Invisible Prey

Jesse off the street. About twenty minutes ago.”
    “You gotta be shittin’ me.” Lucas was on his feet.
    “Jesse said somebody in a white van, a really big guy, she said, pulled up and tried to grab her. She was walking this dog home from her boyfriend’s…”
    “Screw,” Lucas said.
    “What?”
    “That’s the dog’s name,” Lucas said. “Screw.”
    “Yeah. That yellow dog. Anyway, she said Screw went after the guy, and the guy wound up back in the van with Screw and that’s the last she saw of them,” Flowers said. “She said the van did a U-turn and headed back to Lexington and then turned toward the interstate and she never saw them again. She ran home and told Kathy. Kathy called nine-one-one and then called me. She’s fuckin’ hysterical.”
    “Call Kathy, tell her I’m coming over,” Lucas said. “Are the cops looking for a van?”
    “I guess, but the call probably didn’t go out for ten minutes after Jesse got jumped,” Flowers said. “She said the guy was big and beefy and mean, like a football player. Who do we know like that?”
    “Junior Kline…Can you get back on this?” Lucas asked.
    “I could, but I’m a long way away,” Flowers said.
    “All right, forget it,” Lucas said. “I’ll get Jenkins or Shrake to find Junior and shake his ass up.”
    “Jesus, tell them not to beat on the guy unless they know he’s guilty,” Flowers said. “Those guys can get out of hand.”
    “Tell Barth I’m on the way,” Lucas said.
     
    T HE ARTIST was wearing a black T-shirt, black slacks, and a black watch cap on his shaven head, a dramatic but unnecessary touch, since it was probably seventy degrees outside, Coombs thought, as she peered at him over the café table.
    There was tension in the air, and it involved who was going to be the first to look at the check. The photographer was saying, “Camera had eight-bit color channels, and I’m asking myself, eight-bit? What the hell is that all about? How’re you gonna get any color depth with eight-bit channels? Furthermore, they compress the shit out of the files, which means that the highlights get absolutely blown out, and the blacks fill up with noise…”
    Coombs knew it was a lost cause. Almost without any personal volition, her fingertips crawled across the table toward the check.
     
    J ANE PULLED THE VAN into the garage and said, “Let’s go look. Can you walk?”
    “Yeah, I can walk,” Leslie said. “Ah, God, bit me up. The fuckin’ dog. That’s why the kid was walking so slow. She had the dog on a goddamn leash, why didn’t you see that? You had the binoculars…”
    “The dog was just too close to the ground, or the leash was too long, or something, but I swear to God, I never had a hint,” Jane said.
    They went inside, Jane leading the way, up to the master bath. Leslie was wearing the anti-DNA coveralls, which were showing patches of blood on the back of his upper right arm, his right hip, and down both legs. He stripped the coveralls off and Jane gaped: “Oh, my God.”
    Probably fifteen tooth-holes, and four quarter-sized chunks of loose flesh. Leslie looked at himself in the mirror: he’d stopped leaking, but the wounds were wet with blood. “No arteries,” he said. “Can’t get stitches, the cops will call the hospitals looking for dog bites.”
    “So what do you think?” Jane asked. She didn’t want to touch him.
    “I think we use lots of gauze pads and tape and Mycitracin, and you tape everything together and then…When you had that bladder infection, you had some pills left over, the ones that made you sick.”
    “I’ve still got them,” Jane said. The original antibiotics had given her hives, and she’d switched prescriptions.
    “I’ll use those.” He looked at himself in the mirror, and a tear popped out of one eye and ran down his cheek. “It’s not just holes, I’m going to have bruises the size of saucers.”
    “Time to go to Paris,” Jane said. “Or Budapest, or anywhere. Antique-scouting. If anybody should take your shirt off in the next month…”
    “But we’re not done yet,” Leslie said. “We’ve got to get that music box back in place, we’ve got to get the sewing basket.”
    “Leslie…”
    “I’ve been hurt worse than this, playing ball,” Leslie said. Another tear popped out. “Just get me taped up.”
     
    A S T. P AUL COP CAR was sitting at the curb at Barth’s house. Every light in the house was on, and people who might have been neighbors