Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  Horseshit reproduction," Jones said, turning the paper in his hand.

  "This is like toilet paper."

  "in more ways than one," Carr said. "What about the story? Can you do something with it?"

  Jones was on his feet. "Oh, hell yes! The Russ Harper arrest is big.

  The AP'll want that, and I can string it down to Milwaukee and St. Paul. Sure. People are so freaked out I've been talking to old man Donohue..."

  Climpt said to Lucas, "Donohue owns the paper."

  "... about putting out an extra. With Johnny Mueller and now this, I'll talk to him tonight, see if we can get it out Sunday morning.

  I'll need the arrest reports on Russ."

  "Got them right here," Carr said, passing him some Xeroxed copies of the arrest log.

  "Thanks. Whether or not Donohue goes with the extra, we'll have it on the radio in half an hour. It'll be all over town in an hour."

  When Jones had gone, Carr leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and said, 'Think we'll shake something loose?"

  "Something," Lucas said.

  CHAPTER 16

  Weather Karkinnen threw her scrub suit into the laundry rack and stepped into the shower. Her nipples felt sore and she scratched at them, wondering, then realized. beard burn.

  Davenport hadn't shaved for an entire day when she attacked him in the bathtub, and he had a beard like a porcupine.

  She laughed at herself- she hadn't felt so alive in years.

  Lucas had been an energetic lover, but also, at times, strangely soft, as though he were afraid he might hurt her.

  The combination was irresistible. She thought about the tub again as she dried off with one of the rough hospital towels: that was the most contrived entrance she'd ever engineered.

  The bottle of wine, the robe slipping off...

  She laughed aloud, her laughter echoing off the tiles of the surgeons' locker room.

  She left, hurrying: almost six-thirty. Lucas said he'd be done with Harper by six or seven. Maybe they could drive over to Hayward for dinner, or one of those places off Teal Lake or Lost Land Lake. Good restaurants ver there.

  As she left the locker room, she stopped at the nurses' station to get the final list for the morning. Civilians sometimes thought surgeons worked every week or two, after an exhaustive study of the patient.

  More often, they worked every day, and sometimes two or three times a day, with little interaction with the patient at all. Weather was building a reputation in the North Woods, and now had referrals from all the adjoining counties. Sometimes she thought it was a conspiracy by the referring docs to keep her busy, to pin her down.

  ... Charlie Denning, fixing his toe," she said. "He can hardly walk, so you'll have to get a wheelchair out to his car. His wife is bringing him in."

  As they went through it, she was aware that the charge nurse kept checking her, a small smile on her face. Everybody knew that Lucas was staying at her house in some capacity, and Weather suspected that a few of the nurses had, during the day, figured out the capacity. She didn't care.

  probably gonna have to clean her up, and I want the whole area shaved.

  I doubt that she did a very good job of it, she's pretty old and I'm not sure how clearly I was getting through to her."

  The charge nurse's family had been friends of her family, though the nurse was ten years older. Still, they were friends, and when Weather finished with the work list, she started for the door, then turned and said, "Is it that obvious?"

  "Pretty obvious," the nurse said. "The other girls say he's a well-set-up man, the ones who have seen him."

  Weather laughed. "My God-small towns, I love 'em."

  She started away again. The nurse called, "Don't wear him out, Doctor," and as she went out the door, Weather was still laughing.

  zqg -i'@negip ram- Her escort was a surly, heavyset deputy named Arne Bruun.

  He'd been two years behind her in high school. He'd been president of the Young Republicans Club and allegedly had K now drifted so far to the right that the Republicans wouldn't have him. He stood up when she walked into the lobby, rolled a copy of Guns and Ammo, and stuck it in his coat pocket.

  "Ready to roll?" He was pleasant enough but had the strong jaw-muscle complex of a marginal paranoid.

  "Ready to roll," she said.

  He went through the door first, looked around, waved her on, and they walked together to the parking lot. The days were beginning to lengthen, but it was fully dark, and the thermometer had crashed again.

  The Indians called it the Moon of the Falling Cold.

  Bruun unlocked the passenger door of the Suburban, let her climb up, shut it behind her, and walked around the nose of the truck. The hospital was on the south edge of town; Weather lived on the north side. The quickest route to her home was down the frontage road along Highway 77 to Buhler's Road, and across the highway at the light, avoiding the traffic of Main Street.

  "Gettin' cold again," Bruun said as he climbed into the truck cab.

  Following Carr's instructions, she'd called for a lift home. Bruun had been on patrol, and had waited in the lobby for only a few minutes: the truck was still warm inside. "If it gets much worse, there won't be any deer alive next year. Or anything else."

  "I understand they're gonna truck in hay."

  They were talking about the haylift when she saw the snowmobile on the side of the road. The rider was kneeling beside it, working on it, fifteen feet from the stop sign for Buhler's Road. There was a trail beside the road, and sleds broke down all the time. But something caught her attention; the man beside it looked down toward them while his hands continued working.

  "Sled broke down," she said.

  Bruun was already watching it. "Yup." He touched the brake to slow for the stop sign. They were almost on top of the sled. Weather watched it, watched it. The Suburban was rolling to a stop, just past the sled, the headlights reflecting off the snowbanks, back on the rider. She saw him stand up, saw the gun come out, saw him running toward her window.

  "Gun," she screamed. "He's got...

  She dropped in the seat and Bruun hit the gas and the window six inches above her head exploded and Bruun shrieked with pain, jerked the steering wheel. The truck skidded, lurched, came around, and the rear window shattered over her, as though somebody had hit it with a hammer.

  Weather looked to her left; Bruun's head and face were covered with blood, and he crouched over the N N1, wheel, the truck still sliding in a circle, engine screaming, i tires screeching...

  Me The shotgun roared again: she heard it this time, the first time she'd heard it. And heard the shot pecking at the door by her elbow.

  Bruun grunted, stayed with the wheel... they all, M -W were running now, the truck bumping...

  ONN R 40@_ "Gotta get back, gotta get.. Bruun groaned. Weather, ___1

  WIN J, sensing the speed, pushed herself up in the seat. The side.0 window was gone, but the mirror was still there. The rider V, was on the sled, coming after them, and she flashed to the night of the murders, the sled running in the ditch...

  They were passing a tree farm on the road back to the hospital parking lot, the straight, regimented rows of pine flashing by like a black picket fence.

  "No, no," she said. Heart in her throat. Looked into the mirror, the sled closing, closing...

  "Gun coming up!" she shouted at Bruun.

  Bruun put his head down and Weather slid to the floor.

  Two quick shots, almost lost in the roar of the engine, pellets hammering through the shattered back window into the cab, another shot crashing through the back window into the windshield, ricocheting.

  Bruun groaned again and said, "Hit, I'm hit."

  But he kept his foot on the pedal and the speed went up.

  The shotgun was silent. Weather sat higher, looking out the shattered side window, then out the back.

  The road was empty. "He's gone," she said.

  Bruun's chin was almost on the hub of the wheel. "H
old on," he grated.

  He hit the brake, but too late.

  The entrance to the hospital parking lot was not straight i The entry road went sharply right, specifically to slow n.

  incoming traffic. They were there-and they were going' much too fast to make the turn. Weather braced herself, locking her arms against the dashboard. A small flower garden was buried under the snow where they'd hit. There was a foot-high wall around it -_..

  The truck fishtailed when Bruun hit the brake, and then hit the flower-garden wall. The truck bounced, twisting, plowing through the snow, engine whining...

  There were people in the parking lot.

  She saw them clearly, sharply, frozen, like the face of the queen of hearts when somebody riffles a deck of cards.

  Then the truck was in the parking lot, moving sideways.

  It hit a snowbank and rolled onto its side, almost as if it had been tripped. She felt it going, grabbed the door handle, tried to hold on, felt the door handle wrench away from her, fell, felt the softness of the deputy beneath her... Heard Bruun screaming...

  And finally it stopped.

  She'd lost track of anything but the sensations of impact.

  But she was alive, sitting on top of Bruun. She looked to her left, through the cracked windshield, saw legs...

  Voices. "Stay there, stay there..

  And she thought: Fire.

  She could smell it, feel it. She'd worked in a burn unit, wanted nothing to do with burns. She pulled herself up, carefully avoiding Bruun, who was alive, holding himself, moaning, "Oh boy, oh boy..."

  She unlocked the passenger-side door, tried to push it open. It moved a few inches. More voices. Shouting.

  Faces at the windshield, then somebody on top. A man looked in the side window: Robbie, the night-orderly bodybuilder , who she'd not-very-secretly made fun of because of his hobby. Now he pried the door open with sheer strength, and she'd never been so happy to see a muscleman. He was scared for her: "Are you all right, Doctor?"

  "Snowmobile," she said. "Where's the man on the snowmobile ?"

  The body-builder looked up over into the group of people still gathering, and, puzzled, asked, "Who?"

  Weather sat on the edge of the hospital bed in her scrub suit.

  Her left arm and leg were bruised, and she had three small cuts on the back of her left hand, none requiring stitches. No apparent internal injuries. Bruun was in the recovery room.

  She'd taken pellets out of his arm and chest cavity.

  "You're gonna hurt like a sonofagun tomorrow," said Rice, the GP who'd come to look at her, and later assisted in the operation on Bruun.

  "You can bet on it. Take a bunch of ibuprofen before you go to bed.

  And don't do anything too strenuous tonight." His face was solemn, but his eyes flicked at Lucas.

  "Yeah, yeah-take off," Weather said.

  "Does everybody know?" Lucas asked when Rice had gone.

  I imagine there're a few Christian-school children that the secret's been kept from," Weather said.

  "Mmmm.

  "So what'd you find?" she asked.

  -Just that you oughta be dead. Again. You would be if Bruun hadn't kept the truck rolling."

  "And the asshole got away.?"

  "Yeah. He waited in the trees by the stop sign until he saw you coming. After he fired the first shots, he followed you down the road to the spot where the power line cuts through the tree farm and then cut off through the trees.

  There was no chance of following him unless we'd been right there with a sled. He must've counted on that. He did a pretty good job setting it up. If Bruun had stuck the truck in the ditch, he'd of finished you off, no problem."

  "Why didn't he shoot me through the door?"

  "He tried," Lucas said. "Sometimes a double-ought pellet will make it through a car door, but most of the time it won't. Three went all the way through. One hit Bruun and the other two hit the dashboard. And we think Bruun got the arm hit through the broken window."

  "Jesus," she said. She looked at Lucas. He was leaning against an exam table, his arms folded across his chest, his voice calm, almost sleepy.

  He might have been talking about a ball game. "You're not pissed enough," she said.

  Lucas had come in just before she'd gone into the operating room, and waited. Hadn't touched her. Just watched her. She got down from the examination table, winced. Rice was right. She'd be, sore.

  "I was thinking all the way over here that I'm just too fuckin' vain and it almost caught up to me," Lucas said.

  He pushed away from the exam table and caught a fistful of hair at the back of her head, squeezed it, held her by the hair, head tipped up.

  "I want you the fuck out of here," he said angrily. "You're not gonna get hurt. You understand that? You're..."

  "Why are you vain?" She'd grabbed his shirtfront with both hands, held on. Their faces were four inches apart, and they rocked back and forth.

  He stopped, still holding her hair. "Because I thought he was coming after you because of me. I thought he went after the Mueller kid because of me."

  "He didn't?"

  "No. It's you he wants. You know him or you know something about him.

  Or he thinks you do. You don't know what it is, but he does."

  She said, "Another snowmobile ran alongside my Jeep when I was coming back from the LaCourts' house, on the first night. I thought he was crazy."

  "You didn't tell me."

  "I didn't know."

  He let go of her hair and put his arm around her shoulder, squeezed her, careful about her left arm. She squeezed with her right arm, then Lucas stepped back, took out his wallet, unfolded the photograph he'd stuck there.

  "You know this fat man," he said. "He tried to kill you again. Who is he?"

  "I don't know." She stared at the photo. "I don't have the foggiest."

  CHAPTER 17

  The priest said, "I'm okay, Joe. Seriously."

  He stood in the hall between the kitchen and the bedroom.

  He was grateful for the call and at the same time resented it: he should be doing the ministering.

  j A "I had a decent day," he said, his head bobbing. "You know all the talk about me and the LaCourts-I was afraid to say anything that might make it worse. It was driving me crazy. But I found a way to handle it."

  His tongue felt like sandpaper, from sucking on lemon drops. He'd gone through two dozen large sacks the last time he went off booze. He was now working his way through the first of what might be several more.

  Joe was talking about one day at a time, and Bergen only half listened.

  When he'd gone off booze the year before, he hadn't really wanted to quit. He'd simply had to. He was losing his parish and he was dying.

  So he'd gone sober, he'd stopped dying, he'd gotten the parish back.

  That hadn't cured the problems for which bourbon was medication: the loneliness, the isolation, the troubles pressed upon him, for which he had no real answers. The drift in the faith.

  This time he'd sat down to write an excuse for himself, a pitiful plea for understanding. Instead, he'd written the strongest lines of his life. From the reaction he'd gotten at the Mass that morning, he'd gotten through. He'd touched the parishioners and they'd touched him.

  He felt the isolation crumble; saw the possibility of an end to his loneliness.

  He might, he thought, be cured. Dangerous thought. He'd suck the lemon drops anyway. Better safe...

  I won't be going out. I swear. Joe, things have changed. I've got something to do. Okay... And thanks."

  The priest dropped the receiver back on the hook, sighed, and returned to his work chair. He wrote on a Zeos 386 computer, hammering down the words.

  There Is a devil among us - And somebody here in this church may know who it is.

  (He would look around at this point, touching the eyes of A each and every person in the church, exploiting the silence, allowing the stress to build.) The murders of the LaCourt fa
mily must spring from deep in a man's 4 tortured character, deep in a man's dirty heart. Ask yourself: Do I know this man? Do I suspect who he might be?

  Deep in my heart do I believe?

  He worked for an hour, read through what he had. Excellent. He picked up the papers, carried them to his bedroom, and faced the full-length dressing mirror.