Mortal Prey

27

Marcy reached up and tapped her earpiece and Lucas looked at her, irritated, and said, "It's not…" and then other radio people began shouting a weird mishmash of language. Everybody with an earpiece looked up at the valley wall into the notch and saw a green coat and then heard the shot, a hard, sharp WHAP.

Then silence, and then a lone man's voice in the earpiece, harsh but steady: "She's down. Rinker's down."

Lucas could hardly believe it. He gaped at the hole in the trees, the sniper's nest so carefully cultivated, and saw people running toward it, people with guns. Then Black began yelling something, and they all ran for their cars-or waddled, in the case of Lucas, Sherrill, and Del, who were wrapped in body armor.

Sloan drove Lucas's Tahoe, and Lucas, in the backseat, pulled off his jacket and shirt and struggled out of the armor. Marcy was saying, "Goddamnit, undo me, undo me."

Her dress was held on in the back with Velcro, and Lucas pulled it down and helped her out of the armor straps. Underneath it, she was wearing a T-shirt and shorts-anything more had made her look too big. She said, "Throw me my stuff," and Lucas tossed a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt to her, and pulled his own shirt back on.

Marcy said to Sloan, "Don't look," but Sloan looked anyway and said, "Hell, you've got underpants, they're no different than a swimming suit," and she said, "Yes, they are. They're intimate, and you looked, for which I will get you," and Sloan said, "Yeah, but if I didn't look, you'd be insulted."

"Shut up, everybody," Lucas grated. Marcy was about to come back with something snappy, but looked at his eyes and shut up and finished dressing, and Sloan drove.

They had to go almost a half-mile to cross the valley and the creek, then a half-mile back, to cover the hundred and forty-eight yards between the best shooting spot and the church's porch, where the wedding party had posed. Lucas was churning, both excited and sick, a strange dread that had settled over him when he first walked out on the church steps.

When they arrived at the road above the creek, a half-dozen St. Paul cops were clustered along the barrier, with two Minneapolis cops, including an Iowa kid who'd become the department's designated hitter. He was carrying a rifle over his shoulder, a personally modified Remington 7mm Magnum. He was a gun freak, the Iowa boy. Lucas might have worried about that peculiar interest if he wasn't a little bit that way himself.

They climbed out of the Tahoe, still tucking and buttoning, and Lucas walked toward the form of the redheaded woman on the ground, a small body in a Patagonia jacket and jeans, now absolutely still, a purple stain on the jacket between the shoulder blades. She looked very small and very quiet, he thought, like a poisoned chipmunk. The Iowa kid said, "I had to take her. She was moving too fast. If I'd waited one more second, she would have shot one of you guys."

"Okay," Lucas said. He squatted next to Rinker's face and took a good look.

"That's her," he said. He stood up. "That's her."

More people were arriving, to take a look. Black stuck out his hand, but Lucas pretended not to see it and moved away. Rose Marie clutched his upper arm, then let go. Del said, "Goddamn. Goddamn."

A few minutes after the shooting, Lucas's cell phone rang, and he plucked it out of his pocket and heard Mallard's voice: "She didn't show, did she?"

"Yeah, she did," Lucas said, looking back at the growing cluster around the body. "She's dead."

A long silence at the other end. Then Mallard, his voice hushed, asked, "You aren't joking?"

"No. She showed, right in the slot. We had no time to take her. Our sniper nailed her from up on the ridge. Single shot, center-of-mass, looks like it clipped her spine and heart."

More silence, then: "Oh, fuck." Silence, then: "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. She never got a shot off."

"That's not what I meant."

"Yeah, yeah. Listen, let me get back to you. We're still standing here, we got stuff…

Lucas was watching the crime-scene team when Marcy came up. Marcy liked to fight, but never looked happy around a body. She was shaking her head, but then she looked up, a questioning look crossing her face, and then she said, "Jesus, Lucas-you're all teared up. Are you okay?"

"Ah, it's just the fuckin' allergies or something," he said. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Man. Clara Rinker, huh? Clara Rinker."