Silent Prey

CHAPTER
19

Lucas sat alone in the worst row of seats on the plane, in tourist class behind the bulkhead, no good place to put his feet except in the aisle. The stewardess was watching him before they crossed Niagara Falls.

"Are you all right?" she asked finally, touching his shoulder. He'd dropped the seat all the way back, tense, his eyes closed, like a patient waiting for a root canal.

"Are the wheels off the ground?" he grated.

"Uh-oh," she said, fighting a smile. "How about a scotch? Double scotch?"

"Doesn't work," Lucas said. "Unless you've got about nine phenobarbitals to put in it."

"Sorry," she said. Her face was professionally straight, but she was amused. "It's only two more hours…"

"Wonderful…"

He could see it so clearly in his mind's eye: ripped chunks of aluminum skin and pieces of engine nacelle scattered around a Canadian cornfield, heads and arms and fingers like bits of trash, fires guttering just out of sight, putting out gouts of oily black smoke; women in stretch pants wandering through the wreckage, picking up money. A Raggedy Ann doll, cut in half, smiling senselessly; all images from movies, he thought. He'd never actually seen a plane crash, but you had to be a complete idiot not to be able to imagine it.

He sat and sweated, sat and sweated, until the stewardess came back and said, "Almost there."

"How long?" he croaked.

"Less than an hour…"

"Sweet bleedin' Jesus…" He'd been praying that it was only a minute or two; he'd been sure of it.

The plane came in over the grid of orange sodium-vapor lights and blue mercury lights, banking, Lucas holding on to the seat. The window was filled with the streaming cars, the black holes of the lakes stretching down from just west of the Minneapolis Loop. He looked at the floor. Jumped when the wheels came down. Made the mistake of glancing across the empty seat next to him and out the window, and saw the ground coming and closed his eyes again, braced for the impact.

The landing was routine. The bored pilot said the usual good-byes, the voice of a Tennessee hay-shaker, which he undoubtedly was, not qualified to fly a '52 Chevy much less a jetliner…

Lucas stunk with fear, he thought as he bolted from the plane, carrying his overnight bag. My God, that ride was the worst. He'd read that La Guardia was overcrowded, that in a plane you could get cut in half in an instant, right on the ground. And he'd have to do it again in a day or two.

He caught a cab, gave directions, collapsed in the backseat. The driver took his time, loafing along the river, north past the Ford plant. Lucas' house had a light in the window. The timer.

"Nice to get home, huh?" the cabdriver asked, making a notation in a trip log.

"You don't know how good," Lucas said. He thrust a ten at the driver and hopped out. A couple strolled by on the river walk, across the street.

"Hey, Lucas," the man called.

"Hey, Rick, Stephanie." Neighbors: he could see her blond hair, his chrome-rimmed glasses "You left your backyard sprinkler on. We turned it off and put the hose behind the garage."

"Thanks…"

He picked up the mail inside the door, sorted out the ads and catalogs and dumped them in a wastebasket, showered to get the fear-stink off his body and fell into bed. In thirty seconds, he was gone.

"Lucas?" Quentin Daniel stuck his head out of his office. He had dark circles under his eyes and he'd lost weight. He'd been the Minneapolis chief of police for two terms, but that wasn't what was eating him. Innocent people had died because of Quentin Daniel: Daniel was a criminal, but nobody knew except Daniel and Lucas. Lucas had resolved it in his mind, had forgiven him. Daniel never could… "C'mon in. What happened to your face?"

"Got mugged, more or less… I need some help," Lucas said briefly, settling into the visitor's chair. "You know I'm working in New York."

"Yeah, they called me. I told them you were Mr. Wunnerful."

"I need to find the guys who were in the jail cells next to Bekker-or anybody he talked to while he was in there."

"Sounds like you're scraping the bottom of the bucket," Daniel said, playing with a humidor on his desk.

"That's why I'm here," Lucas said. "The cocksucker's dug in, and we can't get him out."

"All right." Daniel picked up his phone, punched a number. "Is Sloan there? Get him down to my office, will you? Thanks."

There was a moment of awkward silence, then Lucas said, "You look like shit."

"I feel like shit," Daniel said. He turned the humidor around, squared it with the edge of the desk.

"Your wife…?"

"Gone. Thought it'd be a lift, seeing her go, but it wasn't. I'd get up every morning and look down at her and wish she was gone, and now I get up and look at the bed and there's a hole in it."

"Want her back?"

"No. But I want something, and I can't have it. I'll tell you one thing, between you and me and the wall-I'm getting out of here. Two months and I hit a crick in the retirement scale. Maybe go up north, get a place on a lake. I've got the bucks."

There was a knock on the door, and Daniel's secretary stuck her head in and said, "Sloan…"

Lucas stood up. "I do wish you luck," he said. "I'm serious."

"Thanks, but I'm cursed," Daniel said.

Sloan was lounging in the outer office, a cotton sport coat over a tennis shirt, chinos, walking shoes. He saw Lucas and a grin spread across his thin face.

"Are you back?" he asked, sticking out his hand.

Lucas, laughing: "Just for the day. I gotta find some assholes and I need somebody with a badge."

"You're working in the Big Apple…"

"Yeah. I'll tell you about it, but we gotta go talk to the sheriff."

Three names, a deputy sheriff said. He'd looked at the records, checked with the other guards. They all agreed.

Bekker had been next to Clyde Payton, who was now at Stillwater, doing twenty-four months on a drugstore burglary, third offense. A doper.

"Motherfucker's gonna come out and kill people," the deputy said. "He thought Bekker was like some rock idol, or something. You could see Payton thinking: Killing people. Far out."

Tommy Krey, car theft, had been on the other side. He was still out on bail; Krey's attorney was dragging his feet on the trial. "The car owner's gonna move to California, I hear. Tommy's lawyer's looking for a plea," the deputy said.

Burrell Thomas had been across the aisle, and pled to simple assault, paid a fine. He was gone.

"I know Tommy, but I don't know the other two," Lucas said. Out of touch.

"Payton's from St. Paul, Rice Street. Basically a doper, sells real estate when he's straight," Sloan said. "I don't know Thomas either."

"Burrell's a head case," the deputy said. "They call him Rayon. Y'all know Becky Ann, the cardplayer with the huge hooters, see her down on Lake sometimes?"

"Sure." Lucas nodded.

"She was going with this super-tall black dude…"

"Manny," said Sloan, and Lucas added, "Manfred Johnson."

"Yeah, that's him-he's a friend of Burrell's. Like from high school and maybe even when they were kids…" • • • "How's New York?" Sloan asked. They were in Sloan's unmarked car, poking into the south side of Minneapolis.

"Hot. Like Alabama."

"Mmm. I never been there. I mean New York. I understand it's a dump."

"It's different," Lucas said, watching the beat-up houses slide by. Kids on bikes, rolling through the summer. They'd called Krey's attorney, a guy who worked out of a neighborhood storefront. He could have Krey there in a half-hour, he said.

"How different? I mean, like, Fort Apache?"

"Nah, not that," Lucas said. "The main thing is, there's an infinite number of assholes. You never know where the shit is coming from. You can't get an edge on anything. You can't know about the place. Here, if somebody hijacks a goddamn Best Buy truck and takes off fifty Sonys, we got an idea where they're going. Out there… Shit, you could make a list of suspects longer than your dick, and that'd only be the guys that you personally know might handle it. And then there are probably a hundred times that many guys that you don't know. I mean, a list longer than my dick."

"We're talking long lists here," Sloan said.

"It's strange," said Lucas. "It's like being up at the top of the IDS Building and looking out a window where you can't see the ground. You get disoriented and you feel like you're falling."

"How 'bout that Bekker, though?" Sloan said enthusiastically. "He's a fuckin' star, and we knew him back when." • • • Tommy Krey was sitting on a wooden chair in his attorney's office. His attorney wore a yellow-brown double-knit suit and a heavily waxed hairdo the precise shade of the suit. He shook hands with Sloan and Lucas; his hands were damp, and Lucas smothered a grin when he saw Sloan surreptitiously wipe his hand on his pant leg.

"What can Tommy do for yuz?" the lawyer asked, folding his hands on his desk, trying to look bright and businesslike. Krey looked half bored, skeptical, picked his teeth.

"He can tell us what he and Michael Bekker talked about in jail," Lucas said.

"What are the chances of knocking down this car-theft…"

"You're gonna have to do that on your own," Lucas said, looking from the lawyer to Krey and back again. "Maybe Sloan goes in and tells the judge you helped on a big case, but there's no guarantees."

The lawyer looked at Krey and lifted his eyebrows. "What d'you think?"

"Yeah, fuck, I don't care," Krey said. He flipped his toothpick at the basket, rimmed it out, and it fell on the carpet. The lawyer frowned at it. "We talked about every fuckin' thing," Krey said. "And I'll tell you what: I been beatin' my brains out ever since he went out to New York, trying to figure out if he gave me, like, any clues. And he didn't. All we did was bullshit."

"Nothing about friends in New York, about disguises…?"

"Naw, nothing. I mean, if I knew something, I'd a been downtown trying to deal. I know that his buddy, the guy who did the other kills, was an actor… so maybe it is disguises."

"What was he like in there? I mean, was he freaked out…?"

"He cried all the time. He couldn't live without his shit, you know? It hurt him. I thought it was bullshit when I first went in, but it wasn't bullshit. He used to cry for hours, sometimes. He's totally fuckin' nuts, man."

"How about this Clyde Payton? He was in for some kind of dope deal, he was around Bekker."

"Yeah, he came in the day before I made bail. I don't know; I think he was a wacko like Bekker. Square, but wacko, you know? Kind of scary. He was some kind of businessman, and he gets onto the dope. The next thing he knows, he's busting into drugstores trying to steal prescription shit. He mostly sat around and cursed people out while I was there, but sometimes he'd get like a stone. He figured he was going to Stillwater."

"He did," said Sloan.

"Dumb fuck," said Krey.

"How about Burrell Thomas?"

"Now, there's something," Krey said, brightening. "Bekker and Burrell talked a lot. Rayon's one smart nigger."

Burrell's address was a vacant house, the doors pulled down, the floor littered with Zip-Loc plastic bags. They crunched across broken glass up an open stairway, found a burned mattress in one room, nothing in the other, and a bathtub that'd been used as a toilet. Flies swarmed in an open window as Sloan reeled back from the bathroom door.

"We gotta find Manny Johnson," Sloan said.

"He used to work at Dos Auto Glass," Lucas said. "Not a bad guy. I don't think he's got a sheet, but that woman of his…"

"Yeah." Manny's girlfriend called herself Rock Hudson. "She took twenty-five grand out of a high-stakes game down at the Loin last month. That's going around."

"She's a piece of work," Lucas agreed.

They found both Manny and Rock at the auto glass. The woman was sitting in a plastic chair with a box full of scratch-off lottery tickets, scratching off the silver with a jackknife blade, dropping the bad ones on the floor.

"Cops," she said, barely looking up when they came in.

"How are you?" Lucas asked. "Doing any good?"

"What d'ya want?"

"We need to talk to Manny," Lucas said. She started to heave herself to her feet, but Lucas put a hand in front of her head. "Go ahead with the tickets. We can get him."

Sloan had moved to the door between the waiting area and the workroom. "He's here," he said to Lucas.

They went back together. Johnson saw them, picked up a rag, wiped his hands. He was at least seven feet tall, Lucas thought. "Manny? We need to talk to you about Burrell Thomas."

"What's he done?" Johnson's voice was deep and roiled, like oil drums rolling off a truck.

"Nothing, far as we know. But he was bunked down at the jail next to Michael Bekker, the nut case."

"Yeah, Rayon told me," the tall man said.

"You know where we can reach him?"

"No, I don't know where he's living, but I could probably find him, tonight, if I walked around the neighborhood for a while. He usually goes down to Hennepin after nine."

"Bekker's chopping people up," Sloan said. "I mean chopping them up. I don't know if Burrell's got trouble with the cops, but if there's any way he could help us…"

"What?".

Sloan shrugged, picked up a can of WD-40, turned it in his hand, and shrugged. "We might be able to take a little pressure off, if he has another run-in with the cops. Or if your friend out there, if she…"

Johnson looked them over for a minute, then said, "You got a phone number?"

"Yeah," Sloan said. He fished a card out of his pocket. "Call me there."

"Like tonight," Lucas said. "This guy Bekker…"

"Yeah, I know," Johnson said. He slipped Sloan's card in his shirt pocket. "I'll call you, one way or another."

The drive to Stillwater cut another hour out of the day; the interview took ten minutes. Payton looked like an ex-college lineman, square, running to fat. He wasn't interested in talking. "What the fuck'd the cops ever do for me? I'm a sick man, and here I am in this cage. You guys can fuck yourselves."

They left him talking to himself, muttering curses at the floor.

"How're you gonna threaten him? Tell him you're gonna put him in jail?" Sloan asked as they walked back through the parking lot.

Lucas glanced back at the penitentiary. It looked like an old Catholic high school, he decided, inside and out, until you heard the steel doors open and shut. Then you knew it couldn't be anything but the joint…

Johnson called Sloan's number a little after six o'clock. Burrell would talk and he'd meet Lucas at Penn's Bar, on Hennepin. Johnson would come down, to introduce them.

"Um, I got some shit to do at home," Sloan said.

"Hey, take off," Lucas said. "And thanks."

They shook hands, and Sloan said, "Don't take no wooden women."

Penn's bar had a sagging wooden floor and a thin mustachioed bartender who poured drinks, washed glasses, ran the cash register and kept one eye on the door. A solitary black hooker leaned on the bar, smoking a cigarette and reading a comic book, ignoring a half-drunk, pale-green daiquiri. The hooker picked up Lucas' eyes for a second, saw something she didn't like, and went back to her comic.

Farther toward the back, four men and two women stood around a coin-op pool table. Layers of cigarette smoke floated around them like the ghosts of autumn leaves. Lucas walked past the bar to the back, past the pool table, past a beat-up pay phone hung in an alcove next to a cigarette machine. He looked in the men's john, came back, walked around the crowd at the pool table. The men wore jeans and vests, with big wallets chained to their belts, and looked at him sideways as he went through. Johnson wasn't there. Neither was anyone who might be Burrell.

"What can I do you for?" the bartender asked, drying his hands on a mustard-stained towel.

"Bottle of Leinie's," Lucas said.

The bartender fished it out of a cooler and dropped it wet on the bar: "Two bucks." And then, tipping his head toward the back, "Looking for someone?"

"Yeah." Lucas paid and sat on a stool. The back-bar mirror ended before it got that far down, and Lucas stared into the fake walnut paneling opposite his stool, hitting on the beer, trying to straighten his schedule out.

If he didn't find Burrell quick, he'd have to stay over a day. Then he'd miss the early flight to Atlanta. Instead of getting into Charleston in the morning, he wouldn't make it until the afternoon and probably wouldn't get out until the next day. Then he'd have to think of an excuse for the New York people.

The hooker rapped on the bar with her knuckles, nodded at the daiquiri, got a new one. She wore a pale-green party dress, almost the color of the drink. She caught his eyes again, let her gaze linger this time. Lucas didn't remember her. He'd known most of the regulars when he was working, but he'd been off the streets for months now. A week is forever, on the streets. A whole new class of thirteen-year-old girls would be giving doorway blow jobs to suburban insurance agents who would later be described in court documents as good fathers…

Lucas was halfway through the beer when Johnson walked in, out of breath, as though he'd been running.

"Jesus, Davenport," he said. "Missed the bus." He looked down the bar at the hooker as Lucas swiveled on the stool.

"Where is he?" Lucas said.

Johnson's face lit up. "What'd you mean, where is he? He's right there."

Lucas looked past the hooker to the back of the bar; all the pool players were white.

"Where?"

Johnson started to laugh, lifted a leg and slapped a thigh. "You sittin' next to him, man."

The hooker looked at Lucas and said, in a voice an octave too low, "Hi, there."

Lucas looked at the hooker for a second, rereading the features, and closed his eyes. Transvestite. In a half-second, it all fell into place. Goddamn Bekker. This was how he got close to the women and the tourist males. As a woman. With the right makeup, at night, with his small, narrow-shouldered body. That was how he got out of the New School…

God damn it.

"Did you tell Bekker how to… do this?" Lucas asked, gesturing at the dress. "The dress, the makeup."

"We talked about it," Thomas said. "But he was a sick motherfucker and I didn't like talking to him."

"But when you talked about it… was he real interested, or did you just talk?"

Thomas tipped his head back, looked up at the ceiling, remembering. "Well… he tried it. A couple of things." He hopped off the bar stool and walked away from Lucas and Johnson, moving his hips, turned and posed. "It ain't that easy to get just the right walk. If you forget halfway through the block, it ruins your whole image."

The bartender, watching, said, "Are you guys gay?"

"Cop," said Lucas. "This is official."

"Forget I asked…"

"I won't forget, honey," Thomas said, licking his lower lip.

"You fuckin'…"

"Shut up," Lucas snapped, poking a finger at the bartender. He looked back at Thomas. "But did he do it? The walk?"

"Couple times, a few times, I guess. You know, we did talk about it, when I think back. Not so much about how good it feels, but how to do it. You know, gettin' the prosthetic bras and like that. He'd make a good-lookin' girl, too, 'cept for the scars."

"You think so?" Lucas asked. "Is that a professional opinion?"

"Don't dick me around, man," Thomas said, flaring.

"I'm not. That's a real question. Would he make a good woman?"

Thomas stared at him for a minute, decided the question was real: "Yeah, he would. He'd be real good at it. 'Cept for the scars."

Lucas hopped off the bar stool, said thanks, and nodded to Johnson: "We owe you. You need something, talk to Sloan."

"That's all?" asked Thomas.

"That's all," Lucas said.

Lucas called Fell from the pay phone at the back of the bar. When she answered, he could hear the television going in the background, a baseball game. "Can you get to Kennett? Right now?"

"Sure."

"Tell him we've figured out how Bekker is doing it," Lucas said. "How he's staying out of sight on the streets, getting out of the New School."

"We have?"

"Yeah. I just talked to his former next-door neighbor at the Hennepin County Jail, name of Rayon Thomas. Nice-looking guy. Good makeup. Great legs. He's wearing a daiquiri-green party dress. He gave Bekker lessons…"

After a moment of silence, she breathed, "Sonofabitch, Bekker's a woman. We're so fuckin' stupid."

"Call Kennett," Lucas said.

"You haven't talked to anyone?" she asked.

"I thought you'd like to break it."

"Thanks, man," Fell said. "I… thanks."