Easy Prey

at Poetry, found a collection of Philip Larkin’s stuff, and was reading through it when she snuck up behind him. “ Guns ’n’ Ammo ,” she predicted, reaching for the book. He let her have it, and she turned it over in her hands and then looked up at him. “Showing off for a girl, eh?”
    He shrugged. “Not really. I don’t read much fiction, but I read poetry.”
    She closed one eye and examined him. “You’re lying like a motherfucker.”
    “Nope.”
    “One of the other cops told me you once owned a computer company.”
    “Yeah, but it was really somebody else who did the computer stuff,” Lucas said. “I just had some good ideas at the right time.”
    “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Having the right ideas at the right time.” She turned the book over. “You think I’d like him?”
    He thought for a minute, then said, “Nope. He’s a little too guy for you.”
    “Who, then?”
    “Emily Dickinson? She’s my favorite—probably the best American poet ever.”
    “All right, I’ll try her,” she said. “Otherwise, all I got was this.” She held up a book with a pot on the cover that said, Japanese Ash Glazes.
    “I got a deep interest in ash myself,” Lucas said.
     
 
AFTER THE BOOKSTORE, they went to a bagel place and got healthy bagels. As they were eating, Jael paging through her collection of Dickinson, she suggested that they go back to the bookstore so she could buy some mysteries. “I always go into the bookstores and wind up buying books for work, or something serious, but if I’ve got to keep sitting in that house, I gotta have something else. I can’t stand TV anymore.”
    “If you want to buy mysteries, there’s a place on the way back that we could stop. Nothing but mysteries.”
    “Sounds good.” She licked a drip of sun-dried tomato hummus off her thumb. “We need to kill some more time.” But in the car, she said, “At your house, do you have both a bathtub and a shower? Or are you just a shower guy?”
    “No, I have both.”
    “Since we’ve gotta kill time, why don’t we go back to your place and jump in the tub? It’s been a while since I had a really great back-washing.”
    They were sitting at an uphill stop sign, and Lucas had one foot on the clutch and let the car roll back a few feet, then accelerated forward, and rolled back, thinking. “Maybe I need a little more romancing,” he said finally. “Besides . . .”
    “Another commitment?”
    “Not exactly. But . . . I’m sort of between everything,” he said.
    “I know you’re not gay, the way you look at me.”
    “That’s not the problem.” But it had been a long time: He remembered standing outside the cabin and looking up at the great smear of the Milky Way stars and feeling not insignificant, but lonely. And alone.
    “It’s just casual sex, Lucas. Therapy,” she said.
    “Maybe I’m still too Catholic. Besides, what about the guys at the bookstore? They need the sales. What’re their children gonna eat if we don’t buy books?”
    “You remember what it feels like? Sitting in a tub, with a woman between your legs, all slippery and slidey, and you’ve got the soap in your hands . . .” She was laughing at him again.
    Lucas let the car roll back, and accelerated, and let it roll back, and accelerated, and said, “All right.”
    “Good choice,” she said. “Fuck the guys at the bookstore.”
    She was laughing, but later that evening she said, “For three hours, I almost forgot about Plain.”

22
    THURSDAY. DAY SIX of Alie’e Maison.
    Frank Lester was carrying a brown sandwich bag up the City Hall steps when Lucas caught up with him the next morning, half jogging through the cold twilight, trailing a long streamer of steam. “Baloney sandwiches?”
    “Peanut butter and jelly,” Lester said. He held up the bag; he was wearing ski gloves. “I understand you were out late with Jael Corbeau.”
    “Yeah, a little late, rolling around town,” Lucas said evasively. “She didn’t want to go back home.”
    “Not a goddamn thing happening. Not with Corbeau, not with Kinsley. Maybe we’re fucked up. Maybe Olson’s not the guy. He’s been preaching every night, he goes around to all these churches. The guys who’re tracking him say he’s completely loony, but the people at these churches, they love him. Last night, he started to bleed--”
    “Aw, man, I don’t want to hear that,” Lucas said.
    “Can’t figure out how he did it. Thought maybe he has a