Certain Prey

and she didn’t dance to rock music, so I was dancing with the owner . . .”
    He trailed off, and after a few seconds, Lucy Marks said, “Lucas? You still in there?”
    “Excuse me,” Lucas said, “but I gotta go. I’m sorry.” He jogged away, across the lawn toward his own place, leaving the Markses at the grill, looking puzzled. At the cabin, he fumbled out the number Sherrill had given him for Malone, and dialed it. One of the FBI agents, a man, picked it up and said, “John Shaw.” Lucas said, “Let me speak to Malone.”
    “She just left . . . I could try to catch her.”
    “Catch her, goddamnit . . .”
    The phone on the other end clattered on a desk and Lucas hung on to the receiver, eyes closed, rubbing his forehead. Could this be right?
    Two minutes later, Malone picked up the phone and said, “Malone.”
    “This is Lucas. Did you get the composite of the shooter?”
    “Yes. Pretty good.”
    “Close your eyes, and think about the woman I danced with at that club in Wichita, whatever it was. The Rink.”
    “My eyes are closed. I . . . hmm. Gotta be a coincidence.”
    “Hey, I’m a great-looking guy,” Lucas said, “I know that, but just between you and me, Malone, not that many thirty-year-old women are coming on to me anymore. And with this one . . . I had the feeling she was more interested than she should have been, and maybe not in sex. I didn’t know why . . .”
    “. . . Or maybe you thought it was sex . . .”
    “Maybe I did, whatever. But I tell you, from talking to the people up here who saw her, and looking at that picture, something kept knocking at the back of my head,” Lucas said. “I finally figured it out: if she’s not the same chick, she’s her twin. And if she was up here, she could very well have seen me on television. And if she did, and I walked into her place in Wichita, and then just sat down for a cheeseburger and a beer . . .”
    “All right,” Malone said, reluctantly. “Sounds like a loser, but give me a couple of hours. I’ll check it out. You’ll be up at your cabin?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. Out through the screen, he could see the lake, flat, quiet, a perfect North Woods evening coming on. And he’d just gotten there. “I think I’m gonna head back to the Cities. I’m telling you, I think she’s the shooter.” H E WAS OUT on I-35, driving way too fast, and still a long way north of the Cities, when the cell phone burped. He picked it up, and heard the first two words, then lost the signal. He punched it off; three minutes later, it rang again, and he answered it: Sherrill, breaking up, but audible.
    “Your FBI friend called; she’s all cranked up. That woman you danced with has disappeared—cleaned out her apartment, quit her job at the bar . . .”
    “I thought she owned it.”
    “So did everybody, but she was really just the manager. It’s really owned by a guy named James Larimore, who is also known as Wooden Head Larimore, who is really connected, really connected, in guess-where?”
    “St. Louis.”
    “Yup.” The cell connection was getting cleaner. “So your FBI friend freaked, and got a crime-scene crew into the apartment, and guess-what again?”
    “It’d been wiped.”
    “Top to bottom.”
    “Got her, goddamnit,” Lucas crowed. “We got her. What’s her name?”
    “Clara Rinker.”
    “Rinker. Fuck those FBI pussies, Marcy. We broke this fuckin’ thing right over their heads.”
    “Yeah, well . . . want to know where Wooden Head got the name Wooden Head?”
    “Sure.” The adrenaline was pumping; he’d listen to anything.
    “He was once in a bar when people started shooting, and he caught a ricochet, and the slug stuck in his skull bone, in his forehead above his nose. Made a dent, and stuck, but didn’t go through. They say everybody was laughing so hard, the gunfight stopped. EvenWooden Head was laughing.”
    “So he’s a tough guy.”
    “Very tough. And they ain’t gonna get much out of him. He says he don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”

TWENTY-FOUR

    Malone met him at the airport. “You look kinda green,” Malone said. “Tough flight down?”
    “Naw, it was all right,” Lucas mumbled. He looked back through the terminal window at the plane, and Malone caught the look and said, “You can’t be one of those . . . you’re not afraid to fly?”
    “It’s not my preferred method of travel,” Lucas said, walking away. She scrambled to catch up, and he turned his head to ask,