Certain Prey Read Online Free PDF Page A

Baily?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s about to go in,” Swanson said, meaning surgery. “They already got the sedative going, so they can plug in the airway shit. He won’t be talking. The surgeon’s down the hall scrubbing up, if you wanna talk to him.”
    “Anybody tell Baily’s wife?”
    “We’re looking for the chaplain,” Swanson said. “He’s at a church thing up on the north side, some kind of yard sale. Dick’s on hold for him now.” He nodded at the cop on the phone. “We’ll get him in the next couple of minutes.”
    Lucas turned to Sloan: “Get the chaplain going, send a car. Lights and sirens.”
    Sloan nodded and headed for the cop on the phone. Lucas turned back to Swanson. “What’s going on at the scene?”
    “Goddamnedest thing. Woman was executed, I think.”
    “Executed?”
    “She took at least four or five in the head with a small-caliber pistol, short range: you can see the tattooing on her scalp,” Swanson said. “Nobody heard a thing, which might mean a silencer. Everything in that stairwell echoes like crazy, off that concrete, and Baily told me he couldn’t remember hearing the gun. Baily saw the shooter, but all he remembered was that it was a woman, and she was a redhead. Nothing else. No age, no weight, nothing. We figure the shooter was white if she was a redhead, but shit, there’re probably five thousand redheads downtown every day.”
    “Who’s working it?”
    “Sherrill and Black. I heard about it, first call, and ran over, took a quick look at the dead woman and then came over here with Baily and the paramedics.”
    “So the dead woman’s still over there.”
    Swanson nodded. “Yeah. She was way dead. We didn’t even think about bringing her in.”
    “Okay . . . you say the doc’s scrubbing?”
    “Dan Wong, right down the hall. By the way, Baily says he was only shot once, but the docs say he’s got two slugs in him.”
    “So much for eyewitnesses,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. But it means that this chick is fast and accurate. The holes are a half-inch apart. Of course, she missed his heart.”
    “If she was shooting for it. If it was a twenty-two . . .”
    “That’s what it looked like.”
    “. . . then she might have been worried about punching through his breastbone.”
    Swanson shook his head. “Nobody’s that good.” “I hope not,” Lucas said. L UCAS BRUSHED PAST a nurse who made a desultory effort to slow him down, and found Wong up to his elbows in green soap. Wong turned and said, “Uh-oh, the cops.”
    “How bad is it?” Lucas asked. “Not too bad,” Wong said, going to work on his fingernails. “He’s gonna hurt for a while, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse. Two slugs—in the pictures, they look pretty deformed, so they were probably hollowpoints. They went in at his right nipple, lodged under the right scapula. Two little holes, he hardly bled at all, though his body fat makes it a little hard to tell what’s going on. His blood pressure’s good. Looks like some goddamn gang-banger with a pieceof-crap twenty-two.”
    “So he’s gonna be okay?” Lucas could feel the tension backing off.
    “Unless he has a heart attack or a stroke,” Wong said. “He’s way too fat and he was panicking when they brought him in. The surgery, I could do with my toes.”
    “So what’ll I tell the press? Wong is doing surgery with his toes?”
    Wong shrugged as he rinsed: “He’s in surgery now, listed in guarded condition, but he’s expected to recover barring complications.”
    “You gonna talk to them afterwards?”
    “I got a two o’clock tee time at Wayzata,” Wong said. He flicked water off his hands and stepped away from the sink.
    “You might have to skip it,” Lucas said.
    “Bullshit. I don’t get invited all that often.”
    “Danny . . .”
    “I’ll give them a few minutes,” Wong said. “Now, if you’ll get your germ-infested ass out of here, I’ll go to work.” R ANDALL T HORN, the newly promoted deputy chief for