John Sandford - Wicked Prey

Briar stepped away from him.

The ambulance pulled into the yard, its headlights sweeping across them, as the second cop, the one who'd gone down the hill, climbed back using his hands as well as his feet to keep his balance. Red-faced and out of breath, he said, "He's alive, but his head looks funny. He might have broken his neck."

One of the paramedics walked over from the ambulance and looked over the edge. "Holy cripes," she said. "Maybe we ought to come up from the bottom."

The second cop shook his head. "He's less than halfway down, and it's even steeper below him. Gotta hurry, guys, he's hurt."

The paramedics got a lightweight carry stretcher, a backboard, a cervical extrication collar, and safety straps, and went over the edge with the second cop.

The St. Paul cop with Lucas asked, "What are we doing here?"

Lucas shook his head: "Not my case. We picked up Briar earlier today'"

He told the cop about the scene at the motel, and the cop listened to it all, and then said, "What about your daughter?"

"I'm looking for her. She was down at the convention, but she was supposed to be home hours ago."

Lucas looked at Briar again, but Briar said, "We haven't seen her. Honest. Not since day before last."

"How do you know her?" the cop asked. "How's she involved?"

"She's not," Lucas and Briar said simultaneously.

Briar said, "She works for a TV station. She found me downtown. She wanted to interview me."

Lucas said to the cop, "She was trying to do a story on young ' prostitutes. For Channel Three."

"Oh, yeah," the cop said. "I know her-the good-looking blond chick."

"She's fourteen," Lucas said.

The cop was unembarrassed: good-looking is good-looking. "You a young prostitute?" he asked Briar. "I'm just a kid," she said.

Ranch, naked except for his Jockey shorts, dug his hand in his pants, scratched himself and said: "Some pretty good pussy, though."

Lucas and the cop both turned to him, and Lucas asked, "What'd you say?"

"Pretty ' uh…"

"They raped me," Briar said. "Or, Ranch did. I think."

"You think?" the cop asked. "You're not sure?"

"Does it count if they do it in your butt?"

The cop rubbed his forehead and said, "Yeah, that counts." He said to Ranch, "Turn around." Ranch, head bobbing, turned around, and the cop cuffed him. "Hey, dude, that's pretty fuckin' ' rude."

Briar said, "Randy made him do it."

Lucas's phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket and checked the number: Letty.

"Where the fuck are you?" he snarled, without preamble.

"I'm at the Capitol," she said. "I didn't realize how late it was. I'm sorry-I'm going home now."

"You're at the Capitol?" He wasn't sure he believed her.

"Yeah. I did some tape on some political kids here. For the weekend. Frat boys for Obama."

Lucas felt as though he were strangling: "You get home. Get home. Goddamnit, Letty…"

"I'm going," she said meekly.

Too meekly, Lucas thought, but she'd hung up, and he wouldn't call her back in the presence of the St. Paul cop.

"That was her?" Briar asked brightly.

"Yeah. She's at the Capitol," Lucas said.

"Glad she's okay," Briar said.

The cop shook his head, but didn't press. He had enough problems, without picking at one that seemed to have solved itself. You could ruin a perfectly good evening, he believed, with one extra ill-placed question. He stepped away, got on his radio, and said, "We need another ambulance and we're gonna need a rape kit at Regions, better alert them…"

Down below, the paramedics were thrashing through the trees. The first cop, with Lucas, began talking to Briar about what had happened that evening, and Briar couldn't get through it-couldn't think of what to say, other than that they were partying and that Randy had been crazy in his wheelchair, and she told him about how Ranch had made the crank pipe. The cop asked, "Mind if we look inside?"

Briar said, "No, go ahead."

Lucas, who'd been looking down into the hollow, smiled to himself: there were a bunch of ill-considered words, he thought, though the cop could probably go in anyway. Now, there was no problem at all-he'd been invited.

"I heard that," he said to the cop, turning toward them, and the cop nodded to him. Lucas was looking right at Briar's back, and in the thin flickering lights from the house, saw what looked like stripes across her dress; but he recognized blood when he saw it.

"Hey…"

The cop picked up the tone and looked toward him. "Check her back," Lucas said. "She's bleeding." Briar started to weep, and sidled away from them. "He didn't mean nothing by it," she said. "He didn't mean nothing."

The paramedics brought Whitcomb up out of the trees, strapped to the board, and hauled him to the ambulance and raced away toward the hospital. He moved not at all, though he appeared to be semiconscious.

The second cop watched them go, then turned to Lucas and said, "He's fucked. His neck is not right."

Lucas was about to comment when Ranch, who'd been standing, silently, a few feet away, fell over, unconscious. Because his hands were cuffed, he landed directly on his face. Lucas and the cop both flinched and glanced around, listening for a gunshot, then the cop crouched over Ranch and said, "He's breathing."

"Better call another meat wagon," Lucas said. He looked toward the house, where the first cop had taken Briar. He could hear Briar weeping again. "These people are messed up."

Lucas left the St. Paul cops to straighten it all out, called Shrake and was told that nothing was happening at the apartment; and that the armored car companies were being monitored. "They might be gone."

"Maybe," Lucas said. "But they lingered. Why did they linger?"

"What about the SWAT?"

Lucas looked at his watch: "Leave them for a while. I'm coming back, but I've got to talk to Letty first. Something weird is going on."

When he got back to the house, he was determined to stay calm. He did, somewhat to his own surprise, because Letty was apparently as confused about events as he was.

"You arrested her at a motel? What for? How did you know her?" Letty asked. "Did you arrest Randy?"

"I didn't even know she was involved with Randy," Lucas said. "How do you know Randy?"

"I only saw Randy once, when I was in a McDonald's with John and Jeff, the day they picked me up at the Capitol, when you gave me the twenty. I don't know what Randy wanted-I just thought Juliet would make a story."

"But you knew I'd been involved with Randy?"

"Yeah, later. I figured he might be coming after me to get back at you, but he was such a dummy, I decided that he really wasn't much of a threat."

"You were wrong about that," Lucas said. "He was a threat. People like that are always a threat, because they're nuts. But then ' you kept going back, didn't you?"

"Only to Juliet," Letty said. "I didn't mess with Randy. Did Jennifer tell you about the perverted mailman? That whole thing?"

"What perverted mailman?" Lucas asked. He looked at Weather, who was draped over a couch, looking at both of them with great skepticism. "Do you know about a mailman?"

"First I've heard about a perverted mailman," Weather said.

"But what about the motel?" Letty asked. "You arrested a possible assassin who Juliet was supposed to ' you know?"

"Let's go back to the mailman," Lucas said.

When they worked through it all, none of it seemed to make too much sense. Lucas finally said, "All right, this is all done, okay? Randy's hurt, and it's pretty bad-he's broken his neck, maybe. But you're all done with Randy and Juliet and I want a no-shit promise from you. I'm not pressuring you, I'm asking you: on our relationship, I'm asking you."