Easy Prey

go,” Lucas said.
    “How long before we catch the guy?”
    “Another place--”
    She nodded. “--that I don’t want to go.”
     
 
DERRICK DEAL HAD once been an assistant county assessor, more or less. His actual position was bagman for a city council cabal that was selling cut-rate property assessments. The cabal ran into trouble when Deal tried to hit up a machine-shop owner, who happened to be the uncle of a vice cop. The cop did some cop shit and got a tape of Deal soliciting a payoff.
    Then the cop made a mistake. He believed that if he simply nailed Deal, that Deal’s brother assessors would, in turn, punish his uncle by running up his assessments, even as Deal went off to six weeks in jail. So instead of arresting him, the cop let Deal listen to the tape, and told him to lay off. Deal misinterpreted the threat and ran to his city council protectors. They went to the chief—this was three chiefs ago—who squashed the vice cop like a bug. The vice cop found himself working traffic management on construction sites.
    Then he rang in his brother cops—notably Lucas. Lucas set up a sting operation and Deal went to jail for nine months. His city council employers managed to slide, and Deal’s brother assessors did the expected number on the machine-shop owner, whose taxes went up fifty percent.
    When Deal got out of jail, he tried selling cars and then houses, but wasn’t good at it. His skills lay in bureaucracy and blackmail, not sales. Lucas heard that he’d gone to California, and until Lane mentioned his name, assumed he was still there.
    “Derrick Deal?” he asked himself as he walked across town.
     
 
BROWN’S HOTEL WAS a brick building a block from the IDS tower. From the outside, it barely looked like a hotel; you had to know it was there. Lucas nodded at the white-gloved doorman, who held the door for him, and turned right across the plush red carpet, around a circular seat with a spray of out-of-season gladiolas in the center, to the reception desk. A neat young woman stood behind the desk. She was black, with delicate bones in her face; she wore a conservative suit and a silver-and-turquoise necklace with small oval stones. “Yes, sir?”
    “I need to see Mr. Deal? Derrick Deal?” Lucas said.
    “Can I tell him who’s calling?”
    “No.” Lucas smiled to soften the answer, slipped his ID from his pocket, and showed it to her. “This is sort of a surprise. If you could just show me where he is?”
    She reached for a phone. “I’ll call the manager on duty.”
    Lucas stretched across the desk and put his hand on the phone. “Please don’t do that. Just show me where Mr. Deal works.”
    “I’ll get in trouble.” Her lip trembled.
    “No, you won’t,” Lucas said. “Believe me.”
    She looked both ways, saw no help, touched her lip with her tongue, and said, “He’s in his office . . . down the hall.” She looked to her right, a long narrow hallway off the lobby.
    “Show me the door.”
    She looked both ways again, as if the manager might spring out of the red carpet, and finally said, “This way.” She came out from behind the desk and started down the hall, walking swiftly. When they were out of sight of the lobby, she slowed. “Is he in trouble?”
    “I have a question for him.”
    “If he’s not in trouble, he should be,” she said.
    “Really?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s a jerk.”
    “Wait a minute,” Lucas said quietly. They stopped in the hallway. “What’s a jerk?”
    “He hassles people,” she said.
    “For money? Sex? Dope?”
    “Not dope,” she said.
    “You’ve had to fight him off?” Lucas asked.
    “Not exactly. I’m a little too dark for him. And I told him that if he hassled me, my brother would cut off his testicles.”
    “He believed you?”
    “Yes. My brother came over and showed him the knife,” she said.
    “Ah.”
    “But we have all these little maids, a lot of them are Mexican, and maybe they don’t have papers. It’s this tight economy is the reason they hire them.”
    “He puts the bite on them?”
    “Yes. Sometimes sex—there are usually a few empty rooms around. Mostly it’s money. The guests leave tips for the maids, ten dollars or twenty dollars. He might take out fifty dollars a day, all told. The maids are afraid to turn him down. All he has to do is make an anonymous phone call. He lets them know it.”
    “Maybe they should bring their brothers up from Mexico,” Lucas said.
    She shook her head. “Easy to