Certain Prey

young guys who looked like they might slap you on the back, women who might enjoy the odd bit of gossip. Empathizers.
    Lucas and Bretano had brought Davis and her daughter back to the apartment, and waited while they packed. When they left, Davis gave the keys to Lucas. “Use the phone or the toilet, if you have to. I’ll pick them up when we get back.” Having the cops around had restored some confidence—but she still wanted to get out of town, and in a hurry. L UCAS USED the apartment as a temporary headquarters while the uniformed cops worked the neighborhood, moving back and forth, visiting and revisiting homes, waiting for people to get home from work, sorting bullshit from egg creams. A little after three o’clock, a cop named Lane wandered into the apartment, carrying a Pepsi, and sat down in a kitchen chair. Lucas was at the kitchen table, just getting off the phone.
    “What?” he asked.
    Lane leaned back, took a hit on the Pepsi. “I’ve been trying to get a break into plainclothes for more’n a fucking year now, and I can’t get it done.”
    “I thought I saw you in plainclothes . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah, that was just the drug guys looking for a fresh face. After a few weeks, my face wasn’t fresh, and I was back sitting in a squad. What I’m saying is, you gotta help get me outa this fuckin’ uniform.”
    Lucas shrugged: “I don’t know you very well, you know? I don’t know what you’d bring to the job especially . . .”
    “I was the guy who found that three-eighty in the McDonald case last fall, you remember? I mean, there was luck involved, but I’m a lucky guy. I pushed it, and we rang the bell.”
    Lucas nodded. “I remember. And being a lucky guy is pretty critical.”
    “I know. But I keep getting this bullshit about being good on the streets, and all that. How they don’t want to lose me off patrol. But I don’t want to be on patrol, and they’re gonna lose me anyway, if they don’t move me. I’ll go someplace else.”
    “This is the only place to work in the state,” Lucas said. Then he tried to put him off. “Anyway, you know, let me ask around.”
    Lane cracked a grin. “I really didn’t come in here to make a speech about getting off patrol, but I thought I’d take the opportunity, especially since I look so good right now.”
    Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, yeah?”
    “Yeah. I was down the street, at 1414, there’s a Mrs. Rann, Gloria Rann. She got home at about nine-fifteen last night. She knows because she caught the bus at University and Cretin when she got off work at nine, and it takes ten minutes to get home, and she was hurrying because she had a show she wanted to watch at nine-thirty. She just had time to put the garbage out before the show started. She sees a small athletic woman getting into what she thinks might have been a green car parked on the street, right on the curb at her house. She couldn’t see the woman’s face, but she thought she might be a college kid, because she looked athletic and because the neighborhood has a lot of college kids around. And . . . she had big hair.”
    Lucas leaned forward: “That’d be right.”
    Lane said, “Yeah. She fits the profile you gave us. Anyway, I ask Mrs. Rann if she’d ever seen the car before, and she said, ‘No, it wasn’t from around here.’ And I say, ‘How do you know that?’ And she says, because when she was walking home from the bus, it was still a little light, and she looked at the car because it was parked right in front of her house.”
    He paused for dramatic effect, and Lucas said, “What?”
    “It had an Avis sticker on it. It was a rental car.”
    “Sonofabitch,” Lucas said. H E TOOK L ANE with him to the airport, tracked down the Avis manager, who was out at the return area, and brought him back to the main office. The manager didn’t need a search warrant. He said, “Let me run a list for you. But I can tell you right now, it’s gonna be eighty to ninety percent guys. Probably won’t be more than ten or fifteen women.”
    “Mid-sized green car, athletic-looking woman, small,” Lane said. “Maybe a redhead.”
    The manager’s hands were hovering over the computer keyboard, but he stopped, turned to Lane and frowned. “Small and athletic redhead? Nice, uh, figure?”
    “That’s what we understand,” Lucas said.
    “Could it have been a champagne Dodge? Instead of green? Because I swear to God, a woman who looks like that returned a champagne Dodge up