Easy Prey

every one of them. The ones we don’t know, the ones we can’t get at, are the really smart ones who only move a kilo or so a week, to rich people. Nobody ever complains, nobody ever gets caught. Nobody’s standing on a street corner. We need some of those names.”
    “You know I don’t mess with dope. Too dangerous.”
    “But you do loan-sharking, Carl. And you got that layoff business with the sports-book guys. You know a lot of rich people who get their money in strange ways, and put a lot of it up their nose, and who don’t buy their shit down in the ghetto.”
    “You’re gonna get my nuts cut off,” Knox said.
    Lucas shrugged. “So who’s ever gonna know that you’re talking to me? And it gives us just that much less incentive to figure out what you really do for a living. You know, the ugly details.”
    “Is this part of the Alie’e Maison thing?”
    “Yeah, part of it.”
    “Nobody ought to be killing young girls,” Knox said. “I saw the story in the Star-Tribune this morning, the interview with her parents.” He looked toward the service door, where his daughter’s face still floated in the rectangle of black glass in the service door. “I can ask around,” he said. “But like the last time, I might come up empty.”
    “That helped, when you came up empty,” Lucas said. “It eliminated some possibilities.”
    “So I can ask,” Knox said. “Now, you wanna take a hike before my kid breaks out in hives?”
     
 
LUCAS LEFT. HALFWAY back to the corner of the building, he turned and said, “I’ll anxiously await your call.”
    Knox shook his head and watched until Lucas had turned the corner. The freckle-faced thief eased out of the building and asked, “What’d he want?”
    “Just bullshit,” Knox said. He turned to the thief. “You said nobody knows the tractor is gone yet?”
    “Won’t nobody know until tomorrow, when the owner gets back from Vegas.”
    “Can you get it back there?”
    “Get it back? I just stole it,” Roy said.
    “Yeah, but this guy is gonna look it up, just sure as shit. If it’s on a list, he’s gonna be back here, and he’s gonna want to know where it went. I’d have to tell him I turned you down, and then he’d come looking for you.”
    “You wouldn’t tell him. . . .”
    Knox shrugged. “You’re not a real big part of my business.”
    “Well, goddamn, Carl . . .”
    “So you take it back,” Knox said. “When does your guy go to Vegas again?”
    “He goes every couple of months.”
    “So steal it again, then. I’ll give you three thousand,” Knox said.
    “Three?”
    “Take it or leave it.”
    The thief looked up at the big orange tractor and said, “I’m gonna be out fifty bucks for gas.”
    “Hey, Roy?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Tell somebody who gives a shit.”
     
 
LUCAS STOPPED BACK at headquarters, left a note for a guy in Property Crimes, asking him to check on stolen Kubota 2900 tractors. He looked at his watch every thirty seconds for ten minutes, then headed for a restaurant called The Bell Jar. No sign of Catrin. He was a few minutes early, but he started to worry. Maybe she’d bailed. . . .
    The maître d’ put him in a corner, where he could see the room. A waitress came by and dropped off the drinks menu; a couple of minutes later she came back and he ordered a martini. “Will you be dining by yourself today?” she asked.
    “No, I . . .” And Catrin came in the door. “I’m meeting that lady right there.”
     
 
CATRIN, HE THOUGHT, had dressed as carefully as he had, in a light gray-wool skirt, a black cashmere sweater, and low heels. She was wearing small diamond earrings. She looked, he thought, absolutely wonderful. She read his face and might have colored, just a bit, as he stood up to meet her.
    “Lucas.”
    “How are you?” He was fumbling already. “I mean, with your friend . . .”
    “Funeral’s on Tuesday,” she said. “It’s over. With what she’d been through, it was time. I don’t feel the least bit bad about it.”
    “Okay. . . .”
    She smiled and said, “Did you order?”
    “A martini.”
    “A martini? What happened to the Grain Belt?”
    “Only on special occasions,” he said. He looked around the restaurant. “If you ordered bratwurst in this place, the chef’d probably faint.”
    “So I’ll have a martini,” she said. “An old-time drink with an old-time friend.”
    And she was fumbling, he thought.
    “Last time I saw you—not yesterday, but back when—you were