Rules of Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

key opened the door, and they pushed in. The house was fully furnished, but the front room had the too-orderly feeling of long-prepared-for absence. The air was still and slightly musty.
    “You want to wander around a minute?” Lewis looked up at him.
    “Sure.” He glanced at the kitchen, strolled through the front room, walked up three stairs to the bedroom level, looked in each room. When he came back down, she was clutching her purse strap in front of her, examining with some interest a crystal lamp on the fireplace mantel.
    “How much are they asking?”
    “A hundred and five.”
    He nodded and glanced toward the basement door at the edge of the kitchen.
    “Is that the basement?”
    “Yes, I believe so.”
    When she turned toward the door, he took the sock out of his pocket. She took another step toward the basement door. Swinging the sock like a mace, he slammed the Idaho baker into the back of her head, just above her left ear.
    The blow knocked her off her feet and Vullion dropped on her back and slammed her again. This one was not like the bitch artist. She was an office worker with no strength in her arms. She moaned once, dazed, and he grabbed the hair on the crown of her head and wrenched her head straight back and shoved in the Kotex. He pulled on his gloves, took the tape from his side pocket, and quickly wrapped her head. As she finally began to struggle against him, he rolled her over, crossed her wrists, and taped them. She was beginning to recover, her eyes half-open now, and he dragged her up the stairs into the first bedroom and threw her on the bed. He taped her arms first, to the headboard, then her legs, apart, to the corner posts of the bed.
    He was breathing hard but he could feel the erection pounding at his groin, the excitement building in his throat.
    He stepped back and looked down at her. The knife, he thought. Hope there’s a good one. He went down to look in the kitchen.
    On the bed behind him, Jeannie Lewis moaned.

CHAPTER
4
    The Twin Cities’ horse track looks like a Greyhound bus station designed by a pastry chef. The fat cop, no architecture critic, liked it. He sat in the sun with a slice of pepperoni pizza in his lap, a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a portable radio in the other. He took the call on the portable just before the second race.
    “Right now?”
    “Right now.” Even with the interference, the voice was unmistakable and ragged as a bread knife.
    The fat cop looked at the thin one.
    “Christ, the fuckin’ chief. On the radio. ”
    “His procedure is fucked.” The thin cop was eating the last of a hot dog and had dribbled relish down the front of his sport coat. He brushed at it with an undersize napkin.
    “He wants Davenport,” said the fat one.
    “Something must have happened,” said the thin one. They were outside, on the deck. Lucas was on the blacktopped patio below, two sections over. He lazily sprawled over a wooden bench directly in front of the tote board and thirty feet from the dark soil of the track. A pretty woman in cowboy boots sat at the other end of the bench drinking beer from a plastic cup. The two cops went up the aisle to the top of the grandstand, down the staircase, and pushed through a small crowd at the base of the steps.
    “Davenport? Lucas?”
    Lucas turned, saw them, and smiled. “Hey. How’re you doing? Day at the races, huh?”
    “The chief wants to talk to you. Like right away.” The fatcop hadn’t thought of it until the last minute, but this could be hard to explain.
    “They pulled the surveillance?” Lucas asked. His teeth were showing.
    “You knew about it?” The fat cop lifted an eyebrow.
    “For a while. But I didn’t know why.” He looked at them expectantly.
    The thin cop shrugged. “We don’t know either.”
    “Hey, fuck you, Dick . . .” Lucas stood up with his fists balled, and the thin cop took a step back.
    “Honest to Christ, Lucas, we don’t know,” said the fat one. “It was all