Night Prey (10 page)

"Shit." He pulled at the door. Nothing. Good lock.

He turned to the steps, thinking to start back down. Then thought: Wait. Did the window at the end of the hall look out at Jensen's building?

It did.

Koop stood in the window, looking up, and a bare two stories above, Sara Jensen came to the window in a robe and looked down. Koop stepped back, but she was looking at the street and hadn't noticed him in the semidark window. She had a drink in her hand. She took a sip and stepped away, out of sight.

Jesus. A little higher, and he'd be virtually in her living room. She never pulled the drapes. Never... Koop was aflame. A match; a killer.

He needed a key. Not sometime. He needed one now.

He'd picked up his philosophy at Stillwater: power comes out of the barrel of a gun; or from a club, or a fist. Take care of number one. The tough live, the weak die. When you die, you go into a hole: end of story. No harps, no heavenly choir. No hellfire. Koop resonated with this line of thought. It fit so well with everything he'd experienced in life.

He went back to his truck for equipment, not thinking very much, not on the surface. When he needed something-anything-that thing became his: the people who had it were keeping it from him. He had the right to take it.

Koop was proud of his truck. It might have belonged to anyone. But it didn't. It belonged to him, and it was special.

He didn't carry much in the back, in the topper: a toolbox, a couple of bags of Salt 'N Sand left over from winter, a spade, a set of snow tires, a tow rope that had been in the truck when he bought it. And a few lengths of rusty concrete reinforcement rod-the kind of thing you might find lying in the dirt around a construction site, which was, in fact, where he had found it. The kind of thing a workingman would have back there.

Most of the stuff was simply a disguise for the big Sears toolbox. That's where the action was. The top tray contained a few light screwdrivers, pliers, a ratchet set, a half-dozen Sucrets cans full of a variety of wood screws, and other small items. The bottom compartment held a two-pound hammer, a cold chisel, two files, a hacksaw, a short pry-bar, a pair of work gloves, and a can of glazier's putty. What looked like an ordinary toolbox was, in fact, a decent set of burglary tools.

He put the gloves in his jacket pocket, took out the glazier's putty, dumped the screws from one of the Sucrets cans into an empty compartment in the top tray, and scooped a gob of putty into the Sucrets tin. He smoothed the putty with his thumb, closed the tin, and dropped it into his pocket.

Then he selected a piece of re-rod. A nice eighteen-inch length, easy to hide and long enough to swing.

He still wasn't thinking much: The room key was his. This asshole-some asshole-was keeping it from him. That made him angry. Really angry. Righteously angry. Koop began to fume, thinking about it- his fuckin' key-and headed back to the apartment building.

He walked down to the apartment entrance, pulling on the work gloves, the re-rod up his jacket sleeve. Nobody around. He stepped into the lobby, pushed up the glass panel on the inset ceiling light, and used the re-rod to crack both fluorescent tubes. Now in the dark, he dropped the panel back in place and returned to the truck. He left the driver's-side door open an inch and waited.

And waited some more. Not much happening.

The passenger seat was what made the truck special. He'd gotten some work done in an Iowa machine shop: a steel box, slightly shallower but a bit longer and wider than a cigar box, had been welded under the seat. The original floor was the lid of the box, and from below, the bottom of the box looked like the floor of the passenger compartment. To open the box, you turned the right front seat support once to the right, and the lid popped up. There was enough room for any amount of jewelry or cash... Or cocaine.

Half the people in Stillwater were there because they'd been caught in a traffic stop and had the cocaine/stolen stereo/gun on the backseat. Not Koop.

He watched the door for a while longer, then popped the lid on the box, pulled out the eight-ball, pinched it, put it back. Just a little nose, just enough to sharpen him up.

Two mature arborvitae stood on either side of the apartment's concrete stoop, like sentinels. Koop liked that: the trees cut the vision lines from either side. To see into the outer lobby, you had to be standing almost straight out from the building.

A couple came down the walk, the man jingling his keys. They went inside, and Koop waited. A woman was next, alone, and Koop perked up. But she was walking straight down the sidewalk, distracted, and not until the last minute did she swerve in toward the building. She would have been perfect, but she hadn't given him time to move. She disappeared inside.

Two men, holding hands, came down the walk. No. Two or three minutes later, they were followed by a guy so big that Koop decided not to risk it.

Then Jim Flory turned the corner, his keys already in his hand. Flory scratched himself at his left sideburn and mumbled something, talking to himself, distracted. He was five-ten and slender. Koop pushed open the car door and slipped out, started down the sidewalk. Flory turned in at the building, fumbled through his keys, pulled open the outer door, went inside.

Koop was angry: he could feel the heat in his bowels. Fucker has my key. Fucker...

Koop followed Flory up the walk; Koop was whistling softly, an unconscious, disguising tactic, but he was pissed. Has my key... Koop was wearing a baseball cap, jeans, a golf shirt, and large white athletic shoes, like a guy just back from a Twins game. He kept the hat bill tipped down. The steel re-rod was in his right pocket, sticking out a full foot but hidden by his naturally swinging arm.

Goddamned asshole, got my key... Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,he whistled, Zip-a-dee-ay, and he was getting angrier by the second. My key...

Through the glass outer door, he could see Flory fumbling in the dark at the inner lock. Key must be in his hand. Koop pulled open the outer door, and Flory, turning the key on the inner door, glanced back and said, "Hi."

Koop nodded and said, "Hey," kept the bill of his hat down. Flory turned back to the door and pulled on it, and as he did, Koop, the cocaine right there, slipped the re-rod out of his pocket.

Flory might have felt something, sensed the suddenness of the movement: he stopped with the key, his head coming up, but too late.

Motherfucker has my key/key/key...

Koop slashed him with the re-rod, smashed him behind the ear. The re-rod hit, pak!, metal on meat, the sound of a butcher's cleaver cutting through a rib roast.

Flory's mouth opened and a single syllable came out: "Unk." His head bounced off the glass door and he fell, dragging his hands down the glass.

Koop, moving fast now, nothing casual now, bent, glancing ferretlike outside, then stripped Flory of his wallet: a robbery. He stashed the wallet in his pocket, pulled Flory's key from the lock, opened the Sucrets tin, and quickly pressed one side and then the other into the glazier's putty. The putty was just firm, and took perfect impressions. He shut the tin, wiped the key on his pants leg, and pushed it back into the lock.

Done.

He turned, still half crouching, reached for the outer door-and saw the legs.

A woman stumbled on the other side of the door, trying to backpedal, already turning.

She wore tennis shoes and a jogging suit. He'd never seen her coming. He exploded through the door, batting the glass out of his way with one hand, the other pulling the re-rod from his pocket.

"No." She shouted it. Her face was frozen, mouth open. In the dim light, she could see the body on the floor behind him, and she was stumbling back, trying to make her legs move, to run, shocked...

Koop hit her like a leopard, already swinging the re-rod.

"No," she screamed again, eyes widening, teeth flashing in fear. She put up her arm and the re-rod crashed through it, breaking it, missing her head. "No," she screamed again, turning, and Koop, above her and coming down, hit her on the back of the neck just where it joined her skull, a blow that would have decapitated her if he'd been swinging a sword.

Blood spattered the sidewalk and she went down to the stoop, and Koop hit her again, this time across the top of her undefended skull, a full, merciless swing, ending with a crunch, like a heavy man stepping on gravel.

Her head flattened, and Koop, maddened by the interference, by the trouble, by the crisis, kicked her body off the step behind the arborvitae.

"Motherfucker," he said. "Motherfucker." He hadn't intended this. He had to move.

Less than a minute had passed since he'd hit Flory. No one else was on the walk. He looked across the street, for motion in the windows of Sara Jensen's apartment building, for a face looking down at him. Nothing that he could see.

He started away at a fast walk, sticking the re-rod in his pocket. Jesus, what was this: there was blood on his jacket. He wiped at it with a hand, smeared it. If a cop came...

The anger boiled up: the goddamned bitch, coming up like that.

He swallowed it, fighting it, kept moving. Gotta keep moving... He glanced back, crossed the street, almost scurrying, now with the smell of warm human blood in his nose, in his mouth. Didn't mind that, but not here, not now...

Maybe, he thought, he should walk out. He was tempted to walk out and return later for the company truck: if somebody saw him hit the woman and followed him to the truck, they'd see the badge on the side and that'd be it. On the other hand, the cops would probably be taking the license numbers of cars in the neighborhood, looking for witnesses.

No. He would take it.

He popped the driver's-side door, caught a glimpse of himself in the dark glass, face twisted under the ball cap, dark scratches across it.

He fired up the truck and wiped his face at the same time: more blood on his gloves. Christ, it was all over him. He could taste it, it was in his mouth...

He eased out of the parking space. Watched in the rearview mirror for somebody running, somebody pointing. He saw nothing but empty street.

Nothing.

The stress tightened him. He could feel the muscles pumping, his body filling out. Taste the blood... And suddenly, there was a flush of pleasure with a rash of pain, like being hand-stroked while ants crawled across you...

More good than bad. Much more.

Chapter
6

Weather wasn't home. Lucas suppressed a thump of worry: she should have been home an hour earlier. He picked up the phone, but there was nothing on voice mail, and he hung up.

He walked back to the bedroom, pulling off his tie. The bedroom smelled almost subliminally of her Chanel No. 5; and on top of that, very faintly of wood polish. She'd bought a new bedroom set, simple wooden furniture with an elegant line, slightly Craftsman-Mission. He grumbled. His old stuff was good enough, he'd had it for years. She didn't want to hear it.

"You've got a twenty-year-old queen-sized bed that looks like it's been pounded to death by strange women-I won't ask-and you don't have a headboard, so the bed just sits there like a launching pad. Don't you read in bed? Don't you know about headboard lights? Wouldn't you like some nice pillows?"

Maybe, if somebody else bought them.

And his old dresser, she said, looked like it had come from the Salvation Army.

He didn't tell her, but she was precisely correct.

She said nothing at all about his chair. His chair was older than the bed, bought at a rummage sale after a St. Thomas professor had died and left it behind. It was massive, comfortable, and the leather was fake. She did throw out a mostly unused second chair with a stain on one arm-Lucas couldn't remember what it was, but it got there during a Vikings-Packers game-and replaced it with a comfortable love seat.

"If we're going to watch television in our old age, we should sit next to each other," she said. "The first goddamn thing men do when they get a television is put two E-Z Boys in front of it and a table between them for beer cans and pizzas. I swear to God I won't allow it."

"Yeah, yeah, just don't fuck with my chair," Lucas had said. He'd said it lightly, but he was worried.

She understood that. "The chair's safe. Ugly, but safe."

"Ugly? That's genuine glove... material."

"Really? They make gloves out of garbage bags?"

Weather Karkinnen was a surgeon. She was a small woman in her late thirties, her blondish hair beginning to show streaks of white. She had dark-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide mouth. She looked vaguely Russian, Lucas thought. She had broad shoulders for her size, and wiry muscles; she played a vicious game of squash and could sail anything. He liked to watch her move, he liked to watch her in repose, when she was working over a problem. He even liked to watch her when she slept, because she did it so thoroughly, like a kitten.

When Lucas thought of her, which he might do at any moment, the same image always popped up in his mind's eye: Weather turning to look at him over her shoulder, smiling, a simple pearl dangling just over her shoulder.

They would be married, he'd thought. She'd said, "Don't ask yet."

"Why? Would you say no?"