Chosen Prey

motherfucker.”
    “Tell them,” DDT said.
    She looked at him and said, “You’re supposed to be on my side.”
    “I owe him,” he said. “Big-time. So you can tell him or move the fuck out.”
    She looked at DDT for a minute, then at Lucas, and said, “He’s in St. Paul, one of them gray apartments on Sibley. I don’t know the number.” She gave them a few details, and Lucas nodded: He knew exactly where she meant. “Thanks.”
    “You be careful. The crazy fucker’s been smokin’ crack since he got back—he ain’t got any brains left. And don’t tell him where you got this.”
    DDT said, “So what’re you driving?”
    “C4,” Lucas said. “Bought it new last year.”
    “Yeah? But you’re not right now. . . .” He raised his eyebrows and looked at the three large men.
    “Not with me. I’m in a company car,” Lucas said.
    “Whyn’t you bring it around sometime?” DDT asked.
    “I will,” Lucas said. “Probably when it warms up a little. We’ll take it out for a run.”
    “Do that,” DDT said.
    On the way out of the house, Marshall said, “That was pretty smooth. Why’d he owe you so big?”
    “Last fall, I found him a four-fifty-five Olds engine. He was really hurting for one,” Lucas said.
    Marshall looked at him strangely and said, “You pullin’ my weenie?”
    “No . . . I mean, it was absolutely cherry.”
     
    L UCAS CALLED S T. Paul from the car, got Allport and filled him in on the jewelry and the connection to Randy Whitcomb.
    “I thought that cocksucker had moved to San Diego or something,” Allport said. “I’ll check with the condo association and see where he is.”
    “We’re on our way right now,” Lucas said. “If you or one of your guys wants to hook up with us.”
    “Need some help?”
    “We could use a warrant and somebody to block the back.”
    “Warrant’s no problem, not with this case. I’ll get a couple of squads and come up myself,” Allport said. “What, half an hour, forty-five minutes?”
    “About that,” Lucas said.
    They were out on I-494, one of the outer-loop highways around the Cities. Marshall, in the back, leaned forward and asked, “What are we doing?”
    “St. Paul’s going to block for us,” Lucas said. He explained the layout of the apartment complex: a rectangular block of two-story townhouse condos, facing the streets on all four sides of a city block. The interior of the rectangle was a common lawn, with marked but unfenced private patio areas behind each town house.
    “Can you get a car in back?” Marshall asked.
    “Not without trying pretty hard. There’re arched entrances to the big lawn on all four sides, but they’re not used for vehicles. Not regularly, anyway. I think they’re more like an emergency thing if there was a fire or something. St. Paul guys’ll have to go in on foot.”
    “Think this guy’ll run?”
    “Can’t tell what Randy’ll do,” Del said. “He’s a rattlesnake and a crazy motherfucker. Comes from a decent family, and they just should have snapped his neck when he was a baby. Would have saved everybody a lot of grief.”
    “Known a couple like that myself,” Marshall said. He thought about it for a minute, then said, “Farm kids, usually. When it happens like that.”
     
    A FTER ANOTHER PHONE call to Allport, they agreed to meet three blocks from Randy’s to coordinate. Six St. Paul uniformed guys arrived in three squads, including one guy who was the designated hammer. They were all in their thirties—veterans—and Lucas guessed that it was not by chance: Allport was taking it seriously.
    “The problem is that the door is at the bottom of a set of stairs—the downstairs part is basically a garage and workshop, or extra bedroom, and the living quarters are upstairs. So we’re gonna be squeezed onto the stairs if we have to kick the door,” Allport said. He looked around at his crew. “Lucas and Del and I have known this asshole ever since he came downtown six or seven years ago. He can be bad news, so be careful. He’s not that big, but he’s crazy and he’s tough as a goddamn hickory tree. He’s a biter. He’ll bite your goddamn fingers off if you get too close.”
    The uniforms weren’t worried. “Give us a couple of minutes to get close,” one of them said. “He won’t run away from us.”
    “We’ve never found a gun on him,” Lucas said. “But he’s carried one from time to time. He’s been doing a lot of crack, we hear, and maybe some