Broken Prey

He might be in one of the caves.”
    “All right. We’re coming. Be careful in those fuckin’ caves, man.”

17
    A MINNEAPOLIS PATROLMAN spotted Mike West walking along the riverbank more than a mile downstream from where the woman had seen him—“When she said she saw him five minutes ago, what she meant was, she saw him half an hour ago,” Del told Lucas and Sloan.
    Del was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and for some reason—odd on a hot day in the middle of the summer, though nobody mentioned it—a navy-blue watch cap. With his weathered face, he looked like the Ancient Mariner, except in a Metallica T-shirt. “We spent another half hour crawling all over the riverbank by the university, and he was already down by St. Thomas.”
    “So where is he?” Lucas asked. They were parked with a half dozen cop cars on Mississippi River Boulevard, looking down into the river gorge that separated St. Paul from Minneapolis. The sides of the gorge were steep, but not sheer, and covered with trees and brush. Outcrops of sandstone were showing through the greenery; the Mississippi snaked through the bottom of it, in its usual summer dress, mud and beached carp.
    Del shrugged: “He must’ve seen us coming, because he fuckin’ vanished. Dick Douglas spotted him, called it in, then went down after him. Never saw him again.”
    “Caves,” Sloan said.
    “Douglas was sure it was him?” Lucas asked.
    “It’s the guy we were told about. We found Gary, the panhandler. He said this was our guy, this Mike West. Calls him Mikey. He pointed us at Sandy, this woman, who knows West pretty good. She’s a graduate student up at the U, she works in a cafeteria and gives him leftover food.”
    “We ought to get Sandy down here,” Sloan said.
    Del nodded: “She’s on the way. Jenkins and Shrake went to get her.”
    “Jesus, I hope you told them to go easy,” Lucas said. Shrake bragged that when it came to pickups, they had a .740 slugging percentage. He wasn’t sure Shrake was joking.
    “Ah, they’re all right,” Del said. “They get a little antsy sometimes.”
    They found West before the woman arrived. A couple of cops halfway down the hill, and two hundred yards south, started yelling and humping around one spot on the hill. A group of college students, who had gathered on the sidewalk, cheered, then booed. Lucas could see the cops bending into the hillside and then yelling some more. “What the hell’s going on down there?” Del wondered. They all started down the hillside, holding on to tree limbs and brush, skidding along in their slick-soled city-cop shoes.
    “What?” Lucas asked when they got to the cops. More cops were crossing the hillside to where they were standing.
    “There he is,” said one of the cops. He was hot and pissed off. He pointed at the hillside, and Lucas took a moment to see what he was pointing at—the worn white soles of two gym shoes, six or eight inches into a hole so small that it seemed impossible that a man could be on the other side of them. The hole, worn by water out of the rotten rock, apparently extended straight back into the hillside.
    Lucas stooped to look, and Sloan and Del scrambled around behind him “Come out of there,” Lucas said. He heard what might have been a muffled reply.
    “He’s holding on to something, inside there,” one of the cops said. “We tried to pull him out, but we couldn’t budge him.”
    “How about some shovels?” Del asked.
    “It’s mostly rock; we’d need jackhammers.”
    “We could try dynamite,” somebody suggested, with a snigger. Most of the cops were now enjoying themselves: watching the heavyweight detectives looking at those two fuckin’ feet. “Or maybe we oughta send for a proctologist,” somebody else said. “I bet he could hook him out.”
    “He’s not going to smother in there, is he?” Lucas asked, looking at the shoe soles.
    “Fuck if we know,” said the cop.
    Del started to laugh, and Sloan shook his head and turned away.
    “Stop laughing and give me a hand,” Lucas said, irritated. Del came over and they managed to wedge their hands into the hole and grab hold of the man’s ankles. There were more muffled comments from inside the hole. “Pull.”
    They pulled, pulled some more, and nothing moved. “We’re gonna hurt him if we pull too hard,” Del said. “We’re gonna pop his knees.”
    “Why can’t anything be easy?” Lucas asked, giving up, dusting his hands together.
    Sloan said, “Anyway,