Gathering Prey Read Online Free PDF

at noon tomorrow.”
    “All right. All right, I’ll meet you at the bus station. Stay away from Pilot and stay away from that blonde.”
    “I will. Oh, Jesus, what about Henry?”
    “We’ll work that out. I’ll get my dad, and we’ll work that out.”
    •   •   •
    HER DAD WAS Lucas Davenport.
    Lucas was a tall man, dark-haired except for a streak of white threading across his temples and over his ears, dark-complected, heavy at the shoulders. He had blue eyes, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and a scar that reached from his hairline down over one eye, not from some back-alley fight, but from a simple fishing accident. He had another scar high on his throat, where a young girl had once shot him with a piece-of-crap street gun. So his body was well lived in, and he’d just turned fifty, and didn’t like it. Some days, too many days lately, he felt old—too much bullshit, not enough progress in saving the world.
    For his birthday, his wife, Weather, a surgeon, had bought him an elliptical machine: “You’ve been pounding the pavement for too long. Give your knees a break.”
    He used it from time to time, but he really liked running on the street, especially after a rain. He liked running through the odors of the night, through the air off the Mississippi, through the neon flickering off the leftover puddles of rainwater. He needed to run when he was dealing with people like Ben Merion.
    By the time he reached the last corner toward home, he’d worked through his grouchiness. He turned the corner and picked up the pace, not quite to a full-out sprint, but close enough for a fifty-year-old.
    And through the sweat in his eyes, saw Letty standing under the porch light, hands in her jeans pockets: looking for him.
    Letty had gotten herself laid: he and Weather agreed on that, although Weather called it “becoming sexually active.” Lucas was ninety percent sure that she hadn’t been sexually active in high school, aside from some squeezing and rubbing, though she’d been a popular girl. Once at Stanford, she’d apparently decided to let go.
    Lucas deeply hoped that the sex had been decent and that the guy had been good for her, and kind. When he was college-aged, he hadn’t always been good for the women in his life, or kind, and he regretted it. He also knew that there was not much he could do about Letty’s sex life, for either good or bad. Keep his mouth shut and pray, that was about it. Trust her good instincts.
    He turned up the driveway and called out, “Whatcha doing?”
    “Waiting for you. Something’s come up,” Letty said.
    He stopped short of the porch, bent over, his hands on his knees, gulping air. When he’d caught his breath, he stood up: “Tell me.”
    •   •   •
    WHEN SHE’D TOLD HIM, he said, “Have you thought about the possibility that she’s nuts? Or that she’s working you?”
    “Of course. I don’t think she’s crazy—I mean, I don’t think she’s delusional,” Letty said. “I have to admit that she talks about a guy being the devil, which doesn’t sound good, but when she does it . . . you almost have to hear it. She’s not talking literally: not a guy with horns and a tail. She’s talking about, what? A Charlie Manson type. A Manson family guy. He calls himself Pilot.”
    “Pilot.”
    “Yeah. Pilot. She flat out says he’s a killer,” Letty said. “She didn’t come up with that today, she said it weeks ago, when we first met in San Francisco, when there was no money in it. As far as working me goes, she tried to work me a little in San Francisco, because they weren’t making any money with their singing. Then she realized she didn’t have to work me, because I was going to buy them a McDonald’s anyway. She’s not dumb.”
    Lucas sat on the porch next to her and said, “Okay. First of all, you know, she
is
crazy. Somehow, someway, because all street people are. Not necessarily schizophrenic, or clinically paranoid, but