Easy Prey

it.”
    “So you’re up? Right now?”
    “I could be, if you whispered in Frank’s shell-like ear,” Marcy said.
    “You remember Trick Bentoin?”
     
 
SHERRILL DIDN’T WANT to go after Bentoin, but if she could bring him into the state attorney’s office, he could keep Del free all day.
    “So if I do this, I can work Alie’e for you?”
    “We’re all working Alie’e after this,” Lucas said. “Maybe forever.”
    Sherrill leaned back in her chair, locked her hands behind her head, and studied him.
    “What?” he asked.
    “You’ve got something going on, the way you look. You look sort of . . . snazzy.”
    “Meeting an old friend for lunch,” Lucas said. No point in denying it. During the affair, Sherrill had learned to read his mind.
    “Nice-looking, I’d guess.” She smiled.
    “I don’t know. I really haven’t talked to her in twenty years.”
    “Whoa. So what happened? She just came back to town?”
    “No, she’s been living down south, on the Mississippi, somewhere down there.”
    And she could read his mind. She rocked forward, her face serious. “Lucas, is she married?”
    He shrugged. “She’s not entirely unmarried, as I understand it. Look, we’re just having lunch.”
    “Oh, God. Don’t fuck her up, Lucas.”
    He was offended, stiffened up. “I won’t. And you go get Bentoin, okay? Call me when you’ve got him.”
    “Lucas . . .” Even more serious now. “Lucas, man, she’s your age, she’s married, she’s in the danger zone. You could seriously mess her up. I can tell by the way you’re acting.”
    “Find Bentoin.” He turned and left. In the hall, under his breath, he said, “Fuck you,” and looked at his watch. Plenty of time for an errand.
    CARL KNOX HAD taken a fine Sunday morning to look at a stolen Kubota 2900 tractor with a front loader and rear-mounted backhoe; an accessory mower was piled on the front of the trailer that held the tractor. While Carl looked, a freckle-faced, straw-haired, outraged thief was talking about the turf tires, practically unused—the goddamn machine had only 145 hours on it, came straight off the best golf course in southern Minnesota. What was this two-thousand-dollar shit?
    Carl couldn’t hear him, because he was thinking about a Cree Indian guy named Louis Arnot up in Canada, who’d been calling around looking for just such a machine. Arnot would pay twelve thousand American if Carl could deliver the tractor to Kenora, Ontario, which he could, but his guys would have to change the numbers and he’d have to come up with some Kubota papers, and he hadn’t done Kubota in a couple of years.
    His daughter had come out to the shop with him. She’d been inside, fooling with the books, but now suddenly broke through the Service Department door and said, “The cops are here.”
    “Uh-oh,” he said. He waved her back inside, and then looked at the tractor. “How hot is this thing?”
    “Nobody even knows it’s stolen yet,” Roy said nervously.
    Davenport came around the corner of the building, fifty yards away. Knox said, quietly, “Here he comes. Don’t look. I know this guy, and he’s not here about the tractor.”
    “I’ll take the two thousand,” Roy said, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Knox stepped away from the trailer to greet Davenport.
    “Nice-looking machine,” Lucas said as he strolled up. “I use a B20 up north.”
    “No offense, but that’s practically a fucking lawn mower,” Knox said. Enough small talk. “What’s going on?”
    Lucas was offended, but tried not to show it. Instead, he looked at the freckle-faced thief: “Why don’t you go get a Coke?”
    “Sounds good,” Roy said. He hopped off the trailer and hotfooted it across the parking lot, toward the Service Department door. Through the glass panel of the door, Lucas could see the pale face of Knox’s daughter peering out at them.
    “Why’s everybody so nervous?” he asked. “What’s everybody doing at work on a Sunday?”
    “You work every day if you have a small business, and you’re not sucking out of the state trough,” Knox said.
    “That can’t be it,” Lucas said. He looked at the Kubota. “What, that hick steal this tractor?”
    “Jesus, Davenport, he’s a goddamn basement excavator who’s going broke and has to sell his job. What do you want?”
    “A list,” Lucas said. “We chase all over town, going after the big dope wholesalers, the gangs, the people pushing shit on the street, and we pretty much know