Buried Prey

staying in there, nobody here’s going away. Yeah, they’ll take you downtown, look for bullet holes, probably make you give them a DNA sample. . . . You just take a little swab and swab the inside of your cheek. The cheek in your mouth. Yeah . . . well, yeah, they’re a little pissed about the dog, but you’d be a little pissed, too, if a goddamn pit bull was biting your ass. . . . Wasn’t all that funny, from our point of view. Huh? Okay. Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll come down and knock.”
     
     
    CRUZ ASKED, “You want a vest?”
    “Yeah, might as well,” Del said. “If he shoots me, I trust you to plug him.”
    “Think there’s a chance of that?” Cruz asked. “If there is—”
    “Nah, he’s not gonna shoot me,” Del said.
    “But take the vest,” Lucas said.
    “You want to come with me?” Del asked Lucas.
    “Fuck no,” Lucas said. “He might shoot both of us.”
    “I was planning to stand behind you,” Del said.
    “You guys slay me,” Cruz said, no sign of a smile. “A laugh a minute.”
     
     
    SO DEL WENT DOWN to the white house, walked up the bank to the front steps, and up the steps and peered in the window, then pulled open an outer screen door, and they saw him talking, and then talking some more, and then he opened the front door and they saw Brett in the doorway. He was a large man with a black beard.
    “He looks right,” Cruz said.
    “Yeah, he does,” Lucas admitted. “But it’s not him.”
    “I think it might be,” Cruz said.
    “He wouldn’t be coming out if he had a bullet hole,” Lucas said.
    “We’ll see,” Cruz said.
    Brett stepped out on the porch, Del said something, and he put his hands on top of his head, POW style, and Del backed away and Brett followed him. A SWAT guy came off the corner of the house, then another one, and a minute later, Brett was sitting on the lawn, his hands cuffed, and SWAT was inside the house.
    Lucas asked Cruz, as they walked toward the house, “Can I ask him one question?”
    “Okay with me, if it’s okay with him.”
    Del was standing over Brett, and Lucas came up and asked, “You give him his rights?” He could hear a girl child crying from up in the house.
    “Yeah, the SWAT guy did.”
    Lucas squatted next to the doper: “I got one question for you, about who might’ve told the cops that you were the shooter. The guy who ratted you out. It’s gotta be somebody about fifty years old. Fat. Black hair, big black beard. Know anybody like that?”
    Brett shook his head in exasperation: “Man, I’m a biker. Everybody’s heavy and fat and got a black beard.”
    Lucas stood up and shook his head at Del. “He’s . . . ah, fuck it.”
    Del asked Brett, “You got any kind of bullet hole in you?”
    “No, man, I never been shot.”
    “They’re gonna look at you downtown.”
    “Man, I keep telling you, I haven’t been shot,” Brett said. “They can take all the DNA they want, I’ll jack off in a bottle, whatever they need.”
    A SWAT guy came out carrying the girl. She was maybe five, and still crying, and her mother came out behind her, and she was crying.
    Brett said to the SWAT guy, “Look what you did.”
    Lucas said to Del, “Come on, let’s go. This is bullshit.”
    “It’s not bullshit,” Cruz said. “We had a credible tip.”
    “It’s bullshit,” Lucas said.
     
     
    ON THE WAY BACK to the car, Del said, “Made more friends in the MPD.”
    “Fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “We got led around by the nose when the Jones girls were killed, and they’re being led around by the nose now.”
    “What if you’re wrong?”
    “I’m not wrong. I’m pissed, and frustrated.”
    They drove back to the BCA, mostly in silence, and finally Lucas said, “I’ll call Cruz this afternoon, and kiss and make up.”
    And a few minutes later, he added, “Fell knows Brett. Somehow he knows him. Maybe if we talked to Brett a little more—”
    “He isn’t the brightest bulb on the pole lamp,” Del said. “He started out stupid and then started sniffing glue, so I wouldn’t expect too much.”
     
     
    BACK AT THE BCA, he walked down to the office where Sandy, the researcher, worked. She was poking at a computer, looked up when Lucas loomed, and said, “It’s impossible. I can’t even give you a probability, because too many records are gone, and too many people took teacher training.”
    “How many names you got?”
    “I haven’t counted them—must be a couple of hundred. But the problem is, this is