Certain Prey

Volkswagen Passat. How about this: I’ll pay mileage. I’ll pay you fifteen cents a mile, and I buy all the gas. I’m driving to Wichita, which is six hundred and fifty miles, more or less, so that’s thirteen hundred miles, you’ll get a couple of hundred bucks for three or four days, and then I won’t be hassling you about your slow work on the Porsche . . . Come on, goddamnit. Whattaya mean, fifty cents? The government doesn’t pay fifty cents, and that’s supposed to cover gasoline . . .”
    He got the 740IL, a long black four-door with a cockpit like an F-16’s, gray leather seats, a CD player in the trunk and sixty-one thousand miles on the clock, for twenty-five cents a mile. He was two miles out of the dealership when he tripped the ill-placed hood-cover latch with his left foot, without knowing what he’d done, and the hood began rattling up and down. Fearing that the hood was about to blow back in his face, he swerved to the edge of the highway and risked his neck to relatch it. He tripped the hood lever again, five minutes later, and again took the car to the shoulder. This time, he called the Porsche dealer, who said, “You’re tripping the hood with your left foot. Stop doing that.”
    Lucas found the hood latch and said, “That’s a good place for it.”
    Thirty miles out of town, a yellow light popped on the left dash that said Check Engine, and he took it to the side again, fearing that he was about to blow a rod. He was still within cell phone distance, and he called the dealer again, who said the light meant that the emission system wasn’t working quite right. “Don’t worry about it; it doesn’t mean anything.”
    “On any other car, ‘check engine’ means all your oil just ran out on the road,” Lucas said.
    “That’s not any car,” the Porsche guy said. “When the oil runs out on the road, that one says ‘STOP!’ in big red letters.”
    “So the light’s gonna be on all trip?”
    “That’s right, pal. You wanted it, you got it,” the dealer said, without a shred of sympathy.
    “There’s this whistling noise . . .”
    “The windshield’s not quite right. We’re gonna try to reseal it when you get back.”
    “I’m beginning to think this thing’s a piece of shit,” Lucas grumbled.
    “What do you want for sixty-nine thousand?” the Porsche guy asked. “You shoulda took the Volkswagen.”
    • • •

    B UT THE CAR was comfortable, and certainly looked good. He made the six hundred and fifty miles to Wichita in nine hours, whipping through Des Moines and Kansas City, pausing only for gas and a sack of hard-shell Taco Supremes at a Taco Bell. He got a room at a Best Western, called Mallard’s office in Washington, where an after-hours secretary said she’d relay his number to Mallard. Mallard called five minutes later: “We’re downtown at a place called Joseph’s. Let me read the menu to you . . .”
    Lucas ordered a steak, medium, baked potato without sour cream and a Diet Coke. He found Joseph’s fifteen minutes later, just as the waiter was delivering the food to Mallard and an angular gray-haired woman named Malone. She was just about his age, Lucas thought, somewhere in the murky forties.
    “Malone is our legal specialist,” Mallard said as he went to work on the steak. “She keeps track of the taps and the warrants and all that, and talks to the judge when we need to talk to him.”
    “Are you an agent?” Lucas asked.
    Malone had just pushed a tiny square of beef into her mouth, and instead of answering, opened the left side of her pin-striped jacket so Lucas could see the butt of a black automatic pistol.
    “Nice accessories,” Lucas said. Trying a little bit.
    “Cop charm works really well on me,” Malone said, after she swallowed. “I get all atwitter.”
    “You wanna stop that?” Mallard asked. “I hate middle-aged courtship rituals.”
    “What’s his problem?” Lucas asked Malone.
    “Recently divorced,” Malone said, tipping her head at Mallard. “Still loves her.”
    “Sorry,” Lucas said.
    “Not true, anyway. I’m all done with that,” Mallard said, and for one small second he looked so miserable that Lucas wanted to pat him on the back and tell him it’d be okay; but Lucas didn’t believe it would be, and Mallard wouldn’t either. “Besides,” Mallard added, “I’m not all alone in that condition.”
    “If you’re talking to me, you’re talking to the wrong person,” Malone said. “I don’t like