Certain Prey

cop and said, “What the fuck are you doing?”
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m on a goddamn stakeout. I was on a goddamn stakeout,” Sherrill said. “Now I’m in a goddamn comedy routine.” People had stopped up and down the street to watch.
    “Well, jeez, we’re sorry.” The cop looked around at the audience and flapped his arms helplessly. “You shoulda told somebody, instead of just lurking around here. The doorman called. He said you’d been here for hours.”
    Sherrill could see the doorman in Carmel’s building peering at them through the lobby window. “Yeah, well: now I’m gonna drive around the block and park again,” she said. “And I’m telling you. Stay away from me or I swear to Christ, I’ll shoot you.”
    The cop peered in the back window and said, “Hi, Tom.”
    “Hi. Want some nachos?”
    “Nah. Give me heartburn. So you’re gonna go around the block?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well. Be cool.”
    Sherrill started the car, and they rolled away, Black laughing in the back. Then Sherrill started: “God, I love police work.” T WO MINUTES LATER, they were back on watch, Black still relaxed in the back and even deeper into the nachos. “How you been?” he asked through a mouthful of chips and cheese. “Since you and Davenport?”
    “I miss him. A lot,” she said.
    “He’s an asshole. Sorta.”
    “I miss him anyway,” she said. “Besides, while I agree he’s an asshole, he’s not an asshole like you think he is.”
    “Oh, I think I know.”
    “Just ’cause you’re queer doesn’t mean you know. You’re still a guy.”
    Black contemplated the statement, formulated a reply, ate the chips as he worked at it: carefully formulated replies were necessary in the stakeout business. You could sit for hours, and you didn’t want to run out of stuff to talk about—or piss off your partner—too soon.
    “Let me tell you my theory of queerness as relates to the straight male,” Black said. And he did, and after a while— ten minutes—Sherrill said, “I never would have thought of any of that.”
    “You’re not gay.”
    “It’s not that. It’s just that I couldn’t have come up with such an utter crock of shit.”
    Black put a final three nachos in his mouth and settled back to formulate another reply. Before he got a good paragraph together, Sherrill said, “Here they come—and Jesus Christ. Look at that dress.”
    Black peered over the sill of the back window. Allen and Carmel stepped out through the glass doors. Allen wore a dark jacket that Black suspected was lightweight cashmere; tan, expensive-looking slacks; and loafers. Carmel was in a shocking, low-cut red party dress and red shoes.
    “Nice dress,” Black said.
    “Nice? A little gaudy, don’t you think? And her tits are about coming out.”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Color is always good in clothing. And skin display is nice, in the summer.”
    “Don’t give me the fag act. Look at her. She’s like a billboard.”
    “All right. She’s obviously a tart,” Black said.
    “Thank you. Not nearly fine enough to aspire after the lovely Hale.”
    “And she certainly doesn’t have your tits.”
    “You don’t think?”
    “Marcy, you’ve probably got the third-best tits in Minneapolis. Davenport says sixth-best, and of course, he would know from firsthand observation, while Sloan says second-best—I don’t know about Sloan’s qualifications . . .”
    “He has none, and shut up, we’re going.”
    “Let me get my Big Gulp off the floor . . . Ah, shit.” R INKER MISSED the foul-up with the squad car; she’d already turned the corner, and was headed back to her hotel to pick up her car. She felt heavy as she went. She might have to kill the two of them, the mother and daughter. Might have to. And that felt wrong. These were people who’d never had a chance; they weren’t people who’d screwed up somehow, had gotten too stubbornly close to something that was bad for them. It was like all that gang-banger talk years ago, of mushrooms popping up in the line of fire. This mother and daughter were essentially mushrooms, and Rinker had always thought of herself more as a surgeon than as a gang-banger.
    She’d have to do this right.
    • • •

    C ARMEL AND H ALE A LLEN went to a club called the Swan, which had a twelve-piece orchestra and a blond chick singer with a voice like buttermilk, and danced. Old-style dances, cheek to cheek, hand in the middle of the back. Carmel could reach