Broken Prey by John Sandford Read Free Book Online Page B

need Davenport.
    He settled in behind his computer, webbed his fingers together, cracked his knuckles, and started typing.
    A serial killer is loose in Minnesota, a sexual predator armed with a razor, a man who tortures his victims before raping them, male and female alike, and cutting their throats . . .
    Another reporter passed by Ignace’s cubicle as he passed a thousand words, and thought, Jesus: the guy really does buzz.

    AND WHILE IGNACE WAS BUZZING, Millie Lincoln was . . .
    Well.

    MILLIE LINCOLN WAS SHORT and blond and liked men; always had. She liked her father, she liked her uncles, she liked all four of her brothers, and they liked her back.
    Men liked her back.
    Millie gave up her virginity when she was sixteen, fumbling around in her boyfriend’s parents’ bed. By twenty-two, she’d had four additional lovers. She spent her senior year in high school with the second one, after the fumbler, and then messed around with a college kid, an affair begun with another freshman during the first long Mankato winter, then got into a more serious thing that lasted almost two years.
    Then, finally, Mihovil Draskovic.

    MIHOVIL WAS SEVEN YEARS OLDER than she. A strong, ropy man , slightly mysterious; and a doctor.
    Mihovil had made his way from his native Serbia to the United States as a fifteen-year-old, had enlisted in the marines when he was seventeen, became a medic, got out of the crotch, as he called it, went to med school on a marine corps scholarship. He had marine tattoos and now wore his hair long and loose over his wide shoulders, like Jesus. He always had a smile on his face, he was a man perpetually amused, a man with Gypsy eyes . . . a man of slightly fractured English, a crazy mixture of broken grammar and cutting-edge slang.
    Mihovil had spent much of his young life in a refugee camp, where the children slept on one side of the hovel and the parents made love behind an army blanket that hung from the ceiling. Since they didn’t have a TV, they were behind the blanket almost every night, and the activity was almost uncommented-upon. Natural.
    Mihovil and Millie met in the Mankato hospital emergency room. Millie had dislocated a finger playing football, and he’d popped it back in place. They’d talked a little before and after, had bumped into each other in the bagel place a couple of days later, and one thing led to another . . .
    Led to another all over the place.
    Inside, outside, on hospital beds, floors, lawns, under apple trees, standing up, lying down, now one on top, now the other.
    Mihovil taught her to say things like “Wait. Do this—here, move your head right over here and now lick slower and shorter . . . Oh, my God, that’s almost right. Wiggle your finger down . . . Oh, my God . . .”
    He’d gone into instructional mode the second time they slept together. Why was she moving around aimlessly, he wanted to know. Why didn’t she have an orgasm and beat her feet on the sheets? Why was she treating his dick like a shovel handle?
    He was nice enough about it, but blunt. She didn’t think it was a language barrier; he was just a blunt guy.
    For example, they’d gone to an arty party, and a woman had been holding forth on Diverse Ways of Meaning, the Science of Signs and the Clash of Cultures. Millie spotted her for a poseur: not only did she smoke, but she held her cigarette upright, between her thumb and forefinger, like some kind of Russian film director or maybe a Nazi. She made no bones about edging in on Mihovil. After delivering a nearly incomprehensible spate on the Evils of American Cultural Imperialism, she asked Mihovil what he thought.
    He said, “I think what you said is bullshit. No, wait—it’s worse than that. We talk about the black people in Uganda and the brown people in New Guinea, and you say that we push our cultural artifacts upon them . . . You mean, medicine? You mean, TV? You mean, cars? Those people are just as smart as we are.