Hidden Prey

guessed.
    “What’s in there? Vehicles?”
    “Yeah, there’s a four-wheeler, a Honda, a boat, a couple of trailers, a couple of sleds, a John Deere Gator. I don’t know if he knows where the keys for the Honda are, but . . . now that I think of it, I bet he does. I bet when they were up here screwing around with that gun, they were running the four-wheeler, too. If he got on that, he could go where we couldn’t . . .”
    Lucas turned to the deputies. “Everybody move carefully. We’ve got him. There’s no point in anybody getting hurt.” One of the deputies carried a radio, and Lucas said to him, “Call in, get some more people down here.”
    “We gonna talk to him, or what?”
    “We’ll stay in the woods, block the place, and wait until the other guys get here. Then we’ll talk . . .”
    “If we see him outside without the rifle, we could try to rush him.”
    “We could, but he might have something else with him—the pistol he used on Jerry Reasons,” Lucas said.
    The radio guy came back: “All right, I talked to Jim, and they’re on the way, the whole bunch of them. Half hour.”
    “Let’s move in close, and then wait,” Lucas said. “Just close it up . . .”
    Nadya stayed at his elbow, her face flushed, intent.
     
    T HE HOUSE SAT on the north side of the narrow river, with a tiny roll-out dock already pulled up on shore; a twelve-foot aluminum rowboat was turned upside down on the bank beside the dock. The house itself was surrounded by an open grassy yard that extended perhaps thirty feet on all sides, before the trees began; a few marigolds were spotted along the sidewalk to the front door. The driveway cut across the north edge of the yard, leading to the pole barn.
    The sniper went with Lucas and Nadya, with Wolfe trailing. One of the other deputies took the east side of the house, the second the west side. They sat and waited. Five minutes passed, then ten.
    And then Carl Walther burst from the house, running, rifle in hand, a fat cloth laundry bag over his shoulder. He went straight into the pole barn, head down.
    “What’s happening?” The sniper asked.
    Lucas looked at the cabin roof. “You’ve got a satellite TV in there, don’t you?” he asked Wolfe. He could see the pie-pan dish.
    “Yeah.”
    “The fuckin’ TV people saw them tearing out of the police station,” Lucas said. The Honda’s engine rumbled to life, and Carl backed out of the garage. The cloth bag was attached to a rack behind the seat, held in place with bungee cords. The rifle was in a plastic scabbard.
    “Take the tires as soon as he’s clear of the garage,” Lucas said to the sniper. “Watch your guy there in the background.”
    The sniper spoke into his shoulder radio and then the Honda was easing out of the garage. “Take it,” Lucas said.
    The sniper waited another two seconds, waiting for an angle, and then took the back tire with a burst of three shots.
    Carl tried to accelerate, but the tire flopped on the driveway and he jumped off the Honda, grabbed the gun, looked wildly in theirdirection, fired a single shot straight up in the air and then ran into the house again.
    “What was that about?”
    “Scared,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch. “The other guys are still twenty minutes out. I’m going to call down to him. I’ll move off your position, get as close as I can, and yell at him.”
    “What if he comes out with the gun?”
    “You have to decide. I don’t want him killed.”
    “Sure you don’t want to wait?”
    “I’m worried about what he’s thinking in there,” Lucas said. “His grandpa just killed himself.”
     
    L UCAS WORKED HIS way back into the woods, so the pole barn was between himself and the house. Wolfe stayed with the sniper, but Nadya followed Lucas.
    “You can come,” he said, when he saw she was coming no matter what he said, “but stay out of the way.”
    “A woman’s voice . . . ,” she said.
    “You’re the woman he once tried to kill. And he almost cut the head off another woman, if he’s the one who killed the old lady in Duluth.”
    “Still. He might believe he would be safer with me.”
    “Just stay out of the fuckin’ way, okay?”
    They slipped around the corner of the pole barn, inside, out of sight. “Now just . . . just get behind the car or something,” Lucas told Nadya.
    She was peeking around the corner of the garage access door. The house was fifty feet away, with the Honda disabled halfway between.