Phantom prey

8

A SLAP in the face. “Frances Austin’s dead,” Lucas said. “You know that and I know that,” Anson said. “The question is, does Frances Austin know that?"

"Man… the blood at Austin’s. You’ve seen the lab reports?"

"I’m just telling you what I was told. We really don’t know how much blood there was at Austin’s place, whether it was a little that got smeared around or a lot that got mopped up. But here’s a question for you. What if the fairy is Alyssa Austin? She looks a little like Frances.”

Lucas had to think it over. Why not? “You’re thinking outside the box,” he said finally.

“She gets a wig, she gets some black clothes…"

"She’s forty- five, or something like that. Everybody says the fairy is in her early twenties,” Lucas said. “Yeah, that’s a question,” Anson said. “Still, I wouldn’t mind getting a peek in her wig drawer.” Lucas thought, I’m right there. He glanced sideways. The house-keeper was twenty feet away, poking a coat- hanger wire down the drain on the left side of the two- basin kitchen sink, her lips moving, as though she were trying to talk it into the garbage disposal. Paying no attention. But how was he going to get into the bedroom? The housekeeper wouldn’t be leaving for hours. And if he found anything, could he tell Anson? It’d be an illegal search and he didn’t know Anson that well. “We’d need something,” he said. “To get a warrant.”

“Think of something,” Anson said. Disappointed? “Did you get anything?”

Lucas told him about the missing fifty thousand dollars. “Looks like she just cashed the check, or signed it over to somebody. Or something. Anyway, it doesn’t pop up in any of her accounts that I can find.”

There was a silence of several seconds, then Anson said, “Fifty grand?”

“Yeah. The question is, what would she use it for? She doesn’t seem like a gambler. Cocaine? Doesn’t seem like that kind, either. Maybe… who knows, maybe she was buying photography equipment or computers or something. But Alyssa says she doesn’t know, and she thinks that she would.”

“So now what?"

"I’ll get my financial guys to look into it. Maybe go back to the A1 tonight. People knew her there. See if she was throwing any money around, talking about anything.”

“What about the photo kit?"

"Gotta think about that. Fax one to me, will you? I’ll look at it later.”

LUCAS HEADED BACK to the BCA, with copies of the Fidelity documents made on Alyssa Austin’s home- office copier. Give them to the accountants, he thought, and let them figure it out.

He’d parked, was out of the car, walking toward the door, head down, when Jenkins and Shrake came hustling out of the building, carrying vests.

He stopped. “Where’re you going?"

"Antsy Toms is back in town,” Shrake said. “I’m coming,” Lucas said. “Let me get my vest.” He ran inside, up the stairs, down to his office, threw the copies at his secretary, Carol, and blurted, “Give these to Dan Hall, find out who cashed the fifty- thousand- dollar check.” She said, “What?” and he pulled his vest out from behind his file cabinets, shouted, “Dan Hall, find out about the check, the fifty grand.”

“Where’re you going?"

"Antsy Toms is back in town,” he said, and he ran past her, down the hall and back down the stairs. Shrake was at the wheel of his personal Crown Vic, waiting in the street. Lucas climbed in the back.

“Where is he?"

"At his mom’s house in Frogtown,” Jenkins said, as Shrake jumped on the gas. “We own the guy who lives across the street. He’s on his second continuance on coke charges. He’s been going down to the cathedral, lighting candles, hoping that Antsy would show up so he could turn him in.”

“He wouldn’t be shittin’ you?” Lucas asked. Jenkins snorted. “He ain’t gettin’ a third continuance."

"Gotta stay cool,” Lucas said. “Antsy’s got more muscle than Rocky II."

"And he’s more fucked up than Rocky the Flying Squirrel,” Shrake said. “I’m just praying he hasn’t left."

"Is St. Paul on the way?” Lucas asked. Long pause. Then Jenkins said, “I guess we forgot to call them."

"You morons,” Lucas said. Jenkins struggled, turned in his seat, and looked at Lucas: “Call them if you want, you yellow motherfucker.”

They looked at each other for a minute, then Lucas said, “Whatever.”

Shrake busted a red light turning onto University, and the Crown Vic took about three turns that the road didn’t, and Lucas said, “I can’t believe you went out and bought this piece of shit.”

“Couldn’t help myself,” Shrake said. “The seats fit my ass."

"The experts rated it on Microsoft Network,” Jenkins said over his shoulder. “How’d they rate it?"

"Six out of ten,” Jenkins said. Then he made a laugh sound that went like “bwa- hahahah,” and Shrake said, “Fuck you,” and then, “We’re four blocks out.”

“Put it at the Taco Shed,” Jenkins suggested. “Somebody’ll steal the tires,” Shrake said. “Not when they see us getting out of the car,” Jenkins said. He reached between his legs and swung up a pump shotgun. “Maybe we could rob the Taco Shed before we take Antsy,” Lucas said. “Not a bad idea,” Jenkins said, “except that it’s daylight.” A block from the Taco Shed, Jenkins called St. Paul and identified himself: “We’ve got a semi- confirmed tip that Antsy Toms is at his mother’s house.”

He gave them the details, and help was on the way. It’d get there only a minute or so too late, Lucas thought: as planned.

The Taco Shed was two houses sideways from Toms’s mother’s place. In addition to being Siggy’s stupid younger brother, and occasional cocaine runner, Toms was a weight guy, a lifter, a bouncer, a steroid freak, and a meth enthusiast. Three weeks earlier, stoned out of his mind, and tired of constant cop probes about his brother, he’d beaten a St. Paul cop unconscious, then pinned him on the floor and methodically kicked his balls until they turned to ravioli.

The cop’s partner, a twenty- four-year-old woman named Les Cooper, had gotten into it, and Toms had picked her up by the short hair at the back of her head and whacked her face twice against a mahogany bar, crushing the bones around her eye sockets. She was the niece of a BCA agent who worked out of the Bemidji office.

Toms had always been a cruel, racist, child- beating, dope- taking freak, and had always walked… until now. He’d been hiding out ever since he’d beaten up the cops, but had been seen a couple times in western Wisconsin and north of the Twin Cities in St. Cloud, so they knew he was still around.

His real name, Lucas had once been told, was Antanas. From there, Antsy was a natural: maybe the name had made him what he was. Like Bugsy…

They made the Taco Shed parking lot and climbed out of the car, three large men wearing bulletproof vests. Shrake hit the locks and the car beeped at them and they ran across the lawn of the first house and then up the porch steps of the second house and Shrake kicked the door and they were inside and there was Antsy, standing in the middle of the living room with an old- fashioned princess phone in his hand.

Jenkins pointed the shotgun at him and screamed, “On the floor, you piece of shit,” and Antsy threw the phone at Jenkins’s head and spun and ran for the stairs. Jenkins ducked and pointed the shotgun, but shook his head and screamed, “Stop… wait, wait.”

Antsy’s mother, a large woman in blue Nike workout sweats, appeared in the kitchen doorway carrying a cutting board as though it were a Ping- Pong paddle and she threw it overhand at Lucas, who ducked, and then Shrake was on the stairs going after Antsy and they heard a rumble and Antsy’s mom yelled, “Not the organ,” and an old Hammond electric organ flew down the stairs like a freight train and Shrake jumped down just in front of it.

As it crashed at the bottom of the stairs, they heard windows breaking upstairs and Lucas yelled, “He’s going out the window,” and Jenkins yelled, “I’m going up, you guys go out,” and he pushed the shotgun out in front of him and took the stairs.

Shrake ran toward the front door and Lucas toward the back of the house, through the kitchen. Antsy’s mom had run back into the kitchen after the organ crashed, and she pulled a butcher knife out of a drawer and blocked Lucas’s route past the kitchen counter.

Lucas got in close, then punched her with a good right hand and she flew ass- over- teakettle under the breakfast table. Lucas went out the back door and around to the side, where he saw Shrake coming toward him. Antsy, appropriately dressed in a wife- beater shirt, jeans, and socks, with no shoes, had climbed out of a dormer window, hesitated on the edge of the roof, just above the gutter, thinking about jumping, twelve feet up.

Then the barrel of Jenkins’s shotgun poked through a broken window and hit him between the shoulder blades, hard, and he tipped forward, tried to catch himself, swinging his hands in little circles, said, “Shit,” and jumped off the roof and landed in the neighbor’s hedge.

Shaken and maybe hurt, he rolled onto his stomach and Shrake ran up and screamed, “Look out, look out,” and punted Antsy in the teeth. Antsy was flopped over on his hands and knees, still in the hedge, which seemed to be some kind of prickly stuff, roses, maybe, and Shrake took the opportunity to kick him in the balls, hard, with a steel toed brogan.

Antsy groaned and scrambled straight ahead, still tangled in the hedge, and Lucas vaulted the low chain- link fence around the neighbor’s backyard and ran up as Antsy finally staggered to his feet, clutching at his crotch, blood bubbling out of his mouth, around his broken teeth. Lucas hit him as hard as he could right between the eyes.

Antsy went back in the hedge and this time didn’t move. Jenkins came running out of the house and said, “Goddamnit, you didn’t wait for me.”

“He’s a violent man,” Lucas said, breathing hard, shaking out his hand.

But the movie wasn’t over, quite. Antsy’s mom came out of the house, screaming, fat, Lithuanian, they’d heard, from the Old Country, hard lard, not soft, waving the butcher knife. “His mother made him what he is,” Jenkins said, quoting a country song. Mom had fixed on Shrake, and charged him, and Jenkins swatted her in the face with the butt of the shotgun and she went down.

There were sirens, had been sirens, and then a uniformed St. Paul cop looked back around the house, saw them, ran up and said, “Whoa. Resisting arrest,” and kicked Antsy in the ribs hard enough to knock him back out of the hedge. More steel- toed shoes.

St. Paul arrived in force, and they dragged Antsy out of the hedge and propped up his old lady, who started crying, and Antsy said, “You motherfuckers are gonna pay for this. We got more goddamn guns than you do and Siggy’s coming back, you motherfuckers. You beat up our mom, you motherfuckers.”

“I hope he’s coming back,” Jenkins said through his teeth. “That cocksucker will look good on the end of my shotgun.”

Antsy spit blood at him, but missed, and the St. Paul cop said, “Maybe we oughta put a spit shield on him."

"What a buttwipe,” Shrake said. “Problem with a spit shield is, sometimes it covers their eyes so much that they can’t see the car roof when they’re getting in, and they just knock the shit out of themselves,” Jenkins said.

“Siggy’s gonna fix your asses,” Antsy said, but he didn’t spit again. His mom said, “I didn’t know Antsy was coming home, I didn’t know, not my fault…” Antsy said, “Shut the fuck up.” His mother was bleeding heavily from her nose, and the cops helped her up and started her toward the car. “You criminals,” she mumbled. “You criminals…”

LUCAS DIDN’T GET back to the office until four-thirty. Carol, his secretary, looked at him and said, “You’ve been taking some exercise.”

“Yeah.” He felt pretty good, in fact, except that his right hand hurt.

The Tomses were both at Regions hospital in guarded condition, with a few broken bones and blunt trauma between them, and Antsy also had about a million tiny thorns sticking in him. “Don’t know what we can do about that,” a doc said. “Let them work their way out, I guess. Gonna itch like fire, though.”

“We’ll have to find a way to live with it,” Shrake said.

“I GOT THAT stuff from Dan Hall,” Carol said. “He faxed a subpoena to Fidelity and they sent back a fax of the canceled check. Frances Austin had a checking account at Riverside State Bank.”

“Huh.” The Antsy episode had temporarily kicked the Austin case out of Lucas’s frontal lobes. He wanted to go around and punch walls, and talk about the bust, and maybe have a couple of beers and kick cans down the street and laugh out loud.

“I got you a subpoena for her Riverside records,” she said, and handed him a piece of paper with his own signature at the bottom. “They close at five. The records will be ready when you serve the subpoena.”

Lucas looked at the paper, felt the high leaking out. “I think I should have been there… you know, to sign it?”

“You were, in spirit,” she said. The Riverside State Bank was not on the side of the river, but in one of St. Paul’s downtown skyways, an obscure bank, one that you didn’t think about. Lucas left his car on the street, got a bag of popcorn, and wound his way through the skyways, replaying the Antsy Toms fight in his head.

How did some people grow up to be pieces of shit? They didn’t have to be-they just were. They liked it. What was the Kid Rock song? “Low Life”? Like that.

The bank was painted in tints and shades of brown; if you didn’t look at it carefully, it might not have been there-in a fantasy novel, it would have been the gate to an alternate reality.

The vice president in charge of the branch, a tall, balding man with weasel- like teeth, took the subpoena and produced a piece of paper, an account file.

“This is it?” Lucas asked, turning it over. “One side of a piece of paper?”

“An unusual account,” the vice president said. “What do you think she’s up to?”

Lucas shook his head. “She’s dead.” The vice president’s hand went to his lips. “Not… She wasn’t withdrawing… Somebody wasn’t taking out…?"

"No, no. She was killed after the last withdrawal. A month or so afterwards. And this is still open, right?” He held the paper up. “Nobody’s gotten in touch about an estate?”

“No. There’s nothing in her file at all. No notations. We did issue a check- cashing card.”

“And it’s open."

"It’s still open, but only has a hundred dollars in it. The fifty-thousand-dollar deposit was withdrawn in cash, starting two weeks after it was deposited. Then nothing more.”

“Hmm."

"That’s what I thought, when I saw it,” the vice president said. “Of course, this is all automated, and it’s not big enough to draw any particular attention. But, look here…”

He reached out for the file, and Lucas let it go, and the vice president put it on the desktop, upside down from himself, so Lucas could read it, and used a pen to point out the individual lines of the withdrawal records.

“We have five branches: this one, plus one at Maplewood, one at Signal Hills, one in Woodbury, and one down at Midway. The money was taken out twenty- five hundred dollars at a time, in cash. Twenty withdrawals, one a day. Look at this code-this tells you the branch where the withdrawal was made. The first was taken out here, the next in Maplewood, the next at Midway, the next at Signal Hills. And so on. Every week for four weeks.”

“Why would they do that?"

"My thought was, she didn’t want to be seen taking out too much money at once,” the vice president said. “I looked in my computer records, and I can tell you that she never saw any teller twice. Since we only have two or three working at a time, that doesn’t work out statistically.”

“So she was avoiding the tellers she’d seen before,” Lucas said. “That’s my idea,” the vice president said. “Thank you,” Lucas said. He started away, then turned back. “The fifty thousand wasn’t the first deposit?"

"That’s on the paper,” the vice president said. “The account was opened with five hundred dollars. There were two one- hundred- dollar withdrawals on the check card, then nothing for two months, then the big check, then nothing for two weeks, then four weeks of daily withdrawals.”

Fifty grand. What had she been buying? Maybe nothing. Maybe she was putting together some case money, a stash. Shit, maybe she was a terrorist. A rich Caucasian Goth terrorist, buying RPGs. Maybe she was going to war against the Republicans. Lucas smiled to himself: maybe not.

So what had she been buying? Or why would she need case money? He couldn’t remember the names, looked in his notebook: Denise Robinson, Mark McGuire. Hung out with her, might have wanted to start a business. Wanted her for the money? Something to push.

HE WENT HOME for dinner, the kitchen warm and smelling good, like potatoes and salmon, Sam making a hash of his hash, Letty working on algebra while she ate (“If a train is going sixty- five miles an hour to the east, and another train is going forty- five miles an hour to the west…”), and took time out to grouse about not getting a cell phone, because everybody else had one, and Weather, quiet, amused, and at the same time, tired from a seven- hour- long operation, talking about going to bed early. A happy moment: if he’d ever thought of commissioning a painting of his family, that would be the moment.

“I’ve got to run out,” Lucas said, when things had settled down to coffee. “Down to the A1, see if I can catch a few of Frances’s friends, people we haven’t touched yet. There’s some weird stuff coming out.”

“You could have another piece of pie,” Weather said. “A small piece.”

Felt so good, in a quiet way. He left at eight, feeling a tug back toward the brightly lit windows, but going on into the dark, in the Porsche, around the corner, and then up Cretin to I- 94.

HE FOUND A place in the street to park the car, under a streetlight. The A1 had changed, just as the bartender had said it would. The lights had been turned down, and the crowd was younger and quieter and dressed in black. The bartender was the same guy: Jerry. Lucas nodded at him and asked, “Can you point me at anybody who knew Frances Austin?”

The bartender asked, “What kind of beer do you drink?"

"Leinie’s?” The bartender nodded and pulled a bottle of Honey Weiss out of a cooler and said, quietly, “Take a drink and then turn and look around, but not like I told you. There’s a guy over there with a black cowboy like hat. He knew her. But don’t go right over.”

Lucas took a sip of the beer and nodded, and the bartender went down the bar, to the only other customer sitting on a stool. Lucas took another sip, then turned and looked at the rooms, clusters of black garbed Goths on their night out, mostly wine with a little beer here and there, quiet enough. The guy picked out by Jerry wasn’t wearing anything like a cowboy hat, Lucas thought; it was the kind of hat you’d wear with a cape, or with a pencil- thin mustache. Lucas turned back around, took another sip, and the bartender laughed with the other guy down the bar. Good time to move…

Lucas stepped over to the booth where the hat guy was, with two other Goths, one male and one female, and took out his ID and said, “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held out the ID, and the three of them looked at it doubtfully, and he said, “Some of you knew Frances Austin, and I’m trying to figure out what happened there. I’ve got a photo kit… Could you tell me if this is Frances?”

The girl said, “I didn’t know her,” but the two guys did, and they shared the photo kit, and both shook their heads. “It looks a little like her, but the hair’s wrong, and this woman is skinnier than Frances. She had a little heft to her. Not fat, but she wasn’t this small.”

The hat guy looked over the back of the booth and said, “Hey, Darrell, look at this.”

In a couple of minutes, a half- dozen Goths had checked the photo kit, and asked why he didn’t have a regular photograph, and then one of them said, “This isn’t Frances. This is the fairy Goth. I heard you guys were looking for her.”

Lucas nodded. “The fairy Goth. You sure?"

"Yeah. I saw her,” the guy said. “In this picture she looks a little like Frances, but she doesn’t look like her in real life. She’s smaller and skinnier and darker.”

“You know both of them.” He shook his head. “I don’t know the fairy, I just saw her one night

I didn’t know anybody was looking for her until tonight.” He glanced at the bartender. “Jerry told me. Anyway, they are definitely different people.”

“Well, shoot,” Lucas said. But he’d known that. Frances Austin was dead. He spent a couple of minutes taking down names. Then, an odd event. A dark- haired man, with a funny fuzzy mustache, in sunglasses and a leather jacket, stepped through the back door and looked directly at Lucas, held his eyes until he saw Lucas look up at him, held them for another beat, then backed out through the door.

Wanted to talk privately? Lucas said, “Excuse me,” and went after him. The alley behind the building, where Dick Ford had been killed, was illuminated by a single electric lamp above the A1 door, and by a streetlight down at the end of the alley. The mustachioed man was down there, at the end of the alley, looking at the door when Lucas came through, and behind him a slender dark- haired woman who darted out of sight. Lucas took a step that way, aware of the litter and the Coke can to his left, the uneven brick surface, and then the man made a gesture with his right hand, and everything seemed to go sideways.

In the first millisecond, Lucas continued with the step he was halfway into; in the second millisecond he recognized the gesture; and in the third millisecond he may have thought, Gun… and his hand started moving toward the pistol on his hip. Then the man opened fire, white sparkles and firecracker bangs and Lucas caught the closing steel door with his hand and lurched back behind it, feeling pain in his left leg, and he sagged against the wall, fumbling his pistol out.

He was hurt and bleeding, he thought, and he peeked, heard people shouting in the club, and he saw the man running out of the alley. There was something wrong with him, fire in his leg, but Lucas lurched that way, and he thought about getting hit in the groin and all the arteries down there and he followed his pistol down the alley, limping, hopping, hurting, then he was at the corner and he heard a car accelerating hard, around the corner, a half- block away, out of sight, and then he thought, Hope it didn’t hit me in the balls hope it didn’t hit me in the balls…

And the pain came in a wave. He lurched back to the bar and the crowd growing around the door, waving his pistol with one hand, and he groaned, “I got shot,” and he sat down in the alley just outside the door, under the light, and people were shouting about ambulances and cops, and one of the Goth women said, “I’m a nurse, let me look at it,” and she and one of the Goth guys got his jeans down and they looked at his bloody thigh.

“No artery,” she said, looking up at him. “You’re bleeding. We’ve got to get you to the hospital, but it’s not pumping, it’s not pumping, it’s through- and- through.” She shouted over her shoulder, “Ask Jerry if he’s got a first- aid kit.” And to Lucas: “We gotta get some pressure on it. Get some pressure on it.”

Jerry shouted, “Cops are on the way, ambulance on the way.” The cops were there in one minute: a red- faced blond and his black partner, who looked down and said, “Holy shit, Davenport, man, what happened?”

“Motherfucker mustache guy shot me,” Lucas said. The Goth nurse was pressing an antique gauze pad, from a thirty-year-old first-aid kit, against the hole in his thigh. “I’m working the Austin case, ahhh… and the Dick Ford case, with Harry Anson,” Lucas told the cop. The leg was on fire, was burning up. He grunted to the nurse, “Goddamn, that hurts. That hurts.” And to the cop again, “Call Anson. Guy ambushed me. Middle height, black hair, mustache, black leather jacket, had a car parked around the corner. Might have a limp. Jesus, that hurts.”

The ambulance was there a minute later and they put him on a gurney and ran him out, and the EMT started running down his list, asking about aspirin and street drugs and heart medications, and Lucas answered and then got his cell phone out and the EMT said, “You can’t use that here,” and Lucas said, “Bullshit. I’m gonna call my wife before anybody else does.”

He did and it was confusing, but she was coming. Because his mind was still operating in some cold not- quite- shocked mode, he made one more call, almost fumbling the phone as he worked down through his call list. But he got it, finally, and Alyssa Austin answered the phone. He hung up without saying anything: but Austin was at home. If the woman he saw running away was the fairy, and it could have been, then Austin was not her.

The ambulance made a swooping move and one of the EMTs said something he didn’t understand, and then the doors were popping open: the hospital. He’d been there before, rolling down a hallway looking up at the passing lights, talking to the docs in their scrubs. One of the docs said, “Sir, you understand me? Sir? It’s more than a couple of stitches, you’ve got a hole there and I’m going to have to clean it out? Do you understand that, sir?”

They were pulling his pants off as they talked and Lucas asked, “What’d it hit?”

“Your leg; I’m going to have to clean it out, okay? We have your permission to clean it out?”

“Yeah, yeah, go ahead."

"Do you take a heart aspirin or Plavix or Coumadin, any drugs that you think might affect…” Some time passed; he didn’t know exactly how much, and then he was moving again. He was out of his clothing and there was something cold and wet on his leg and belly and nurses were pushing and pulling on him, transferring him to an operating table, and a masked man looked down at him and then he went away for a while…

Weather was sitting white- faced in a chair next to the bed when he came back. He was in a recovery room, and she must’ve gotten in on her physician’s ID. He groaned, “Ah, man,” and she stood up clutching a purse to her chest and she began to weep and said, “Oh, God you scared me, goddamn, you scared me…”

Lucas said, “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.”