Gathering Prey Read online

  “That might not be how you do business in the backwoods, but it’s how we do it in L.A.,” Pilate said. “I got contacts all over the movie business, we get top price—”

  “Excuse me,” Malin said, looking around the RV. He was a bulky man with skinny legs. Cowboy boots poked out from under his boot-cut jeans. “I gotta say, this don’t exactly look like a big-time director’s place.”

  “Hey! We’re good for the money. I got a reputation in L.A.—”

  “Look out the window, you fuckin’ moron, you see any skyscrapers out there?” Malin asked. “Does that look like Rodeo Drive?”

  He said Rowdee-oh Drive, and Kristen smirked over her pointed teeth and said, from behind him, “That’d be Rodeo Drive, dumbass. Row-Day-Oh.”

  “Fuck a bunch of roads, I’m going,” Malin said. “If you actually get the cash, I’ll be in Chippewa. You got my number.”

  Pilate put his hand up, toward Malin’s chest: “Wait a minute.”

  “I ain’t waiting,” Malin said. He was wearing one of those loose Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirts and now dropped his hand down to his side, slipped it under the shirt, dropped it again, now showing a compact revolver. “I’m going.”

  “So now you’re showing a gun and we’re supposed to be business partners?” Pilate said. “That’s really fucked up, man.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” Malin stepped toward Pilate, who didn’t step back.

  “Get the fuck out of the way,” Malin said.

  • • •

  KRISTEN WAS STANDING BEHIND HIM, and she was such a thin woman that Malin ignored her, despite the filed teeth and all the apocalyptic-themed ink. As Malin pushed toward Pilate, she picked up a ten-inch Henckels chef knife that had been lying under a towel on a sideboard, and stuck it in his back.

  Nothing tentative about it, she stuck it in him as hard as she could, with a hundred and ten pounds of weight behind it. The knife went through the peachy silk shirt, deflected off Malin’s spine, missed his heart to the right, took out a piece of lung, and emerged on the other side of his body, inside his right nipple.

  Malin grunted, “Oh,” and with an astonished look on his face, turned to her, the gun momentarily forgotten in his hand. Kristen wrenched the knife free and stabbed him in the neck, the razor-sharp blade sliding off to the left, slicing neatly through Malin’s carotid artery.

  He tried to scream but failed, turned to run from the flailing knife, blood pumping from his neck like water from a hose. He crashed into Pilate, almost fell, then threw an arm at Kristen: she fumbled the knife, flipping it up in the air, and it came down on her arm, between her elbow and hand, slicing it open. She tried to snatch at the blade and cut her hand, badly, through the palm, and Malin hit her in the face and she went down and he rumbled toward the back door, blood still pumping from his neck, his vision going gray like an Apple computer with a bad video card, and then black.

  He missed the side door to the outside and crashed through a door at the end of the short hallway, into a bedroom where a young woman lay on the bed, wrapped in silver duct tape.

  He never saw her, simply crashed on the bed, pushed himself up, and as Kristen followed him with the knife, blundered into Skye. Kristen stabbed him in the eye, and he managed to backhand her, then plowed all the way through the RV, almost to the front door, where Pilate whacked him with his scepter, and Malin finally went down, the flow of blood from his neck slowing to a gurgle.

  Then everything stopped for a few seconds, and finally Pilate said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Six quarts of Malin’s blood had painted the inside of the RV: the carpet, the couch, a bolster, an ottoman, the woodwork, towels, the mattress on the bed. The blood had painted all three people in the RV: Pilate, Kristen, and Skye, whom they’d picked up in Duluth.

  Kristen spit on Malin’s body and said, “Suck on that, asshole.”

  Pilate said, “Make sure that bitch is still taped up back there.” He felt Malin’s hip pocket, took out his wallet, extracted three hundred dollars in twenties and his credit cards, looked at a half-dozen other cards and slips of paper, and found one with four numbers: held the paper up to Kristen and said, “Does that look like an ATM code, or what?”

  “I’m bleeding bad,” she said. She held her hand out, showing the bloody cut, and wrapped a towel around her forearm. “I need a hospital.”

  “Not around here,” Pilate said. “Not with Malin all carved up like that.”

  “I need a doc—”

  “We’ll get you one,” Pilate said.

  • • •

  PILATE DROPPED THE WALLET on the floor and said, “We need to get his keys. Can you use the phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Call the guys, tell them we’re heading down to St. Paul. We’ll get you to a doc, tell them it was Saturday-night fights at the local parking lot, and some black dude cut on you. You don’t know who it was . . .”

  As she called, Pilate rolled Malin’s body, dug in his pants pocket and came up with the truck keys. Didn’t notice Malin’s wallet disappearing under his butt. When Raleigh came up on Kristen’s phone, Pilate took it and said, “We got a situation. You need to go to a gas station, tell them your buddy ran out of gas, get a five-gallon can if they got one, or a couple of two-gallon cans, get over here to the campground. Gotta be fast: we’re heading down to St. Paul.”

  He rang off and Kristen, who was wrapping a towel around her arm and hand, asked, “What are we doing?”

  Pilate looked around the RV. “No way we can keep this—no way we can clean it up enough. There’ll always be blood in it, and if we ever get seriously pushed by the cops, they’ll find it. And in a couple days, it’s gonna stink real bad. We’re gonna drive it out in the woods and burn it. In the meantime, you lay towels on the floor so we can walk on something clean, and get in the shower and hose yourself off. I’m going out, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “My arm is really hurting—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of it.”

  • • •

  PILATE WENT OUT in the cool night air, walked over to Malin’s pickup. Took a while, but in the end found a kilo of cocaine—the coke he was supposedly buying that night—and two pounds of weed.

  He went back in the RV and said, “Lookee what I got.”

  Kristen was just out of the shower. She still had the pillowcase wrapped around her arm, blood was showing through. She said, “Oh. My. God. I might be hurtin’, but I’m not gonna be hurtin’ long.”

  Pilate laid out a few lines, and they snorted them up, then Pilate, high as a kite, went to shower and change clothes. When he was out, they piled all the bloodstained clothing on top of the body, then walked around to the cab, and rolled off into the dark. Raleigh called ten minutes later and asked, “Where you at?”

  “Coming down to 77. We’re gonna go west on 77 until we find a good spot. You got the gas?”

  “Four gallons. I’ll be up behind you in three minutes. The rest of them are coming along behind me. What are we burning?”

  • • •

  THEY GOT READY to burn the RV in the campground by the river. Skye was still taped up in the back. The tape wrapped round and round her body, pinning her arms to her sides, but left her hands free. They cut the ankle wraps so she could waddle out, but left the wraps around her knees and thighs, so she couldn’t run. As she was edging past Malin’s body, she saw his iPhone lying on the blood-soaked couch, almost slipping through the couch cushions. She faked a fall.

  “What the fuck are you doin’? Get up, bitch.”

  “I fell . . . Don’t hurt me.” Skye managed to get the phone between her hand and her thigh, and hold it there. She struggled to her feet and waddled outside.

  They put her in the back of Bony’s station wagon, and threw a wool blanket over her. Bony said, “You move that blanket, I’ll get the tire iron out and beat the shit out of you.”

  Skye never saw the RV burn, but she heard the whump when the fire started. The four remain
ing cars in Pilate’s convoy fled west on 77, crossed the river into Minnesota, hit I-35, and turned south toward the Twin Cities. Skye could move her hands, from her wrists to her fingertips, but not her arms; nor could she see what her fingers were touching. The back of the old station wagon smelled like dog shit and hay and oil, and the car’s shocks were so bad that lying under the blanket was like rolling down a hill in a garbage can.

  She was afraid the phone would ring and give her away. The rattling car gave her the cover she needed to turn the phone in her hand, find the power button with her index finger, and hold it down until she thought it was turned off. She then twisted around enough to see that the phone’s screen had gone dark.

  Then she folded her legs at the knees, and managed to shove the phone into her sock.

  In St. Paul, the convoy rolled into Regions Hospital. Kristen went in alone, and told the duty nurse a story about a fight on the Capitol lawn between a bunch of drunk street people. The cops came and took a statement, and three hours later, she was sitting on a wall outside the hospital when Pilate came back.

  “Didn’t cost me anything, but I had to promise to pay,” she said. She’d used Skye’s ID, and nobody had looked too closely at the photo.

  • • •

  WHILE KRISTEN WAS being sewn up, Bony took Skye around to two Wells Fargo ATMs, gave her the card and the number, and they pulled out six hundred dollars before midnight, and another six hundred after midnight, the single-day limit on the card. Then they taped her up again, threw her back into the station wagon, and covered her with the blanket. Skye heard Kristen talking outside the car before they were moving, and so knew the other woman had gotten out of the hospital. She felt the car take a couple of turns, then it accelerated: they were back on the freeway. Which one, she didn’t know, but she didn’t care.

  She had one chance: the cell phone. She resolved to wait to use it, until she was sure it would pay off. She knew one cell number for sure: Letty’s. She mumbled it over and over as she lay under the blanket, hoping for a break.

  She didn’t get it that night. They drove for no more than fifteen minutes, then pulled off and parked. Bony rolled down his window and Pilate said, “We’ll stay here for the night. We can get water and food, and they don’t give a shit how long we stay. And no cops. Give Skye some water, don’t have to waste any food on her.”

  “I’m gonna go ahead and fuck her—”

  “Not here, you asshole. Somebody would see the car bouncing up and down, and then we could have trouble. You can fuck her tomorrow.”

  “You said we were all gonna party, we were all gonna fuck her tonight.”

  “Well, you might’ve noticed we had a little problem,” Pilate said. “We don’t need to attract no cops.”

  • • •

  SKYE HAD NO IDEA what time it must have been, but it was late. People were getting in and out of the car, talking, paid no attention to her. At some point, Bony remembered that he was supposed to get her water, and so came back and ripped some tape off her mouth and let her drink a bottle of spring water. He said, “We’re gonna get you airtight, tomorrow, bitch. Think about that.”

  She slept for a while, or passed out, or something.

  • • •

  SHE GOT HER BREAK the next morning. They were in Hudson, Wisconsin, where the convoy stopped for gas at a Kwik Trip convenience store, and breakfast at the McDonald’s next door. Before Bony got out of the car, he said, “You move and I’ll kill you. I’ll cut your fuckin’ throat.”

  He got out of the car and Skye managed to pull the phone out of her sock and turn it on. When the screen lit up, she lay the phone on the floor and, using her thumb, managed to punch in Letty’s number.

  Letty answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Letty. Pilate’s got me. They’re going to kill me. I think they killed Henry. They killed a man up by Hayward, they murdered him in the RV and set it on fire. They’ve got me in the back of Bony’s car, they’re getting gas, I stole this phone—”

  “Skye! Hide the phone, but leave it on. I think they can track cell phones. You have to turn off the ringer. Do you know how to turn off the ringer?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what kind of phone it is?”

  “I think it’s an iPhone.”

  “There should be a button on the side of it . . .” Letty talked her through it, and Skye found the button and pushed it until the ringer-tone indicator was down as far as it would go.

  “Okay, I think it’s off,” Skye said.

  “Look in the upper left corner of the screen. Does it say AT&T, or Verizon, or—”

  “It says Verizon.”

  “What kind of car are you in?”

  “A station wagon, an old one, it’s black and it’s funny-looking and it stinks. But I don’t know where I am, I think we drove out of the city we were in.”

  “Okay. When they come back, hide the phone in the car, in case they search you. Leave it turned on. Now, tell me what happened.”

  “They picked me up at a mall in Duluth,” Skye said. “I was walking in and this car pulls over to the side, and this guy gets out and picks me up, just picks me up and throws me in the back of the car, and Pilate was there and they beat me up and then they taped me up . . .”

  They took her to Hayward, she said, where they told her that they were going to take her out in the woods for a party. She didn’t believe she’d survive it.

  “Then something happened and they killed the man in the RV, where they had me. There was a fight, and Kristen got hurt. Got cut. We drove for a couple of hours, for a long time, anyway, and then they stopped at a hospital. I think we were in Minneapolis or St. Paul, we were at some ATMs and I could tell it was a big city.”

  “Okay. Hide the phone. I’m going to call my dad.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS ON I-94, heading back to the Twin Cities, when Letty called. “Skye called me. Pilate’s got her, she thinks they’re going to kill her . . .”

  She gave him the details of Skye’s call, and Lucas said, “She’s right. They’re going to kill her. I gotta call in. Good-bye.”

  He got the BCA duty officer on the phone and told him the problem. “Get to Verizon, find out where they’re at.”

  He gave the duty officer the number that Skye had called from, then called Stern, the Wisconsin DCI agent, and told him what had happened. “It’s possible they came back this way. We’ll know in a few minutes.”

  “Keep me up.”

  Lucas turned on his flashers and went past the town of Menomonie at a hundred and ten. The duty officer called back and said, “The phone’s on Highway 63 in Wisconsin, headed north, they’re south of Clear Lake.”

  “I went through Menomonie a few minutes ago. I’m gonna take County Q, I think it goes north—”

  “No, no. I’m looking at a map. Keep going past Q, just a couple more miles up to 128, you’ll be faster and closer.”

  “Okay, you get onto the county sheriffs up there, I don’t know what counties they are, tell them to look for an old black station wagon, maybe California plates. You should be able to vector them in pretty close, tell them it might be part of a convoy, everybody in it is wanted for multiple murder . . . You gotta get me there as quick as you can. I’m going to call my guy at the DCI.”

  Lucas got Stern on the phone again. Stern said, “I’ll get my duty guy on our net up there, we need to talk to your guy about what Verizon is telling them. You say this girl is a witness to the Malin killing?”

  “Apparently. And I gotta go, my turn’s coming up.”

  Lucas took the off-ramp, took a fast right past the convenience store, drove past a half dozen cars on the wrong side of the road, punched up the duty officer again, and said, “I’m on 128.”

  “Take it right straight north to 64. They’re in Clear Lake right now. Okay, we got nothing going yet in Clear Lake, but we got a highway patrolman coming south on 63, he’s in Turtle Lake. Hang on, hang on . . . Okay,
I’m talking to a guy in Madison, he’s saying that the patrolman is talking to the sheriff’s department up there, there’s a lake, right on the highway, Magnor, everything squeezes down.”

  “I know it.”

  “They’re going to take him there,” the duty officer said.

  Lucas went past Glenwood City about as fast, he suspected, as anyone had ever done that, watching his nav system for a jog in the road, got through it just fine, then almost drove right through a T intersection, got straight, and went on.

  “Lucas, the phone’s north of Clear Lake, they’re heading for a collision up at Magnor. We got two deputies coming up behind him, too.”

  “Okay. You told them about the girl? The hostage?”

  “Yeah, they’re all clear on that,” the duty officer said. “They’re only three or four miles out.”

  Lucas came up on Highway 64, took a left, and ran hard the three or four miles to the intersection of 63. Now he was behind them, but still well back, out of the action.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know . . . Verizon . . . ah, heck, Verizon said the phone’s turned left on a back road. Turned left. They were only two miles out of Magnor, the deputies coming up behind saw him make the turn. They say he’s moving fast now, they’re strung out behind him, they’re all running behind him, chasing him.”

  “Shit, one of the other cars in the convoy saw the cops and they called him.”

  The duty officer went away for a minute, then came back and said, “They didn’t see anything that looked like a convoy. They’re all over this guy, they’re right behind him.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Coming up on Clear Lake, a couple miles out,” Lucas said.