Storm Prey by John Sandford Page B

it’s settled.”
    “Yes, it is,” he said.
    She recognized the tone. They both had tempers, and they had learned to recognize when the other was putting his/her foot down, when things had moved beyond negotiation. She nodded: Virgil it was.
     
     
    LUCAS CALLED the cops’ supervisor, an old friend named Larouse, who said he’d call with any news. “You want a car outside your house?”
    “You don’t have to park it, but if you’d cruise it pretty steadily, that’d be good.”
    “We’ll check every movin’ dog,” Larouse said. Then, “Hang on a minute.” There was a moment of silence, then Larouse was back. “We’ve got a gun. A Taurus revolver. Listen to this: it’s loaded with three .410 shells and two Colt .45s. Got run over about two hundred times, but the shells are still inside. Maybe we’ll get something off them.”
    They talked for a couple of more minutes, then Lucas signed off: “Get back to me, man.”
    Weather had been listening and she asked, “Good news?” “Well, you weren’t hallucinating—they found the gun.”
    “I knew it.”
    “It’s all beat up. Got run over a lot. They’re running it back to the lab. They’ll check the shells for prints and then ship them over to us and see if we can pull any DNA.”
    “Doesn’t sound too hopeful.”
    “Hey: if there’re prints on the shells, Lodmell will pull them up. And I believe the guy’ll be on record. You don’t send somebody out with a man-killer and a crotch rocket if he’s a virgin.”
    “A man-killer?”
    He looked at her: “You got lucky.”
    “Not just lucky,” she said. The two cops had gone off a way, and she told him about flicking the Audi into the biker’s lane, causing him to fumble the gun, and about going after him with the car.
    “Crazy woman,” he said, and wrapped an arm around her head, in a headlock, and gave her a noogie.
    But he was scared.

    THE NOOGIE made her laugh, at least a bit, and then Lucas went off to talk to the cops again, leaving her, and suddenly, for the first time in years, she flashed back to a winter day with a motorcycle crazy named Dick LaChaise, at Hennepin General Hospital in Minneapolis.
    LaChaise and two killer friends had come to town looking for Lucas, because Lucas had led a major crimes squad that had killed LaChaise’s wife and sister during a bank robbery. LaChaise had taken Weather hostage at the hospital. Lucas had come to negotiate in person, to talk LaChaise out of killing her.
    At least, that’s what Weather had thought, and LaChaise, too.
    But as soon as LaChaise moved the muzzle of his pistol an inch from Weather’s skull, a concealed sniper had shot him in the head. Weather went down, covered with blood, brains, and fragments of skull.
    She hadn’t been able to stay with Lucas after that; it had taken years to get back. But they had gotten back, and now here was another motorcycle hoodlum coming for her on the highway, and suddenly she was there again, in the hallway, and LaChaise’s head was exploding behind her ...
    “No.” She shook it off.
    She might flash back again, she thought, but she wasn’t having it, this time. She’d worked all through it. LaChaise was dead, and this had nothing to do with Dick LaChaise or Lucas Davenport.
    Lucas touched her on the shoulder. “You okay?”
    “Yeah. Yeah.”
    “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
    “I suddenly got scared,” she said. “Before, I was too busy to be scared.”
     
     
    CAPPY SWORE and tried to grab the gun, fumbled it, then heard the scream of an angry engine, looked back, and realized that the bitch was coming after him. He hit the accelerator, felt the rush as the front wheel lifted free, cut down a center line and was gone. He watched her lights and saw her swerve left, and she was gone up the off-ramp. He took the next one, quick right at the top, then a left, down through the dark streets, careful about the leftover snow, and the black ice at intersections. Three blocks from