Broken Prey

there are lots of guys not as lucky as you were, but I always knew that I’m not a good-looking guy. I mean, not like Tom Cruise or anybody. I got okay teeth, though, and that’s important . . .
    “I thought maybe a truck would be a big idea, and maybe it would be. I got an eighty-six Ford F-one-fifty. It’d been wrecked but it’d been fixed, a cherry red color, best truck I ever had. I was working at an assembly plant building computer cases and making good money, six bucks an hour, nine bucks on overtime, pretty good job but it was all piecework, some weeks I’d work six days and some weeks I’d work two days . . .
    “. . . Women, you know, they’re the big shots in the courts now, judges and lawyers and everything, they don’t know about blue balls, because they don’t have them. So how can they know about it? They don’t know that you’re forced to get some sex. Have you ever tried coke? I tried some once and the thing I thought was, it’s like getting the blue balls. It makes your head different. I’d get me some sex and then my head would be all right, but if I’d go awhile without it, and get the blue balls, my head would get all weird and I’d have to get some.
    “. . . Okay, I paid a couple of times, but it was just a couple girls in Rochester that you sorta knew were okay. What’s the difference between that and maybe taking some chick out to TGI Fridays and maybe blowing twenty dollars, just to try to get some, and then you don’t get it. Maybe if you know a couple of girls it’s better just to give them the money . . .
    “I wouldn’t ever go with a colored girl, their pimp’d catch you and he’d cut your nuts off. I seen some good-looking colored girls, though. If I thought, you know, they could go for me, and if they didn’t have a boyfriend around . . .
    “. . . I don’t remember strangling her. I don’t think I did. I think the cops just made it up. I just whacked her a few times. I wouldn’t do it again, you know, unless it was self-defense or something. Okay, so it probably wouldn’t be self-defense, but some of these chicks, they can really fight . . .”
     
    LUCAS LISTENED FOR ALMOST two hours, running the tape back and forth, made a few notes. Charlie Pope was afraid of big cities, he thought, and blacks and Latinos and Hmong. If he were hiding someplace, it would be in a small city or a town.
    He would be looking for sex. The shrinks had been emphatic about it, and Lucas was convinced: sex seemed to soak through Charlie Pope’s view of the world. A note should be sent to all the law-enforcement agencies to warn the local hookers against him, and to circulate his photograph where hookers would see it. In most smaller cities, that would be one or two bars.
    Pope would definitely go for a car, Lucas thought, or most likely, a truck, and almost certainly already had one. Unless . . .
    Could he be hiding out in the countryside? Literally living in the woods? Did he have that capability? He’d been working as a garbageman and Lucas had known a couple of guys who’d lived on dumps, eating garbage and furnishing their hand-built hovels with whatever they could find on the piles of trash.
    If not that, he must be disguised. At a minimum, he would have grown a beard. But what could he be doing? Stealing stuff to live on? How about just one holdup, where he scored a couple of grand, and continued to live on that? Lucas made a note to have the co-op guys check muggings and robberies by bearded men who fit Charlie’s physical form.
     
    WHEN HE FINISHED with the tapes, Lucas thought he knew Charlie Pope. But where was he? A Charlie Pope didn’t hide well. Unless . . .
    A second man or woman was hiding him. Was running him.
    Or, maybe after the second killing he’d run so far that the news hadn’t caught up to him. Maybe he was working as a janitor or a garbageman or an assembly worker in backwoods Florida.
    That was possible, but Charlie was rooted in the Upper Midwest. He was nuts, but he was a small-town boy. He was afraid to go to big places, afraid of the people he might meet. And he didn’t seem to be smart enough, or to have the will, to ignore those fears.
    A village idiot.
    Lucas sighed and put down his pen. A second man—or a woman. Something to lose sleep over.

10
    RUFFE IGNACE WAS WORKING LATE. Not much to do, feet up on his desk, waiting for the paper to be put to bed. His latest triumph, the serial-killer story, cut no ice with