Certain Prey

messing with a doper or a player or a stickup guy. If he screwed up, he could go to jail.
    After a few minutes, he roused himself from the chair and walked down the hall to the Homicide office. Sloan was just leaving: “The goddamned air-conditioning is giving me goose bumps.”
    “What are you doing tonight?” Lucas asked.
    “Maybe taking the old lady out for a movie.”
    “If you take her to Penelope’s, on Lake Minnetonka, I’ll pay for the meal and sign off on the overtime.”
    “Ya got me,” Sloan said quickly. “For one thing, if I said no, the old lady’d murder me.” Sloan had a daughter in college and tuition to pay, and luxury was hard to come by. “What do I have to do?” W HEN S LOAN HAD GONE, Lucas called Jim Bone, president of Polaris Bank: “Jim, are you gonna be home between eight and nine tonight?”
    “Yeah; you need something?”
    “I need to talk. Ten minutes, maybe. I’ve been running around like a mad dog, and I can’t spring any time during the day, and besides, you’re busy . . .”
    “Come on over. Kerin would love to see you.”
    “How’s she doing?” Bone’s wife was pregnant.
    “Just starting to show.”
    “You guys didn’t waste any time.”
    “Yeah, well, we’re old people.” M YRON B UNNSON TOLD everybody that his mother was a stone freak hippie and that his real given name was Bullet Blue, and that his father had been an Oakland Hell’s Angel, before the Angels got old. None of that was true. His parents were really named Myron (Senior) and Adele Bunnson, and they ran a dairy farm near Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
    Bullet was working one of the three valet slots at Penelope’s. He saw the red Jag swing into the lot and said to the other two, “This is it. This is mine.”
    “Three-way split, man,” said his friend Richard Schmid, who was trying to convince his friends to call him Crank. The third valet nodded: “Three ways.”
    “No problem,” Bullet Blue said. “I’m just workin’ the chick.”
    “Right.” Crank recognized the Jag. Bullet’s chances of nailing this particular chick, especially dressed as he was, like an organ-grinder monkey, were slim and none, and slim was outa town. Still, Bullet Blue wanted the car, and they all had their favorites.
    Blue took the Jag and ten bucks from Carmel, who flashed a smile at him. “Thank you, ma’am,” Blue said, giving her his best look. The look apparently missed over her bare shoulder, and she was into the restaurant with her friend, a guy who Blue thought looked way too straight. Whatever. He hopped into the Jag, and rolled it into the valet parking area on the side of the restaurant. Lucas was leaning against a Chevy van, talking to the man who sat in the driver’s seat.
    “You got the money?” he asked Lucas.
    “Keys?”
    Bullet dropped the keys into Lucas’s hand. Lucas passed them through the window to the man in the driver’s seat, who took them and clambered into the back. Lucas handed Bullet Blue a small fold of currency. “I’ll talk to McKinley.”
    “If we could just get her off this one time . . .” Bullet slipped the bills into his pants pocket. The three-way split involved only the ten bucks from Carmel.
    “I didn’t say I could do that,” Lucas said bluntly. From the van, they could hear the grinding buzz of the key-cutter. “The best we could do is maybe drop the charge to something less heavy. But she’s gonna do some time.”
    “She’s already done time,” Blue protested. He was talking about his sister, who came off the farm two years after Bullet, and started calling herself Baby Blue. “She’s been sittin’ in jail for a month, waiting for the trial. Can’t we get her time served?”
    “Not with this one,” Lucas said. “If she hadn’t had the gun . . .”
    “It wasn’t her gun; it was Eddie’s,” Bullet said heatedly.
    “But she had it. I’ll see if McKinley and the guys’ll go for two or three months. As it is, she’s looking at a year, and maybe more.”
    “Anything you can do, man.”
    “And you stay the fuck outa trouble, dickweed,” Lucas said. “Go back home if you gotta.”
    “Right. Spend my life pulling cow tits.”
    “Then get your ass back in Dunwoody—how much time you got to go there?” Lucas asked.
    “One semester.”
    “One semester. You get out, you start making some good money, and you make it wherever you go.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Bullet said.
    “You don’t want to hear my Dunwoody speech?”
    “I just ain’t