Certain Prey

fingerprints. We’re gonna process all the paper we got here. And when the next check comes in . . .”
    “Do everything,” Lucas said.
    He turned back to look at the building as he walked away, and saw Mallard looking after him. The call-in arrangement was clever: it was also not quite right. D ONNAL O’B RIEN WAS a husky black man with a small brush mustache and four kids at home: his wife had gone out for a loaf of bread one night and never come back, he said. “Just too quiet in that convenience store, I guess, with none of the kids around.”
    She was now living in North Miami Beach with a retired D.C. cop named Manners. “The drug guys called him Bad Manners. I think he retired with a little more than the regular pension, seeing as how he didn’t bust anybody for the last three years he was on the force.”
    Lucas had met O’Brien at a computer-training conference when Lucas was still hawking his police simulation software. They’d had a few beers, shared information a coupleof times. When O’Brien was still married, he and his wife had once spent a week at Lucas’s Wisconsin cabin.
    O’Brien was sitting in a small gray-walled cubicle reading a People magazine story about a lesbian golfer when Lucas leaned in the doorway: “Did you know that Kitty Veit is a lesbo?”
    “I don’t know who Kitty Veit is.”
    “She shot a sixty-three in the final round of the women’s grand-am last weekend, at Merion, and won three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. She’s the only woman who ever shot a sixty-three there.”
    “You mean golf?”
    O’Brien sighed. “Never mind. Anyway, she’s a lesbo.”
    “And that offends your golfer’s sense of propriety?”
    “No, it makes me wonder if I got an operation, I could shoot a sixty-three.”
    “You’d probably just sit home all day and play with your tits.”
    “Mmm. Hadn’t thought of that.”
    “How ya been?” Lucas asked.
    “Tired. Let’s go get a Coke.”
    They found an empty booth at a small, moderately greasy diner with Formica tabletops and cracked red plastic booth seats. The counterman drifted toward them and O’Brien called, “Big Coke and Big Diet Coke.” Lucas told O’Brien that he was thinking of buying a golf course, and O’Brien didn’t believe him. Five minutes later, when he did believe him, O’Brien started fishing for a job as a greenskeeper.
    Lucas laughed: “I haven’t bought it, yet.”
    “Keep me in mind, I’d be great at it,” O’Brien said. “I’m two years from retirement if some asshole doesn’t shoot me first. Work in Minnesota? Hell, yes.” Then, his voice pitched down, he asked, “What’s going on? You’re working, right?”
    “Yeah. We had some people executed in the Cities . . .” Lucas gave him a quick rundown, leaving Carmel Loan’s name out of it, and concluded with the FBI entry at the answering service.
    “Never heard of the place. Louise Marker?”
    “Yeah. Just like it sounds, like Magic Marker, M-A-RKE-R.”
    “Four dead. Never heard of a pro going in for something like that . . . You might get three or four dead all at once, but not in a series, like they’re hunting them down.”
    “There’s something going on,” Lucas said. “It could be something really simple—a money thing. The hit goes sour, somebody gets a name or a connection, and then this killer chick has to come back and clean up.”
    “Impossible to prove, though,” O’Brien said. “I get pretty goddamned depressed about it sometimes. Crooks are getting too smart, they move too fast. Hit here, gone tomorrow.”
    “Be nice to pull this chick down, though,” Lucas said. “I’d like to see if you’ve got anything local on this Marker, or any of the people who work there. Even word of mouth. The Feebs don’t have anything that’s not on paper . . .”
    “I’ll check around,” O’Brien said. “And I’ll tell you what: I know this guy named George Hutton, he works in Fraud . . .” T HEY CAUGHT H UTTON standing at a bus stop where a desk sergeant said he might still be, if they hurried.
    “George,” O’Brien called across the street. A bus was rolling down the block. “Wait.”
    They crossed at the corner and Hutton looked at his watch and said, “Two minutes and I’m out of here, gone for the week. Then the local Black Irish shows up with some guy in an expensive suit and I get this really bad feeling . . .”
    “All we need is a name,” O’Brien said. “Let me tell you a name.”
    “One