Broken Prey

both old and new, and his cheekbones stood out like axe edges in a field of blemishes. His hair, a uniform four inches long, looked as though it had been cut with hedge clippers and stuck out from his head in dirty brown clumps. His eyes were wide, blue, and frightened. He was wearing a open long-sleeved flannel shirt, North Face nylon drawstring pants, and a theme T-shirt. The theme was outer space—a small black circle on top, labeled URANUS , with a much larger black circle below it, with the caption, URANUS IN PRISON .
    “I didn’t do anything,” he said to Jenkins.
    “Tell this guy here,” Jenkins said, turning a thumb at Lucas.
    “We don’t think you did anything,” Lucas said. “We just want to get you a shower, maybe get a McDonald’s or something, maybe get your clothes washed, and talk.”
    West wrapped his arms around his garbage bag: “Talk about what?”
     
    WEST WAS WILLING enough to talk, when he remembered to. He was one of the legion of the lost, a schizophrenic who could tolerate neither his condition nor the drugs that treated it. As Lucas and Sloan talked him along, he’d break off to stare, to mumble, to twitch. He had an uncle, he said, who pinched him. Hard. “I know he’s not really there,” he said to Lucas, “but I can feel him. He hurts. What an ass wipe he is.”
     
    WEST HAD OCCASIONALLY stayed at the St. Paul Mission. They took him there in the back of a Minneapolis squad, got him a shower. Sandy, his friend, had voluntarily stopped at a Goodwill store and picked up clean clothes. She waited outside while West dressed, and he looked at himself in the mirror—jockey shorts, white T-shirt, plaid shirt, stone-washed jeans. “I look really square, dude,” he said, with an unhappy grimace.
    “Ah, you look okay,” Lucas said. West went away for a minute, mumbled to an unseen presence, flinched, said, “ Ow .” Lucas touched him on the shoulder: “You really look good.”
    West came back. “What?”
    “You sure as shit smell better,” Del added.
    “I’m gonna miss my turn at the stoplight,” West said. “And I’m not gonna make a dime dressed like this.”
    “I’ll give you a couple bucks,” Lucas said. “If you’re reasonable.”
    “A couple bucks? Man, I need thirty bucks a day just to make my nut,” West said. He tended to slip into a whine when things weren’t going well.
    Lucas: “You want to eat or what?”
     
    THEY ATE IN A BAR , Coney Islands and sauerkraut and beer. Sandy wanted to come along, but they thanked her for her trouble and sent her on her way. “He’ll be okay?”
    “He’ll be back on the job tomorrow,” Del said.
    As they were walking over to the bar, Del chatted with West. When they got there, Del hooked Lucas by the arm before they went inside, and he said, “West didn’t kill anybody.”
    “Seems pretty unlikely,” Lucas agreed.
    “It’d be the most unlikely thing I’ve ever run into—he’s scared all the time, he’s got dead relatives plucking at his shirt and his hair, some days the sidewalks melt and get weird and his feet stick in the concrete.”
    “Ah, man.”
    “With some people I’d say it might be an act; but with him, it’s not.”
     
    WHEN THEY TOLD WEST what they wanted—explained the situation—he said, “You shoulda come to me first.”
    “Well, Mike, we tried,” Sloan said. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”
    “I’ve been workin’ the same spot every day, six days a week, for a month, dude. Really fuckin’ first-class police work, huh?”
    “So . . . what do you think?” Lucas asked.
    “I woulda told you that it wasn’t Charlie. Charlie might have killed one or two of them, but then he would have hid them and run,” West said, adding more raw onions to the Coney Island. “He would have got scared. He wouldn’t have done anything to them. I mean, except fuck ’em and kill ’em. He wouldn’t torture anybody.”
    “That’s what we’re figuring out,” Lucas said. “We’ve talked to all those guys, you know, the shrinks and the security guards, and they can’t give us a name. I mean, we thought we had a name—Charlie. It turned out it wasn’t him. Then we got another name. Yours. Everybody said you were Charlie’s friend, and you worked down there around the Big Three. So, one way or another, we figured you might know who else was talking to the Big Three.”
    West shuddered. “Those guys. Those guys are really nuts. I mean, all of us were nuts, except