Certain Prey

nodded: “Give a guy a little heroin, he goes to sleep. Give him a little more, he dies. No problem.”
    “Shoplift like crazy, though,” Sloan said.
    “A cultural skill,” Lucas said, lifting up the top of his cheeseburger to inspect the solitary, suspiciously pale pickle. “Passed on by heroin gurus. Somebody oughta look into it. An anthropologist.”
    “Or a proctologist,” Sloan said. “Say, with that commission meeting tonight, you won’t be shooting.”
    “I’m thinking of giving it up, anyway,” Lucas said. “That goddamn Iowa kid shot my eyes out last time.”
    “He’s a freak,” Sloan said. “He’s shooting Olympic, now. He’s got a target on his locker, ten bulls, every shot in the X ring. In the middle of the X ring—you can see black all around the edges.”
    “He’s good,” Lucas said. “At my age, you can’t be that good. Can’t do it. Your fine muscle control isn’t fine enough.”
    “Yeah, yeah. He’s sort of a dumb fuck,” Sloan said.
    “I heard he was actually a smart fuck.”
    “Yeah, well—he’s a dumb smart fuck.” Sloan looked at his watch. “I gotta get going. I gotta talk to a guy.” O N THE WALK back to City Hall, Lucas realized that a mental penny had dropped during the lunch. Something was packed into the back of his head, now, but he didn’t know what it was.
    But it was, he thought, something important: he dug at it, and realized it involved the Iowa kid. The kid was still a uniformed cop, but he volunteered for everything hard, and he had a thing about guns. All kinds of guns: he dreamt about them, used them, fixed them, compared them, bought and sold them. A throwback to an old western gunfighter, Lucas thought.
    He tried to think about the coming interview with Jan and Heather Davis, the photo spread that Sherrill was putting together. A photo spread involved some risks: if the child identified Carmel as one of the killers, and they went to court, then a witness-stand identification could be challenged on grounds that the police had contaminated the witness’s memory with the photographs. So the whole thing had to be done just right.
    As much as he tried to think about the upcoming interview, the shooter from Iowa always came back. Something that Sloan said about him. Something small. He just couldn’t nail it down.
    This, he thought after a while, is what it’s like to be senile. He had something in his head, but he couldn’t get it out. Finally, he walked down to the locker room, wandered through, looking for the Iowa kid’s locker: found it, with the target on it, just like Sloan said.
    “Checking out the competition?” a tall blond cop asked. Another shooter, and Lucas nodded at him.
    “I heard about the perfect score,” Lucas said. He leaned forward to look at it. The bull’s-eye on the target was called the ten ring, but inside the bull was another, much smaller circle: the X ring, not much bigger around than a .22 slug. There were ten small target faces on the target sheet: and in the middle of each X ring, a slightly soft-edged hole. Around each of the holes, the full X ring line could be seen. Lucas whistled.
    “Guy’s abnormal,” the cop said. He was pulling on a bulletproof vest, slapping the Velcro fastening tabs in place. “My eyes are supposed to be twenty-twenty, but I can’t even see the X ring on them twenty-two faces. Keeping them inside the ten-ring is one thing; keeping them inside the X, man . . . that’s abnormal.”
    “It’s tough,” Lucas agreed. “I’ve never done it.” He took a last look, shook his head, and started back to the office. Keeping them inside the ten ring was one thing, but inside the X . . .
    He went back to his office, scrolled through the list of phone numbers he’d sent off on the Internet. And there it was, the last one.
    Tennex Messenger Service.
    “Sonofabitch,” he said. That had to be a coincidence.
    He was still thinking about it when Sherrill and Black showed up with a file of full-length color photos of women, silhouetted, wearing head scarves with dark raincoats. A dozen different faces had been grafted into the folds of the scarf, as if the faces had suddenly been hit by light from a doorway.
    “Not bad,” Lucas said, looking through them. “This one is Carmel?”
    “Yeah—it’s weird how context makes a difference; I wouldn’t recognize her in a thousand years in that getup,” Sherrill said.
    Black and Sherrill drove over together. Lucas followed. Davis met