Night Prey

bean dip and the black cop said, “Jesus, you sound like some kind of parrot. Polly want a lawyer?” but he grinned, friendly. His hand was hard on Koop’s triceps.
    “I want a lawyer.” In the joint they said that after they warn you, the cops’ll get friendly, try to get you talking about anything. After they get you rolling, when you’re trying to make them happy—because you’re a little scared, you don’t want to get whacked around—then you’ll start talking. Don’t talk, they said in the joint. Don’t say shit except “I want a lawyer.”
    They went out the door, a customer and the counterman gawking at them, and the red-faced man said, “My name is Detective Kershaw and the man behind you is Detective Carrigan, the famous Irish dancer. We’ll need your keys to tow your truck, or we could just pop the tranny and tow it.”
    Two squad cars were nosed into the parking lot, one blocking the truck, four more cops standing by. Too many for a routine coke bust, Koop thought. “Keys are in my right side pocket,” Koop said. He desperately wanted to know why he’d been arrested. Burglary? Murder? Something to do with Jensen?
    “Hey, he can talk,” the black cop said.
    He slapped Koop on the shoulder in a comradely way, and they stopped while the red-faced cop took his keys out and tossed them to a patrolman and said, “Tow truck is on its way.” To Koop, Kershaw said, “That black car over there.”
    While they opened the back door of the car, Koop said, “I don’t know why I’m arrested.” He couldn’t help it, couldn’t keep his mouth shut. The open back door of the car looked like a hungry mouth. “Why?”
    Carrigan said, “Watch your head,” and he put a hand on top of Koop’s head and eased him into the car, and then said, “Why do you think?” and shut the door.
    The two detectives spent a few minutes talking to the uniformed cops, letting Koop stew in the backseat of the car. The back doors had no inside handles, no way to get out. With his hands pinned behind him, he couldn’t sit easily, had to sit upright on the too-soft seats. And the backseat smelled faintly of disinfectant and urine. Koop felt another spasm of claustrophobic panic, something he hadn’t expected. The damn cuffs: he twisted against them, hard, gritting his teeth; no chance. The cops outside were still not looking at him. He was an insect. Why in the hell. . . .
    And then Koop thought, Softening me up.
    He’d done the same thing when there was a prison squabble that they had to look into. When the cops got back into the car, one of them would look at him, friendly-like, and ask, “Well, what do you think?”
    The plainclothes cops spent another minute talking to the uniforms, then drifted back to the car, talking to each other, as if Koop were the last thing on their minds. A screen divided the front seat from the back. The black guy drove, and after he started the engine he looked at his partner in the passenger seat and said, “Let’s stop at a Taco Bell.”
    “Oooh, good call.” When they got going, the red-faced guy turned and grinned and said, “Well, what do you think?”
    “I want a lawyer,” Koop said. The red-faced guy pulled back a quarter inch on the other side of the screen, his eyes going dark. He couldn’t help it, and Koop almost smiled. He could play this game, he thought.

30
    LUCAS AND CONNELL watched the arrest from a Super America station across the street, leaning on Connell’s car, eating ice cream sandwiches. Koop came out, Kershaw a step behind, with one hand on Koop’s right elbow. “I wanted to take him,” Connell said between bites.
    “Not for burglary,” Lucas said.
    “No.” She looked at her watch. “The search warrants should be ready.”
    Carrigan and Kershaw were pushing Koop into the car. Koop’s arms were flexed, and his muscles stood out like ropes. Lucas balled up the ice cream sandwich wrapper and fired it at a trash can; it bounced off onto the pavement.
    “I want to get down to the house,” Connell said. “See you there?”
    “Yeah. I’ll wait until they open the truck—I’ll let you know if there’s anything good.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS WANTED CRIME-SCENE people to open the truck. “We might be talking about a couple of hairs,” he told the patrolman with the keys. “Let’s wait.”
    “Okay. Who was that guy?” the patrolman asked.
    “Cat burglar,” Lucas said. “He sure went nice and easy.”
    “He scared the shit out of