Shadow Prey (26 page)

"Jesus, I missed you at the gate," Lucas said, hurrying over. She was wearing a beige silk blouse with a tweed skirt and jacket and dark leather high heels. She was beautiful and he had trouble saying the words.

"God damn it, Davenport," she said.

"What?"

"Nothing. That was just a general 'God damn it.' About everything." She rose on her tiptoes and pecked him on the cheek. "I didn't want to come back."

"Mmm."

"There's a bag," she said. She stopped a suitcase and Lucas lifted it off the carousel. "And there's the other, coming through now."

Lily's second bag came around, and Lucas grabbed the two of them and led the way to the parking ramp. On the way, he looked down at her and said, "How've you been?"

"About the same as I was yesterday," she said with mild sarcasm, squinting as the outdoor light hit her face. "I was out of here. Finished. Job done. I got to our apartment, opened the door, and the phone was ringing. David was in the shower, so I picked it up. It was a deputy commissioner. He said, 'What the fuck are you doing here?' "

"Nice guy," Lucas said.

"If there were honorary degrees for assholes, he'd be a doctor of everything," Lily said.

"How's David?" Lucas asked, as though he knew her husband.

"Not so good the first time, 'cause he was a little overexcited. After that, he was great," she said. She looked up at him and suddenly blushed.

"Women are no good at that kind of talk," Lucas remarked. "But it wasn't a bad try."

They stopped at the gray Ford and Lily lifted an eyebrow.

"We got something going," Lucas said. "In fact, we're in kind of a hurry. I'll tell you about it as we go along."

Hart was worse. He'd tried to talk money with some of his acquaintances, and everything, he said, had changed. He'd be a pariah. The Indian man who bought people. And he worried about Harold Richard Liss.

"Man, I don't like this, I don't like this." He sat in the backseat, twisting his hands. Tears ran down his face. He wiped them away with the sleeve of his tweed jacket.

"He's a fuckin' criminal, Larry," said Lucas, annoyed. "Jesus Christ, quit whining."

"I'm not whining, man, I'm..."

Lucas let the Ford idle along. A hundred yards ahead, Harold Richard Liss ambled down Lake Street looking in the store windows. "He was making money selling chloroform to little kids. And glue," Lucas said, interrupting.

"This still isn't right, man. He's a fuckin' teenager." Hart shivered.

"It's only for a couple of days," Lucas said.

"It still isn't right."

"Larry..." Lucas started in exasperation. Lily touched his shoulder to stop him and turned and looked over the seat.

"There's a big difference between Welfare work and police work," she said to Hart, keeping her face and voice soft and sympathetic. "In a lot of ways, we're on different sides. I think you'd be more comfortable if we just dropped you off."

"We might need his help," Lucas objected, glancing sideways at Lily.

"I won't be much help, man," Hart said. There was a new note in his voice, the sound of a trapped man who sensed an opening. "I mean, I spotted him for you. I don't know shit about surveillance. It's not like you need to interrogate him."

Lucas thought about it, sighed and picked up the radio. "Hey, Sloan, this is Davenport. You still got him?"

Sloan came back: "Yeah, no sweat. What's happening?"

"I'm dropping Larry. Don't worry when you see us stop."

"Sure. I'll hang with Harry."

Lucas pulled over to the side and Hart scrambled to get out. "Thanks, man," he said, leaning over the driver's side window. "I mean, I'm sorry...."

"That's okay, Larry. We'll see you back downtown," Lucas said.

"Sure, man. And thanks, Lily."

They pulled away from the curb and Lucas turned to Lily. "I hope we don't need him to talk to the guy."

"We won't. Like he said, you're not planning to interrogate him."

"Hmph."

Lucas watched Hart in his rearview mirror. Hart was peering after them as they continued down the street after Harry. Then Hart turned and walked away, around a corner. Up ahead, Harry stopped on the street corner to talk to a fat white man in a black parka. The parka was a full season too big, the kind you wore in January when the temperature went down to minus thirty. Harry and the white man exchanged a few words, the white man shook his head and Harry started pleading. The white man shook his head again and stepped away. Harry said something else and then turned, despondent, and started down the street again.

"Dealer," said Lily.

"Yeah. Donny Ellis. He wears that parka 'til June, puts it back on in September. He pisses in it, never washes. You don't want to get downwind of him."

"This is going to be stupid, Lucas.... Nobody ever sold anybody that much crack on credit. Especially not..."

"Hey, we don't have to convince anybody. It's just... Okay, there's Stone...." Lucas picked up the radio and said, "Stone just came around the corner."

"I got him," Sloan said.

Lucas looked at Lily. "You know what? We should have gotten rid of Larry sooner than we did. He's the kind of guy who might go to the Human Rights Commission."

"Maybe, but I don't think so. That's why he was sweating," she said. She was watching as Elwood Stone walked toward Harry Dick, who was still shambling along the sidewalk. "It's not like we're going to do anything with the Liss kid. Hold him a couple of days and then kick him out of the system. My sense of Larry Hart is that his career means everything to him. He's a success. He makes some money. People like him. They depend on him. If he went outside with this, he'd be on the city's shit list. End of career. Back to the res. I don't think he'd risk that. Not if we kick the kid back out on the street after a couple of days."

"Okay."

"But it will make him feel like a small piece of shit," Lily added. "We whipsawed him between his job and his people and he's smart enough to see that. He'll never trust you again."

"I know," Lucas said uncomfortably. "God damn, I hate to burn people."

"Professionally, or personally?"

"What?" Lucas asked, puzzled by the question.

"I mean, you hate to burn a guy because it loses a contact, or because it loses a friend?"

He thought about it and after a minute said, "I don't know." Up the street, Harry spotted Elwood Stone and quickened his step. Stone was one of the tightest dealers on the street, but it never hurt to ask. All he needed was a taste. Just a taste to tide him over.

"They're talking," Sloan said on the radio. "That goddamn Stone is shuckin' like he's on Broadway."

"I told him not to overdo it," Lucas muttered to Lily. Lucas had pulled into a parking place and couldn't see well from the driver's side. He crowded against Lily, who had her face pressed against the passenger-side window, and let his hand drop on her thigh.

"Watch it."

"What?"

"The hand, Davenport..."

"God damn it, Lily."

"It's going down," she said.

"It's going down," Sloan said. "He's got it."

"Let's take him," Lucas said.

Sloan came in from the west, Lucas from the east. Sloan pulled into the curb ahead of Harry, Lucas did a U-turn into a fire-hydrant zone behind him. Harry was still grinning, still had his hand in his jacket pocket, when Sloan hopped out of his car. He was inside fifteen feet before Harry figured out something was happening. He turned to run and almost bumped into Lucas, who was closing in from behind. Lily stayed in the street, blocking a dash to the side. Lucas grabbed Harry by the coat collar and said, "Whoa." A second later, Sloan had him by the arm.

"Hey, man," Harry started, but he knew he had been bagged.

"Come on, on the wall," Lucas said, "on the wall." They pushed him onto the wall. Sloan frisked him and found the baggies in his pocket.

"Holy shit," Sloan said. "We got us a dealer."

He opened his palm to Lucas, showed him the two eight-balls.

"I'm no fuckin' dealer, man...."

"A quarter-ounce of dog-white cocaine," Lucas said to Harry. "That's a dealer load, kid. That's presumptive prison term."

"I'm a juvenile, man, look at my ID." Harry was old enough to be worried.

"You don't get no juvenile break on a presumptive-dealer rap," Lucas said. "Not unless you're ten years old. You look older than that."

"Oh, man," Harry moaned. "I just got it, a guy give it to me...."

"Right," Sloan said skeptically. "He gave it to you all right. He gave it to you right in the ass." He cranked down one arm while Lucas hung onto the other, and Sloan put on his handcuffs. "You got the right to remain silent..."

Daniel wanted to push as hard as they could. If they waited, he thought, Len Meadows would get Liss' family organized and protected.

"You can fly out to Sioux Falls and rent a car..." Daniel started.

"Fuck fly," Lucas said. "I'm driving. We'll be there in four hours. We wouldn't get there any faster if we waited for an airplane and then drove up from Sioux Falls."

"Are you going?" Daniel raised an eyebrow and looked at Lily.

"Yeah. We'll be dealing with this Louise Liss. Maybe a woman would do it better."

"Okay. But take it easy with the Liss woman, will you? This whole thing is a little shaky. Larry Hart is shitting bricks. He's scared," Daniel said. "Worse than that, he's pissed off."

"Can you talk to him?"

"I already did and I'll go back with him again. I'll tell him if we squeeze anything out of Liss, we can probably send him back to work at Welfare...."

They took overnight bags to Brookings. If they didn't get the information the first night, there wouldn't be much point in staying a second.

"Your friend... Jennifer. She's in Brookings, right?"

"Yeah. They sent out a crew. She's producing." They were crossing the Minnesota River at Shakopee. A flock of Canada geese were standing on the riverbank, watching the water go by. Lucas said, "Geese."

"Mmm. Will you stay with her?"

"What?"

"Jennifer. Will you stay with her?"

Lucas downshifted as they came into town and rolled up to a stoplight. He glanced at her, then turned right on the red light. "No. I'd rather that she not know I was there. She has a way of reading my mind. If she sees me, she'll know something is up."

"Do you know where she's staying?"

"Sure. It's out by the interstate that comes up from Sioux Falls. The Brookings cops told me that Louise Liss is staying in a place downtown. I thought we'd check in there."

They were going through the town of Sleepy Eye on Highway 14 when they passed a man on bicycle, dressed in cycling clothes: a green-striped polo shirt, black cycling shorts, white helmet. It was cool, but his bare legs were exposed and pumped like machine pistons. Lucas estimated that he was breaking the speed limit through the downtown.

"He looks like David," Lily said. "My husband."

"David's a cyclist?"

"Yeah. He was pretty serious about it, once." She turned her head to watch the cyclist as they went by. "He'd go out every Saturday with a group of people and they'd ride centuries. Sometimes two. A century's a hundred miles."

"Jesus. He must be in great shape."

"Yeah." She was watching the storefronts in the tiny town. "Bicycles bore the shit out of me, to tell you the truth. They always break down, then you've got to fix them. Or they're not broken, then you've got to fiddle with them to get them tuned up exactly right. The tires go flat all the time."

"That's why I bought a Porsche," Lucas said.

"A Porsche's probably cheaper too," Lily said. "Those goddamned racing bikes cost a fortune. And you can't have just one."

A few minutes later, back in the countryside, they passed a herd of black-and-white dairy cows.

"Neat cows," she said. "What kind are they?"

"Beats the hell out me," Lucas said.

"What?" she said in amusement. "You're from Minnesota. You ought to know about cows."

"That's the cheeseheads over in Wisconsin who know about cows. I'm a city kid," he said. "If I had to guess, I'd say they're Holsteins."

"Why's that?"

" 'Cause that's the only cow name I know. Wait a minute. There's also Guernseys and Jerseys. But I don't think they're the spotted ones."

"Brown Swiss," Lily said.

"What?"

"That's a kind of cow."

"I thought that was a kind of cheese," Lucas said.

"I don't think so.... There's another bunch." She watched a herd of cows ambling down the pasture toward the barn, walking in ones and twos, like tourists coming back to a bus, shadows trailing behind them. "David knows the names of everything. You drive up toward the mountains and you say, 'What's that tree?' And he says, That's a white oak,' or, 'That's a Douglas fir.' I used to think he was bullshitting me, so I started checking. He was always right."