John Sandford - Hidden Prey

The sniper was running down the hill with his rifle, and Lucas yelled to the radio guy, "Call an ambulance, tell them we need an ambulance…"

He pushed Carl down, the kid moaning in pain, checked his belt for a gun, found nothing, picked up the rifle, carried it out of arm's reach, and put it down again.

The sniper had stopped and was talking into his shoulder microphone; Wolfe was in the woods, standing, looking down at them. Another deputy was running in from the other side of the house.

Carl started crying. He looked very young, lying on the ground, with his slender blond face and pink cheeks. Lucas bent over him and asked, "Where are you hit, where are you hit?" and Carl began stuttering incoherently. The sniper came up and said, "I tried to take him in the butt. I was sure he was going to get you."

"Okay," Lucas said. "Help me roll him."

Another deputy came up, and Wolfe, and then the third deputy, and they rolled Carl up on one hip and Lucas saw the blood soaking into his jeans. "Let's get his jeans off, make sure it's not arterial."

Nadya helped, held Carl's hand, and Lucas noticed that she was bleeding; she had three or four small cuts on her face. She said to Carl, "You will be okay, you will be okay," and stroked his hair as a mother would.

The single, copper-jacketed bullet had penetrated the top of Carl's left buttock, angling down, then went through his right buttock and exited. Blood was flowing from all four wounds, but the flow wasn't too heavy. "I got a first-aid kit in the car; I'll bring it over," one of the deputies said. He left his rifle behind and ran off through the woods for the cars.

"Am I gonna die?" Carl asked.

"No, but you're gonna spend some time in the hospital," Lucas said. "Hell of a lot better than what you did to Oleshev or Jerry Reasons."

Carl, in pain, opened his mouth to say something, then a light came on in his eyes and he looked at Lucas and said, "I want a lawyer."

"Fuck you," Lucas said. He stood up and said to Nadya, "What happened to you? Let me look."

She stood up and Lucas took her chin between two fingers, turned her face. "You have four small cuts, probably from glass. There may still be glass… here. Here's a piece." He could see a small sliver of glass protruding from one of the cuts. He caught it between the fingernails of his two index fingers, and lifted it out. Blood tricked down her face. "That's what happens when you don't behave."

"Bad?" she asked.

"Nah. You might have to have some glass picked out, but nobody'll even see the cuts after they heal up. You'll still be gorgeous."

He looked back at the kid, and Nadya walked away, back into the garage and behind the car. He turned back in time to see her pick up a long, thin piece of glass from the car's trunk. "Careful with that…" he called.

She fit it between two fingers and then lightly slapped herself twice on the forehead. Blood trickled from two long new cuts, running across her fair skin into her eyebrows.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"Politics," she said.

The ambulance took a full half hour to get to the shooting scene. Carl had slipped into shock, and while the wounds were serious, they weren't life threatening, an EMT told them-Carl was young, in good shape, and should recover quickly. Before they took off in the ambulance, the EMT looked at Nadya's face, and found one additional small shard of glass, which he removed with a pair of tweezers.

When he'd finished, Nadya asked Lucas to take a picture of her with the blood on her face: "This I can use," she said. She posed next to the ambulance, with Carl's feet visible on a gurney, her face smeared with blood.

Two days later, she was gone. Lucas dropped her at Minneapolis-St. Paul International, and said, "Well: it's been real."

"What is this 'real'?"

"I mean, it's been interesting."

"I think I have been a pain in your ass," she said, smiling at him.

"Ah, well…"

"I'm so sorry about Jerry…" Her smile disappeared. "This will not go away."

"Nothing you could do. You did nothing wrong-except run into a crazy kid."

"Who thought he was working for Mother Russia." They were coming up to the security screening, and she sighed, stood on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek. "If you ever come to Russia…"

"Right."

She smiled again. "I know-you won't. But if you do…" She patted him on the chest. "Say good-bye to Weather for me. I like her very much. And I think she has a very good husband."

The day after that, he'd gotten comfortable with his couch again.

He was lying on it, reading GQ, an article about a specially spun wool used by an Italian tailor, for suits that cost six thousand dollars. He would not pay six thousand dollars for a suit under any conditions, he decided. Well. It'd have to be a really good suit.

He was reading about bespoke shoes when heard a car enter the driveway, and then a quick beep on a horn. He'd been waiting for it. He dropped the magazine, rolled off the couch, and headed out the front door. Weather was there, standing back, looking at her new red BMW 330 sedan. "It's not as good-looking as the Prelude," she fretted.

"It's better-looking than the Prelude," Lucas said, walking around the car. "It's just different."

"More practical," she said. "All-wheel drive and you can carry more stuff."

"I got your practical right here," Lucas said. "You don't buy a forty-thousand-dollar car to haul celery." He patted the car on the ass. "You buy it because it's an artwork. Just don't drive it through the fuckin' garage door."

She looked at the new garage door, then said, "What about Carl?"

When they'd gotten Carl to the hospital, an examination showed that a piece of the bullet jacket had fragmented off and had ripped into his sphincter muscle. That could have been serious, but a delicate operation had removed the remains of the bullet and had repaired the damage to the muscle.

"I talked to the doc about an hour ago-everything went fine. He won't be running for a while."

"Thirty years, if you have anything to say about it."

"The little asshole killed Jerry Reasons," Lucas said. "And the Russian. I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for him."

"Good-looking guy, though," Weather said. She turned back to her car. "Would blue have been better?"

A few more days went by. Weather began driving the new BMW into the driveway at fifty miles an hour, and Del got surveillance on the McDonald's truck deliveries.

The St. Louis County attorney announced that the grand jury had indicted Carl Walther on charges of first-degree murder in the killings of both Rodion Oleshev and Jerry Reasons. The feds indicted Anthony Spivak on espionage charges, and the county attorney dropped charges of accessory to murder, saying that they were redundant in light of the federal charges. In fact, he seemed pleased to get out from under the Spivak case.

Lucas heard from Harmon, unofficially, that Janet Walther was willing to talk about the espionage ring if she could make a deal for Carl.

The deal would be a tough one, though: the Duluth cops were convinced that Carl had killed Jerry Reasons, and they wanted him put away. The only problem was that they had little evidence, other than Lucas's story of chasing a man up and down the hills, and some general descriptions from the women behind the hotel desk.

On the other hand, the blood from the switchblade definitely was Carl Walther's, and Carl had definitely gone to the emergency room the night Oleshev was murdered, within a couple of hours of the murder taking place.

Carl claimed that the cut on his arm had come from a broken window in Grandpa's basement. The feds, as it happened, had spotted and processed the window, and confirmed that the blood was in fact Carl's.