There'd been a poetry reading, and the store had been populated by long-haired women with disappointed faces-Koop's kind of women-and men with bald spots, potbellies, and tentative gray ponytails tied with rubber bands.Ī woman had come up to ask, "Have you read the Rubaiyat?" Koop had been inside the place only once. A genteel meat-rack, where shy people went to get laid. Coffee was twenty cents a cup, get it yourself, pay on the honor system. Books new and used, trade your paperbacks two-for-one. The Saint was run by a graying graduate of St. There were two or three bookstores downtown, but only one that interested him. He looked in at antique stores along West Seventh, drove past the Civic Center, and then curled down Kellogg Boulevard to Robert Street, left on Robert, checking the dashboard clock. He drove a couple of laps around United Hospitals, looking at the nurses on their way to their special protected lot-a joke, that. NIGHT PREY BOOK CRACKPaul Cathedral, past a crack dealer doing business outside the offices of the archdiocese of St. Now he drifted down Grand Avenue, over to Summit to the St. He spent his days driving, wandering, looking for new places, tracking his progress through the spiderweb of roads, avenues, streets, lanes, courts, and boulevards that made up his working territory. Koop knew all the streets and most of the alleys in Minneapolis and St. He could climb eleven floors of fire stairs without breathing hard. NIGHT PREY BOOK PROFESSIONALHe could chin himself until he got bored, he could run forty yards as fast as a professional linebacker. Koop was an athlete of a specialized kind. He still felt the hate, but controlled it now, except on special occasions, when it burned through his belly like a welding torch… He had once been a bar brawler, a man who could work up a hate with three beers and a mistimed glance. His arms were thick and powerful, ending in rocklike fists. His heavy shoulders and thick chest tapered to narrow hips. His nose was pinched, leathery, and long, and he wore a short, furry beard, notably redder than his hair. His strawberry-blond hair was cut tight to his skull. He was a short, wide man with a sharecropper's bitter face and small, suspicious gray eyes he had a way of looking at people sideways. Koop was thirty-one years old, but at any distance, looked ten or fifteen years older. She was too confident, too lively, moving too quickly she was somebody who knew where she was going. She had a long, graceful neck, her dark hair up in a bun, her high heels rattling on the blacktop. The soft evening air felt like a woman's fingers, stroking his beard.Īt Lexington and Grand, a woman in a scarlet jacket crossed in front of him. He rolled through the residential streets in his Chevy S-10, radio tuned to Country-Lite, his elbow out the window, a bottle of Pig's Eye beer between his thighs. The daffodils and tulips were gone, while the petunias spread across their beds like Mennonite quilts. Overhead, above the new green of the elms, nighthawks made their skizzizk cries, their wing-flashes like the silver bars on new first-lieutenants. At eight, the streetlights came on, whole blocks at once, with an audible pop. A gaggle of college girls jogged down the bike path, wearing sweatsuits and training shoes, talking as they ran, their uniformly blond ponytails bouncing behind them. NIGHT PREY BOOK CRACKEDThe night was warm, the twilight inviting: middle-aged couples in pastel shirts, holding hands, strolled the old cracked sidewalks along the Mississippi. Series: Lucas Davenport Night Prey John Sandford
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