Mortal Prey

shoulder, “And don’t start without me.”
    Lucas, waiting at the back of the church, pulled at the collar of his dress shirt, plucked at his tie. Del had been in the—What’d he call it? The nave? The main part of the church—drinking what Lucas hoped was a cream soda. Now he came up and asked, “Nervous?”
    “Of course I’m fuckin’ nervous, what’d you think?” Lucas snapped. Then, quickly, “Sorry. I’m not sure this is gonna work out. I thought about it all night. I was one inch from canceling the whole thing.” He looked at his watch and said, “One minute. Where’s that fuck in’ Marcy?”
    Sloan said, “She just went down to the can,” and Lucas said to Del, “I met this guy down in St. Louis who told me about this time he had to wear a tux and it kept dragging his Jockey shorts up the crack of his ass, and I swear to God, right now…”
    Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police, went by and said, “I think I’m more nervous than you are.”
    Lucas grinned at her, a tight grin. “If I was losing my job next week, I’d be nervous too. What if something happens and queers the deal with the state?”
    “One big lawsuit, that’s what would happen.”
    Del prompted him, “The guy’s shorts kept dragging up his ass….”
    Lucas tried to pick it up, and said, “Yeah, and he said…”
    Swanson, an old homicide dick, came by and said, “This is the most fucked-up wedding I’ve ever been to, and my wife’s family is a bunch of Polacks.”
    “Thank God your wife isn’t,” Sloan said.
    “Where in the fuck is the bride?” Lucas snarled.
    Tom Black, a semicloseted gay homicide detective, came out of the nave and said, “Look at the women in there. They’re having a great time. They’re gonna be breaking out in fistfights.”
    “If you couldn’t get laid at this wedding, you couldn’t get laid,” Del said. Then he glanced sideways at Rose Marie and said, “No offense.”
    “No problem,” the chief said, taking a drag on a fresh Marlboro. “Cuts both ways.”
    “Where’s that fuckin’ Sherrill?” Lucas barked. “Christ…what?”
    “Your earpiece is hanging down your neck,” Sloan said.
    “Thing is covered with somebody else’s ear wax,” Lucas said, looking at the earpiece. He plugged it in, and saw Marcy Sherrill coming.
    “Where in the hell…?”
    “Gun wasn’t working out. I thought I’d hold it like this, like a little black clutch purse,” she said, holding her revolver in both hands.
    “Like you’re gonna need that,” Lucas said. Then he turned, and shouted into the nave. “All right, people, we’re gonna do this. Everybody sit tight, unless you’re part of the porch group.”
    Then, to the people gathered around him: “Everybody ready, porch people? Porch people? Let’s do it. Reverend, lead the way.”
    Del put down the bottle of what Lucas hoped was cream soda, adjusted his choir robe, picked up a cigar box, which everybody agreed looked a lot like a Bible—the prayer books had been locked up by some mistake—and led the way through the church’s double doors. Marcy, all in bridal white, her revolver clutched like a purse, put her arm through Lucas’s arm, pulled it tight, and said, “I always dreamed of this day,” and Lucas said, “Enjoy it while it lasts. Man, you look like fuckin’ Moby Dick.”
    “You look a little like Shamu the killer whale, yourself,” she said. “I think it’s the black and white that does it.”
     
    THE TROUBLE IN St. Louis seemed almost like a dream. Treena Ross had been indicted for her husband’s murder, and the local cops had chased down every story of an injured woman that they could find. Three days after Ross went down, Lucas returned to the Twin Cities, and the whole episode drifted off into the past, another complicated memory, mostly bad.
    Weather had been happy to get him back. The wedding planning had been completed, the invitations ordered, and the house had taken a big step toward completion. Getting through daily life pushed aside any speculation about Clara Rinker, though Lucas was careful not to pattern himself.
    Clara, he thought, would come, sooner or later. He’d half expected her to call, as she had after their last collision, but she hadn’t. The silence intensified his apprehension.
     
    RINKER SAT BEHIND the wheel of the red Jeep Cherokee and looked across the valley at the front of the church, a half-mile away. A beautiful view, she thought, in the brilliant sunlight, with the