Eyes of Prey

case,” Del said, poking an index finger at Lucas’ face. “You’re more fucked up than I am, and I’m a goddamned train wreck.”
    “Thanks . . .” Lucas opened his mouth to ask another question, but two pedestrians were drifting along the length ofthe window. One was a very light-skinned black woman, with a tan trench coat and a wide-brimmed cotton hat that matched the coat. The other was a tall, cadaverous white boy wearing a narrow-brimmed alpine hat with a small feather.
    Lucas sat up. “Randy.”
    Del looked out at the street, then reached across the table and took Lucas’ arm and said, “Take it easy, huh?”
    “She was my best snitch, man,” Lucas said, in a voice like a gravel road. “She was almost a friend.”
    “Bullfuck. Take it easy.”
    “Let him get all the way inside . . . . You go first, cover me, he knows my face . . . .”
    Randy came in first, his hands in his coat pockets. He posed for a moment, but nobody noticed. With twelve seconds left in the NBA game, the Celtics were one point down with a man at the line, shooting two. Everybody but the drunk hooker and the bitter old man who was talking into his overcoat was facing the tube.
    A woman came in behind Randy and pulled the door shut.
    Lucas came out of the booth a step behind Del. She’s beautiful, he thought, looking at the woman past Del’s shoulder; then he put his head down. Why would she hang with a dipshit like Randy?
    Randy Whitcomb was seventeen and a fancy man, with a gun and a knife and sometimes a blackthorn walking stick with a gold knob on the end of it. He had a long freckled face, coarse red hair and two middle teeth that pointed in slightly different directions. He shook himself like a dog, flicking water spray off his tweed coat. He was too young for a tweed coat and too thin and too crazy for the quality of it. He walked down the bar toward the drunk hooker, stopped, posed again, waiting to be seen. The hooker didn’t look up until he took a hand out of his coat and slid a church key down the bar, where it knocked a couple of quarters off her stack of change.
    “Marie,” Randy crooned. The bartender caught the tone and looked at him. Del and Lucas were closing, but Randy paid them no attention. He was focused on Marie like fire: “Marie, baby,” he warbled. “I hear you been talking to the cops . . . .”
    Marie tried to climb off the stool, looking around wildly for Lucas. The stool tipped backward and she reached out to catch herself on the bar, teetering. Randy slid around the corner of the bar, going for her, but Lucas was there, behind him. He put a hand in the middle of the boy’s back and pushed him, hard, into the bar.
    The bartender hollered, “Hey,” and Del had his badge out as Marie hit the floor, her glass shattering.
    “Police. Everybody sit still,” Del shouted. He slipped a short black revolver out of a hip holster and held it vertically in front of his face, where everybody in the bar could see it.
    “Randy Ernest Whitcomb, dickweed,” Lucas began, pushing Randy in the center of his back, looping his foot in front of the boy’s ankles. “You are under . . .”
    He had Randy leaning forward, his feet back, one arm held tight, the other going into his pocket for cuffs, when Randy screamed, “No,” and levered himself belly-down onto the bar.
    Lucas grabbed for one of his legs, but Randy kicked, thrashed. One foot caught Lucas on the side of the face, a glancing impact, but it hurt and knocked him back.
    Randy fell over the bar, scrambled along the floor behind it and up over the end of it, grabbed a bottle of Absolut vodka and backhanded it at Del’s head. Then he was running for the back of the bar, Lucas four steps behind him, knowing the back door was locked. Randy hit it, hit it again, then spun, his eyes wild, flashing a spike. They were all the fashion among the assholes. Clipped to a shirt pocket, they looked like Cross ballpoint pens. With the cap off, they were six-inch steel scalpels, the tip honed to a wicked point.
    “Come on, motherfucker cop,” Randy howled, spraying saliva at Lucas. His eyes were the size of half-dollars, his voice high and climbing. “Come on, motherfucker, get cut . . . .”
    “Put the fuckin’ knife down,” Del screamed. His gun pointed at Randy’s head. Lucas, glancing at Del, felt the world slowing down. The fat bartender was still behind the bar, his hands on his ears, as though blocking out the noise of the