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 The Prey Series Easy Prey Virgil Flowers The Kidd Series Other Novels Etcetera | Easy Prey The Prey series contains strong language and scenes
of graphic violence and sex, and it may thus be inappropriate or offensive to
some readers. The excerpt below is the complete first chapter of
Easy Prey, and it has not been censored in any way. If you are offended
by this sort of material, or will get in trouble for reading it (e.g. if your
parents think it would be inappropriate for you), do not continue.
Thank you. When the First Man woke up that morning, he wasn't thinking
about killing anyone. He woke up with a head full of blues, a brain that was
too big for his skull, and a bladder about to burst. He lay with his eyes
closed, breathing across a tongue that tasted like burnt chicken feathers. The
blues rolled in through the bedroom door. Coming down hard. The First Man had been flying on cocaine for two days, getting
everything done, everything. Then last night, coming down, he'd
stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of Stolichnaya. His bleeding brain
retained a picture of himself lifting the bottle off the shelf; and another
picture of an argument with the counterman, who didn't want to break a
hundred-dollar bill. By that time, the coke high had become unsustainable; and the
Stoli had been a bad idea. There was no smooth landing after a two-day toot,
but the vodka turned a wheels-up belly-landing into a full crash-and-burn. Now
he'd pay. If you peeled open his skull and dumped it, he thought, his brain
would look like a coagulated lump of Campbell's Bean Soup. A woman's face floated up in his mind's eye, and with it, a
little trickle of pleasure. She didn't want to do it anymore, she said. She was
getting scared. The First Man disagreed. If she persisted, he might have hurt
her a little. Let her know What was What, Who was Who. The idea of whacking her
around... he liked that idea. The First Man cracked his eyes, lifted his head, and looked at
the clock. A few minutes past seven. He'd gotten four hours of sleep. Par for
the course with coke, and the Stoli hadn't helped. If he'd stayed down for ten
hours, or twelve – he needed about sixteen to catch up – he might
have been past the worst of it. Now he was just gonna have to suck it up. He turned to his left where a woman, a dishwater blonde, lay
face-down in her pillow. He could only see about half of her head: the rest was
buried by a red fleece blanket. She lay without moving, like a dead woman: but
no such luck. He closed his eyes again, and there was nothing left in the world
but the blues music bumping in from the next room, from the all-blues channel,
nine-hundred-and-something on the TV dial. Must've left it on last
night... Gotta move, he thought. Gotta pee. Gotta take twenty aspirins
and kick the bitch out of bed and go down to Country Kitchen and get some
pancakes and link sausages... The First Man didn't wake up thinking about murder. He woke up
thinking about his head and his bladder and a stack of pancakes. Funny how
things work out. That night, when he killed two people, he surprised
himself. Green-eyed Alie'e Maison stood in the hulk of a rust-colored
Mississippi River barge. She was wrapped in a designer dress that looked like
froth over a reef in the Caribbean Sea – an ankle-length dress the exact
faded-jade color of her eyes, low-cut and sheer, hugging her hips, flaring at
her ankles. She was large-eyed, barefoot, elfin, fleeing down a pale yellow
two-by-twelve-inch pine plank, which stretched like a line of fire out of the
purple gloom of the barge's interior. Behind her, a huge man in a sleeveless white t-shirt, filthy
Sears-Roebuck work pants and ten-inch work boots blew sparks off a piece of
wrought iron with an acetylene torch. He was wearing a black dome-shaped
welding helmet, and acrid grey smoke curled around his heavy, tense legs. The
blank robotic faceplate, in combination with his hairy arms, the dirty shirt
and the smoke, squat legs, gave him the grotesque crouching power of a
gargoyle. A fantasy at three thousand dollars an hour. And not quite right. "That's no fucking good. NO FUCKING GOOD!" Amnon Plain moved through the bank of strobes, his thick black
hair falling over his forehead, his narrow glasses glittering in the set
lights, his voice cutting like a piece of broken glass: "Alie'e, you're
freezing up at the line. I want you blowing out of the place. I want
you moving faster when you come up to the line, not slower. You're
slowing down. And I want you to look pissed. You look annoyed, you
look petulant..." "I am annoyed; I'm freezing," Alie'e snapped. "I've
got goosebumps the size of fucking oranges." Plain turned to an assistant: "Larry, move the heater into the
back. You gotta get some heat on her." "We'll get the fumes," Larry said, arms akimbo, a deliberately
effeminate pose. Larry wasn't gay, just ironic. "We'll deal with the fucking fumes. Huh? Okay? We'll deal with
the fucking fumes." "You gotta do something, I'm really cold," Alie'e said. She
clasped her arms around herself and shivered, for effect. A man dressed in
black walked out from behind the lights, peeling off his cashmere sport coat.
He was tall, thin, his over-the-shoulder brunette hair worn loose and back. He
had a thick hammered-silver loop earring in his left ear and a dark soul-patch
under his lower lip. "Take this, until they're ready again," he said to Alie'e.
She huddled in the coat. Turning away from them, Plain rolled his eyes. "Larry
– move the fuckin' heater." Larry shrugged and began wheeling the propane heater further
into the barge. If they all died of carbon monoxide poisoning, it wouldn't be
his fault. Plain turned back to Alie'e. "Jax, take a hike, and take your
coat with you..." "Hey..." the man in black said, but nobody was looking at him,
or paying attention. Plain continued: "... Alie'e, I want you pissed. Don't do that
thing with your lips. You're sticking your lips out, like this." Plain pursed
his lips. "That's a pout, I don't want a pout. Do it like this...." He grimaced
and Alie'e tried to imitate him. This was one of her talents: the ability to
imitate expression, the way a dancer could imitate motion. "That's better," Plain said to Alie'e. "But make your mouth
longer, turn it down, and get it set that way while you're moving. Do
it again." She did it again, making the changes. "That's good; but now you need
some mouth." He turned back to the line of lights, and the small crowd
gathered behind them – an account executive, a creative director, a
make-up artist, a hair-dresser, a couture rep, a second photo assistant and
Alie's parents, Lynn and Lil. Plain did not provide chairs, and the inside of
the barge was not a place you'd want to sit down, not if your hand-tailored
jeans cost four hundred and fifty dollars. To the make-up artist Plain said,
"Fix her mouth." And to the second assistant, "Jimmy, where's the fucking
Polaroid? You got the Polaroid?" Jimmy was fanning a 6x7cm Polaroid color print, which was used
the check exposure. He glanced at the print and said, "It's coming up." Behind him, the creative director whispered to the account
executive, "Says fuck a lot," and the account executive muttered, "They all
do." Plain peered at the Polaroid, looked up at an overhead
softbox: "Move that box. About two feet to the right, that way." Jimmy moved it
and Plain looked around: "Everybody ready? Alie'e, remember the line. Clark,
are you ready?" The welder said, "Yeah, I'm ready. Was that enough
sparks?" "Sparks were fine; sparks were good," Plain said. "You're the
only fucking professional working here this morning..." He looked back at
Alie'e. "Now don't fucking pout: blow right through the
line..." Alie'e waited patiently until her mouth was fixed, staring
blankly past the make-up artist's ear as a bit of color was patched into the
left corner of her lower lip; Jax said into her ear, "Love you; you're doing
great, you look great." Alie'e barely heard him. She was seeing
herself walking the plank, the vision of herself that came from Plain's
mind. When her mouth was done, she stepped back to her starting
mark. Jax got out of the way, and when Plain said, "Go," Alie'e got her
expression right, started down the plank with a lanky, hip-swinging stride, and
blew past the exposure line, the green dress swirling about her hips,
the orange-yellow welder's sparks flashing in the background. The stink and
smoke of the burning metal curled around her as Plain, standing behind the
camera, fired the bank of strobes. "Better," Plain said, stepping toward her. "A little fuckin'
better." "Goddamn, I wish we could get that smell," the account exec
said. "Maybe we could do a scratch-and-sniff." The creative director turned to the couture rep and asked,
"Was there enough flare around her legs? You think we need the fan?" Plain said, without looking at them, "We're gonna do the fan
whether we need it or not. Right now, we're gonna do another without the fan.
You get too much fucking fan, we could lose the line of her ass. Alie'e, that
was a lot better. Do that again." Alie'e gave herself a moment to preen, then backed up to the
starting point, and Plain said to the make-up artist, "Check her
mouth." They'd been working for two hours in the belly of the grain
barge. The barge was a gift: a pilot on the Greek-owned Mississippi towboat
Treponema had driven it into a protective abutment around a bridge
piling. The damaged barge had been floated to the Anshiser repair yard in St.
Paul, where welders cut away the buckled hull plates and prepared to burn on
new ones. Plain spotted the disemboweled hulk while scouting for photo
locations. He made a deal with Archer-Daniels-Midland, the barge owner: delay
repairs for a week, and ADM would make Vogue. The people who ran ADM
couldn't think of a good reason why the company would worry about
Vogue, but their publicity ladies were wetting their pants, so they
said okay and the deal was made. They were still working with the green dress when a team from
TV3 showed up, and they all took a break. Alie'e goofed around, for the
camera, with Jax; showing a little skin, doing a long, slow rolling
tongue-kiss, which the camera crew asked them to re-do twice, once as a
silhouette. The interviewer for TV3, a square-jawed ex-jock with whitened teeth
and a smile he'd perfected in his bathroom mirror, said, after the cameras shut
down, "It's a slow day: I think we'll lead the news with this." Nobody asked why it was news: they all lived with cameras, and
assumed that it was. Two hours for four different shots, with and without fans, two
rolls of high-saturation Fujichrome film for each of the shots. The Fuji would
make the colors pop. Plain pronounced himself satisfied with the green dress,
and they moved on. The next pose involved a torn t-shirt and a pair of male-look
women's briefs, complete with the vented front. Alie'e and Jax moved against
the far hull and a little shadow, and Alie'e turned her back to the photo crowd
and peeled off the green dress. She'd been nude beneath the dress: anything
else would ruin the line. She was aware of her nudity, but not self-conscious about it,
as she had been at first. Her first jobs had been as one model in a group, and
they usually changed all at once; she was simply one naked woman among several.
By the time she started up the ladder to stardom, to individual attention,
she'd become as conditioned to public nudity as a strip-tease dancer. Even more than that. She'd worked in Europe, with the Germans,
and total nudity wasn't uncommon in fashion work. She remembered the first time
she'd had her pubic hair brushed out, fluffed up. The brusher had been a
thirty-something guy who'd squatted in front of her, smoking a cigarette while
he brushed her, and then did a quick trim with a pair of barber scissors, all
with the emotional neutrality of a postman sorting letters. Then the
photographer came over to take a look, suggested a couple of extra snips. Her
body might as well have been an apple... You want privacy? You turn your back... Almost nobody looked toward her as she changed, first pulling
on the shorts, then the t-shirt, slipping over her head. The exception was the welder, Clark, who was sweating bullets.
Clark was not a model: he'd been working in the barge, welding, when Plain
spotted it. Plain had come after Clark at the same time he was negotiating for
the barge, offering him two thousand dollars for a day's work as a model. Clark
took the two thousand, fast enough. He even liked the work. But he'd never actually seen a live naked woman who looked as
good as Alie'e, not even at the gold-whatever tittie bar in downtown
Minneapolis. Alie'e looked so good she seemed to have come from a different
planet. Clark sat in the corner with his welding torch, welding shield
down, his head turned slightly away, as though he were contemplating a support
beam at the edge of the wounded hull. Actually, his eyes were glued to Alie'e's
long legs and narrow ass as the shorts came up. When she was covered, he sighed
and concentrated desperately on holding the memory. "Let's go, people," Plain called from the line of lights.
"Clark, we're gonna want you on that blue spot." Alie'e Maison – Ah-Lee-Ay May-Sone – had been born
Sharon Olson in Burnt River, Minnesota. Until she was seventeen, she'd lived
with her parents and her brother Tom in a robin's-egg blue rambler just off
Highway 54, fourteen miles south of the Canadian line. She was a beautiful
baby. She won a beautiful baby prize when she was a year old – she'd been
born just before Halloween, and her costume was a pumpkin that her mother made
on her Singer. A year later, Sharon toddled away with a statewide
beautiful-toddler trophy. In that one, she'd been dressed as a lightning bug,
in a suit of black and gold. Dance and comportment lessons began when she was three,
singing lessons when she was four. At five, she won the North Central
Tap-Fairies contest for children five and younger. That was the pattern: Miss
Junior North Country, International Miss Snow (International Falls and Fort
Francis, Canada), Miss Border Lakes. She sang and danced through her school
days. Miss Minnesota and even – her parents, Lynn and Lil, barely dared to
dream it – Miss America was possible. Until she was fourteen, anyway. When the tit genes were passed out in heaven, Alie'e had been
in line for an extra helping of eyes. That became obvious in junior high when
her friends began to complain about bra straps cutting into their necks. Not
Alie'e. As the Olson's best friends, Ellen and Bud Benton said – Bud said
it anyway – "Ain't no Miss Minnesota without the big bumpers,
y'know." As it happened, the tits didn't matter. In the summer of her
fifteenth year, Lynn and Lil took her to a model agency in Minneapolis, and the
agent liked what she saw. Alie'e had knife-edge cheekbones and those jade-green
eyes. They came straight from God in a perfect package with white-blonde hair,
a flawless complexion, delicate fuck-me shoulder blades and hips so narrow
she'd have trouble giving birth to a baling wire. Between Minneapolis and New York, Sharon Olson vanished and
Alie'e Maison stepped into her size-six dress. She was so famous that the
second-most famous person in Burnt River was a lawn-care service operator named
Louis Friar. Friar, one night in eleventh grade, nailed Alie'e in the short
grass beside the first-base line of the American Legion baseball diamond on
Bergholm Road, on an air mattress that he'd brought along for that express
purpose. Louis never talked about it. He never even confirmed that it
happened. He held the memory of the event in a beery reverence. Alie'e, on the
other hand, talked to everyone; so everyone in Burnt River knew about it, and
how, at the critical moment, Louis had cried out, "Oh God oh God oh God oh
God;" which was why everybody in town called him Reverend. Friar himself
thought the nickname was based on his last name, as if the residents of Burnt
River were universally fond of puns; nobody ever told him different. "You don't think they're getting too close to porno?" Lil now
asked, under her breath to Lynn, as they watched Amnon Plain push their
daughter around the set. "I don't want any goddamned porno." Lil had a thing
about porno. "You know they're not going to do any porno," Lynn said
placatingly. He was wearing black-on-black, with wrap-around Blades. "They better not. That'll kill you in a minute." She
refocused: "Look at Jax. I think he's so good for her." Jax – he had no last name – was peering around the
set through the viewfinder of Nikon F5. He thought of himself as a
photographer, although he hadn't yet taken many photographs. But how hard could
it be? You look through the hole, you push the button. When Alie'e said, "You
got anything?" Jax let the camera drop to his side, tipped his head and they
moved together, against the hull of the barge. Jax took a plastic nose-drop
bottle from his pocket and passed it to her. Alie'e unscrewed the top, slipped
the end into a nostril and squeezed the bottle once, twice. "Whoa, whoa," Jax
muttered. "Not too much, it'll kill the eyes." If you had eyes as green and
large as Alie'e's, you didn't want them dilated. Amnon Plain was moving lights around as his assistants
refilled the camera backs with Kodachrome. Alie'e's would be wearing a torn
pale-blue t-shirt that was meant to show just a hint of rouged nipple within
the tear; and the film had to hold the subtlety of the pink-against-blue. With
the Kodachrome, the flare of the torch behind her wouldn't pop like it would on
the Fuji, but that wasn't so important in this shot. Plain was juggling the color equities in his mind when Alie'e
said, past his head, "Hello, Jael." Plain turned. His sister was standing in the gash in the
barge's hull, just inside the line of lights. "What do you want?" he
snapped. Jael Corbeau – she'd changed her name with her mother,
after their parents split up – was light where Plain was dark, blond
against Plain's deep brunette. Despite their coloring differences, they had
faces that were astonishingly alike, wedge-shaped, edgy, big-eyed. Jael had once been a model herself; didn't need the money,
found the life boring, and moved on. Although the two of them looked alike,
there was a singular difference in their faces. Three long pale lines slashed
across Jael's face; scars. She was a lovely woman to begin with, but the scars
made her something else. Striking. Beautiful. Erotic. Exotic.
Something. "I came to see Alie'e," she said, sullenly. "See her someplace else," Plain said. "We're trying to work
here." "Don't give me a hard time, Plain." "Get the fuck off my shoot," Plain said, walking toward her.
All other talk stopped, and Clark, the welder, stood up, uncertainly, and
pushed his mask back. Plain's voice vibrated with violence. From behind him, Alie'e said, "There's a party at Silly's
tonight, nine o'clock." Jael had taken a step back, away from her brother. There was
no fear in her, but she didn't doubt that Plain would physically throw her off
the barge. He was bigger. "Silly's at nine," she said, and left. Plain watched her go, watched until she was out of sight,
turned back to Alie'e, took a breath, saw Clark hovering in the background like
a sumo wrestler. He turned to the couture rep and said, "I've got your key
shot." The couture rep was a thin-faced German named Dieter Kopp. He
had a stubble-cut skull, two-day beard, and gaunt, pale face; his cheeks were
lightly scarred, as though he might once have suffered from smallpox. He was
the only one not wearing jeans. Instead, he wore a pale gray Italian suit with
an open-necked black dress shirt, and a gold tennis bracelet. Kopp didn't want to be in St. Paul, didn't want to be in
America. He wanted to be in Vienna, or Berlin, but he was condemned to this: to
sell a shitload of seventy-dollar male-look underpants, complete with front
vent, to American women. Like a good German, he would do what was necessary to carry
out his orders; but at the moment, he was still vibrating with the possibility
of violence against the striking blonde who'd just walked off the barge. He
knew her face: she'd been a model, he knew that, but she'd been out of it for a
few years. She looked better now; she was stunning, he thought... "What?" he asked. He'd missed what Plain said to him. "I've got your key shot, but don't have the lens. I'll have to
send somebody to Minneapolis to rent it." Plain turned to his second assistant.
"Jimmy! Get your ass over to ProShot and rent that 500. I want the F/6, don't
let them give you the other one." Jimmy asked no questions. He hustled off the barge, fumbling
his cell phone from his jacket pocket. He'd call on the way, to make sure it
was ready. "Look," Plain said to the crowd behind the lights, "We move
Clark around back and we put Alie'e dead-center – Alie'e, come over here."
Alie'e walked toward them, along the plank, as Plain continued: "We light them
separately and then jam them together with the long lens. Clark will look like
the fuckin' moon coming over the horizon, and Alie'e will be there in the
foreground..." "We still need the nipple for the punch," said the German. "We
could lose it with a long lens." "Gotta lose it anyway for the Americans," said the creative
director, a man with a red beard and bald, freckled head. "We can do it both ways," Plain said. "For the Europeans,
we'll hold it. We'll stick a snoot over on the left and light it. Alie'e..."
Alie'e stepped closer and Plain slipped his fingers into the torn slit in the
t-shirt, and pulled it wider, to expose her nipple. "We'll have to tape this
back, we'll have to bring it out a little more. Maybe touch it with a little
more makeup..." "Not too much, she's really pale, and too much would look
artificial," the art director said nervously. "Artificial would be all right," Plain said. "What could be
sexier than rouged nipples?" "In Germany, yes, I think," Kopp said. "In America..." "Sexy in America, too, but it'd be too much for the mainline
magazines," Plain said. "For the American shot, we'll ice her nipple to bring
it up, so you can see it through the t-shirt, put a little shading on the side
to emphasize it, but we re-layer the rip so there's more coverage, and drop the
snoot. But you'll still be able to feel it there – there'll be like a
mental tit behind the t-shirt." "You're gonna ice me?" Alie'e asked. "You're gonna fucking ice
me? It's twelve fuckin' degrees in here." The German had closed his eyes. After a moment, he nodded.
Plain had worked for eight years in Miami, where he'd developed a reputation
for a decadent, sexually charged fashion art, juxtaposing outlandishly
disparate characters in variations of the Beauty and the Beast theme. Anyone
could do that, and many tried, but Plain had something different, something
that nobody else could quite get. Something straight out of Grimm's Fairy
Tales. Like this shot. The German could see it in his mind's eye, now that
all the characters were assembled in this ridiculous hulk, with the lights, the
smell of the welder, the roaring propane heater... but never could have thought
of it. This was why he traveled to Minneapolis and paid Plain the big
bucks. Plain had vision. They worked the rest of the morning: hard work, done over and
over. Plain had a color card in his brain, and a drama chip. He knew what he
was getting, and he pushed it. Shredded the t-shirt; exposed one breast
completely. Clark watched from the background, a burning torch in his hand, his
cement-block sausage-lover's face fixed by the vision of the woman's body;
Lynn and Lil watched from behind the lights: "You don't think that's getting
toward the porno...?" When they were done, and while Jax was collecting her dressing
bags, one of Plain's assistants walked Alie'e back to a rented Lincoln Towncar.
She recovered her purse and the stash of cocaine, caught a little dust under a
fingernail, and inhaled. "What do you think of that Clark guy?" the assistant
asked. Alie'e, whose eyes had been closed, the better to experience
the rush, now opened one eye, cocked her head and thought about it: "He's not
bad, for a pick-up." "What I meant was, he looked like he had a zucchini stuffed in
his pants during that last sequence." Alie'e smiled her wan, coked-up smile and said, "Then it must
have been a good sequence." Dieter Kopp had seen it; so had Plain. "I was afraid I'd lose it," Plain laughed, brushing the hair
back from his eyes. "I was over there waggling that snoot around trying to get
some light on him, hoping it wouldn't go away, hoping he wouldn't figure out
what I was doing." "Not for the American magazines, I don't think?" Kopp said.
But it was a question. "Oh, I think so," Plain said. "You couldn't say
anything about it. You couldn't make it too obvious. But a little work on the
computer, taking it up or down. We'll get it in. And people will
notice..." Kopp bobbed his head, flashed his thin, hard grin. At another
time, he might've been driving a tank into Russia, instead of selling
underwear. But that was then, and this was now. He was in underwear. "With your
perverted camera and my budget we are going to sell a shitrole of underwear,"
he said. "Is that right? Shitrole?" "Shitload," Plain said. "Yes. A shitload of underwear to American women." They all went to the party that night, at Silly Hanson's home:
Alie'e, Jax, Plain, Kopp, Corbeau, the photo assistants, Alie'e's parents, even
Clark the welder. Alie'e looked spectacular. She wore the green dress from the
photo shoot, and hung with Jael Corbeau and Catherine Kinsley, the heiress, the
three women like the three fates in the Renaissance paintings, all tangled
together. Alie'e's father, Lynn, had a good night, copping a blow job
from a $200-an-act pro who slipped in with the art-museum crowd. Jax got in a
shoving match with a stock broker, but neither of them wanted to fight, and it
all came to nothing. Techno-pop rolled from small black speakers spotted around
Silly Hanson's public rooms and Alie'e images flashed across movie-aspect
flat-screen monitors, The crowd danced and sweated and drank martinis and
Rob Roys and came and went. Silly herself got drunk and physical with Dieter Kopp, who
left thumb bruises on her breasts and ass. A gambler drifted through the crowd,
and met a cop who was astonished to see him. And the killer was there. In the corner, watching. |
13 May 2008  The Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series,
the Kidd series, The Night Crew, Dead Watch, The Eye
and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle, and Plastic
Surgery: The Kindest Cut are copyrighted by John Sandford. All excerpts are
used with permission. All original content on the website (excluding the message
board and some other specifically disclaimed text) is copyright © 2008 by
Roswell Anthony Camp. Please do not steal anything from these pages. If you
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