Buried Prey

women crawling all over me. That and my good looks and charisma.”
    “One: I get laid all the time, and, two, that sounds pretty fuckin’ cynical for a fifteen-year-old, or however old you are.”
    “Not cynical. I’m sincere,” Lucas said. “I really do try to see it from their point of view.”
    Del looked skeptical.
    “Really,” Lucas said. “I’m serious. I try.”
     
     
    THEY SAT AND TALKED, getting acquainted. Del had been on the force for nine years, after two years of college, and had worked patrol for only six months.
    “I went on in October, got off in April. Coldest winter in twenty years,” he said. “Honest to God, there were nights so cold that the car wouldn’t heat up. I’d walk down the street, and my nuts would be banging together like ball bearings. I was directing traffic around a big fire downtown one night, it was nineteen below zero with a thirty-mile-an-hour wind. The fire guys were spraying the building, and we had icicles blowing back on us.”
    Like Lucas, he’d done drug decoy work out of the academy, but unlike Lucas, he’d liked it, and stayed on, started working with intelligence and the sex unit, off and on, before his short stint on patrol. “They had a nasty long-term intelligence thing come up. I took it, and the payoff was, I got to stay on with Intel,” he said.
    Lucas told him about his time on patrol, and how he’d like to get off, the sooner the better: “If I’m not off in the next couple of months, I’m gonna apply for law school for next year. I already took the LSATs and I did good.”
    “You really want to be a fuckin’ lawyer?” Del asked. “Look in the yellow pages. There are thousands of them. They’re like rats.”
    “Yeah, I know. I don’t know what to do. I used to think I could be a defense lawyer, but now, you know, after looking at four years of dirtbags, maybe not,” Lucas said. “So then I’m thinking about being a prosecutor, but then I see the prosecutors we work with, and the political bullshit they put up with, and I’m thinking . . .”
    “Maybe not,” Del finished.
    “But there’s gotta be something in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe get a law degree, I could go to the FBI.”
    “Ah, you don’t want the FBI. Maybe ATF or the DEA, and you don’t need a law degree for that,” Del said. “The FBI . . . there’s not much there. They mostly call each other up on the telephone. If you want to hunt, you need to be a big-city cop.”
    “I wrote a role-playing game when I was in college,” Lucas said. “I was in this nerd class, introduction to computer science, and these guys were playing Dungeons and Dragons. I got interested and wrote a module for them, and they played it, and they liked it. There’s some money in that. . . . I’m writing another one, on football. I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff out there that I could do. I think I could be an investigator, but if I’ve got to spend much more time on patrol, I’m not gonna do it.”
    “Daniel likes you and he’s got clout,” Del said. “Have a serious talk with him. Something’ll get done.”
     
     
    SALLY, THE UNIFORMED COP, stopped on her way out, patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for all that. I gotta think. Maybe we could get a cup of coffee.”
    “Anytime,” Lucas said. “But hey: stay loose. And if you need help, call.”
    She patted his shoulder again and when she left, Del said, “I can barely stand it.”
    Lucas grinned and said, “Sincerity. That’s all it is. So—let me tell you about John Fell, and you can tell me how to find him.”
    When Lucas finished explaining his ideas about Fell, Del said: “Interesting. So we’ve got a bunch of people who know him, who’ve seen him. Let’s go talk to them.”
    “I talked to them—”
    “But from what you tell me, you haven’t conversed with them,” Del said. “You interviewed them, you got a bunch of facts. What we want is all the ratshit they’ve seen and know about. Have they seen him in the neighborhood? What kind of a car does he drive? Does he smoke dope? Snort cocaine? If he does, I might get something on him, with my people out on the town. Oh—and we get Anderson in again, and instead of a credit check, we get his Visa bills. We want to know where he spends his money.”
    Lucas said, “That’s good.”
    Del said, “No, it’s not—it’s just a bunch of words. We’re just sitting here bullshitting.”
    They called Anderson, the computer guy, and