Eyes of Prey

bowling. Two more, both looking as if they might be from the neighborhood, talked to the bartender. A fifth man, older, sat by himself in front of a bowl of peanuts, nursing a lifelong rage and a glass of rye. He’d nip from the glass, eat a peanut and mutter his anger down into his overcoat. A half-dozen more men and a single woman sat in a puddle of rickety chairs, burn-scarred tables and cigarette smoke at the back of the bar, watching the NBA playoffs on satellite TV.
    “Haven’t seen much crack on TV lately,” Lucas said, groping for conversation. Del had been leading up to something all night but hadn’t spit it out yet.
    “Media used it up,” said Del. “They be rootin’ for a new drug now. Supposed to be ice, coming in from the West Coast.”
    Lucas shook his head. “Fuckin’ ice,” he said.
    He caught his own reflection in the window glass. Not too bad, he thought. You couldn’t see the gray thatch in the black hair, you couldn’t see the dark rings under his eyes, the lines beginning to groove his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. Maybe he ought to get a chunk of this glass and use it to shave in.
    “If we wait much longer, she’s gonna need a cash transfusion,” Del said, eyeing the drunk hooker. Lucas had staked her with a twenty and she was down to a pile of quarters and pennies.
    “He’ll be here,” Lucas insisted. “Motherfucker dreams about his rep.”
    “Randy ain’t bright enough to dream,” Del said.
    “Gotta be soon,” Lucas said. “He won’t let her sit there forever.”
    The hooker was bait. Del had found her working a bar in South St. Paul two days earlier and had dragged her ass back to Minneapolis on an old possession warrant. Lucas had put the word on the street that she was talking about Randy tobeat a cocaine charge. Randy had shredded the face of one of Lucas’ snitches. The hooker had seen him do it.
    “You still writing poems?” Del asked after a while.
    “Kind of gave it up,” Lucas said.
    Del shook his head. “Shouldn’t of done that.”
    Lucas looked at the plastic flowers in the window box and said sadly, “I’m getting too old. You gotta be young or naive to write poetry.”
    “You’re three or four years younger’n I am,” Del said, picking up the thought.
    “Neither one of us is a fuckin’ walk in the park,” Lucas said. He tried to make it sound funny, but it didn’t.
    “Got that right,” Del said somberly. The narc had always been gaunt. He liked speed a little too much and sometimes got his nose in the coke. That came with the job: narcs never got out clean. But Del . . . the bags under his eyes were his most prominent feature, his hair was stiff, dirty. Like a mortally ill cat, he couldn’t take care of himself anymore. “Too many assholes. I’m gettin’ as bad as them.”
    “How many times we had this conversation?” Lucas asked.
    “ ’Bout a hundred,” Del said. He opened his mouth to go on, but they were interrupted by a sudden noisy cheer from the back and a male voice shouting, “You see that nigger fly?” One of the black hookers at the bar looked up, eyes narrowing, but she went back to her magazine without saying anything.
    Del lifted a hand to the bartender. “Couple beers,” he called. “Couple Leinies?”
    The bartender nodded, and Lucas said, “You don’t think Randy’s coming?”
    “Gettin’ late,” Del said. “And if I drink any more of this Coke, I’ll need a bladder transplant.”
    The beers came, and Del said, “You heard about that killing last night? The woman up on the hill? Beat to death in her kitchen?”
    Lucas nodded. This was what Del had been leading up to. “Yeah. Saw it on the news. And I heard some stuff around the office . . . .”
    “She was my cousin,” Del said, closing his eyes. He let his head fall back, as though overcome with exhaustion. “We grew up together, fooling around on the river. Hers were the first bare tits I ever saw, in real life.”
    “Your cousin?” Lucas studied the other man. As a matter of self-defense, cops joked about death. The more grotesque the death, the more likely the jokes; you had to watch your tongue when a friend had a family member die.
    “We used to go fishing for carp, man, can you believe that?” Del turned so he could lean against the window box. Thinking about yesterdays. His bearded face drawn long and solemn, like an ancient photo of James Longstreet after Gettysburg, Lucas thought. “Down by the Ford dam, just a