Naked Prey by John Sandford Read Free Book Online

steering wheel as they bumped over the last set of ruts onto the highway, and turned south toward Broderick and Armstrong. “Never heard anybody use the word wizard around him,” he said. “He’s pretty much wholly owned by Barry Wilson, who’s the head of the county commission. That’s okay, most of the time. Doesn’t work too well when there’s an actual crime, or something.”
    T HE TOWN OF Broderick was a few hundred yards down the highway, and Zahn took them through it at a crawl.
    The town was built along two streets that intersected the highway at right angles. A big four-square farmhouse sat on the north edge of town, on the west side of the highway. A sheriff’s car sat in the driveway, in front of the garage, and Zahn said, “That’s the victims’ place.”
    “Okay.” It looked like a rural murder scene on a CNN report, a lonely white farmhouse surrounded by snow, with a cop car in the yard.
    Farther south, still on the west side of the highway, they passed Wolf’s Cafe, which looked like a shingle-sided rambler; the Night Owl Club; and a building with a wooden cross fixed above the door and a bare spot where a sign had been pulled down. “That used to be the Holy Spirit Pentecostal Church—holy rollers,” Zahn said. “They eventually rolled out of town. Now a bunch of women work there. Like religious women, do-gooders, I guess. Some Catholics and some Lutheran women from Lutheran Social Services, and I heard one of them’s a Quaker. One of the Catholics is a looker. The other ones are the blue-tights kind.”
    Scattered among the buildings were a half-dozen small houses, a couple of trailer homes, a corrugated-steel corn silo with a cone-shaped roof, and a red barn.
    The east side of the highway was sparser: a Handy Mart gas station and convenience store; Calb’s Body Shop & Tow, in a long yellow metal-sided pole barn; Gene’s 18, an over-the-road truck rehab place; and two more houses.
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it, that’s the town,” Zahn said, as they rolled out into the countryside.
    Del asked, “What’s with all the truck places, the body shops? Isn’t that pretty heavy industry for a place like this?”
    “Naw . . . I don’t know. Would you drive your car nine miles to get it fixed? We’re nine miles from Armstrong.”
    “I guess I would,” Del admitted. “Actually, I know I would, ’cause I have.”
    “And it was an inheritance deal. Gene inherited the body shop from his old man, and then he added the truck rehab business. Truck rehab, you can do anywhere. He does pretty good. He’s why the town started coming back. Most everybody who lives here works for him. Not a bad guy.”
    “A long way out,” Del said.
    “Some people like it lonely,” Zahn said. “Some people don’t.”
    Then they were out of town, out in the countryside. A crow or a raven was flying south, parallel to the highway, a fluttering black speck against the overcast sky, the only thing besides themselves that was moving. Del said, “Jesus Christ, it’s flat.”
    They rode in silence for a couple of minutes, then Zahn started a low, unconscious whistling. Lucas recognized the tune, probably from an elevator somewhere. “What’s that song you’re whistling?”
    “Didn’t realize I was whistling,” Zahn said. He thoughta minute. “It’s that thing from Phantom of the Opera.”
    “That’s right.” After a second, “You don’t seem to be too upset, you know, by the bodies.”
    “Well, you’re with the Patrol, you learn not to be a pussy, like a homicide cop or something,” Zahn said.
    “All right, pussy,” Del drawled from the back seat.
    Zahn glanced over the seat and said, “Every time I go out to an accident and there are a couple of high school kids bleeding to death right in front of my face, and screaming for their dad or their mom, I know them. They’re kids from down the street. You do that for a few years and a couple strangers up in a tree won’t bother you much.