Extreme Prey Read Online Free

candidate who ran more toward the middle; and he had a half-billion dollars, which would come in handy during a national campaign. The sex-and-drugs thing wouldn’t keep him from something as insignificant as the vice presidency.
    He had a shot.
    —
    AFTER THE CALL from Weather, Lucas showered and shaved, put a Band-Aid and some antiseptic on his index finger, above the knuckle, where he’d picked up a splinter earlier in the day, and put on some fresh clothes. He took ten minutes to vacuum up an accumulation of Asian ladybugs that had found their way through the windowless addition, and bagged up the garbage and trash. He called Jimi to tell her he’d be gone for a short time, no more than a few days.
    “Thank God,” she’d said.
    “What?”
    “I mean . . . that the time’ll be short,” the carpenter said.
    Closing down the cabin took fifteen minutes. He hauled thegarbage bag to his Mercedes SUV, locked up the cabin, and was on the dirt road out.
    —
    THAT NIGHT LUCAS’S FRIEND Del Capslock and his wife came over for barbecued steaks and salad, and they sat around speculating on the governor’s problem. “It better not involve a woman,” Weather said. “If he’s been caught with his hand in the wrong pair of pants, that’s not a problem I want you to solve.”
    “A hand wouldn’t be such a big problem—a pregnancy would be,” Del said. “But Elmer’s not that dumb.”
    “His penis might be,” Del’s wife said.
    “He has a well-schooled cock, he only impregnates what he wants to impregnate,” Del said.
    “Hope you’re right,” Lucas said. “If it’s that kind of problem, he’s on his own. I’ll turn the truck around and go back to the cabin.”
    Lucas’s youngest kid, Gabrielle, was now old enough to sit in her own chair at the table. She pointed a spoon at Del and said, “Cock.”
    “Oh my God,” Weather said.
    Lucas’s son, Sam, now in third grade, said to Weather, “Mom, Gabby said ‘cock.’”
    Del’s wife rapped Del on the head with a soup spoon.
    —
    AND THE NEXT MORNING, leaving behind a wife and two small children—Lucas had an older adoptive daughter going to college atStanford, and another daughter who lived with the family of an ex-girlfriend—he put the Benz on I-35 and pointed it south for Iowa.
    Weather waved from the doorstep. She was smiling.
    Quickie, my ass
, he thought, as he rolled out of the driveway.
    —
    FROM ST. PAUL to Des Moines was three hours, more or less straight down I-35. Ames was a half hour short of Des Moines, and a college town—Iowa State. A few miles out of St. Paul, Lucas was into the corn and soybeans, and corn and beans it would remain, all the way to Ames, the grain fields punctuated by snaky lines of junk trees along the flatland creeks, the windbreaks around farmhouses, and the occasional cow.
    After he’d quit the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Lucas and Weather had taken a vacation trip to France. They’d spent most of their time in Paris, with a one-day run by train to London, but had also spent a week driving around the South of France, where they’d encountered a fundamental difference between European and American farmlands.
    In Europe, it seemed, farmers mostly lived in villages, and during the day, went out to their farms. In America, they lived on their farms and during the day, went into the villages.
    The European way seemed more . . . congenial. There’d always be somebody to talk to at night. Especially on long winter nights. When you were as far north as St. Paul or Paris, the nights began at four o’clock in the afternoon and ended at eight in the morning; Lucas had been surprised to learn that Paris was farther norththan the Minnesota-Canada border. Looking at some of the old farmsteads out on the prairie, Lucas thought he might well have died if forced to sit through a winter in one of those isolated farmhouses, back in pre-TV days, nothing for companionship except the wind and a woodstove and a Sears