to scare him off before we can get things rolling."

  "There's a phone in my bedroom-c'mon," she said.

  She padded down the hall, Lucas following. "What else?"

  "He's got to find a place to get in, and that's gotta make some noise.

  I want you down by the kitchen, just listening.

  Stay behind the counter, on the floor. I'll be in the living room, by the couch. If you hear him, just sneak back and get me. Let's call."

  They were at her room and she picked up the phone.

  "Uh-oh," she said, looking at him. "It's dead. That's never happened.

  .

  "He took the wires out. God damnit, he's here," Lucas said. "Get on the kitchen floor. I..

  "What?"

  "I've got a handset in the truck." He looked at the garage door; it'd take him ten seconds.

  A loud knocking from the front room turned him around.

  "What?" whispered Weather. "That's the doors to the deck."

  "Stay back." Lucas slipped down the hall, stopped at a corner, peeked around it, saw nothing. They'd left the -curtains open so they could see the moon, but there was no visible movement on the deck outside the house, no face pressed against the glass. Nothing but a dark rectangle. The knocking started again, not as though someone were trying to force the door, but as if they were trying to wake up Weather.

  "Hey..." A man's voice, muffled by the tri-pane glass.

  "What?" Weather had stood up, and was walking through from the kitchen toward the living room.

  "Get the fuck down," Lucas whispered urgently, waving the pistol at her.

  "Get down."

  She hesitated, still standing, and Lucas scuttled across the room, caught her wrist in his left hand, pulled her down and toward a wall.

  "Somebody needs help," she said.

  "Bullshit: remember the phone," Lucas said. They both edged forward toward a corner.

  Another call, as if from a distance. "Hey in there. Hey, we got a wreck, we got a wreck," and there were three more knocks. Lucas let go of Weather's wrist and did a quick peek around the corner.

  "It can't be him-that's somebody looking for me," Weather said. She started past him, her white nightgown ghostly in the dim reflected light from the hall.

  "Jesus," said Lucas. He was sitting on the floor at the corner and reached up to catch her arm, but she stepped into the sightline from the deck, eight feet from the glass.

  The window exploded, showering the room with glass, and a finger of fire poked through at Weather. Lucas had already pulled her back and she came off her feet, sprawling , okay, and Lucas yelled, "Shotgun, shotgun..." and fired three quick shots through the door, pop-pop-pop and pulled back.

  The shotgun roared again, sending more glass flying across the room, pellets ripping through the end of the leather couch, burying themselves in the far wall. Lucas did a quick peek, then another, fired a fourth shot.

  Weather, on her hand
s and knees, lunged toward the kitchen, came up with the.22 rifle she'd left there, and started back.

  "Fucker!" she screamed.

  "Stay down, that's a twelve gauge," Lucas shouted.