Chosen Prey

can’t get tight with the idea of feeding live gerbils to big snakes. You know, as an everyday thing.”
     
    T HE C OBRA WAS as dim inside as out, a narrow entry past the bar with its red leatherette stools, a couple of tables in the back with a color TV, a shuffleboard bowling game, and what appeared to be a little-used dartboard. The smell of beer and peanuts and smoke. A unisex toilet in the back showed down a back hall, next to a lighted sign that said “Caution, Alarm Will Sound: Emergency Exit Only.” Two customers sat at a table in the back, watching a Lakers game. A third huddled over the bar. Lucas pointed at a stool and said, “Beer?”
    “You buy,” Del said.
    The bartender drifted over, pulled two beers, gave Lucas change on a five. Lucas laid his badge case on the bar and said, “We’re cops. We’re looking around for one of your regulars.”
    “Yeah?” The bartender was friendly enough. “I seen you on TV once or twice. You the Minneapolis guy?”
    “Yeah. We’re looking for Larry Lapp,” Lucas said. “You know him?”
    “Larry?” The bartender was surprised. “What’d he do?”
    “Nothing, really. We need to talk about a friend of his.”
    “I wondered. He’s a good guy. . . . He was here tonight, must’ve left two hours ago. He only lives two or three blocks away, I think, but I don’t know where, exactly.”
    “Couldn’t find him in the phone book,” Lucas said.
    “He’s got an old lady, I think it’s her house.” He spread his hands apologetically. “All I know about her is that her name is Marcella.”
    Del nodded toward the back of the bar. “Any of those guys know him?”
    The bartender looked. “Those guys?” He thought about it. “Yeah, maybe.”
    Lucas and Del collected their beers and walked to the back, where the two guys were watching the basketball game; they were painters, Lucas thought, still in paint-spattered jeans. Both were in their mid-twenties; one was wearing a Twins baseball hat and the other a Vikings sweatshirt with a plastic football on the chest. Lucas and Del watched the game for a minute, then Lucas said to the guy in the baseball cap, “We’re police officers. We’re looking for a friend of yours.”
    The two men looked at each other, then the guy in the baseball hat shrugged and said, “Who? What’d he do?”
    “Larry Lapp, and he didn’t do anything. We just need to talk to him about a woman he used to know.”
    “Oh, jeez . . . You’re talking about that girl that got killed?” the Vikings fan asked.
    They nodded, and Del asked, “You knew her?”
    “Knew who she was,” the Vikings fan said. “She was from the neighborhood, until her folks moved out-state somewhere. She knew some other kids from over here.”
    “I understand she was . . . seeing this Lapp guy,” Lucas said, giving a little extra to the “seeing.”
    “Oh, man, I don’t think so—and you could get Larry in big trouble with his wife, talking that way,” the guy said. “Him and this girl went back a long way, you know, to junior high or something. They weren’t doin’ nothing, but Marcella ain’t gonna believe that if you go knockin’ on her door.”
    Del said, “Mind if we sit for a minute?” and pulled around a chair without waiting for an answer. Lucas pulled one up for himself, leaned on the table, and said quietly, “We were told that this girl . . . might have been selling it. Hundred bucks a throw. Nobody’s gonna get in trouble for talking about it, or even going with her—we’re just trying to get some traction on the murder. Either of you guys ever hear anything like that?”
    “That’s bullshit,” said the baseball cap, sitting back. “Whoever told you that is an asshole.”
    “Never heard nothing like that,” the football-shirt guy said, shaking his head. “She was a nice kid. Shy. I mean, if she was selling it, she could’ve sold it to me, and she never offered or even let on that, you know, it might be possible.”
    The baseball cap said, “Same with me. We get a pro in here every once in a while, and it’s not like you don’t figure it out pretty goddamn quick.”
    “Look around,” the football shirt said. They looked down the bar at the cheap stools, at the used booths sloppily cut into the new space, at the crap littering the floor. “You think you’re gonna find a hundred-dollar girl working this place? Twenty-nine-ninety-five is more like it.”
    “This Lapp guy,” Del said.
    “You’re