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 The Prey Series Hidden Prey Virgil Flowers The Kidd Series Other Novels Etcetera | Hidden 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
Hidden 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. The tag end of summer, in the very heart of the
night. Annabelle Ramford sat on a soggy piece of carpet, in a
patch of goldenrod on the southernmost shore of Lake Superior, a huge,
butterball moon rising to the east. A bottle of New York pinot noir was
wedged securely between her thighs. She was warm, comfortable, at peace,
and a little drunk, bathed in the odors of dead fish and diesel exhaust,
ragweed, and the rancid sweat of her unwashed cotton shirt. Annabelle's friends, if they were friends, called her
Trey. She had shoulder-length reddish-blonde hair, which hung straight
and close to her skull because of the dirt in it; a deeply weathered
face with feral green eyes; a knife-edged nose; and a too-slender,
square-shouldered body, with the bones showing through. On her chin she
carried what she thought of as her identifying mark – as in,
"police said the body carried an identifying mark." The mark was a backwards-C-shaped scar, the product of
a fight at the mission in Albuquerque. A bum named Buddy had bitten her,
and when she'd gotten up off the floor, she was dripping blood and
missing a piece of chin. Buddy, she believed, had swallowed it. She
almost sympathized: When you're a bum, you get your protein where you
can. Like Buddy, Annabelle Ramford was a bum. Or maybe a bummess. A long and exceptionally strange trip, she thought,
growing philosophical with the wine. She'd grown up well-to-do and
thoroughly educated – had sailed boats on Superior, which was why
she returned to Duluth in the summer. After private schools in St. Paul,
she'd gone to the University of Minnesota, where she'd majored in
sociology, and then on to law school, where she'd majored in marijuana
and gin-and-tonic. She'd graduated, though, and her father's influence
had gotten her a job with the Hennepin County public defender's office,
interviewing gang-bangers at the height of the crack plague. Crack. She could close her eyes and feel it lifting her
out of herself. She'd loved crack like she'd loved no human being. Crack
had cost her first the job, then all of her square friends, and finally
her parents, who'd given her up for lost. Even at the end, even when she
was fucking the crack man, it had seemed like a reasonable trade. When she finally woke up, four years after she went on
the pipe, she had no life and three STDs, though she'd somehow avoided
HIV. She'd been traveling ever since. A strange trip, growing ever
stranger... Straight north of her spot on the working harbor shore,
she could see the bobbing anchor-light of a sailboat, and beyond it, the
street and house lights stretching along Minnesota Point, the narrow
spit of land across the mouth of the harbor. Though the boat was five
hundred yards away, she could hear the tinkling and clanking of hardware
against the aluminum mast, and, every once in a while, a snatch of
music, Sinatra or Tony Bennett, and a woman's laughter. Overhead, a million stars. Off to her right, another
million stars, closer, larger, more colorful – the night lights of
Duluth, sliding north along the hill. A dying summer, and cool. The breeze off the lake had
teeth. The day before, Trey'd scored a Czechoslovakian Army coat at the
Goodwill store, and she tugged the wool collar up around her throat.
Superior's water temperature didn't get much above 50 degrees, even at
mid-summer, and you could always feel the winter in the wind. But with
the coat, she was warm, inside and out. She took a pull of the wine, wiped her lips on the back
of her free hand, savored the thick grape flavor. A month, she
thought. Another month here and she'd start moving again. Back
to Santa Monica for the winter. Didn't like Santa Monica. Too many bums.
But you could freeze to death in Minnesota, no joke: get a skin full of
whiskey and forget what you were doing, and the next morning the cops
would find you in a doorway, frozen stiff, frozen in the L shape of the
doorway. She'd seen it. Still, for the time being, she had a good spot, a
cubby-hole that was safe, obscure, sheltered, and free. Women transients
had a tougher life than the men. Nobody wanted to rape some broken down
thirty-five-year-old bum with no teeth and a fourteen-inch beard and
scabs all over him; but women, no matter how far down they'd gone, had
that secret spot that some guy always wanted to get into, even if only
to prove that he was still male, somehow, someway. To further prove it,
half the time they weren't happy with simple rape; they had to beat the
shit out of you. Some women got so accustomed to it that they barely
cared, but Trey wasn't that far down. Scrape away the dirt and she
didn't look too bad. She still worked, sometimes, waitressing, fry-cook
jobs, rent-a-maid stuff. Hadn't ever quite gotten to the point of
selling herself. Not technically, anyway. Here in Duluth, she had a nice routine. The morning bus
driver with the route along Garfield Avenue – his name was Tony
– would let her ride into town for free. There were good safe
public bathrooms at the downtown mall, and after cleaning up, she'd get
up to the Miller Hill Mall to do a little subtle panhandling, avoiding
security, picking just the right guys: Got a dollar? Got a dollar,
please? She'd perfected the waif look, the thin high cheekbones and
starving green eyes. Some days she cleared fifty dollars. Try doing that
in Santa Monica. She took another pull at the wine, leaned back, heard
the sailboat woman laugh again. Then, a little later, something
else. Somebody coming. Carl Walther sat as silently, his back against the side
of the building, his senses straining into the night, the pistol cold in
his hand. He could hear the elevator inside, moving grain up to the
drop-pipe, and the rush of it into the ship's hold. He'd waited like this before, in the dark, on an
early-morning deer stand, listening for footfalls, trying to pick
movement out of the gloom. As also happened in a deer stand, when he
first found his ambush spot, he'd been all ears and eyes. As the minutes
passed, other thoughts intruded: he thought he could feel bugs crawling
on him; a mosquito whined past his ear. He needed a new job, something
that didn't involve food – six months in a pizza joint was
enough. He thought about girls. Randy McAndrews, a jock-o
three-letter guy, had been talking after gym class, Carl tolerated on
the edge of the conversation, and he said Sally Umana had been cooling
him off with blowjobs in the backroom of Cheeney's Drive-In. The account
was greeted with a half-dozen groans and muttered bullshits but
McAndrews swore it was the truth. Carl had groaned with the others but
later that day had seen blond Sally in the hallway and had instantly
grown a serious hard-on, which he had to awkwardly conceal with a
notebook as he hiked through the school. And
thinking about it now, waiting in the dark, began to have the same
effect; the idea of that blond head bobbing up and down... He heard a voice on the deck of the ship; a distant
voice. He shifted position and strained into the night. Where the fuck
was he? He pushed up his sleeve and looked at his watch: Jeez – six
minutes since the last check. Seemed more like an hour. Same as on a
deer stand, waiting for dawn. He was not exactly tense; not as tense as when he'd
killed his first dog. He still thought about that, sometimes, the
black-and-white pooch from the pound, out in the woods. "Why are you killing the dog?" Grandpa asked. "Because it's necessary to condition myself against the
shock," he said. The response was a learned one, like the responses for
a Boy Scout rank, or a First Communion exam. "Exactly. When you are working as a weapon, you must
focus. No pity, no regrets, no questions, because those things will slow
you down. All of the questions must be resolved into trust: your
committee instructs you to act, and you do. That's your highest
calling." "Okay." "Remember what Lenin said: 'There are no morals in
politics: there is only expedience.'" "Okay." Enough Lenin. The old man said, "Now. Kill the dog." He could remember licking his lips, working the slide
on the pistol. The dog knew something was going on, looked up at him,
small black eyes searching for compassion, not that it had gotten much
in the pound. Then the dog turned away, as if it knew what was
coming. Carl shot him in the back of the head. Not hard. Not hard at all; a certain satisfaction
uncurled in his soul. That surprised him. The shock came a few minutes
later, when they buried the dog. When he picked up the small body, it
was still warm, but it was dead and there was no way to get it back. The
dog was gone forever. He remembered looking back at the small grave and
thinking, Really? There'd been more dogs after that, and Carl's soul had
hardened. He no longer dreaded the trips. He didn't enjoy it, he just
didn't feel much at all. Now he sat with his head down. Would a human be harder?
He doubted it. He liked dogs better than he liked most people. And while
the dog had been a test, this killing was absolutely
necessary... Then headlights played across the waste land, amid the
railroad tracks. A car bounced along a rutted track, then stopped a
couple of hundred yards out. There was a light on the roof. A taxi. Carl
slipped the safety on the pistol, felt the weight in his hand; kept his
finger off the trigger, as he'd been trained. Rodion Oleshev had been left in the dark. The taxi turned away, the door locks snapped down, and
it was gone, back to the hillside of light, back into town. Oleshev
scowled at it: the taxi driver, a block-headed Swede, according to his
taxi license, wouldn't go any further off-road. He might break a wheel
in the dark, he'd said. He might fall in a hole. Fuckin' Swedes. The
whole area was lousy with them. Oleshev was a broad man in a black leather jacket,
black denim jeans and plain-toed military dress shoes. He hadn't shaved
that morning and his two-day beard was a briar-patch, chafing against
his neck. He carried a black nylon briefcase. Inside were his seaman's
papers, a digital camera, a pair of Razor sunglasses and a laptop
computer. The night was pretty, with the thinnest summer haze
over the cool water of the lake, and the moon coming up, and he could
clearly see the lights of a building six miles down the shoreline. Ahead
of him, closer, only two hundred yards away, the bulk carrier
Potemkin sat in a berth beneath the TDX terminal. The deck of
the ship was bathed in floodlights, as it took on duram wheat from North
Dakota. There was a lot of light around, Oleshev thought, there
just wasn't any where he was. The whole area south of the grain
terminals was a semi-wasteland of dirt roads, waist-high weeds, railroad
tracks and industrial detritus, all smelling of burnt diesel. The
moonlight didn't help, casting hard shadows everywhere, making holes
look like bumps, and bumps like flat spots. Oleshev felt his way toward
the Potemkin, stepping carefully; saw a shiny, knife-like
streak in the dirt ahead of him, reached out with his toe, felt the
steel rail of the first set of tracks. "Fuck this place," he muttered out loud. Oleshev was an unhappy man, thinking about the
satellite call he'd have to make back to Russia. Things were more
complicated than anyone had expected. The Circle at the SVR had expected
either agreement or rejection, had been prepared to react with either
money, as a gesture of good will, or blackmail. What they'd gotten
was... bullshit. What'd the old man say? "It is impossible to predict
the time and progress of the revolution. It's governed by its own more
or less mysterious laws..." Vladimir Ilyich fuckin' Lenin. Oleshev spat into the
weeds, thinking about it. Bullshit and more bullshit. The people here
swam in it. They were Communists. How crazy was that? Somehow,
they'd been expecting Russians, and they'd gotten
Communists. Politics complicated everything. He tripped again,
swore into the quiet of the night, and stumbled on, cursing, scowling,
toward the waiting ship. Oleshev had just stepped into the light, on to the
concrete pad around the grain terminal, when another man moved out of
the shadows on the side of the terminal. The man stepped out backwards,
and Oleshev saw that he was fumbling at his crotch, zipping up. Taking a leak: the idea popped into Oleshev's
head and he relaxed a half-inch, enough that he wasn't ready. The man
turned around and Oleshev saw the pink apple-cheeks and the blond hair
and the thought flashed through his mind that the blond was a crewman, a
member of the night watch who he'd not often seen coming across the
Atlantic. "Mr. Moshalov." Not a crewman, not with those round, Swedish-sounding
O's. The man's hand came up. Not to shake. He was holding a gun and
Oleshev saw it and another thought flew through his mind, one word from
his training: Shout. Actually, what the manual said was, Try to relax
but be prepared to move instantly. If you see that your captor intends
to fire, shout at him, to distract him. Even if you are killed, perhaps
your companions will gain from the edge you give them. A lot of horseshit, Oleshev had thought when he first
read it. Let somebody else shout. Still, at the critical moment, he
thought Shout, but before he could open his mouth, the other
man shot him in the heart. Oleshev fell over backwards. His chest hurt,
but his mind was okay for a few seconds, and his vision actually seemed
better: there was lots of light now. Enough light that when the man
stood over him and pointed the gun at his eyes, he could clearly see the
O of the muzzle. He wanted to shout again. Carl, who didn't know that he'd hit Oleshev in the
heart, stepped forward and fired twice more, from short range, through
the Russian's forehead. Unnecessary, but he didn't know that. He had the
theory, but he didn't have the training. Trey had heard Oleshev coming, stumbling through the
weeds, muttering and grumbling. There had been two or three people walking around the
terminal in the past hour. She'd stayed out of sight in her hole with
her bottle, invisible in the night, enjoying the lake. She yawned. When
this one had gone up the ladder into the ship, she thought, she'd head
back across the wasteland to the shack where she was crashing. Her pad. She'd found two whole rolls of bubble-wrap in a
dumpster at the Goodwill store, and with a little duct tape, had made
the most luxurious mattress out of it. Asleep on the bubble wrap,
cocooned in an olive-drab army blanket, she could almost believe that
she was back home. The best nights were the nights when it was raining,
when the rain on the roof and the warmth of the bed made her feel cozy
and snug. The problem with it, was that when she was lonely, or bored,
or stressed, she tended to pop the bubbles... Now, sitting in her hole, she heard a man speak; and
then a shot. She recognized the shot for what it was, though it wasn't
loud. A Bap!, like the noise made by a pellet gun. She stood
up, thinking herself safe in the dark, her eyes just inches higher than
the weeds around her. A tall man, with fair hair, stood over another man, who
was supine on the concrete slab. The tall man's face was turned toward
her and she registered his good looks. He pointed the pistol and fired
twice more into the second man's head, bap! bap! The pistol had a
bulbous barrel. A silencer? She'd only seen them in movies. The killing had been cold, she thought. She shivered,
lost her balance for a moment, caught herself. Stepped on piece of
broken concrete, lost her balance again, and caught herself a second
time. And made just enough noise to attract the attention of the
killer. His head came up, and he saw her – saw the light
reflecting off her face – lifted the pistol and fired two quick
shots at her. She saw the small flashes, but never heard the slugs go
by, because she already moving, running through the jumble of weeds and
concrete along the bank, frantic to get away from the gun. Moving just a fraction slower than she might have, had
her hands been empty: but a bum and a drunk would never drop a half-full
bottle of pinot, not if there was an alternative. Behind her, a thrashing. Trey fell, saved the bottle by
rolling, clambered to her feet, looked back, was shocked to see the
killer only fifty feet away and closing. She ran, scrambling, heard him
fall and cry out, ran some more, fell, smashed the bottle, cried,
"Motherfucker," turned and saw him, still coming, even closer, saw him
go down again, ran a few more steps, the darkness now closing down like
velvet, looked back, saw him coming, thirty feet away, catching
her... He stopped and fired again, and she imagined that the
slug went through her hair; fired again, and now he was so close that
she couldn't imagine him missing her, but he did. Running and shooting
was hard, and he wasn't trained... But he was going to catch her. She went down again,
felt the rocks under her knees, and he was right there. She dug in her
pocket. A helpless Mexican bum in Los Angeles, selling the last thing he
owned so he could buy a little food, had given her a six-inch
switchblade with a curved yellow-plastic handle, for six dollars. She'd
carried it for two years, more as a comfort than as a weapon, but now
she dug it out, nearly dropped it, pushed the button and the blade
sprang out, turned, desperate, not ready to die... The killer was there, three feet away, and he pointed
the gun at her and pulled the trigger... and nothing happened. He said, almost conversationally, "Shit." Trey went after him with the knife. She didn't like to
fight, but she wasn't bad at it. Not for a woman her size. She knew to
shout, too. She screamed, "I'm gonna cut your fuckin' face off,
motherfucker..." and she was right at him, slashing at him, and he put
up his gun arm to fend her off and she slashed his arm, and he screamed
and backed away from her, and she went for his face. He looked around, backed away, then said, "I'll come
and get you." He turned and half-ran, half-walked, into the dark, back
toward the lights of Garfield Avenue. A minute passed, then another. Trey could hear her own
heart beating, hear her breath, harsh, grating as she gasped for air. A
car started, out in the wasteland between Garfield and the docks, and
she saw the taillights, tall and vertical, with smaller lights below, a
scarlet exclamation point. She looked around: she was only a hundred feet from the
dock. Her flight had gone almost nowhere, with all the falls on the
rough ground. Still trying to catch her breath, her body trembling with
the adrenaline, she made her way slowly back to the dock. The knife was
slippery in her grasp, and she thought it must be blood: she pushed the
blade back into its groove with the heel of her hand, dropped the knife
in her pocket, wiped her hands on her pants. At the edge of the dock pad, she squatted in the weeds,
looking around. No sign of anybody living, just the body stretched on
the concrete. After a moment, scared, but powerfully tempted, she moved
out of the weeds and then stole toward the body like a hungry cat
looking for something to eat. "Are you okay?" she called out loud. Stupid.
The man in the leather coat was dead. She knew he was dead. She saw him
killed. He lay unmoving, like a six-foot paperweight, like a
leather-jacketed anvil, spread-legged on the concrete. She squatted next to him, groped under his hip for a
wallet. There was a thickness there, but no wallet. Next she went into
his jacket; and found a wallet, took it, shoved it into the briefcase
that lay by the man's hand. She looked around again, stepped away toward
the safety of the surrounding darkness, and felt again, in her mind, the
sensation of thickness at the man's waist. Looked around; a nervous cat. Stole back, knelt again, fumbled at the dead man's belt
buckle, uncinched it, unzipped his pants, felt... there. Another strap,
elastic. She pulled it through her hands. She couldn't see it, but she
could visualize it – she'd once had a belt like this of her own,
given to her by her father for a post-college trip to Italy. She found
another buckle, freed it, and pulled hard. The man was heavy, but the
money belt was made of slippery nylon, and she felt it coming
free... Got it. She was surprised by the weight of it.
Couldn't be money, must be papers of some kind. The ship was
Russian... She moved away, carrying the belt and briefcase,
slipping back into the dark. She was forty yards from the body when she
heard somebody call from the top of the elevator: Hey. HEY! An
American voice, not a Russian. She kept moving, faster now, deeper into
the dark, choking back the panic. Her spot was in an abandoned shed off Garfield, six
hundred yards from the grain terminal, across the street from the
Goodwill store. The shed's door and windows were heavily boarded. Two
months earlier, she'd walked around the place, interested, but unsure of
how she could get in without attracting the cops. Then she'd seen the loose concrete blocks in the
foundation on the back side of the building. She'd levered the blocks
out, pulled herself beneath the shed, and found herself looking at the
underside of a board floor. She'd gone back out, scouted the tracks
until she found a convenient length of re-rod, and had come back and
pried and pounded on the floor boards until she'd gotten inside. Inside was perfect: empty, dry, and safe. Everything
but a phone. The place smelled of creosote, like old railroad ties or
phone poles, but she no longer noticed it. Now she pulled her blocks out and crawled under the
shed, up and inside. She had a pack, and inside the pack, an REI candle
lantern. She lit it with a book match, then opened the wallet. Holy shit. She fumbled the bills out, looked at them in
wonder: tens, twenties, more than a dozen fifties. She counted: nine
hundred and sixty dollars. She was rich. She pried at other parts of the wallet, but it was full
of cards in Russian, and a few photos, small color snaps of a
dark-haired woman who looked like she came from a different time, from
the fifties or sixties. But then, she thought, maybe that was what
Russian women looked like. And the money belt: papers of some kind, she
thought. She unzipped it and turned it, and thin bricks of cash
began falling out. Holy shit. Holy shit. Hundreds. They were
all hundreds, still in bank wrappers. She snapped the wrapper off one
brick, and counted the bills in the pale yellow light of the candle.
Fifty. She counted the bricks: ten. She had fifty thousand dollars in
hundred-dollar bills. She sat motionless for a moment. People would be
coming. They'd want the money. But no fuckin' way. Finders keepers. Her
jaw tightened: the money was hers. Trey looked around at her snug little spot, suddenly
unattractive in the flickering candle light. She'd been happy enough
here, but now she had things to do, places to go. This place was
history. Somebody might have seen her, the cops might be coming... But she could handle all that, if she had a few
minutes. She was a lawyer, for Christ's sake; she'd lived with
criminals, and she'd worked with cops. She knew what to do. She was
cleaning frantically when, far away, a siren started. Please God: Just a few minutes... just do this one
thing for me. |
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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