Eyes of Prey

everything you got, apartment six-forty-two. We got two of them, yeah, it’s Druze . . . .”
    He looked at Lucas, who was back on his feet, ready to go after him. But Lucas walked away from the bedroom and did something that frightened Del more than any effort to look at Cassie: he stood staring at a wall from a distance of no more than a foot, expressionless, unmoving, his eyes open.
    “Lucas?” No answer. “Davenport, for Christ’s sakes . . .”
     
    “You want to go to the hospital?” Sloan asked.
    “What for?” Del had pulled him off the wall, stuffed him into the elevator, guided him to the lobby and held him there.
    “Get some dope.”
    “No.”
    “You’re totally fucked, man. You can’t be like this,” Sloan said. He was driving the Porsche, while Lucas slumped beside him in the passenger seat.
    “Just get me home,” Lucas said. The storm was back in his head, the storm he’d feared. Cassie’s face. The things he could have done, might have done, that she might have done. Going around, thousands of options, millions of intricatepossibilities, all leading to life or to death . . . Sybil’s face popped into his head.
    “We saved the life of a woman who’s gonna die in a week . . .” he moaned.
    “But we maybe got Bekker, the lawyers are looking at the tapes right now.”
    “Fuck me,” Lucas said, dropping his chin on his chest. He had to cry, but he couldn’t.
    And then he said, “I went to a funeral home. If I’d come here . . .”
    And then he said, “Every fuckin’ woman I see gets hurt. I’m a goddamned curse on their heads . . . .”
    And then he said, “I could’ve saved her . . . .”
    “I gotta make a call,” Sloan said suddenly, taking the car into a convenience-store parking lot. “Just take a minute.”
    Sloan called Elle Kruger, looking back over his shoulder at Lucas in the passenger seat of the Porsche. All he could see was the top of Lucas’ head. The nun’s phone was answered by a woman at a switchboard; Sloan explained that he was calling on a police emergency. The woman said she’d try to find Elle, and began switching. A moment later, she came back on to say that the nun was at dinner, and a friend would get her. She told Sloan to hold on.
    “Lucas?” Elle asked when she picked up the phone.
    “No, this is his friend Sloan. Lucas has a problem . . . .”
    When Sloan returned to the car, Lucas’ eyes were closed, and he was breathing slowly, as though he were sleeping. “You okay?” Sloan asked.
    “That fuckin’ Loverboy. If he’d come in, he could’ve looked at the picture of Druze the minute I found it, and we could’ve busted him. But we had to go through this newspaper-ad bullshit . . . .”
    “Let it go,” Sloan said. “Nothing we can do about it now.”
    • • •
    Elle was waiting at Lucas’ house with another nun and a small black car.
    “How are you?” she asked.
    He shook his head, looking down at the driveway. Meeting her eyes would be impossible, too complicated.
    “I’ll call my friend, get a sedative for you.”
    “I’ve got this stuff going around in my head . . .” he said. And the guns: he could feel the guns in the basement. Not heavy, not like last winter, but they were back.
    “Let me call my friend.” Elle took his arm, then his hand, and led him toward the door like a child, while Sloan and the other nun followed behind.
     
    Lucas woke the next morning exhausted.
    The sedatives had beaten him into a dreamless sleep. The storm in his head had dissipated, but he could feel it just over the horizon of consciousness. He slid tentatively out of bed, stood up, swayed, opened the bedroom door and almost fell over the couch. Sloan had pushed it up against the door and was struggling to get up.
    “Lucas . . .” Sloan, in a T-shirt and suit pants, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, looked tired and scared.
    “What the fuck are you doing, Sloan?”
    Sloan shrugged. “We thought it might be a good idea, in case you sleepwalked . . . .”
    “In case I started looking for my guns?”
    “Something like that,” Sloan admitted, looking up at him. “You look like shit. How do you feel?”
    “Like shit,” Lucas said. “I gotta get some dead kids dug up.”
    The blood seemed to drain from Sloan’s face, and Lucas smiled despite himself, smiled as a widow might smile the day before her husband is buried. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not nuts. Let me tell you