Chosen Prey

told him I couldn’t afford it, but what I really think was, the risk must have been terrific. Maybe he took a hit.”
    They batted it all around for a while, and finally Cheryl, Del’s wife, watching her husband crack a lobster claw and dip it in butter, asked, “I wonder if lobster has as much cholesterol as shrimp?”
    “Both are sorta like bugs,” Lucas said. He got up and said, “More beer?”
    Cheryl looked at the other two women. “Is Del the only one with high cholesterol?”
    “Ah, shut up,” Del said.
    “No, really.”
    “Sloan’s is so low that it’s like a race with his blood pressure, to see which one can hit bottom first. I’m sorta borderline,” Sloan’s wife said.
    “I’m okay. Lucas has to think about it, but he’s basically okay, if he’d just cut out the doughnuts,” Weather said.
    “Del’s ought to be better with this Lapovorin stuff.” Cheryl poked her husband with her elbow. “That doesn’t mean you can eat everything in sight. Go back on those terrible pig rinds.”
    “Shut up. You gonna eat those claws?”
    She pushed her plate toward him. “Mr. Sophisticated has been worrying about what that guy told you in the bar,” she said to Lucas.
    Lucas had to think a minute: the Cobra. “Oh, yeah. Lapovorin makes you come backwards.”
    “What?” Sloan was interested.
    “Ah, Jesus,” Del said.
    “This guy told us that this woman who got killed by the gravedigger, that the only thing that she said about him—she was laughing about it—was that he was taking Lapovorin and was afraid that he was gonna be screwed up sexually.”
    “Like he isn’t,” Weather said.
    “Yeah, but this is some kind of real physical thing,” Lucas said. “Some kind of ejaculation thing happens, and . . .”
    He hesitated to say it, but Del didn’t. “You come backwards. Nothing comes out.”
    They were all mildly amused, and Weather said, “Del, that’s nonsense. I know a little about Lapovorin, and there are no side effects like that at all. You’ve got to have your liver function checked every once in a while, a blood test—”
    “Really?” he said, brightening. “I got the blood test.”
    “You mean the guy was talking through his ass?” Lucas asked. “I was planning to pimp Del with this for the next ten years.”
    “Not Lapovorin. What he was talking about is a situation that you see in a certain percentage of men who use that baldness drug,” Weather said.
    “What?” Del asked.
    “You know. It’s on television all the time,” Weather said. “It’s got enough weird hormones in it that they recommend that women never handle it. Not even get dust on them.”
     
    T HE THREE COPS did the dishes while the women talked in the living room. They filled Sloan in on the gravedigger case, and talked a bit about Terry Marshall.
    “Tough guy,” Del said. “You get that way, I think, when you’re one of those country guys. Around here it’s all lawyers and shit, but out in the country, a lot of times it’s just you, and you got to fix it.”
    “Know what you mean,” Lucas said. “But he’s got this soul-brother thing going with Anderson.”
    “Anderson.”
    They spent the rest of the evening gossiping about friends and acquaintances. Cheryl Capslock asked Weather if they’d made any decision about children, and when they were going to get married, if they were. “We haven’t figured out a wedding date,” Weather said. “We’re still working on that. We’re working on a kid at the same time.”
    “Good luck,” Sloan said. “Let’s see, Lucas, you’ll be about, mmm, ninety-four when the kid graduates from high school. . . .”
     
    W ITH ALL THE talk, nothing tripped with Lucas until the next morning. Weather had already gone, and he was in the shower.
    Weather, he thought, might have been slightly irritated with Sloan’s crack about Lucas’s age, especially since Weather wasn’t that much younger. The thought of aging, and the thought of the whole group getting gray, and that they were worrying about cholesterol and reverse ejaculation . . .
    He was grinning into the shower head, thinking about the coming-backwards discussion, when it struck him.
    “Sonofabitch,” he said. He stepped away from the water and looked down at his feet. Weather said it was the baldness remedy that made you come backwards?
    So the guy was bald, or getting that way. He didn’t look like the Jackal actor—that guy was all teeth and eyes and hair. Take away the