Wicked Prey

Chapter 2

Lucas Davenport rolled in his Porsche through the August countryside, green and tan, corn and beans, the blue oat fields falling in front of the John Deeres, weeping willows hanging over the banks of black-water ponds, yellow coneflowers climbing the sides of the road-cuts, Wisconsin farms with U-Pick signs hung out on the driveways, Dutch Belted cows and golden horses and red barns, Lucas's arms prickling from sunburn ' One of the finest summers of his life.

His wife, Weather, dozed beside him, despite the gravelly ride of the car. She'd tuned to a public radio station before she'd gone to sleep, and it was playing something by Mozart or one of those big guys, and the sound floated around them like the soundtrack in a chick flick.

Weather's nose was burned and would be peeling; so were her stomach and her thighs. Twenty minutes, she said, only twenty minutes, lying back in a two-piece bathing suit, on the front deck of Lucas's boat. She'd known better, but she'd done it anyway.

Twenty minutes was all it took. Lucas grinned at the thought of it: she was cooked. Because she was almost constitutionally unable to admit error, she wouldn't even be able to complain about it.

He idled through Hammond, up the hill past the golf course, down the hill past the high school, the small-town boys out on the football field, turning at the burble of the car's exhaust to look at the Porsche; and then on down County T to I-94, where he made the turn toward the Cities in the evening's dying light.

They'd spent two days at their lake cabin outside Hayward; hiding out. Two weeks before, one of Lucas's agents, Virgil Flowers, had arrested two Homeland Security officials for conspiracy to commit murder.

The shit hit the fan with all the expected velocity. The governor and his chief weasel were handling it-had asked for it. The arrest was as political as legal, although the big newspapers, the New York and L.a. and even the London Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, said the legal looked fairly strong. Of course, it was hard to tell whether the papers were serious, or just fucking with George Bush.

The governor was definitely fucking with George Bush, since the Republican National Convention was in town the next week.

In any case, Lucas took two days at the lake to avoid the growing siege of phone calls, while Virgil went fishing in northern Minnesota, and the governor continued to make the rounds of the Washington talk shows. They'd watched him on satellite and Weather had been delighted. She'd once had a favored pair of manicure scissors seized by the TSA, and as far as she was concerned, this was payback time.

Now Weather woke up and groaned and said, "Ah, God, where are we?"

"I-94. Six miles from the river," Lucas said.

"Mmm." She fumbled around for her purse, took out her BlackBerry and punched it up, stared at the screen for a moment, then put it back in her purse. "Nothing from anybody ' I can't believe you're listening to Chopin."

"Well, no phone calls means that everything's okay," Lucas said. Weather hadn't wanted to leave Sam, their son, though he was almost two, and they had a live-in housekeeper who was like a second mother to the kid. Still, she was anxious about it: she'd never been away from him for more than eight or ten hours, and wanted to get back.

"You feeling a little pink?" Lucas asked.

"What?"

"Sunburned?"

"Oh, not really," she said. "It's nothing."

He laughed and said, "Bullshit-you're toast."

She said, "Check your phone. See if Ellen called."

Ellen was the housekeeper. He fished out the phone, opened it, turned it on: three messages, all from the same guy. "Dan Jacobs," he said. "Nothing from Ellen."

"Too late to call him tonight," Weather said.

"He called three times ' last time was twenty minutes ago ' he'll be working twenty-four hours a day now."

He punched redial and waited. Jacobs ran the convention-security coordination committee for Minneapolis and St. Paul. A woman's voice, tired: "Jacobs committee, Sondra speaking."

"This is Lucas Davenport, returning a call from Dan."

"Just a minute, Lucas, I'll switch you in."

After a snatch of country and western music, Jacobs came up: "Lucas-we've got a problem. I'm going to send you a file on a man named Justice Shafer. We need to get our hands on him. I'd appreciate it if you could coordinate with your opposite number in Wisconsin."

"Who is he?"

"A nutcake. Sells copies of Rogue Warrior at gun shows ' you know Rogue Warrior?"

"Yeah, sort of." Guerrilla war fantasies set in a future America somehow taken over by Islamic revolutionaries, except for those parts run by the Jewish bankers. "Something more specific?"

"Well, we never heard of him, tell you the truth," Jacobs said. "Then some guy who goes to gun shows ran into him at a quarry over in Wisconsin, in Barron County, where he was sighting in a.50 cal. The guy talked to him and said Shafer got going on Jews and jihad and how the politicians were selling out America, you know ' and he had this.50 cal, and the guy who saw him said he was knocking over metal plates at seven hundred and forty-five yards."

"Unusual distance," Lucas said.

"Which has us worried. For one thing, Shafer lives in Oklahoma, and we've got no idea what he's doing up here. He's poor as a church mouse and he runs around in a rattrap Ford pickup-but he's got this shiny new rifle with a thousand-dollar scope and a Nikon range-finder, and he's shooting at this specific distance ' seven hundred and forty-five yards. Like he had the distance in mind. He's got an FBI file: he tried to join the marines and then the army, years ago, but they didn't want him, said he was a little shaky on his feet. He may have hooked up with some of the extremist white gangs-he's got a skinhead brother who did some time. The feds think he might have painted some swastikas on a synagogue in Norman, tipped over some Jewish tombstones ' Got "eighty-eight" tattooed on his chest. Like that."

"We'll get on it," Lucas said. "The file's on the way?"

"I'm pushing the button on it. ATF is working it, too, and the FBI'S interested, so you may be bumping into some of them."

"I'll warn everybody," Lucas said.

Lucas Davenport was a tall, tough, dark-haired man, heavily tanned at the end of the Minnesota summer. The tan emphasized his blue eyes, his hawkish nose, and his facial scars: a long thin one down through his eyebrow, like a piece of white fishing line, another circular one on his throat, with a vertical line through it, like the Greek letter phi-the remnants of a.22 wound, followed by the tracheotomy that kept him alive. The tracheotomy had been done by Weather, with a jackknife. "So?" Weather asked.

"Some redneck with a.50-caliber sniper rifle, up here from Oklahoma," Lucas said. "One of the eighty-eights. They're worried, but not too worried."

"What's an eighty-eight?"

"You know-H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, so eighty-eight is HH. Heil Hitler," Lucas said. "You got guys who get it tattooed on their scalps."

"Then I'd be worried, if I were Dan Jacobs," she said.

"Yeah ' The ATF guys are out looking for him, and probably the Secret Service," Lucas said. "They want me to call our Wisconsin contacts, and people around the metro, see if we can spot him. I'll make some calls tonight, get some deputies looking around."

"Good luck with that," she said. The longer they'd lived together, the more skeptical she'd become of the concept of sharp-eyed cops picking the bad guys out of a crowd. She'd moved toward Lucas's view, as regarded cops and robbers: it was all chaos, accident, stupidity, insanity, and coincidence.

He'd cited as evidence the case of the doper who'd gotten out of Stillwater prison on Wednesday, who'd promptly gotten drunk with his release money, had fallen asleep at midnight in a filling station parking lot, had woken at three o'clock in the morning, out of money, only to spot the Coke machine right there, with a brick sitting next to it, had smashed open the machine with the brick, and was still scooping up the coins when the cops arrived. On Friday, he was back in Stillwater for the remaining three years of his original term.

Yowza.

They crossed the St. Croix River into Minnesota, and twenty-five minutes later, were home. There were lights all over the house, and from the garage, they could hear Letty, their ward, shrieking with laughter. Inside, they found Letty and Sam playing a kind of volleyball using a sponge batted over a string.

Sam quit the moment he saw Weather and Lucas, and Letty called, "Quitter," which he understood, and he said, "No-no-no-no," one of his few dozen words, and ran to Weather.

Perfect, Lucas thought. Just perfect. The kid was obviously brilliant, as well as athletically gifted, and probably the best-looking toddler in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. And Letty was growing up into something interesting. Her mother had been murdered in a case broken by Lucas; and he'd been so taken with the child that he'd brought her home to Weather.

Now she was growing up, and Lucas and Weather were back in court, with her consent, to formally adopt her, to make her Letty Davenport. She feigned nonchalance, but once or twice a week, she'd ask, "So, how's things with the court?"

Lucas brought in a fabric cooler full of beer with a slab of walleye fillets-the only cooler he'd found that would fit in the Porsche- and Weather's overnight case. He gave Letty a hug, Sam a head-rub, got a piece of blueberry pie from Ellen, and went off to the den and brought up the computer.

The file on Justice Shafer was sitting in the e-mail at his office, at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He pulled it out, opened it, and read it as he ate the pie.

Shafer was one of the border-states bad boys who looked like an antique photo of Cole Younger or Jesse James: hair like straw, freckles, pale eyes, bones in his face; like he hadn't had enough to eat as a kid, like he'd never had baby fat. In the photograph, he was standing next to the back of a pickup truck, a pump.22 in his hands, a pile of dead squirrels on the tailgate. His tongue was tucked in one corner of his mouth, the tip protruding, and it made him look both stupid and crazy, the kind of guy who couldn't keep his tongue out of the cold.

His file was full of the small detail that spelled trouble: never made it out of high school; juvenile record for theft; failed the psychological tests for both the marines and the army. Might have robbed a couple of gas stations, but hadn't gotten caught at it. Hung out with the Clan, a mid-continent neo-Nazi motorcycle club that mostly got in fights with other neo-Nazi groups and Chicano gangs.

All right. Lucas did some editing on the file, then called the duty man at the BCA and told him to circulate the file to sheriffs' departments in Minnesota and western Wisconsin.

Kicked back, and thought about the Republican convention.

In the months leading up to the main event, the nomination of John McCain for the presidency, he'd argued that the Twin Cities weren't prepared to deal with it. He'd made the argument hard enough, and loud enough-he had excellent contacts with the local TV stations and the two major newspapers-that the local agencies finally got some intelligence work under way, and contracted with police agencies around the country to bring in more cops. In doing that, he'd made himself unpopular enough that he'd been disinvited from the party.

Well, what the hell. He didn't want to go anyway.

Glanced at his watch, called a pal in the Ramsey County sheriff's office. "Surprised you're home," he said, when the guy came up. "I thought you'd be out violating the rights of the protesters."

"I would be, but my kid's leaving for Madison this weekend. I'm packing a trailer," the guy said.

"Not bad," Lucas said. "I always liked that place. When I was at the U, we'd go down there and try to get laid."

"Glad to hear that, since it's my daughter I'm taking down," the guy said.

Oops. "Mmm. Anyway, you got things under control?"

"I think so. We're going out tomorrow night, hit some of the assholes," the guy said. "Preempt them. They think they're hiding in Minneapolis, but we've got a couple of guys with them."

"Ah, jeez…"

"You're welcome to come along and watch."

Lucas was tempted, but it would be a bit humiliating, standing there, rubbernecking, while the other guys got the action. "Ah, you know. I pissed off too many people. But' glad to know you got it covered."

They talked a few more minutes, then he went out and hung with Letty and Sam, and started an Alan Furst novel, and eventually went to bed and slept the sleep of the righteous.

Friday morning, another gorgeous day, driving north up Cretin Avenue.

Anti-Semites were milling around the corner at Summit Avenue, with signs about Palestine; on up to I-94, then blowing the doors off the chain of Camrys and Priuses as he merged into traffic. Made him smile, made him feel happy, as though there were possibilities in the world. He hustled across town, up I-35Every, off on Maryland, down the road to the headquarters of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension ' past the filling station where a madwoman once tried to shoot him to death.

He parked in the BCA lot and walked up to his office, peeling off his jacket to show the.45 he carried under his armpit. Pulled off the shoulder rig, stuck the whole apparatus in a file cabinet. His secretary, Carol, trailed him into his office.

"You've got a call, sounds like it might be important," she said.

"The security committee? I got that'"

Carol looked at a piece of paper. "From New York. You know a woman named Lily Rothenburg? Says she's a captain with the NYPD?"

"Absolutely" Lucas said.

"She wants you to give her a call," Carol said. "She says it's semi-urgent."

"Ring her up and transfer it in," Lucas said. "Dig up a phone number for Dan Coates over in Wisconsin-it's the Special Assignments Bureau in their Justice Department. I need to talk to him right after Lily."

"Gotcha." She hesitated in the doorway. "One more thing. You got a nut call: the guy says, "Is this Davenport 's office?"' I say, "Yes." He says, "Tell that motherfucker that I'm coming for him."

Lucas laughed: "Did he say who it was?"

"There was a caller ID. Do you know an Achmed Mansoor?"

Lucas shook his head. "Nope. Did he say anything about Allah?"

"No ' and this guy sounded like an American. Ghetto accent. I did a reverse directory and came up with a Middle Eastern sandwich shop in Dinkytown."

"Gimme the address: I'll look into it."

Del Capslock had come through the door while they were talking, and said to Carol, "You sweet thing."

Carol, feigning propriety: "How's the pregnant wife?"

"She's fine. She's great," Del said. "She looks like a goddamn rosebud. Doc says she's starting to dilate, but she's still a while out. She's got me running around like a Shriner parade."

Lucas asked, "Do they still have those?"

"They must, somewhere," Del said. "They still got Shriners." He eased into one of the visitors' chairs and put his boots on Lucas's desktop. "So what's this about a sandwich shop in Dinkytown?"

Carol explained and Del said, "I'll go over and have a chat with the guy."

"I'm not doing much," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but you go walking in the door, maybe he pulls out a shotgun and kills you," Del said. "Me, he doesn't know from Adam."

"As far as you know."

"Whatever." Del yawned then added, "I never heard of a cop getting killed by somebody who called ahead."

"Probably happened somewhere," Lucas said. "Everything's happened somewhere."

Del was a battered man in his late forties, in jeans and a Pennzoil T-shirt with grease spots on it, rough-side-out Red Wing work boots, and an old, unfashionable nylon fanny pack, worn in front. He had a cell-phone-sized digital camera hung on a string around his neck and a.38 revolver in the fanny pack. He'd been working the streets around the convention center.

"So what's happening?" Lucas asked.

"Ah, you know: kids and old people. There are some assholes out there, but most of them are hobbyists. They seem like my mom ' you know, old. They've got these recycled chants from the sixties. "Hey, hey, John McCain, how many children have you slain?"' Like that."

"With a few assholes."

"A few," Del said. "Vandals. Red-and-black flags. Slingshots. Guys who want to wreck the place for the pure pleasure of it. I could point out twenty people, if we picked them up and put them in the basement for a few days, the convention would be a sea of peace."

" Ramsey County sheriff is setting up a raid tonight, tomorrow night, pick some of those guys up," Lucas said. "Or so I'm told."

"Here?"

"No, over in Minneapolis," Lucas said. "They're pulling in some Minneapolis cops."

They talked about that for a while, and Lucas told Del about the guy with the sniper rifle, and Del shook his head and said, "That's all we need."

"You having a good time?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, I am," Del said. "I like talking to them; pretty good folks, for the most part. Even the assholes are interesting."

"I'd like to get out there; just to see it, you know?" Lucas said.

Del was doubtful. "You look too much like a cop-or even a Republican."

"Not that."

"Well-you got that vibe. You'd have to tone it down," Del said. "Like, borrow clothes from me." Lucas shuddered: "Maybe not."

He was, in fact, a clotheshorse, this morning wearing a light checked sport coat over an icy-blue long-sleeved dress shirt, black summer-weight woolen slacks hand-knit by an Italian virgin, and square-toed English-made loafers.

Carol shouted: "Lily Rothenburg on two."

Lucas said to Del, "I got a call coming here."

Del said, "Pick it up. I ain't going anywhere, if it's Lily calling."

"Fuck you," Lucas said. He and Lily had once been a passing fashion, including a geometrical insanity in an earlier Porsche. Del knew all about it: Lucas shook his head and picked up the phone. "Lily?"

"Lucas Davenport," she said, "How's every little thing?"

"Well, we got a lot going on, so ' pretty good," Lucas said. "How about you? How's the kid? If you're divorced, I can offer you space in my garage."

She laughed and said, "From what I hear about Weather, it'd be more like the backyard. But, the kid's fine and I'm not divorced."

" Del 's here, he says hi'"

They caught up for a few minutes, then she said, "Look. We've got a problem-or, maybe, you've got a problem. We had an armored car robbery here two and a half years ago, and two guards were killed. They were off-duty cops. The robbery crew got away with a half-million dollars."

"Not that big, for an armored car," Lucas said.

"Well, there was more inside, but the thing went bad. Most of the money was behind a locked barrier inside the truck," Lily said. "The idea was, if trouble started, the guards would put the keys in a solid-steel lockbox inside the back, which they didn't have keys to, and then nobody could get at the money ' that's what they did. But somebody got pissed, we think, and started shooting, and all the shooters got were the receipts from a couple of big-box stores that hadn't been put behind the barrier yet."

"How does that get to us?"

"We think the leader of the crew was a guy named Brutus Cohn," Lily said. "We got an anonymous tip. A male caller, deep southern accent, calling from Kennedy. He said that he'd seen Cohn getting on a plane at Heathrow, in England, yesterday, going to Los Angeles. He said he knew him from Alabama, and Cohn is from Alabama. He said Cohn had grown a red beard, and Cohn is a redhead."

"So he sounds good," Lucas said.

"Yes. Anyway, this guy said he was waiting to get on his plane, when he saw Cohn. He didn't want to call from London, because he was afraid we'd identify him, and he's afraid of Cohn. So he got way back and watched Cohn going into a gate for a flight to Los Angeles. By the time we got to the LA cops, Cohn's flight was an hour out. They met the plane, and there was no Brutus Cohn. There was no way to get back to the original source, so we checked with Heathrow. Everything was right: there was the Kennedy gate, and down the way, the LA gate. But the gate was a joint gate-and the next gate down, where Cohn could also have been headed…"

"… came here."

"Right. The Minneapolis plane was on the ground for three hours before we got it straight. Our people talked to the flight crew, and there was a man in first class who probably was Cohn. He almost certainly was the guy that the source saw, and the source said he knew Cohn pretty well. The crew said he was very tall, fairly thin, muscular, red hair, and charming with the flight crew. The girls liked him, and that's Cohn, from what we hear."

"What's he doing?" Lucas asked.

"Don't know. It's possible he moved right on through the Cities, changed planes, and is gone. But it's also possible that he's up to something," Lily said. "He's a serious, ultra-violent holdup man who needs a big score so he can bury himself somewhere. He mostly worked in the south, down to Florida, north to Atlanta, west to New Mexico. Maybe California. Maybe one job in Mexico. The FBI isn't sure about all of that, but if they've got him right, there have been at least five dead in thirty to forty robberies, and one survivor shot through the chest who should've died. He's the guy who eventually identified Cohn for the FBI, from prison photographs. S. We've been looking, and waiting, and here he is. You've got that convention going on ' lots of cash there. A boatload of cash."

Lucas said, "Let me ask you this-how'd the caller know you were looking for Cohn?"

"We didn't make any secret about it," she said. "We put out posters, we sent some guys to Birmingham to look up his old acquaintances, his relatives, dear old Mom. They got some TV time, it was sort of a thing, you know, a modern Jesse James. Got some attention down there."

"You want him pretty bad," Lucas said.

"Yes, we do."

"Send me what you got," Lucas said. "I'll spread it around to the TV stations."

"Ah-don't do that," Lily said. "He's very careful. You could almost call that his MO. If he suspected we were onto him, he'd be gone in a minute."

The problem, she said, was that New York really had no solid proof that he'd been involved in the armored car robbery. They had DNA that they believed had come out of the struggle between the cops and the shooter, but they didn't know whether it was Cohn's DNA, or DNA from somebody else in the gang.

"Cohn would have done the killing, if he thought he needed to, but we don't know that he was the shooter. He was there, but maybe didn't pull the trigger. Then, we think we found the place where they got together before the robbery, a motel out in Queens, but they burned it down, so we got nothing. No DNA, nothing."

"Burned it down?"

"Yeah. Fire guys say somebody doused the place with a mix of gasoline and motor oil, and torched it," Lily said. "Fire kills DNA…"

"I know. But it seems kind of extreme," Lucas said.

"That's Cohn. He's Mr. Extreme. He did three years in prison in Alabama, a newbie, but he was running the place by the time he left."

"So if you don't want us to spread his face around, what do you want?" Lucas asked.

"We want to send you a bunch of photos," Lily said. "They're twelve years old, but we Photoshopped them to age him, and we added the beard. We thought some of your guys could walk them around to the local hotels and motels, see if you can spot him. And then ' see what he's doing."

"You mean, let him take a shot at another armored car?"

"You wouldn't have to wait until the last second," she said, but her tone was rich with suggestion.

"But they'd have to be making a move…"

"Yeah, well. Life in the big city, huh?" Lily said. "The thing is, if he knows he put some DNA on somebody, here in New York, he'll try to shoot his way free."

"You want us to kill him," Lucas said.

"I didn't say that. I said, he killed two of our guys, and probably three more people, along the way," Lily said.

Lucas thought about it for a moment, then said, "Send the stuff. I'll get it to the people who need it."

"Lucas ' thank you. And stay in touch."

"Interesting little conversation," Del said.

Carol routed through a call from Dan Coates, his opposite number in Wisconsin. Lucas filled him in on Justice Shafer. "We sent the file across the river, to the sheriffs' departments between us and Eau Claire, but it'd help if you goosed them along a little. You know, so you can deflect the blame when something goes wrong."

"Who'd point the finger at us? If something went wrong?" Coates asked. He was crunching on something like a carrot or a celery stick.

"Listen, if something goes wrong at the convention, with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-yard shot from a.50-cal, everybody will point the finger at you. And at me, and every other local cop. Think about it."

"I'll call everybody," Coates said. "How much you want to put on the Vikings?"

"Screw the Vikings. They're a bunch of criminals," Lucas said. "Not that Green Bay won't stink the place up."

"Let me tell you…"

They were discussing the possibilities when Del yawned and stood up and said, "I'm gonna go see that Arab dude in the sandwich shop."

Lucas took the phone away from his mouth: "Careful."

"Think about a disguise," Del said. "If you go out on the street." From the outer office, Carol called, "Why don't you drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile? Nobody would suspect."

Lucas said, " Del ' shut the door on the way out, okay?"

Del didn't shut the door. Carol propped herself in it, and when Lucas got off the phone, asked, "Are you serious about going out there?"

"Yeah. There are about a million people wandering around out there, and I'd like to go out and see it," Lucas said.

She nodded: "Listen, I was looking at National Geographic'"

"Didn't know you were an intellectual'"

"… and one of the guys in it, one of the photographers, this war photographer, looked like you. Attitudinally if you know what I mean. If you got some Levi's and gym shoes and, like, a long-sleeved shirt and rolled the sleeves way up over your elbows, and messed up your hair, and put some convention credentials around your neck, and borrowed a camera bag from Dan Jackson and a couple of cameras-you could make it as a photographer."

Lucas shook his head. "Pretending that you're a reporter tends to piss people off."

"Don't. Wear your official ID," Carol said. "Who looks at it? They just see the tags."

"I'll think about it," Lucas said.

She shrugged. "Do what you want-but you could look like a photographer."

He thought about Lily for a while, and the Cohn gang, and then he went on the Internet and looked at pictures of war photographers. Carol was right, he decided; he could be a photographer. Maybe. He called Jackson, said he was coming down for wardrobe and makeup.

On the way out of the office, he told Carol to print the pictures of Justice Shafer, and of Brutus Cohn, when they came in. "Call Minneapolis and St. Paul and Bloomington and get a list of firearms dealers who might be dealing dirty. Big enough so that their names would be around: somebody that a bad guy could find if he blew into town."

"You want them rated by their dirt quotient," she suggested. "Yeah. I'll go chat with them. Give me something to do," he said.

Lucas had a small Nikon single-lens reflex digital camera, given to him for Christmas by Weather, along with a couple of zoom lenses. He used it to take pictures of the kids. When Jackson backed out of the equipment closet with two Nikon cameras, and an old Domke cloth camera bag and three lenses, he knew more or less how they worked.

"What we're gonna do," Jackson said, peeling a strip of black gaffer tape off a roll, "is we're gonna tape out the Nikon and the D2x logos, which some war guys do to reduce visibility, you know? Then, not many people will know that you're shooting older cameras."

"I'm not going to be shooting them much," Lucas said.

"Gotta look like it, though," Jackson said. "Do take a few shots, you might like it. The other thing is, make your shirt kinda military. Black, or olive green, with the sleeves rolled up. Military's sort of photo-trendy."

"What do I do if somebody asks me who I'm with?" Lucas asked.

"I just keep moving and say, "BCA," and they'll nod like they know who it is," Jackson said. "Sounds sort of like BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC."

"Maybe I oughta wear white socks," Lucas suggested.

"Maybe you oughta take it seriously," Jackson said. "You could get your ass kicked, if somebody took you the wrong way."

"Lots of cops around…"

Jackson looked up. "You know, one way you'd be safe is, wear a police uniform. Nobody'll fuck with you. Nobody'll talk to you, either, other than to say hello."

"This is better," Lucas said, peering through the camera's view-finder. "I'm looking pretty good here."

"Your hair is way too combed," Jackson said. "You gotta get some Brylcreem or something, get some hair spiked up. Wear jeans. And you gotta scuff them up-you're way too neat. Way too neat. You gotta look like you slept in the jeans. Every time I see you in jeans ' What do you do? Do you dry-clean your jeans?"

"No, I don't dry-clean my jeans," Lucas said.

"Then you iron them," Jackson said.

"The housekeeper irons them, sometimes," Lucas admitted.

"Irons your jeans?" He was appalled.

"Hey'"

"Sorry'"

"You're sorta getting into this," Lucas said.

"Well, you know, it's interesting," Jackson said. "Carol was right: you do sorta look like a conflict photographer. So: let me show you how to handle the camera. It's like shooting on the range, very similar to a gun…"

Del called during the lecture, from the Middle East sandwich shop, and talking around a gyro, said, "They got a phone on the counter here, no long distance company, so they let anybody use it. They got no idea who called you, but they say they remembered one guy yelling into it, and Carol told me the guy who left the message was yelling, but this yelling guy was in a wheelchair."

"That's a relief," Lucas said. He hung up and asked Jackson, "You got any lighter lenses? This lens is big as my dick."

"You wish."