Read Sudden Prey for Free Online

Her terrified dark eyes flicked between Harp and whichever of the white men was in sight.
    Martin and Butters checked the apartment. The landing outside the front door, Martin found when he opened it, was blocked by a pile of brown cardboard appliance boxes. The boxes made a practical burglar alarm and buffer, should the cops come, but still provided an escape route if one were needed.
    Butters checked the two bedrooms and found nothing of interest but a collection of vinyl 33-rpm jazz records.
    “Clear,” Butters said, coming back to the front room.
    Martin sat down in a third chair and, knee-to-knee with Harp, said, “You probably know people like us. Met us in the joint. We don’t much care for black folks and we’d be happy to cut your throats and be done with it. But we can’t, this time, ’cause we need you to introduce us to a friend of yours.”
    “Who?” Daymon Harp asked.
    “The cop you’re working with.”
    Harp tried to look surprised. “There’s no cop.”
    “We know you gotta go through your routine, but we don’t have a lot of time,” Martin said. “So to show you our . . . mmm . . . sincerity . . .” He chose his words carefully, softly: “We’re gonna cut on your girlfriend here.”
    “Motherfucker,” Harp said, but it wasn’t directed at Martin. It was simply an exclamation and Martin took it that way. The woman’s eyes bulged and she rattled around in the chair, and Martin let her. Over his shoulder, he said, “Ansel? See if you can find a knife in the kitchen . . .”
    There was no one standing in the street outside the laundromat, which was a good thing for Butters and Martin, because Harp wouldn’t talk right away, and for one short moment, even with the gag, with the windows shut, in the middle of winter, even with that, you could hear Jasmine screaming.
     
     
     
    THE MICHIGAN STATE prison sent a single escort with Dick LaChaise. LaChaise was four years into a nine-year sentence, and not considered an escape risk—with good behavior, he’d be out in a couple of years. They put him in leg irons and cuffs and LaChaise and Wayne O. Sand, the escort, flew into Eau Claire as the sun was going down, eight days after the shootings in Minneapolis.
    During the flight, Wayne O. Sand read The Last Mammoth by Margaret Allan, because he liked that prehistoric shit and magic and all. If he’d lived back then, he thought, he’d probably be a clan chief, or something. He’d be in shape, anyway.
    LaChaise read a tattoo magazine called Skin Art. LaChaise had full sleeves: tattoos running up and down both arms, a comic-book fantasy of superwomen with football-sized tits and lionish hair tangled around his bunched-up weight-room muscles, interspersed with eagles, tigers, knives, a dragon. His arms carried four names: Candy and Georgie on the right, and Harley and Davidson on the left.
    The sleeves had been done on the outside, by commercial tattoo artists. The work on his back and legs was being done on the inside. Prison work, with a sewing needle and ballpoint ink. Though the figures lacked the finish of the commercial jobs, there was a nasty raw power to them that LaChaise liked. An aesthetic judgment.
    When the plane’s wheels came down, LaChaise put the magazine away and looked at Sand: “How about a Mc-Donald’s? A couple of Big Macs?”
    “Maybe, you don’t fuck me around,” Sand said, still in the book. Sand was a flabby man, an authoritarian little prison bureaucrat who’d be nice enough one day, and write you up the next, for doing nothing. He enjoyed his power, but wasn’t nearly the worst of them. When they landed, Sand marched LaChaise off the plane, and chained him to the seat post in the back of a rental Ford.
    “How about them McDonald’s?” LaChaise asked.
    Sand considered for a second, then said, “Nah. I wanna get a motel ’fore it’s too late. There’s a game tonight.”
    “Hey, c’mon . . .”
    “Shut up,” Sand said, with the casual curtness of a