Free Sudden Prey by John Sandford Page B

it.”
    “Guys, I tell you, we’re moving stuff today . . .” Elmore stuttered. Martin and Butters scared Elmore. Martin, Elmore thought, was a freak, a pent-up homosexual hillbilly crazy in love with LaChaise. Butters had the flat eyes of a snapping turtle, and was simply nuts.
    Elmore tried to get out of it, but Martin put his hands in Elmore’s coat pocket, and when Elmore tried to wrench away, Butters pushed him from the other side. Martin had the keys and said, “We’ll get them back to you, bud.”
     
     
     
    THE HOUSE WAS a shabby two-story clapboard wreck on a side street in the area called Frogtown. The outside needed paint, the inside needed an exterminator. Half the basement was wet and the circuit box hanging over the damp concrete floor was a fire marshal’s nightmare. Martin had brought in three Army-surplus beds, a dilapidated monkey-shit-yellow couch and two matching chairs, and a dinette set, all from Goodwill, and a brand-new twenty-seven-inch Sony color TV.
    “Good place, if we don’t burn to death,” Martin said. The house smelled like wet plaster and fried eggs. “That wiring down the basement is a marvel.”
    “Hey, it’s fine,” LaChaise said, looking around.
    No web of sewer pipe, no Honda generators. No land mines.
    That evening, Butters sat in one of the broken-down easy chairs, his head back and his eyes closed. Martin sat cross-legged on the floor with his arrows, unscrewing the field points, replacing them with hundred-grain Thunderheads, a can of beer by one foot. He would occasionally look at LaChaise with a stare that was purely sexual.
    “We’re gonna do it,” LaChaise said. He had a half-glass of bourbon in his hand. “We’ve been talking for years. Talk talk talk. Now with Candy and Georgie shot to pieces, we’re gonna do it.”
    “Gonna be the end of us,” Martin said. His beard was coppery red in the lamplight.
    “Could be,” LaChaise agreed. He scratched his own beard, nipped at the bourbon. “Do you care?”
    Martin worked for another minute, then said, “Nah. I’m getting crowded. I’m ready.”
    “You could go up north, up in the Yukon.”
    “Been there,” Martin said. “The goddamn Canadians is a bunch of Communists. Even Alaska’s better.”
    “Mexico . . .”
    “I’m a goddamn American.”
    LaChaise nodded and said, “How about you, Ansel?”
    Butters said, “I just want to get it over with.”
    “Well, we got to take our time, figure this out . . .”
    “I mean, everything over with,” Butters said. “I can take my time with this. ”
    LaChaise nodded again. “It’s the end for me, for sure. But I swear to God, I’m taking a bunch of these sonsofbitches with me.”
    Martin looked at him uncertainly, then nodded, and looked away. They worked together, comfortable but intent, like they did in hunting camps, thinking about it all, drinking a little, letting the feeling of the hunt flow through them, the camaraderie as they got the gear ready.
    They checked the actions on their weapons for the twentieth time, loading and unloading the pistols, dry-firing at the TV; the good smell of Hoppe’s solvent and gun oil, the talk of old times and old rides and the people they remembered, lots of them dead, now.
    “If I lived,” LaChaise continued, “I’d do nothing but sit in cells for the rest of my life anyhow. Besides . . .”
    “Besides what?” Martin asked, looking up.
    “Ah, nothin’,” LaChaise said, but he thought, Mexico. He’d always planned to go, and hadn’t ever been.
    “It cranks me up, thinking about it,” Butters said. His face was flushed with alcohol.
    SANDY HAD BLOWN up when she’d come back from her ride, and Elmore had told her about the truck. She jumped in her van and went after them, but they were gone. She got to the St. Croix, realized the futility of the chase, slowed, turned around and went back.
    “What were you thinking about?” she shouted at Elmore. “You shoulda swallowed the keys.”
    That night,