Easy Prey

said.
    “That’s nothing,” Lucas said. “Nothing.”
    “Yeah, I know. And we can’t find Scott—I don’t think he’s in town. But even if he is in the Twin Cities, looking for his truck won’t do you any good.”
    “Keep an eye out,” Lucas said. “If we don’t find Scott, maybe he’ll show up for work.”
     
 
LUCAS TOLD DEL, who shook his head. “Gotta be him, though,” Del said. “You saw the room.”
    “But what do you think? He’s hitchhiking down to the Cities?”
    “No, he just got down somehow. Be nice to know the car, though.”
     
 
HALFWAY BACK, LUCAS said, “I just thought of something else. You know that Oriental chick at the Matrix? She saw the guy we think was the shooter—only for a second or two—but she thought it was the vending machine guy. She also thought he looked a little porky, and so did Jael, when a guy tried to break into her house that night. . . . But when St. Paul picked up the vending machine guy, he wasn’t porky. He was skinny.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I bet this asshole Martin Scott was wearing his Coke coveralls. One of those guys said he wore them twenty-four hours a day. I bet that’s what this chick was reacting to—the coveralls, the kind a vending machine guy would wear.”
    “That’s thin,” Del said.
    “But it’s there,” Lucas said.
     
 
“MY ASS IS kicked,” Del said, just before they landed. “You gonna drop me?”
    “Yeah. But I’m gonna cruise up and take a look at Jael’s place, make sure they’ve spread out that perimeter.”
    “I’ll ride along for that,” Del said.
    They’d left Lucas’s car at the motel, because it could only handle two, and had ridden over in Olson’s rattle-trap Volvo. “I’m going back to the valley,” Olson said as he drove them back to the motel. “Back to Fargo. Tomorrow. Have somebody call me when you’re gonna release the bodies. I’ll come and bury them, but I won’t wait here anymore. This place is a suburb of hell.”
    “Oh, bullshit. It’s a pretty nice place,” Del said irritably.
    “Think about the last week,” Olson said. His voice was mild, quiet. “Ten days ago, I had a family—now I don’t. But it’s not so much individual people who did this: They’re just souls trying to get through life. It’s the culture that does it. It’s a death culture, and it’s here, right now. It comes out of TV, it comes out of magazines, it comes out of the Internet, it comes out of video games. Look at that television set that poor Martin Scott had. The biggest, most expensive thing he owned, except for his truck. And all those video games. And he was a hardworking man; worked hard. But the culture burned him out, reached out through that satellite dish and grabbed him. We see it in Fargo, but you can still fight it there. Here . . . this place is gone. Too late for this place. Too late. You’ll see.”
    “Shut the fuck up,” Del said.

29
    SUNDAY. DAY NINE.
    Six o’ clock in the morning.
    Olson parked at the hotel and said, “Call me when the bodies are ready.”
    Lucas said he would.
    As they got in Lucas’s car, Del said, “He could still have a finger in it.”
    “Nah. There’s no conspiracy here, Del. A bullshit drug murder and then a nutcase on the loose.”
    “Where do you think Scott is?”
    “Here,” Lucas said.
    “In the suburb of hell?”
    “Yup. Somewhere.”
    THERE WERE TWO guys in Jael’s yard. “We get a car about once every five minutes,” one of them said. “They’re getting a little more traffic up at the Kinsley place, but man, there’s just nothing going on.”
    “All right.” They went inside, quietly as they could. A cop was sitting on an easy chair in a hallway, watching a TV on the floor. “We didn’t want to get any TV flicker on the windows,” he explained.
    “Is Jael asleep?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Where’s the perimeter?”
    “Two blocks out on every side; we got every street covered. He’s gonna have to parachute in, if he’s coming.”
    “What I’m worried about, if he comes, is a suicide run,” Lucas said. “He’s got that shotgun.”
    “I just wish he’d come,” the cop said. “This is boring my goddamned brains out.”
     
 
BACK IN THE car, Lucas said, “I’d like to go up to Kinsleys’, if you don’t mind. Take ten minutes, look around.”
    “It’s all right with me.”
     
 
TWO BLOCKS FROM Jael’s, at a four-way stop, a crossing car paused as Lucas approached, then pulled slowly across the intersection.