Invisible Prey

woman with the pipe, heavy impacts shaking the floor. Little went after him, catching him after the first three impacts, pulling him away, voice hard, “She’s gone, for Christ’s sakes, she’s gone, she’s gone…”
    “Fucker,” Big said. “Piece of shit.”
    Little thought, sometimes, that Big should have a bolt through his neck.
    Big stopped, and straightened, looked down at Peebles, muttered, “She’s gone.” He shuddered, and said, “Gone.” Then he turned to Little, blood in his eye, hefting the pipe.
    Little’s hands came up: “No, no—it’s me. It’s me. For God’s sake.”
    Big shuddered again. “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s you.”
    Little took a step back, still uncertain, and said, “Let’s get to work. Are you okay? Let’s get to work.”
    Twenty minutes after they went in, the front door opened again. Big came out, looked both ways, climbed into the van, and eased it around the corner of the house and down the side to the deliveries entrance. Because of the pitch of the slope at the back of the house, the van was no longer visible from the street.
    The last light was gone, the night now as dark as a coal sack, the lightning flashes closer, the wind coming like a cold open palm, pushing against Big’s face as he got out of the van. A raindrop, fat and round as a marble, hit the toe of his shoe. Then another, then more, cold, going pat-pat…pat…pat-pat-pat on the blacktop and concrete and brick.
    He hustled up to the back door; Little opened it from the inside.
    “Another surprise,” Little said, holding up a painting, turning it over in the thin light. Big squinted at it, then looked at Little: “We agreed we wouldn’t take anything off the walls.”
    “Wasn’t on the walls,” Little said. “It was stuffed away in the storage room. It’s not on the insurance list.”
    “Amazing. Maybe we ought to quit now, while we’re ahead.”
    “No.” Little’s voice was husky with greed. “This time…this time, we can cash out. We’ll never have to do this again.”
    “I don’t mind,” Big said.
    “You don’t mind the killing, but how about thirty years in a cage? Think you’d mind that ?”
    Big seemed to ponder that for a moment, then said, “All right.”
    Little nodded. “Think about the SLs. Chocolate for you, silver for me. Apartments: New York and Los Angeles. Something right on the Park, in New York. Something where you can lean out the window, and see the Met.”
    “We could buy…” Big thought about it for a few more seconds. “Maybe…a Picasso?”
    “A Picasso…” Little thought about it, nodded. “But first—I’m going back upstairs. And you…”
    Big grinned under the mask. “I trash the place. God, I love this job.”
     
    O UTSIDE, across the back lawn, down the bluff, over the top of the United Hospital buildings and Seventh Street and the houses below, down three-quarters of a mile away, a towboat pushed a line of barges toward the moorings at Pig’s Eye. Not hurrying. Tows never hurried. All around, the lights of St. Paul sparkled like diamonds, on the first line of bluffs, on the second line below the cathedral, on the bridges fore and aft, on the High Bridge coming up.
    The pilot in the wheelhouse was looking up the hill at the lights of Oak Walk, Dove Hill, and the Hill House, happened to be looking when the lights dimmed, all at once.
    The rain-front had topped the bluff and was coming down on the river.
    Hard rain coming, the pilot thought. Hard rain.

2
    S LOAN CARRIED a couple of Diet Cokes over to the booth where Lucas Davenport waited, sitting sideways, his feet up on the booth seat. The bar was modern, but with an old-timey decor: creaking wooden floors, high-topped booths, a small dance floor at one end.
    Sloan was the proprietor, and he dressed like it. He was wearing a brown summer suit, a tan shirt with a long pointed collar, a white tie with woven gold diamonds, and a genuine straw Panama hat. He was a slat-built man, narrow through the face, shoulders, and hips. Not gaunt, but narrow; might have been a clarinet player in a fading jazz band, Lucas thought, or the cover character on a piece of 1930s pulp fiction.
    “Damn Diet Coke, it fizzes like crazy. I thought there was something wrong with the pump, but it’s just the Coke. Don’t know why,” Sloan said, as he dropped the glasses on the table.
    At the far end of the bar, the bartender was reading a Wall Street Journal by the light from a peanut-sized reading lamp