Buried Prey

against the kitchen sink. He slashed at Lucas’s face with the knife and the woman came free and fell on the floor, and Lucas tried to catch Hanson’s knife hand but missed, snagged a shirtsleeve, but he felt the knife slash across his shoulder and the back of his neck, and he twisted away from the knife and the woman’s body hit him behind the ankles and he went down, losing his grip on Hanson and then,
    BOOM.
    The gunshot, the sound not the slug, was like a bolt of lightning, and then another BOOM and Lucas, confused and half blinded by blood, scrambled across the supine woman, tried to pull her away from Hanson, and then realized Hanson was going down.
    Jenkins said, “Stay down, stay down . . .” and he pushed Lucas down with his hand. The woman was squealing, and Del was saying, “. . . ambulance down at a place called Pit Stop right now. We’ve got a seriously injured police officer. . . .”
    Jenkins looked down at him and Lucas said, “I’m not seriously injured.”
    Jenkins said, “Maybe not, but you’re bleeding like you’re seriously injured. So just stay down.”
    Del loomed over him: “Dumb shit.”
    “What about Hanson?” Lucas asked.
    Jenkins looked behind himself, at the form on the floor, and Lucas realized he still had his gun in his hand, a big .357 revolver that he’d bought from a highway patrolman.
    “You got what you wanted,” Jenkins said. “He’s stonecold dead.”

25
    Del pushed Lucas flat and said, “Let me look at it.”
    Lucas let him look: Del used a paper towel to wipe the blood off Lucas’s forehead, and then looked at his shoulder through a slash in Lucas’s jacket, and said, finally, “It’s not that bad. You’ve got a nasty cut right along your hairline, but I don’t see any bone. It’s bleeding like crazy, though. There’s another cut on your shoulder, but your coat took most of the damage. You need to get sewn up.”
    They pressed more paper towels to his head, trying to stop the flow of blood, and he stayed on the floor, waiting for the ambulance. Carver County sheriff ’s deputies showed up two minutes after the shooting, and were handled by Jenkins. Then the ambulance came, and Lucas walked out to it on his own, stepping over Hanson’s facedown body as he left the house. The woman who owned the house was unhurt, but in shock, and was taken out to the ambulance with Lucas.
    At the hospital, they compressed the wounds to control the bleeding, and waited for a doc, and after Lucas had been waiting for fifteen minutes or so, a plastic surgeon showed up, took a long look at the cuts, and said, “Not too bad, but the recovery is going to be uncomfortable. Let’s get them closed up.”
    They closed the wounds with a local anesthetic, plus some kind of intravenous relaxer. Before they started, Lucas made a quick call to Weather, caught her just as she was leaving the hospital, told her that he’d been dinged up in a fight and was getting some stitches. She wanted details, and he passed the phone to the surgeon, who, after a minute, said, “Oh, yeah, I know you,” and told her that Lucas was worse than dinged up, but would nevertheless be home that afternoon.
    When he got off, he said, “Weather Karkinnen, huh? I better do my best work.”
     
     
    THEN LUCAS WENT AWAY for a while, came back sewn up and bandaged, and found Del sitting next to the hospital bed.
    “The doc said that when you’re steady on your feet, we can drive you home. He’s going to come by and talk to you, though.”
    “How’s everybody?” Lucas mumbled. He was still feeling fuzzy.
    “Jenkins shot Hanson twice, in the middle of the chest. He’s over there, working through the shooting with the sheriff ’s department. The woman there, her name’s Betty Ludwig, she’s okay, she’s maybe got some bruises; they brought her in with you and gave her some pills. . . . Shrake’s with Jenkins, filling in the sheriff ’s guys on the investigation. They might be a little pissed that we didn’t give them a call—and they want a statement from you, but it doesn’t have to be today.”
    “Not a big problem,” Lucas said. He was clearing up: Del’s voice was giving him something to focus on. “Have you heard from Johnston?” Johnston was the entry team leader at Hanson’s house.
    “They got trophies. Locks of hair, underwear, a kid’s necklace. And home movies,” Del said. “They’ve got VHS movies of the Jones girls.”
    “Don’t want to see that,” Lucas