Certain Prey

going to look like dumbshits. Which choice do you think a bunch of City Hall bureaucrats is gonna choose?”
    “By golly, that really makes me mad.” He hurled the terry-cloth towel at a couch.
    “Hey. Unless something new comes up, it’s over,” she said. “About Barbara—the funeral is at two?”
    “Yes, at Morganthau’s.”
    “I won’t be able to make the service; I’ll be at the cemetery, though.”
    “Thanks. I . . .” He plopped on the couch, picked up the damp towel, turned it in his large hands. “I have some questions that I want to ask Barbara, and I’ve got some things I want to talk over, but I can’t, ’cause she’s dead. I can’t get around that.”
    “Like what do you want to tell her?” Real curiosity.
    “Like, I want to tell her about Louise.”
    Now Carmel was puzzled: “Why? You’d only hurt her.” “I wouldn’t only hurt her; I think it’s more complicated than that, don’t you?”
    “All right,” Carmel said. She sat on the couch next to him. “Tell me about it. Tell me about Louise.”
    Louise liked sex, and so did Hale. Barbara liked it better than, say, a fried egg sandwich, but not as much as a good soft back rub. “When we were having sex, I always had the feeling that she was taking care of me, not making love with me. She was always waiting for me to finish. She always wanted it to be good for me, but then she always wanted to round out the night with a book . . .”
    “Uh-huh, I know the feeling,” Carmel said.
    The room was closing around them, getting tighter, the walls moving in, until there was nothing in the house but the two of them. He talked about Barbara, about Louise; laughed a little about some of Louise’s excesses; cried a little about Barbara’s idiosyncrasies. Carmel patted him on the shoulder blades, then rubbed his back a little. He held one of her hands, turned it over, fondled it.
    The room closed in and Carmel tipped back and there he was: a perfect little spread of hair on his chest; a tidy circumcision.
    Unfortunately, she thought afterward, he didn’t have the best of bathroom habits.
    She sighed. So much to do.

TEN

    Sloan was wearing khaki shorts, a black faux-leather fanny pack pulled around to his stomach and a pink golf shirt. His legs were the color of skim milk, and so bony they might have been attached to a short ostrich. “My wife made me wear them,” he said, looking down at the shorts. “She said I was gonna get heatstroke, and there’s no point in getting heatstroke on a vacation day.”
    Lucas was peering over the top of his desk. “You got your gun in the fanny pack?”
    “Yeah. I got the pack from Brinkhoff. It’s all Velcro, it’s not really zipped up. See?” He stood up, pulled on the front of the fanny pack, and the entire cover came away. The revolver inside was attached by a single tab over the barrel, which tore away when Sloan pulled the gun out.
    “Pretty slick,” Lucas said. He settled back. “But it looks stupid.”
    “My wife says . . .”
    “Your wife has the fashion sense of a cockroach.”
    “I’ll tell her you said so.”
    “If you do, I’ll have to kill you.”
    There was a tentative knock at the door. Lucas called, “Come in.”
    The door opened and Hale Allen stepped halfway inside, stopping when he saw Sloan with his khaki shorts, pink shirt and the pistol in his hand. “You need to talk to Lucas?” Sloan asked.
    “If he’s not busy,” Allen said.
    “I was just about to shoot him,” Sloan said. “Could it wait until after that?”
    “Well . . . Do you think he’d be better by lunchtime?”
    “Go away,” Lucas told Sloan. To Allen, politely, with curiosity, “Come in, sit down.”

    “I S THERE ANYTHING new with the case?” Allen asked. He looked uneasily around the office as he asked the question; crossed and recrossed his legs.
    “We’re still working on it, but we’re kind of stuck,” Lucas said.
    A week had gone by since Lucas had spoken to Carmel Loan. All the crime-scene evidence had been exhaustively reviewed, but nothing was coming out. In the meantime, a Ferris wheel at a neighborhood carnival had collapsed, two children had been killed and seven more badly hurt. The execution killings had disappeared from the media, as reporters and state safety inspectors chased down every carnival in the state. The lack of both progress and outside attention had taken pressure off the investigation. Lucas had the feeling that the whole thing was headed for the