Secret Prey

THREE

The four surviving hunters sat on the porch in the afternoon sunlight, in rustic wooden chairs with peeling bark and waterproof plastic seat cushions. They all had cups of microwaved coffee: Wilson McDonald’s was fortified with two ounces of brandy. James T. Bone sat politely downwind of the others, smoking a cheroot.

The sheriff’s investigator perched on a stool at the other end of the porch, like the class dummy, looking away from them. If one of the bankers suddenly broke for the woods, what was he supposed to do? Shoot him? But the sheriff had told him to keep an eye on them. What’d that mean?

And the bankers were annoyed, and their annoyance was not something his worn nerves could deal with. He could handle trailer-home fights and farm kids hustling toot, but people who’d gone to Harvard, who drove Lincoln and Lexus sport-utes and wore eight-hundred-dollar apre`s-hunt tweed jackets, undoubtedly woven by licensed leprechauns in the Auld Country-well, they made him nervous. Especially when one of them might be a killer.

"Davenport is the bad dog,"Bone said from downwind, as they watched Krause lead his parade down through the woods toward the cabin. He bit off a sixteenth-inch of the cheroot and spit it out into the fescue at the bottom of the porch. "He oughta be able to tell us something."

"Mean sonofabitch, by reputation," O’Dell said. She said it casually, looking through the steam of the coffee. She wasn’t impressed. She was surrounded by mean sonsofbitches. She might even be one herself.

"Just another c-cop," Robles stuttered. Robles was scared: they could smell it on him. They liked it. Robles was the macho killer, and his fear was oddly pleasing.

"I talked to him a couple of times on the transfers with his IPO-you all know he used to be Davenport Simulations?" Bone said. They all nodded; that was the kind of thing they all knew. "He sold the company to management and walked with better’n ten, AT." He meant ten million dollars, after taxes.

"So why doesn’t he quit and move to Palm Springs?" Robles asked.

" ’Cause he likes what he does," Bone said.

"I wish he’d get his bureaucratic ass down here and do what we have to do; I wanna get back to town," McDonald grumbled. Back to a nice smooth single-malt; but he’d stay here as long as the others did. Sooner or later, they’d start talking about who’d be running the bank. "No point in keeping us here. We’ve told them everything we know."

"Unless one of us killed him," Bone said lazily.

"Gotta be an accident," Robles said, nervously. " Opening day of deer season… I bet there’re twenty of them. Accidents."

"No, there aren’t," Bone said. "There are usually one or two, and most of the time, they know on the spot who did the shooting."

"Besides, it wasn’t an accident," O’Dell said positively.

"How do you know?" McDonald asked. He finished the loaded coffee and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. He could use another.

"Maybe she did it," Robles said. He tried to laugh, but instead made a small squeaking noise, a titter.

O’Dell ignored him. "Karma’s wrong for an accident," she said.

"Great: we’re talking karma," McDonald said. " Superstitious hippie nonsense."

Bone slumped a little lower in his chair and a thin grin slipped across his dry face: "But she’s right," he said. "Dan was a half-mile onto his own property. Who’s going to shoot him through the heart from more’n half a mile away? Nope. I figure it was one of us. We all had guns and good reasons."

"Bullshit," McDonald said.

As they watched the parade approaching, O’Dell said, "We should decide who’ll speak for the bank. The board’ll have to appoint a CEO, but somebody should take over for the moment. Somebody in top management."

"I thought Wilson might do it-until a decision is made on a CEO," Bone said. He looked over at Wilson Mc-Donald, whose eyes went flat, hiding any reaction; and past him at O’Dell. The top job, Bone thought, would go either to himself or O’Dell, unless the board did something weird. Robles didn’t have the background, McDonald wasn’t smart or skilled enough. "If you think so," McDonald said carefully. This was the moment he’d been waiting for.

O’Dell had done her calculations as well as Bone, and she nodded. "Then you’ve got it," she said. She put her battered hunting boots up on the porch railing and looked past McDonald at Bone: "Until the police figure out if one of us did it. And the board has a chance to meet."

After a moment’s silence, Robles said, "My gun wasn’t fired."

Bone rolled his eyes up to the heavens: "I’ll tell you what, Terry. It would take me about three seconds to figure a way to kill Kresge and walk out of the woods with a clean weapon." He took a final drag on the cheroot, dropped the stub end on the porch, ground it out with his boot, and flipped it out into the yard with his toe. "No sir: I figure a fired weapon is purely proof of innocence."

He was breaking Robles’s balls. Bone and O’Dell had the two dirty rifles, while McDonald and Robles were clean. Usually, Bone wouldn’t have bothered: Robles wasn’t much sport. But Bone was in a mood. Davenport and the others were dropping the last few yards down the trail to the clearing around the house, and Bone muttered to the others, "Bad dog."

Lucas led the parade up the porch steps, with Krause and Sloan just behind, and the four bankers all stood up to meet them. Lucas recognized Bone and nodded: "Mr. Bone," he said. "Did Sally get the Spanish credit?"

Bone’s forehead wrinkled for a second; then he remembered and nodded, smiling: "Sure did. She graduated in June… Are you running things here?"

"No, I was just about to leave, in fact. Sheriff Krause runs things up here. We’ll be cooperating down in Minneapolis, if he needs the backup."

"So why did you come up?" O’Dell asked. She put a little wood-rasp in her voice, a little annoyance, so he’d understand her status here.

Lucas grinned at her, mild-voiced and friendly: "Mr. Kresge carried a lot of clout in Minneapolis, so it’s possible the motive for the shooting will be found there. Quite possibly with the bank, from what I hear about this merger. Detective Sloan"-Lucas looked at Sloan, who raised a hand in greeting-"has been assigned to help Sheriff Krause with his interviews, so we can get you folks on your way home."

"Are you's-s-sure it wasn’t an accident?" Robles stuttered.

Lucas shook his head and Krause said, "He was murdered."

"So that’s it," O’Dell said, and the bankers all looked at each other for a moment, and then Bone broke the silence: "Damn it. That’ll tangle things up."

McDonald, ignoring Krause, asked Lucas, "Do you think… one of us…?"

Lucas looked at Krause. "We have no reason to think so, in particular. Since we know you were here, we’ve got to talk to you," Krause said. "But we’ve got no suspects."

Sloan suggested that he would prefer to talk to the four of them individually, inside, while the others waited on the porch. "Nice day, anyway," he said, pleasantly. "And it shouldn’t take long."

"Let me go first," McDonald grunted, pushing up from his chair. "I want to get back and start talking to the PR people. We’ll need a press release ASAP. God, what a disaster."

"Fine," Sloan said. He turned to Lucas: "You gonna take off?"

"Yeah. The sheriff’ll send you back with a deputy."

"See you later then," Sloan said. "Mr. McDonald?"

McDonald followed Sloan and Krause into the cabin. When they’d gone, Bone said to Lucas, "I’d feel better about this if you were running things."

"Krause is a pretty sharp cookie, I think," Lucas said. "He’ll take care of it."

"Still, it’s not something where you want a mistake made," Bone said. "A murder, I mean-when you’re a suspect, but you’re innocent."

"I appreciate that," Lucas said. He glanced at the other two, then took a card case from his jacket pocket, extracted four business cards and passed them around. "If any of you need any information about the course of the investigation, or need any help at all, call me directly, any time, night or day. There’s a home phone listed as well as my office phone. Ms. O’Dell, if you could give one to Mr. McDonald."

"Very nice of you," O’Dell said, looking at the cards. "We just want to get this over with."

"You shot one of the deer, didn’t you?" Lucas asked her. The two gutted deer were hanging head down from the cabin’s deer pole in the side yard.

"The bigger of the two," she said.

"I like mine tender," Bone said dryly. "Always go for a doe."

"Good shot," Lucas said to O’Dell. "Broke his shoulder, wiped out his heart; I bet he didn’t go ten feet from where you shot him."

She didn’t feel any insinuation; he was just being polite. "Do you hunt?" she asked.

He smiled and nodded: "Quite a bit."

When Lucas had gone, O’Dell said to Bone, "That’s not a bad dog. That’s a pussycat."

Bone took another cheroot out of his jacket pocket, along with a kitchen match, which he scratch-lit on the porch railing; an affectation he acknowledged and enjoyed. "He’s killed four or five guys, I think, in the line of duty. He built a software company from nothing to a ten-million AT buyout in about six years. In his spare time. And I’ll tell you something else…"

He took a long drag on the cheroot, and blew a thin stream of smoke out into the warming afternoon air, irritating O’Dell. "What?"

Bone said, "When we did the transfers on the IPO, I talked to him for ten minutes. While we were doing it, my daughter called on my private line, from school. All upset. She was having a problem with a language credit, and she was afraid they’d hold up her graduation. I mentioned it to him, in passing-just explaining the phone call. This was seven months ago. He remembered me, he remembered Sally’s name, and he remembered the language she was taking."

Bone looked at O’Dell. "You can take him lightly, if you want. I wouldn’t. Especially if you pulled the trigger twice this morning."

"Don’t be absurd," she said. But she looked after Lucas, down by the parking area, just getting into his truck. "Nice shoulders," she said, thinking the comment would irritate just about everybody on the porch.

The truck was very quiet without Sloan: Lucas didn’t need the quiet-in the quiet, his mind would begin to churn, and that would lead…

He wasn’t sure where it would lead.

He was tired, but he needed to be more tired. He needed to be so tired that when he got back home, he could lie down and sleep before the churning began. He put a tape in the tape player, ZZ Top, the Greatest Hits album, and turned it up. Interference. Can’t churn when there’s too much interference.

The killing at the hunting camp was not particularly interesting: one possible motive, the bank merger, was already fairly clear. Others of a more personal nature might pop up later-Kresge was in the process of getting a divorce, so there might be other women. Or his wife might have something to do with it.

Routine investigation would dredge it all up, and either the killer would be caught or he wouldn’t. Whichever, Lucas felt fairly distant from the process. He’d been through it dozens of times, and the routine greed, love, and stupidity killings no longer held much interest.

Evil was interesting, he would still admit; this a residue from his term in Catholic schools. But so far he detected no evil in the killing. Spite, probably; stupidity, possibly. Greed. Anger. But not real evil…

He rode mindlessly for a while, the winter fields and woods rolling by, holsteins out catching a few uncommon November rays, horses dancing through hillside pastures; a few thousand doomed turkeys… Then he glanced out the side window, caught the boles on the oaks, recognized them, shivered. Turned up the tape.

He’d been dreaming again, lately; he hated the dreams, because they woke him up, and when he woke, in the night, his mind would begin running. And the dreams always woke him…

One dream had an odd quality of science fiction. He was being lowered, on some kind of platform, into a huge steel ylinder. Nearby was a steel cap, two feet thick, with enormous threads, which would be screwed into place after he was inside, sealing him in. The process was industrial: there were other people running around, making preparations for whatever was about to happen. He was cooperating with them, standing on the platform obviously expectant. But for what? Why was he about to be sealed inside the cylinder? He didn’t know, but he wasn’t frightened by the prospect. He was engaged by it, though. He’d start thinking about it, and then he’d wake up, his mind churning…

The other dream was stranger.

A man’s face, seen from a passing car. There were small beads of rain on the window glass, so the view was slightly obscured; in his dream, Lucas could not quite get a fix on the face. The man was hard, slender, wore an ankle-length black coat and a snap-brim hat. Most curious were the almond-shaped eyes, but where the surfaces of his eyes should be-the pupils and irises-there were instead two curls of light maple-colored wood shavings. The man seemed to be hunched against a wind, and the drizzle; he seemed to be cold. And he looked at Lucas under the brim of the hat, with those eyes that had curls of wood on their surfaces.

Lucas had begun to see the almond shapes around him on the street. See them on the faces of distant men, or in random markings on buildings, or on trees. Nonsense: but this dream frightened him. He would wake with a start, sweat around the neckline of his T-shirt. And then his mind would start to run…

He turned up the ZZ Top yet another notch, and raced toward the Cities, looking for exhaustion.

An hour after Lucas had passed that way, Jamest. Bone hurtled down I-35 in a large black BMW. As he crossed the I-694 beltline he picked up the cell phone and pushed the speed-dial number. The other phone rang three times before a woman answered it, her voice carrying a slight whiskey burr. "Hello?"

"This is Bone. Where are you?"

"In my car. On my way back from Southdale."

"I’m coming over," he said. "Twenty minutes."

"Okay… you can’t stay long. George is-"

"Twenty minutes," Bone said, and punched off. He pushed another speed-dial button, and another woman answered, this voice younger and crisper: "Kerin."

"This is Bone. Where are you?"

"At home."

"Dan Kresge’s been killed. Shot, probably murdered. Had you heard yet?"

"No. My God…"

"I’ll be at the office in an hour, or a little more. If you have the time…"

"I’ll be there in ten minutes. Can I get anything started before you get there?"

"Names and phone numbers of all the board members…"

They talked for five minutes; then Bone punched out again.

A three-car fender bender slowed him a bit, but he pulled into the downtown parking garage a little less than a half hour after he made the first call. He’d gotten out of his hunting clothes and was wearing a Patagonia jacket with khakis and a flannel shirt. He pulled the jacket off as he rode up in the elevator.

Marcia Kresge met him at the door in a blue silk kimono. "You like it? I bought it an hour ago."

"I hope you’re not celebrating," he said.

He said it with an intensity that stopped her: "What happened?"

"Your soon-to-be-ex-husband was shot to death up at the cabin this morning. I’m undoubtedly one of the suspects."

Kresge looked mildly shocked for a quarter-second, then slipped a tiny smile: "So the fucker’s dead?"

"I hope to Christ you didn’t have anything to do with it."

"Moi?" she asked mockingly, one hand going to her breast.

"Yeah, Marcia, you’re really cute; I hope you’re not that cute when the cops show up."

"The cops?" Finally serious.

"Marcia, sit down," Bone said. Kresge dropped onto a couch, showing a lot of leg. Bone looked at it for a moment, then said, "Listen, I know you think you fucked over Dan pretty thoroughly. You’re wrong. Last week the board granted him another two hundred and fifty thousand options to buy our stock at forty, as a performance award. If the merger goes through, and it’s botched, the stock’ll be worth sixty in a year. If the merger is done exactly right, it could be at eighty in a year. That’s ten million dollars, and if it’s held for a year, you’ll take out eight after taxes."

"Me? I-"

"Marcia, shut up for a minute. The options have value. They become part of his estate. You’ll inherit. You’ll also get the rest of his estate, that you didn’t get in the divorce. No taxes at all on that. In other words, Dan gets murdered, you get ten million. I’m up there with a gun, and guess who’s fucking Marcia Kresge?"

"Jesus," she said.

"I seriously doubt that he’s involved."

"But they can’t think I…?"

"You didn’t, did you? You know all those crazy nightclub characters…"

"Bone: I had not a goddamned thing to do with it. I really did think I’d taken him to the cleaners… and I mean, I didn’t like him, but I wouldn’t kill him."

He knew her well enough to know she wasn’t lying. He exhaled, said, "Good."

"You honest to God thought…"

"No. I didn’t think you went out and hired some asshole to kill him," Bone said. "What I was afraid of is, you’d mentioned to one of your little broken-nosed pals that if Dan died, you’d get another whole load of cash."

"Well, I didn’t," she said. "Because I didn’t know that I would."

"Okay… I don’t think it would be necessary to mention to the police that we’ve been involved," he said dryly.

"Good thought," she said, matching his tone precisely.

"All right." He stood up and started toward the door. "I’ve got to get down to the bank."

"The bank? God, when you called, I thought maybe…" She’d gotten up and come around the couch.

"What?" He knew what.

"You know." She slipped the belt of the kimono; she was absolutely bare and pink beneath it. "I just got out of the shower."

"I thought George was coming over."

"Well, not for a couple of hours… and you gotta at least tell me what happened."

"Take off the kimono."

She took it off, tossed it on the couch. He was staring at her, like he always did, with an attention that both disturbed and excited her.

"What?" She unconsciously touched one arm to her breastbone, covering her right breast as she did it. Bone reached out and pushed her arm down.

"Put your hands behind you," he said. "I want to look at you while I tell you this."

She blushed, the blush reaching almost to her waist. She bit her lower lip, but put her hands behind her back.

"We started out like we always do, walking back into the woods. You know how that trail goes back around the lake…"

As he told the story, he began to stroke her, his voice never faltering or showing emotion, but his hands always moving slowly. After a moment she slowly backed away, and he stepped after her, still talking. When her bottom touched the edge of a couch table, she braced herself against it, closed her eyes.

"Are you listening?" he asked; his hands stopped momentarily.

"Of course," she said. "A few minutes before six and the shooting started."

"That’s right," he said. He pushed her back more solidly into the couch table and said, "Spread your legs a little."

She spread her legs a little.

"A little more."

She spread them a little more.

"Anyway," he said, gently parting her with his fingertips. "Any one of us could have killed him. It was just a matter of climbing down from the tree, sneaking back up the path…"

"Did you do it?" she asked.

"What do you think?"

"You could have," she said. And then she said, "Oh, God."

"Feel good?"

"Feels good."

"Look at me…"

She opened her eyes, but they were hazy, a dreamer’s eyes, looking right through him. "Don’t stop now," she said.

"Look at me…"

She looked at him, struggled to focus on his dark, cool face. "Did you kill him?"

"Does the thought turn you on?"

"Oh, God…"

Susan O’Dell’s apartment was a study in black and white, glass and wood, and when she walked in, was utterly silent. She pulled off her jacket, let it fall to the floor, then her shirt and her turtlenecked underwear, and her bra. The striptease continued back through the apartment through her bedroom to the bathroom, where she went straight into the shower. She stood in the hot water for five minutes, letting it pour around her face. When she’d cleaned off the day, she stepped out, got a bath towel from towel rack, dried herself, dropped the towel on the floor, and walked back to the bedroom. Underpants and gray sweatsuit.

Dressed again, warm, she walked back to the study, stood on her tiptoes, and took a deck of cards off the top of the single bookshelf.

Sitting at her desk, she spread the cards, studied them.

She’d once had an affair, brief but intense, with an artist who’d taught her what he called Tarot for Scientists. A truly strange tarot method: business management through chaos theory, and he really knew about chaos. An odd thing for an artist to know, she’d thought at the time. She’d even become suspicious of him, and had done some checking. But he was a legitimate painter, all right. A gorgeous watercolor nude, which nobody but she knew was O’Dell herself, hung in her bedroom, a souvenir of their relationship.

After she realized the value of the artist’s tarot method, he’d bought her a computer version so she could install it on her computer at work-the cards themselves were a little too strange, and a little too public, for a big bank. They’d done the installation on a cold, rainy night, and afterwards had made love on the floor behind her desk. The artist had been comically inept with the computer. He’d nearly brought down the bank network, and would have, if she hadn’t been there to save him. But she could now access electronic cards at any time, protected with her own private code word.

Still. When she could, she preferred the cards themselves: the cool, collected flap of pasteboard against walnut. Hippielike, she thought. McDonald referred to her as a hippie, but she was hardly that. She simply had little time for makeup, for indulgent fashion, or for the flattering of men- all the things that Wilson McDonald expected from a woman. At the same time, she obviously enjoyed the company of men, and her relationship with the artist and a couple of other men-about-town had become known at the bank. And she was smart.

As McDonald had thumbed through his box of mental labels, he’d been forced to discard housewife and help meet, lesbo and bimbo. When word inevitably got around about the tarot, McDonald had relaxed and stuck the hippie abel on her. The label might not explain the hunting, or the manner in which she’d cut her way to the top at the bank… but it was good enough for him.

Fuckin’ moron.

O’Dell laid out the Celtic Cross; and got a jolt when the result card came up: the Tower of Destruction.

She pursed her lips.Yes.

She stood up, cast a backward glance at the spread of cards, the lightning bolt striking the tower, the man falling to his death: rather like Kresge, she thought, coming out of the tree stand. In fact, exactly so…

She shivered, pulled a cased set of books out of the bookcase, removed a small plastic box, opened it. Inside were a dozen fatties. She took one out, with the lighter, went out to her balcony, closing the glass doors behind her. Cold. She lit the joint, let the grass wrap wreaths of ideas around her brain. Okay. Kresge was dead. She’d wanted him dead- gone, at any rate, dead if necessary, and lately, as the merger deal crept closer, dead looked like the only way out.

So she’d gotten what she wanted.

Now to capitalize.

Terrance Robles hovered over his computer, sweating. He typed:

"Switch to crypto."

You’re so paranoid; and crypto’s boring

"Switching to crypto…"

Once in the cryptography program, he typed:

"What have you done?"

Why?

Oh shit. "Somebody shot Kresge today. I’m a suspect…"

My, my…

Even with the crypto delay, the response was fast. Too fast, and too cynically casual, he thought. More words trailed across the screen.

So, did you do it?

Robles pounded it out: "Of course not."

But you thought I did?

He hesitated, then typed, "No."

Don’t lie to me, T. You thought I did it

"No I didn’t but I wanted you to say it."

I haven’t exactly said it, have I?

"Come on…"

Come on what? The world’s a better place with that fucking fascist out of it.

"You didn’t do it."

A long pause, so long that he thought she might have left him, then: Yes I did.

"No you didn’t…"

No reply. Nothing but the earlier words, half scrolled up the screen.

"Come on…" A label popped up:

The room is empty.

"Bitch," he groaned. He bit his thumbnail, chewing at it. What was he going to do? Looking up at the screen, he saw the words.

Yes I did.

Marcia Kresge opened her apartment door and found two uniformed cops standing in the hallway.

"Yes?"

"Mrs. Kresge?" The cops looked her over. Late thirties, early forties, they thought. Very nice looking in a rich-bitch way. She was wearing a black fluffy dress that showed some skin, and was holding a lipstick in a gold tube. She had a lazy look about her, as though she’d just gotten out of bed, not alone.

"Yes?"

They kept it straightforward: her husband had been killed in a hunting accident.

"Yeah, I heard," she said, leaning against the doorpost. Her eyes hadn’t even flickered; and to the older cop they looked so blue he thought he might fall in. "Should I do something?"

The cops looked at each other. "Well, he’s at the county medical examiner’s office. We thought you’d want to make, er, the funeral arrangements."

She sighed. "Yeah, I suppose that would be the thing to do. Okay. I’ll call them. The medical examiner."

The older of the two cops, his experience prodding him, tried to keep the conversation going. "You don’t seem too upset."

She thought about that for a moment. "No, I’d have to say that I’m not. Upset. But I’m surprised." She put one hand on her breast, in a parody of a woman taken aback. "I thought the asshole was too mean to get killed. Anyway, I just don’t… mmm, what that’s colorful redneck phrase you policemen always use in the movies? I don’t give a large shit."

The cops looked at each other again, and then the younger one said, "Maybe we got this wrong. We understood…"

"Yeah, I’m his wife. In two weeks we would’ve been divorced. We haven’t lived together for two years, and I haven’t seen him for a year. I don’t like him. Didn’t like him."

"Uh, could you tell us where you were…?"

She smiled at him sleepily. "When?"

"Early this morning?"

"In bed. I was out late last night, with friends."

"Could anybody vouch for you being here last night?" The older cop was pressing; once you had somebody rolling, you never knew what might come out.

But she nodded: "Sure. A friend brought me home."

"I’m talking about later, like early this morning."

"So am I," she said. "He stayed."

"Oh, okay." Neither one of them was a bit embarrassed, and she was now looking at him with a little interest. "Could we get his name?"

"I don’t see why not. Come on in," she said. "I’ll write it down."

They followed her into the apartment, noted the polished wood floors, the Oriental carpets, the tastefully colorful paintings on eggshell-white walls.

"You haven’t asked me how much I’d get from him, if he died before the divorce," she said over her shoulder.

The older cop smiled, his best Gary Cooper grin. He liked her: "How much?"

"I don’t know," she lied. "My attorney and I took him to the cleaners."

"Good for you," he said. She was scribbling on a notepad, and when she finished, she brought it over and handed it to him. "George Wright. Here’s his address and phone number. I’m going to call him and tell him about this."

"That’s up to you," the older cop said.

"That’s my number at the bottom, in case you need to interrogate me. It’s unlisted," she said. She looked at him with her blue eyes and nibbled on her lower lip.

"Well, thanks," he said. He tucked the slip of paper in his shirt pocket.

"Do I sound like a heartless bitch?" she asked him cheerfully. And as she asked, she took his arm and they walked slowly toward the door together.

"Maybe a little," he said. He really did like her and he could feel the back of his bicep pressing into her breast. Her breast was very warm. He even imagined he could feel a nipple.

"I really didn’t like him," she said. "You can put that in your report."

"I will," he said.

"Good," she said, as she ushered him out the door. "Then maybe I’ll get to see you again… You could show me your gun."

The cops found themselves in the hallway, the door closing behind them. At the elevator door, the younger one said, "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"You gonna call her?"

The older one thought a minute, then said, "I don’t think I could afford it."

"Shit, you don’t have to buy anything," the young one said. "She’s rich."

"I dunno," the older one said.

"Take my advice: If you call her, you don’t want to jump her right away. Get to know her a little."

"That’s very sensitive of you," the older one said.

"No, no, I just think… She wants to see your gun?"

"Yeah?"

"So you wanna put off the time when she finds out you’re packing a.22."

"Jealousy’s an ugly thing," the older cop said complacently. As they walked out on the street to the car, he looked up at the apartment building and said, "Maybe."

And even if not, he thought, the woman had made his day.

Audrey McDonald, coming in from the garage, found her husband’s orange coveralls on the kitchen floor, and just beyond them, his wool shooting jacket and then boots and trousers in a pile and halfway up the stairs, the long blue polypro underwear.

"Oh, shit," she said to herself. She dropped her purse on a hallway chair and hurried up the stairs, found a pair of jockey shorts in the hallway and heard him splashing in the oversized tub.

When Wilson McDonald got tense, excited, or frightened, he drank; and when he drank, he got hot and started to sweat. He’d pull his clothing off and head for water. He’d been drunk, naked, in the lake down the hill. He’d been drunk, naked, in the pool in the backyard, frightening the neighbor’s daughter half to death. He’d been in the tub more times than she could remember, drunk, wallowing like a great white whale. He wasn’t screaming yet, but he would be. The killing of Dan Kresge, all the talk at the club, had pushed him over the edge.

At the bathroom door, she stopped, braced herself, and then pushed it open. Wilson was on his hands and knees. As she opened the door, he dropped onto his stomach, and a wave of water washed over the edge, onto the floor, and around a nearly empty bottle of scotch.

"Wilson!" she shouted. "Goddamnit, Wilson."

He floundered, rolled, sat up. He was too fat, with fine curly hair on his chest and stomach, going gray. His tits, she thought, were bigger than hers. "Shut up," he bellowed back.

She took three quick steps into the room and picked up the bottle and started away.

"Wait a minute, goddamnit…" He was on his feet and out of the tub faster than she’d anticipated, and he caught her in the hallway. "Give me the fucking bottle."

"You’re dripping all over the carpet."

"Give me the fucking bottle…" he shouted.

"No. You’ll-"

He was swinging the moment the "no" came out of her mouth, and caught her on the side of the head with an open hand. She went down like a popped balloon, her head cracking against the molding on a closet door.

"Fuckin’ bottle," he said. She’d hung on to it when she went down, but he wrenched it free, and held it to his chest.

She was stunned, but pushed herself up. "You fuck," she shouted.

"You don’t…" He kicked at her, sent her sprawling. "Throw you down the fuckin’ stairs," he screamed. "Get out of here."

He went back into the bathroom, and she heard the lock click.

"Wilson…"

"Go away." And she heard the splash as he hit the water in the tub.

Downstairs, she got an ice compress from the freezer and put it against her head: she’d have a bruise. Goddamn him. They had to talk about Kresge: this was their big move, their main chance. This was what they’d worked for. And he was drunk.

The thought of the bottle sent her to the cupboard under the sink, to a built-in lazy Susan. She turned it halfway around, got the vodka bottle, poured four inches of vodka over two ice cubes, and drank it down.

Poured another two ounces to sip.

Audrey McDonald wasn’t a big woman, and alcohol hit quickly. The two martinis she’d had at lunch, plus the pitcher of Bloody Marys at the club, had laid a base for the vodka. Her rage at Wilson began to shift. Not to disappear, but to shift in the maze of calculations that were spinning through her head.

Bone and O’Dell would try to steal this from them.

She sipped vodka, pressed the ice compress against her head, thought about Bone and O’Dell. Bone was Harvard and Chicago; O’Dell was Smith and Wharton. O’Dell had a degree in history and finance; Bone had two degrees in economics.

Wilson had a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in business administration and a law degree from the same place. Okay, but not in the same class with O’Dell or Bone. On the other hand, his grandfather had been one of the founders of Polaris. And Wilson knew everyone in town and was a member of the Woodland Golf and Cricket Club. The vice chairman of Polaris, a jumped-up German sausage-maker who never in a million years could have gotten into the club on his own, was now at Woodland, courtesy of Wilson McDonald. So Wilson wasn’t weaponless…

She heard him thumping down the stairs a minute later. He stalked into the kitchen, still nude, jiggling, dripping wet. "What ya drinking?" he asked.

"Soda water," she said.

"Soda water my ass," he snarled. Then his eyes, which had been wandering, focused on the cold compress she held to her head. "What the fuck were you taking my scotch for?"

"Because we’ve got things to think about," she said. "We don’t have time for you to get drunk. We have to figure out what to do with Kresge dead."

"I already got his job," he said, with unconcealed satisfaction.

"What?" She was astonished. Was he that drunk?

"O’Dell and Bone agreed I could have it," he said.

"You mean… you’re the CEO?"

"Well… the board has to meet," he said, his voice slurring. "But I’ve already been dealing with the PR people, putting out press releases…"

She rolled her eyes. "You mean they let you fill in until the board meets."

"Well, I think that positions me…"

"Oh, for Christ’s sake, Wilson, grow up," she said. "And go put some pants on. You look like a pig."

"You shut the fuck-"

He came at her again and she pitched the vodka at his eyes. As he flinched, she turned and ran back into the living room, looked around, spotted a crystal paperweight on the piano, picked it up. Wilson had gotten the paperweight at a Senior Tour pro-am. When he came through the doorway after her, she lifted it and said, "You try to hit me again and I swear to God I’ll brain you with this thing."

He stopped. He looked at her, and at the paperweight, then stepped closer; she backed up a step and said, " Wilson."

"All right," he said. "I don’t want to fight. And we gotta talk."

He looked in the corner, at the liquor cabinet, started that way.

"You can’t have any more…"

She started past him and he moved, quickly, grabbed her hand with the paperweight, bent it, and she screamed, "Don’t. Wilson, don’t."

"Drop it, drop it…" He was a grade school bully, twisting the arm of a little kid. She dropped the weight, and it hit the carpet with a thump.

"Gonna fuckin’ hit me with my paperweight," he said, jerking her upright. "Gonna fuckin’ hit me."

He slapped her again, hard, and she felt something break open inside her mouth. He slapped her again, and she twisted, screaming now. Slapped her a third time and she fell, and he let her go, and when she tried to crawl away, kicked her in the hip and she went down on her face.

"Bitch. Hit me with, hit me, fuckin’ bitch…" He went to the liquor cabinet, opened it, found another bottle. She dragged herself under the Steinway, and he stopped as though he was going to go in after her, but he stumbled, bumped his head on the side of the piano, caught himself, said, "I’m the goddamned CEO," and headed back up the stairs to the tub, his fat butt bobbling behind him.

Audrey sat under the piano for a while, weeping by herself, and finally crawled out to a telephone, picked it up, and punched a speed-dialer.

"Hello?" Her sister, Helen, cheerful, inquiring.

"Helen? Could you come get me?"

Helen recognized the tone. "Oh, Jesus, what happened?"

"Wilson’s drunk. He beat me up again. I think I better get out of the house."

"Oh, my God, Aud, I’ll be right there… hang on, hang on…"