Certain Prey

building had a five-story parking garage. Carmel stepped out of the suite, checked to make sure that the security guard had moved on, and then trotted briskly down to the stairwell at the far end of the hall and down seven flights of steps. The cops might be watching every entrance and exit to the parking garage, but, she thought, they couldn’t be watching all of it. Of course, if they were, she was screwed . . .
    But it was a good bet, she thought. She poked her head through the door on the fourth floor, saw nobody. A single empty car, a red Pontiac, sat halfway down the ramp, but she’d seen it before. Not a cop. She glanced again at her watch: one minute. She waited it out, hearing nothing at all along the concrete corridors of the building, and then opened the door again.
    Here was the only spot that she’d be in the open: she walked quickly across the top of the floor, and stepped into the corkscrew exit ramp. She heard a car moving up the entrance ramp: had to be Pam, she thought. She listened, heard the car turn into the exit spiral, and nodded. The car started down, made the turn toward her. A gray-haired old lady was looking through the windshield. Carmel recoiled, then saw the hand waving her forward: “Get in.”
    “That’s you?” The car stopped, just for a half-second, and Carmel jerked open the back door and flopped on the seat, pulling the door shut without slamming it. “Get under the blanket,” Rinker said.
    Carmel was already doing that, rolling onto the floor, her head on the driver’s side. She pulled the blanket over her legs and lower body and lay quietly beneath it. The entrances and exits from the building were on opposites sides, and even at this time of night, there were always a few cars coming and going. With any luck at all, the cops on the entrance side—if there were any—wouldn’t be calling out the cars coming and going, so the cops on the exit side wouldn’t notice the odd fact that a gray-haired old lady in a Japanese car had gone in one side and come right back out the other.
    She heard Rinker lower the driver’s-side window; heard the cashier mutter something, and a minute later, they were rolling out of the building.
    “You can get up on the seat,” Rinker said a minute later. “But I wouldn’t sit up, yet. Let me take a few side streets, see if there’s anybody back there.”
    “If there are, there’s nothing to do but run for it,” Carmel said cheerfully.
    “Yeah, well, just stay down for a few minutes anyway.” Rinker didn’t know anything about throwing off a following car, but she’d watched enough cop shows on television to know that they might be both in front of, parallel to, and behind her. She took the car across the Washington Avenue bridge to eliminate the parallel cars, a block the wrong way down an empty one-way street to eliminate the forward cars, and then quickly along a one-way frontage road in the warehouse district, looking for followers. She didn’t see anybody, and that was the best she could do.
    “Best I can do,” she told Carmel.
    “I can’t think of anything else,” Carmel said. “Pull over; let me get in the front.”
    • • •

    M AX B UTRY CAME from a short line of mean cops; his father was one, and so was Max, the meanness beaten into him from a tender age. “You don’t stay alive long on the streets unless . . .” his father would say, following with a lecture about a specific point of manhood in which Max was faltering: “You don’t stay alive long on the streets if you hide behind your hands. What if some greaser’s got a shiv, huh? He’ll cut your hands right off.You gotta come down on those boys.”
    And his father would come down on him, show you how you beat a guy right into the ground by getting in close and on top of him, and fuck all your cherry greaser knives.
    Butry carried the attitude onto the force; and on this night carried it into the bus station. A desk clerk had called to say that two guys were smoking dope in the john, and the smog was getting so thick nobody could get in to take a leak. By the time Butry arrived, though, the smokers had gone, and he turned around and banged back through the door.
    Outside, three skaters were practicing slides off a planter onto a curb. There was nothing illegal about this, but Butry considered skateboards one symptom of the decline of American civilization, and himself, by virtue of the badge in his pocket, one of the pillars of that civilization.