Mortal Prey

26

The bride was blushing in white and big as a house, and finally said she had to go off to the bathroom to get the goddamn leg strap right. Sloan, Lucas's oldest friend on the police force, leered at her and said, "So you show a little leg. You're among friends."

She said, "Don't hold your breath, pervert-boy," and went off into the back, shouting over her shoulder, "And don't start without me."

Lucas, waiting at the back of the church, pulled at the collar of his dress shirt, plucked at his tie. Del had been in the-What'd he call it? The nave? The main part of the church-drinking what Lucas hoped was a cream soda. Now he came up and asked, "Nervous?"

"Of course I'm fuckin' nervous, what'd you think?" Lucas snapped. Then, quickly, "Sorry. I'm not sure this is gonna work out. I thought about it all night. I was one inch from canceling the whole thing." He looked at his watch and said, "One minute. Where's that fuckin' Marcy?"

Sloan said, "She just went down to the can," and Lucas said to Del, "I met this guy down in St. Louis who told me about this time he had to wear a tux and it kept dragging his Jockey shorts up the crack of his ass, and I swear to God, right now…"

Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police, went by and said, "I think I'm more nervous than you are."

Lucas grinned at her, a tight grin. "If I was losing my job next week, I'd be nervous too. What if something happens and queers the deal with the state?"

"One big lawsuit, that's what would happen."

Del prompted him, "The guy's shorts kept dragging up his ass…"

Lucas tried to pick it up, and said, "Yeah, and he said…"

Swanson, an old homicide dick, came by and said, "This is the most fucked-up wedding I've ever been to, and my wife's family is a bunch of Polacks."

"Thank God your wife isn't," Sloan said.

"Where in the fuck is the bride?" Lucas snarled.

Tom Black, a semicloseted gay homicide detective, came out of the nave and said, "Look at the women in there. They're having a great time. They're gonna be breaking out in fistfights."

"If you couldn't get laid at this wedding, you couldn't get laid," Del said. Then he glanced sideways at Rose Marie and said, "No offense."

"No problem," the chief said, taking a drag on a fresh Marlboro. "Cuts both ways."

"Where's that fuckin' Sherrill?" Lucas barked. "Christ… what?"

"Your earpiece is hanging down your neck," Sloan said.

"Thing is covered with somebody else's ear wax," Lucas said, looking at the earpiece. He plugged it in, and saw Marcy Sherrill coming.

"Where in the hell…?"

"Gun wasn't working out. I thought I'd hold it like this, like a little black clutch purse," she said, holding her revolver in both hands.

"Like you're gonna need that," Lucas said. Then he turned, and shouted into the nave. "All right, people, we're gonna do this. Everybody sit tight, unless you're part of the porch group."

Then, to the people gathered around him: "Everybody ready, porch people? Porch people? Let's do it. Reverend, lead the way."

Del put down the bottle of what Lucas hoped was cream soda, adjusted his choir robe, picked up a cigar box, which everybody agreed looked a lot like a Bible-the prayer books had been locked up by some mistake-and led the way through the church's double doors. Marcy, all in bridal white, her revolver clutched like a purse, put her arm through Lucas's arm, pulled it tight, and said, "I always dreamed of this day," and Lucas said, "Enjoy it while it lasts. Man, you look like fuckin' Moby Dick."

"You look a little like Shamu the killer whale, yourself," she said. "I think it's the black and white that does it."

The trouble in St. Louis seemed almost like a dream. Treena Ross had been indicted for her husband's murder, and the local cops had chased down every story of an injured woman that they could find. Three days after Ross went down, Lucas returned to the Twin Cities, and the whole episode drifted off into the past, another complicated memory, mostly bad.

Weather had been happy to get him back. The wedding planning had been completed, the invitations ordered, and the house had taken a big step toward completion. Getting through daily life pushed aside any speculation about Clara Rinker, though Lucas was careful not to pattern himself.

Clara, he thought, would come, sooner or later. He'd half expected her to call, as she had after their last collision, but she hadn't. The silence intensified his apprehension.

Rinker sat behind the wheel of the red Jeep Cherokee and looked across the valley at the front of the church, a half-mile away. A beautiful view, she thought, in the brilliant sunlight, with the pale blue skies: the white, New England… style village church sitting on the edge of the valley, surrounded by maple trees in blazing orange fall foliage, with strips of yellow aspen above and below the clutch of maple around the church.

A place to get married, she thought. They'd been in there for a while. She looked at her watch. Forty minutes, now. What were they doing? Maybe they'd written long vows or something.

As she was thinking that, the church doors popped open and a man stepped out into the sunshine, and then two more, a woman in white…

"Go," she grunted. She pulled the Cherokee out of the notch in the trees and turned down the narrow blacktopped street. There was another notch a hundred and fifty yards out from the front of the church, but on a busier street. She wouldn't have been able to wait. As it was, she was taking a risk. She'd wrapped the rifle in a blanket, and she'd simply pull over to the side of the road as if she were having a problem, and then she'd walk back into the line of bushes and take her shot and drop the rifle and go.

Her backup car was a half-mile away. She'd be in the second car and traveling in a few seconds more than one minute after she fired the shot. She'd timed it. She'd done all her research. She'd monitored the Star-Tribune on the Net, had found Davenport's wedding announcement, along with a couple of pieces in the local gossip columns. She'd confirmed it with the church, and then had scouted the church. And above the church, she found a sniper's nest, as though it had been created for that specific purpose.

The only little piece of dissonance was that she thought she remembered Davenport saying that the wedding would be in an Episcopalian church, and this one was a Lutheran. But maybe she mis-remembered. Besides, it had all been confirmed.

Now it was all coming together. The shooting point was just up ahead, a stand of oaks next to the guardrail over the valley. She jerked the car to the curb, hopped out, grabbed the blanket, and carried it past a bush to the steel barrier that overlooked the creek at the bottom of the slope. She could still be seen from the road, but again, she'd have to be unlucky…

She was moving fast now, looking at the penguins on the porch step, the guys in black and white, standing stiffly beside the woman in white at the center, and the priest.

She lifted the rifle and slipped the safety and pulled down on the porch.

Rinker never felt death coming for her.

She never felt pain, never saw a shining light leading her away.

Death came without a whisper, and she was gone.