Hidden Prey by John Sandford Page A

first time this night, felt something, a cold little thrill, unrelated to the people’s cause. He lowered her to the pavement, unwrapped the wire, had to pull it out of her flesh, like pulling a piece of sticky tape off a wall. He could smell the blood in the damp night air; and in the light of the single visible streetlamp, saw a reflection from the whites of her eyes. They were unmoving.
    He stood still for a moment, listening, trying to see into the dark; heard cars at the bottom of the hill, and the cart still rattling down the blacktop toward the street below. Time to move. He walked fifteen feet to the corner, turned toward his car, glanced back once at the lump on the sidewalk.
    Stuffed the garrote in his pocket, felt a wetness. When he took his hands out to look, found them covered with blood. An imperfect weapon still, he wiped the blood on his pants. The woman had been a fountain . . .
    He moved on, quickly. Had to clean up. Had to get rid of the garrote and the clothes.
    Had to report.

     4 
    J ERRY R EASONS WATCHED Lucas slide four feet down a pile of broken concrete-block chips to the lake. Reasons was a cop and a muscleman, with a broken nose and a crooked smile and a chipped tooth. He wore a black golf shirt that showed off his ball-bat forearms and Mack-truck chest; his jeans looked like they were painted on his perfect, sculpted butt. He had a Glock on a belt clip under his right hand, and a badge in a belt clip over his left pocket. He said, “I hate the fuckin’ Russians.”
    “Yeah?” Lucas stood with one foot on a chunk of eroded concrete, the other on the lake bank, stooped and stuck his hand in the water. The day was unexpectedly warm and windless, but Superior was as cold as ever, the color of rolled steel. He’d been on the lake a few times, but had never been easy with it. Fall overboard in Superior, you had fifteen minutes to get out before the cold killed you. He looked back up at Reasons. “Hate ’em, huh?”
    They were at the end of a boat slip, one that must have been a halfmile long and a couple of hundred feet across. The TDX grain elevator stood along one side of the slip, a series of off-white ten-story-high cylinders full of wheat, soybeans, and various kinds of agricultural pellets.
    “Yeah. You ask them a question about one of their buddies bein’ killed, and you can see them thinking it over, what to say. They’re figuring out whether or not to lie. You see it all the time,” he said. “You pick up a drunk Russian on the street, you ask, ‘You been drinking?’ and the guy thinks it over. He smells like a fuckin’ distillery, he’s got puke running down his shirt, he’s got a bottle in his hand, he can’t stand up, and he’s thinking it over. What happens if I say yes? Fuckin’ Russians.”
    “So you don’t like Russians,” Lucas said. He shook the water off his hand, patted his hand against his pants leg, and climbed back up the bank. They started back through the weeds toward the dirt track that led to the elevator. The ground was rough, hard to walk on. They’d followed what Reasons said was a chase path that had been crushed through the weeds, though there was no longer much evidence of the chase, if there had been one. Reasons thought that the victim had run from the gun, had taken a fall or two—the gunman may have fallen as well—and then, perhaps disoriented, he’d turned back toward the elevator. The gunman had caught him on the pad, and had killed him. Lucas thought that was possible, if a little strange. “You ever known one personally? A Russian?”
    Reasons kept a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. Using his tongue, he switched the toothpick from the left side to the right side, cleared his throat, and said, “I married one.”
    Lucas grinned at him. “That’s good.”
    “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. He scratched his neck. “Living with the bitch is like having a rock in your shoe. A big rock. Though I gotta