Easy Prey

Photographs.”
    “Maybe. You think I couldn’t?”
    “I don’t even know how you’d go about it.”
    “It’s not like I’d be broke. Like I said the other day, we’ve got money.”
    “So why don’t you just go ahead and do what you want, without walking? Just tell him, ‘Look, I’m gonna be busy for the next couple of years. Remind me to stop by once in a while.’”
    “’Cause he’s in the way,” she said. “Anything I’d do, it’d be a hobby. We’d have to go to London for shows and someplace for family medical conventions, and I’d have to cook at Thanksgiving and Christmas for the kids and we’d have to keep up with our friends. . . . I couldn’t think. I just need to think. ”
    “And what happens to Jack?”
    “You know what I think?” She looked at him steadily. “I think if we got divorced in January, he’d be married again by December.”
    “You’ve got somebody in mind for the job?” Lucas asked.
    “No. He doesn’t fool around. But he needs a wife to hold him up, and if I moved out, there are plenty of women around town who’d sign up as candidates.”
    Lucas shook his head. “You know what? I bet he’d be devastated. I bet he wouldn’t be married in five years. You’d be a little hard to . . . get over.”
    She smiled at him, a sad smile. “Thanks.”
    “You gotta think about it,” Lucas said. “Probably the most important thing you’ve thought about since you got married, or got pregnant.”
    “I didn’t think about those things. I just did them,” she said.
    “So think about this.”
    She nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”
     
 
OUTSIDE, ON THE sidewalk, she said, “This whole conversation took a kind of unexpected turn. It was more like therapy than anything. . . . You’ve thought about this more than I expected you would have.”
    “I had a woman I wanted to marry, and didn’t. She wouldn’t. I’m still not over it,” Lucas said. “When I look around City Hall, or the County Courthouse, the place is full of wounded people. I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember this happening to our parents’ generation.”
    “It probably did, but they just never told us,” Catrin said.
    “Yeah.” Lucas took a step back. “So think about it.”
    “One of the things I’m thinking about,” she said, “is sleeping with you. But I’ve got to decide whether to do it before I walk, just to try it out, to see if I’ve got anything left . . . or just go ahead and walk out, and sleep with you later.”
    Lucas was offended. “Like I don’t have a say in it.”
    She regarded him for a minute, then shook her head. “Not much. You already want to sleep with me. If I really wanted to force it, I could press up against you and you’d get all kinds of Catholic guilt and everything, and you’d go raving up and down the house waving your arms, and then you’d do it.”
    “Jesus, I’m a piece of meat.”
    “Not that,” she said. She reached out with an index finger and pushed against his chest. “You’re just one of those guys who likes to sleep with women. You need the comfort. And you’re not seeing anyone now. So I could do it, if I wanted to. . . . I just have to think.”
    He took another step back. “Well . . . let me know.”
    Now she laughed, and for a moment she looked like she was nineteen again. “I will.”
     
 
FROM HIS CAR, Lucas used his cell phone to call his friend Bone; fifteen minutes later, Bone’s secretary pushed him past a panel of waiting middle managers in the banker’s outer office.
    Bone was looking at two computer monitors at the same time. He turned away from them when Lucas came in and said, “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got so much radiation going through my skull, you could put a roll of film behind my head and get an X ray.”
    “How’s your ankle?”
    “Hurts. Should be okay by next week.” They played pickup basketball twice a week. Bone had once been a suspect in a case Lucas had worked. Now he was not only a friend, but his banker connections could get Lucas useful financial information. “I got that stuff on your guy.”
    “Confidentially.”
    “Of course. But there wasn’t much.”
    “Would you loan him money?”
    Bone leaned back. “There are two things you look at before you loan a guy money: history and security. He never had much security, but, boy, his history is good.”
    “Too good?”
    “No such thing as too good ,” Bone said. “It just can’t be too bad. ”
    “What if