Buried Prey

fuck, attempting to recruit runaway girls to hustle for him, beating them blue when they failed or didn’t work hard enough or held out on him.
    Lucas got the cuffs on and jerked Randy to his feet, and started marching him back down the alley to the hedge where he’d thrown the bag. “You know what’s in the bag, dickhead? There’s one-half ounce of weed, which will get me about, uh, an hour in jail, you piece of shit,” Randy said. “Good going, Davenport, you’re a real fuckin’ . . . you know . . . that guy with the hat.”
    “What?”
    “The fuckin’ cop with the fuckin’ backwards hat.”
    “Fuck you, Randy,” Lucas said, with no idea of what Randy was talking about. But if he was telling the truth, the weed hadn’t been worth the chase.
    Then Lucas said, “You can take that weed and stick it up your ass, as far as I’m concerned. You’re going down for the Billy Smith murder, you little shit.”
    “What? What the fuck?”
    “We just got fuckin’ tired of you,” Lucas said. “We got the knife he was stabbed with, and guess whose fingerprints are gonna be on it? Man, I been waiting three years for this day. . . .”
    “You wouldn’t do that,” Randy said, trying to twist around to see Lucas’s face.
    “Bullshit, I wouldn’t,” Lucas said. “So would every other cop on the south side. We solve a murder, we put you away for eighteen fuckin’ years, get you outa our hair.”
    “But I didn’t do it,” Randy said. “I didn’t do it.”
    “But you’ve done all kinds of other shit. We’ll just call it even,” Lucas said. “You get away with that, we frame you for this. Everybody’s happy. Especially those three-hundred-pound weightlifting homos out at Stillwater. They’re gonna love your little red ass.”
    They came to the point in the hedge where Randy had tossed the bag, and Lucas steered him through a hurricane fence gate, and found the bag sitting on the back lawn of a darkened house. Lucas picked it up between two fingers, not getting prints on it: weed, all right, and probably not much more than a half-ounce. He stuck it in Randy’s back pocket. “Oh, look—he’s still got the weed.”
    “You fuck.”
    “And you murdered that poor Billy Smith boy.”
    Then Randy said, “Davenport, listen, goddamnit. I got something for you. You know when Rice got stabbed the other week? I know who done that.”
    “Rice?” Lucas knew about a guy named Ronald Rice getting stabbed on the north side, out of his territory, but hadn’t heard much more about it.
    “Yeah. I know who done that, and I know who’ll tell you about it. You let me go . . . you got nothing here with this little bit of weed . . . you let me go, I’ll give you the name. Just you and me.”
    “Randy, you’re going to prison. Right now. You’re off—”
    Randy smelled the interest. “No, no, no, man, I got these names. They’re good names, honest to God. I just don’t want to go to jail tonight, and I don’t like this asshole anyway, he gives me a lot of shit, so I’ll give the name to you. And the name of the chick who can back it up.”
    Lucas thought about it, standing in the alley. Then he said, “If there’s one thing I hate more than you, it’d be you punkin’ me,” Lucas said. “You punkin’ me, Randy? If you are, I swear to God, I’ll find you and I’ll choke you to death and I’ll throw your body in the fuckin’ Mississippi River.”
    Randy felt the deal coming: “Okay. Okay. Here’s the name: Delia White. She lives on the corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth, in a big red house. You know that big red house?”
    Lucas did. “Delia White.”
    “That’s right. The guy who stabbed Rice is her brother-in-law, which name is El-Ron Parker. And she’ll talk, because she thinks El-Ron killed her sister two years ago.”
    “Did he?”
    “How in the fuck would I know? And who cares?”
    Lucas looked at Randy for a minute, then said, “How do you know this?”
    “Because I sell a little medicine to Delia and her friends.”
    “Crack?” Lucas asked. A crackhead wouldn’t be the best witness.
    “Not crack, just a little weed.”
    “If you’re punkin’ me . . .”
    “I’m not, I swear to God.”
    Lucas looked at him another moment, then said, “You get off the south side. I don’t care where you go. You go up north, you go over to St. Paul. I don’t want to see you on my turf.”
    “I’m outa here,” Randy said. He held his cuffed hands out to the side. Lucas looked at