Mortal Prey

place on the first try: a corner tavern with Budweiser and Busch signs in the window, and a flickering-orange “Andy’s” sign hung over the front door. A half-block up the street, a couple of guys were working on what looked like an eighties Camaro, using shop lights on orange extension cords that led across the sidewalk to the car at the curb. He could hear traffic, at some distance, and a nearly full moon was high and squarely aligned with the street. Felt kinda good.
    Inside Andy’s, a long bar led away from the door into the interior. A half-dozen guys and one woman seated at the bar turned their heads to see who was coming in, and gave him a good look when they didn’t recognize him. He could smell microwave pizza, popcorn, and beer; a jar of pickled pig’s feet sat at the end of the bar, beside a jar of pickled eggs. A bartender was wiping glasses, and as Lucas ambled past, he asked, “You looking for Dan?”
    “Yeah. Is he here?”
    “In the back on the right. Their pitcher is probably pretty down by now.”
    “So give me another one and a glass,” Lucas said. He gave the bartender a twenty, got his change, and carried the pitcher down the bar. Loftus and two other guys, who both looked like ex-cops, were sitting in Andy’s biggest booth, big enough for six or eight.
    When Lucas came up, Loftus lifted a hand, and Lucas slid into the booth with the beer. Loftus pointed at the other two men. “Dick Bender, Micky Andreno. Dick was homicide, Micky was a patrol lieutenant when he retired.”
    Lucas said hello, and they all poured beer and Bender said, “I called a guy up in Minneapolis and he said you weren’t the worst guy in the world. Said you got shot a lot, and that you like to fight. Said you got shot by a little girl.”
    “Right in the throat,” Lucas said. “That was a good fuckin’ day.”
    So he told the story, and they told a few, about car chases and assholes they’d known, one story about a cop who’d been killed when he’d run through a stream of water from a fire hose and got his neck broken, and then Lucas had to tell the story of the Minneapolis guy who’d fired a blank at his own head as a joke, and blown his brains out, and Andreno told about the three women—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—who had all been beaten to death by the men in their lives, the daughter when she was only seventeen: “She already had a kid of her own, a daughter, she’s growing up somewhere. How’d you like to have that curse on you?”
    After the dog-sniffing, they got another pitcher and Loftus asked, “How was the meeting?”
    “I’ll tell you, guys, they might get her, but if they do, it’s gonna be by accident,” Lucas said. “They’re gonna run computer programs all night, trying to nail down every single person she ever worked with. They figure she’s got to be staying with somebody she knows.”
    “Probably is,” Bender said.
    “I know, but Jesus, she worked for a big liquor company and a couple of bars here in town, with all those contacts, and she went to two different colleges that we know of—maybe they’ll get lucky, but that’s a hell of a lot of people,” Lucas said.
    “So what’s the choice here?” Andreno asked. “I don’t see that you’ve got an edge.”
    Before Lucas could answer, a fourth guy showed up, a former patrol sergeant named Bob Carter. He slid into the booth and was introduced, and said, “Pour me one of them beers…. Some asshole parked a Porsche outside.”
    “That’d be me,” Lucas said.
    “Really? A fuckin’ C4?” Carter was not embarrassed. “They must have good bennies in Minneapolis.”
    Then they had to dog-sniff some more until Lucas finally got back to Andreno’s question. “She bought a hot cell phone here in St. Louis—so she’s already gone to somebody. That guy might know where she’s at, he might know who she’s calling. How many guys you got selling hot cell phones here?”
    “’Bout a hundred,” Loftus said.
    “Wholesaling them? Well enough established that she could come back after a few years away and go straight to him?”
    “Don’t know that she did that,” Andreno said. “She might have called a friend, who got them for her.”
    “That’s right, but she must’ve called somebody connected, because Dichter called her, on her cell phone. And the feds have Dichter’s phone calls, both business and home from every phone we think he had, and she’s not on the list. Her phone isn’t. She