Sudden Prey Read Online Free PDF

outside an Amoco station off I-94, an olive-drab duffel at his feet. Martin eased to the curb and Butters climbed in and said, “Straight ahead, back down the ramp.”
    Martin caught the traffic light and said, “How you been?”
    “Tired,” Butters said. His small eyes looked sleepy.
    “You was tired last fall,” said Martin. Martin had passed through Tennessee on one of his gun-selling trips, stopped and done some squirrel-hunting with Butters.
    “I’m more tired now,” Butters said. He looked into the back of the truck. “What’d you bring?”
    “Three cold pistols, three Chinese AK semis, two modified AR-15s, a bow, a couple dozen arrows and my knife,” Martin said.
    “I don’t think you’ll need the bow,” Butters said dryly.
    “It’s a comfort to me,” Martin said. He was a roughmuscled, knob-headed outdoorsman with a dark reddish beard over a red-pocked face. “Where’s this guy we gotta see?”
    “Over in Minneapolis. Just outa downtown. By the dome.”
    Martin grinned his thin coyote-killing smile: “You been studying up on him?”
    “Yeah, I have been.”
    They took I-94 to Minneapolis, got off at the Fifth Street exit, got a pizza downtown, then went back to Eleventh Avenue. Butters directed Martin to a stand-alone two-story brick building with a laundromat on the ground level and apartment above. The building was old, but well-kept: probably a neighborhood mom-and-pop grocery in the forties. Lights showed in the apartment windows.
    “He owns the laundromat,” Butters said. “The upstairs is one big apartment. He lives up there with his girlfriend.” Butters looked up at the lights. “She must be there now, ’cause he’s downtown. He runs his boys right to closing time. He got back here last night about two, and he brought a pizza with him.”
    Martin looked at his watch, a black military-style Chronosport with luminescent hands. “Got us about an hour, then.” He looked back out the window at the building. There was just one door going up to the apartments. “Where’s the garage you were talking about?”
    “ ’Round the side. There’s a fire escape on the back, one of them drop-down ones, too high to get to. What he did last night was, he pulled into the garage—he’s got a garage-door opener in his car—and the door come down. Then, a minute later, this light went on in the back of the apartment, so there must be an inside stairs. Then he come down through the back again, out through the garage, around the corner and into the laundromat. He was in the back, probably countin’ out the machines.”
    Martin nodded. “Huh. Didn’t use them front stairs?”
    “Nope. Could be something goin’ on there, so I didn’t look.”
    “All right. We take him at the garage?”
    “Yeah. And we might as well eat the pizza. We only need the box, and Harp ain’t gonna want any.”
    They chatted easily, comfortable in the pickup smells of gasoline, straw, rust and oil. Then Martin, dabbing at his beard with a paper napkin, asked, “What do you hear from Dick?”
    “Ain’t heard dick from Dick,” Butters said. He didn’t wait for Martin to laugh, because he wouldn’t, although Butters had a sense that Martin sometimes enjoyed a little joshing. He said, “Last time I talked to him direct, he sounded like he was . . . getting out there.”
    Martin chewed, swallowed and said, “Nothing wrong with being out there.”
    “No, there ain’t,” Butters agreed. He was as far out there as anyone. “But if we’re gonna be killing cops, we want the guy to have his feet on the ground.”
    “Why? You planning to walk away from this thing?”
    Butters thought for a minute, then laughed, almost sadly, and shook his head. “I guess not.”
    “I thought about goin’ up to Alaska, moving out in the woods,” Martin said, after a moment of silence. “You know, when I got the call. But they’ll get you even in Alaska. They’ll track you down anywhere. I’m tired of it. I figure, it’s