Easy Prey

they took apart his garbage disposal,” Lucas said.
    “I didn’t know fingernails would do that,” Sloan said. They thought about fingernails, and headed back into St. Paul.
     
 
RODRIGUEZ WAS AT his office. Another patrol cop had been stuffed into a sport coat and left to keep an eye on him. They found him shifting from foot to foot in the Skyway, eating popcorn out of an oversized box. “Hey, guys,” he said when Lucas and Sloan stepped into the Skyway. He looked at the popcorn box in his hand and said, “Gift from the St. Paul guys. Their precinct is right inside.”
    “What’s he doing?” Lucas asked.
    “Working on his computer. He went away for a while, and I lost him, but he came back.”
    “In his car?”
    “No, he walked back into the building somewhere. You see the building entrance . . . his office opens off that hallway. When he put on his coat, I ran down, but he was already out the door into the hallway. He was out of sight when I got there, so I went back to the parking garage and waited to see if he was coming out. . . . He never came out, and when I checked again, he was back in the office.”
    “So he went someplace inside.”
    “Yeah, but it’s all hooked into the Skyway through there, so he could have gone anywhere. He was gone for maybe twenty minutes.”
    “Put on his coat.”
    “Yeah.”
    They thought about that for a minute, but nothing occurred to them except that he probably hadn’t been on his way to the can.
    “Maybe we need a couple more guys,” Lucas said.
    “If we’re serious about him,” the cop agreed. “As it is, I’ve got my car parked down on the street, but if he comes out the ramp and turns the wrong way, I’m gonna be pretty obvious doing a U-turn fifteen feet behind him.”
    Lucas looked at Sloan and said, “More guys.”
    “And soon—my feet are killing me,” the cop said.
     
 
RODRIGUEZ WAS NOT what Lucas expected. He was not Latino: He didn’t look Latino, or sound Latino. He didn’t sound like a drug dealer, either. Most drug dealers had a streak of macho in them, or if not that, then a bit of backslapper bullshit.
    Rodriguez looked and sounded like a white middle-class businessman who’d crawled up out of the working class, sweating the details of whatever kind of business he was in. He was a large guy, thick-necked, thick-waisted, round-shouldered. Maybe he drank too much, and if so, it’d be beer, or if not beer, something serious—vodka martinis with a pearl onion. Lucas had seen the same guy in car salesmen, machine-shop owners, bartenders, union officials. He saw it sometimes in lawyers who came from a working-class background.
    And Rodriguez was mad: “What the fuck are you doing, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, bustin’ my reputation and my bidness dealings? I’ll tell you what: I’m getting my lawyer down here right now”—he snatched up a telephone—“and we’re gonna add this little patch of harassment to the lawsuit. I don’t need no goddamn apartment buildings, because I’m gonna get rich suing the city of Minneapolis for about a billion bucks, and this ain’t the first time you Minneapolis cops got nailed doing this kind of harassment bullshit and--”
    “You’re dealing drugs, Richard,” Lucas said. “We can prove that. We can prove you ran Sandy Lansing: We’ve got people who will stand up in court and say so. We can prove you got a bunch of bullshit loans that you supported with dope money, and the IRS is gonna come after your ass. We’ve got all that. The question is, can we get you for killing Alie’e? We know you did it, we just gotta fit the suit to you.”
    “Bullshit. I never touched that bitch.” He’d been punching numbers into his phone set, and now he spoke into the phone. “Let me talk to Sam. The cops are here, hassling me. Davenport and some other guy.” He listened for a moment, then thrust the phone at Lucas. “Talk to him.”
    “No. We’re leaving,” Lucas said. “I just wanted to get a look at your ass. We’re coming for you, Richard.”
    “Fuck you,” Rodriguez said, and into the phone, “He won’t talk to you. They’re leaving. . . . Yeah, yeah.”
    As Lucas and Sloan went through the office door into the hallway, they heard the phone clattering on the desk, and a minute later Rodriguez was in the hall behind them. “Let me tell you assholes something,” he said. “Let me tell you something. You and me. My goddamn mother was no better’n a whore in