Broken Prey

hung off the bumper on wire loops.
    “Good-looking place,” Sloan said, as they got out of the Porsche.
    “Ah, if I were seventeen . . .”
    “And stupid . . .”
     
    THE SALOON WAS COOL INSIDE , smelling of beer and fried hamburger. A woman bartender in a white blouse, black vest, and ribbon tie was wiping down the bar. A couple of guys were shooting pool in the back, nine ball, and three more watching, all of them with longnecks in their hands. Everybody turned their heads when Lucas and Sloan stepped inside. Sloan muttered, looking at the bartender, “That doesn’t look like a Booger.”
    “C’mon,” Lucas said; he’d been checking faces in the back.
    They went on to the bar, and the bartender asked, “Gentlemen? What can I do you for?” She was a sturdy dark-haired woman, about fifty, with too-red lipstick and too much rouge. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray next to the cash register.
    “Carl around?” Lucas asked.
    “Can I tell him who’s calling?”
    “Yeah, the cops,” Lucas said. He held out his ID. “We need a little help.”
    She looked at Lucas, then at Sloan, and asked, “Is he in trouble?”
    “Can’t tell yet,” Lucas said.
    “I’ll see if I can find him,” she said. She walked down behind the bar and out, and into a back room. The pool watchers were now all watching Lucas and Sloan, and Lucas smiled at them. Ten seconds later, the bartender reappeared. A fat man, with hair like a haystack, and who might have described himself as muscular, shambled along behind.
    “Hi, I’m Carl,” he said. “You’re police officers? Is there a problem?”
    “You know a guy named Adam Rice?” Lucas asked.
    Carl blinked rapidly, then said, “Jesus. He was the guy. We weren’t sure.”
    “Yeah, he was,” Lucas said. Everybody in the bar was listening now. “You gotta place where we can go talk?”
     
    CARL HAD A SMALL OFFICE , a cherry-laminate desk with a swivel chair, and two formed-plastic chairs for visitors. The desk was piled with paper, a well-used desk calculator to one side. Carl leaned back in the chair, which squealed under the load, and said, “I know the guy. He’d come in, have a few beers, cry a little, listen to music. He was a sad guy. How’d you know he came in here?”
    “Heck, everybody’s been calling us,” Sloan said. “You ever see him with a guy . . .”
    Carl’s eyes got thin: “The way you said that—you mean, a gay guy?”
    “Yeah.”
    Carl snorted and leaned farther back in the chair. “A gay guy would not come in here. Or if he did, he’d sure as shit not let anybody know he was gay. I only saw Rice talking with a couple of guys, and then it was just random guy-shit, sitting at the bar, drinking beer.”
    “What about the girls?” Lucas asked.
    Carl’s eyes involuntarily wandered. “He’d come in alone . . . ,” he began.
    “Don’t bullshit us, Booger,” Lucas said, scuffing his chair an inch toward the fat man. “We know about the girls, we know you introduced them. We need your help, and we’re gonna get it one way or another. Now . . . was there one girl, or more than one? And where could we find them?”
    After a moment of silence, Carl said, “They’re gonna give me a ton of shit about this.”
    “We’re talking about a serial torture killer. If there’s any hint that he somehow met Rice here, through the girls, they’d want to know about it,” Lucas said.
    Carl sighed, put his hands over his belly, twiddled, then said, “He’d try to get Dove, a blondie. If she was busy, he’d take one or the other. But he’d usually ask if anybody had seen Dove.”
    “But he hooked up with some of the others, too.”
    “Yeah, he did,” Carl said. “They’d go over next door, the girls got rooms. He’d get his blow job, and he’d come back here all weepy, have another beer, and then go on home.”
    “How often?” Sloan asked.
    “Twice a week, maybe,” Carl said.
    “How much?”
    “For a blow job? Fifty if you wear a rubber, or seventy without,” Carl said. “The extra twenty is, like, AIDS insurance.”
    “That’s a good idea,” Sloan said. “Nothin’ like AIDS insurance.”
    “Hey, it’s not me, the girls don’t work for me,” Carl protested. “They come in here, but what am I gonna do? I’m not a cop. I’m not their guardian. They don’t do any business on the premises, and some of the guys . . . like to have them around.”
    Lucas: “Their names are Dove