Naked Prey

going. I’ll talk to Dickerson.”
    “Gotta get up to Moose Bay,” Del said. “How’s the heater in the Olds?”
    “Fine.”
    “Then let’s take your car. Mustang heater wouldn’t soften up butter.”
    M OOSE B AY WAS run by the Black River band of the Chippewa, on the banks of a river whose water was stained so absolutely black by decomposing vegetation that whenit froze over, even the ice looked black. From Cash’s house to the res was twenty-four minutes, nine minutes down to Armstrong, then another fifteen minutes through Armstrong and out the county road to the casino.
    “Tell me your theories,” Del said, on the way out. “You give good theory.”
    “I’m thinking . . . drug deal,” Lucas said. “Calb was probably right both ways: it’s connected with Kansas City and Cash’s jail contacts, and it’s probably connected with the casino. The casino Indians don’t have much truck with drugs, but the people who come in to gamble, have a good time . . . they’d do a little coke.”
    “So the money’s drug money,” Del said. “All in cash, all bundled up, but not fresh bricks. Cash makes the wholesale contacts, driving for Calb back and forth. Warr has the contacts up here, delivers it out to the individual dealers. Or deals it herself.”
    “Then they fuck with somebody. Or, somebody knows they’ve got that money, and they come looking for it.”
    “But then they’d just shoot them—they wouldn’t hang them,” Del said.
    “Trying to get them to talk?”
    “More likely they fucked with somebody and got made an example of,” Del said. “A bigger network that’s still up and running, where they need an occasional example.”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said. “Where does Calb come in?”
    “He doesn’t. Not necessarily.”
    “Look at the farmhouse—there was a lot of work done in there, new work, and it cost a bundle. Believe me, I know.” The Big New House back in St. Paul had cost $870,000. “If Calb knows Cash is only getting paid for driving, and if Warr is just dealing cards, where’d he think they got the money to fix that place up? There’s a hundred grand in work in there, minimum, and a ten-thousand-dollar television set.”
    “Tell you what—if the total’s a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, that’s not much for a house, with two incomes, and a guy upstairs who might be paying rent,” Del said.
    “C’mon,” Lucas scoffed. “How many drug dealers do you know who have a mortgage? How many have bought a house?”
    “Jimmy Szuza bought a house for his mother.”
    “Jimmy Szuza was working for his mother, the treacherous old bitch. He was fronting for her.”
    “Still.” After a couple of minutes: “And what about the cell?”
    “Beats the shit outa me.”
    “C ALB WAS RIGHT about the travel time,” Lucas said, glancing at his watch as they rolled into the casino’s parking lot.
    The casino looked like a larger version of Calb’s truck shop, but a truck shop on steroids: a huge, rambling, two-story yellow-and-green metal building with a prism-shaped glass entry built to resemble a crystal tepee. “Liquor in the front, poker in the rear,” Del said.
    “Bumper sticker,” Lucas said. “But I don’t think they sell booze.”
    T HE M OOSE B AY security chief was a cheerful Chippewa man named Clark Hoffman, who hurried down to meet them after a call from the reception desk. “Figured you’d get here sooner or later,” he said, shaking their hands. He looked closely at Del. “Did you hang out at Meat’s in the Cities?”
    “Yeah, I’d go in there before it closed,” Del said.
    “It closed? Shit.”
    “Couple years back.”
    Hoffman thought about that for a moment, then said, “I used to kick your ass at shuffleboard. I thought you were a wino.”
    Del grinned and shrugged. “I remember. You told me you were at Wounded Knee.”
    “That’s me,” Hoffman said. “Sneaking through the weeds with a hundred pounds of frozen brats in a backpack. Fuckin’ FBI—no offense. C’mon this way.”
    They followed him upstairs to his office, Del filling him in about Meat’s. “Trouble with the health inspectors,” Del told him. “You name it, they had it: mice, rats, roaches, disease. The only thing that kept you from dyin’ was the alcohol.”
    “Everything did have a . . . particular flavor,” Hoffman said. “Ever notice that?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I always sorta liked it. What happened to Meat?”
    “He moved to San Clemente and