Buried Prey

have been enough bad people around—crack cocaine had arrived that spring, and was spiraling out of control—to inject some extra stress into the work. On this night, there were so many cops on the street that the bad people moved over.
    “Weird thing happened with crack,” Sloan observed, as they tramped between houses, and the dark shadows between streetlights and elm trees. “The pimps got fired. We used to think that the hookers were slaves. Turns out it was more complicated than that.”
    “I gotta say, I haven’t seen some of the boys around,” Lucas said.
    “They’re gone. They’ve been laid off. Had to sell their hats,” Sloan said.
    Lucas said, “When I was working dope, nobody even heard of crack. You had a few guys freebasing, but other than that, it was right up the nose.”
    “Chemical genius out there somewhere,” Sloan said.
    “Sales genius,” Lucas said. “Toot for the common people.”
    Sloan was a few years older than Lucas, a narrow-slatted man who dressed in earth colors from JCPenney. When he wore something flashy, it was usually a necktie, probably chosen by his wife; and it was usually a glittery, gecko green. He’d been developing a reputation as an interrogator, because of a peculiar, caring, softtalking approach he took to suspects. He was as conservative in lifestyle as in dress, having gotten married at eighteen to his highschool sweetheart. He had two daughters before he was twenty-one, and worried about insurance. As different as they were, Lucas liked him. Sloan had a sense of humor, and a good idea of who he was. He was quiet and cool and smart.
    “The word is, you’re moving to plainclothes right away,” Sloan said, as they moved across the dark end of a block, ready to start on another circle of houses. “Compared to patrol, it’s a different world. Patrol is like football; plainclothes is like chess.”
    “Or like hockey,” Lucas said.
    Sloan looked at him suspiciously. “I’ll have to assume that’s your sense of humor talking,” he said.
    “Why’s that?” Lucas asked.
    “It’s well known that hockey guys are almost as dumb as baseball players.”
    “I didn’t know that,” Lucas said.
    “It’s true,” Sloan said. “In the major college sports, football’s at the top of the intelligence ratings, then wrestling, then basketball, then golf, swimming, hockey, baseball, and tennis, in that order.”
    “Tennis is at the bottom?”
    “Yup. Not only that, the further west you go, the dumber the athletes get,” Sloan said. “By the time you get to the Midwest, tennis players are dumber’n a box of rocks. Across the Rockies? Don’t even ask. The tennis players out there are not so much human, as dirt.”
    “Dirt?”
    “Dirt.”
    “Something else I didn’t know,” Lucas said.
    “Well, you were a hockey player.”
     
     
    THEY PUSHED through the gate on a chain-link fence, toward a clapboard house with a narrow front porch with a broken-down couch sitting on it, and a light in one window. Sloan pointed his flashlight into the side yard, at a circle of dirt around an iron stake, and said, “Bad dog.”
    “Could be a horseshoes pit,” Lucas said.
    Sloan laughed. “So you go first.”
    Lucas moved up to the door and knocked, and a dog went crazy behind the door.
    “Bad dog,” Sloan said behind him. “Sounds like one of those bull terriers.”
    Nobody answered for a minute, then two. Lucas pounded again, and a light came on at the back of the house. Another minute, and a man appeared, opening the door just an inch, looked at them over a heavy chain lock. “Who’re you?”
    Sloan explained, and the man started shaking his head halfway through the explanation. “I didn’t see no white girls doin’ nothin’,” he said. The dog was snuffling at the man’s pant leg, its toenails scratching anxiously on the linoleum. “I gotta go to bed. I gotta get up at five o’clock.”
    Walking back down the sidewalk, Sloan asked, “You hear what happened to Park Brubaker?” Brubaker was a Korean-American detective, now suspended and looking at time on federal drug charges.
    “Yeah. Dumb shit.”
    “He had problems,” Sloan said.
    “I got problems,” Lucas said. “I don’t go robbing people for their Apple Jacks.”
    They came to a door on Thirty-fifth Avenue, answered by a heavyset white man with a Hemingway beard and a sweaty forehead and an oversized nose. A fat nose. He said, “We didn’t see nothin’ at all. Except what was on