Night Prey

playing a pro athlete: a tan, a golf shirt, capped teeth, and a gold chain around his thick neck. But he knew stones, and the smile was gone from his eyes when he looked at them. He gave Koop $1,300. The total take from the apartment pushed $6,000, not counting the belt. It never occurred to Koop to feel a connection between the jewelry and the woman who’d caught his heart. The jewelry was his, not hers.
    He left the Bloomington strip and idled back into Minneapolis, killing time behind the wheel, eventually turning east, to an Arby’s on St. Paul’s east side. He’d called the moving man who’d given him the map of Jensen’s apartment, and arranged to meet. Koop was both early and late for the meetings, arriving a half hour early, watching the meeting spot from a distance. When his man arrived, alone, on time, he’d watch for another ten minutes before going in. He’d never had a contact turn on him. He didn’t want it to happen, either.
    The moving man arrived a few minutes early, hurried straight into the Arby’s. The way he moved gave Koop some confidence that everything was okay: there was no tentativeness, no looking around. He carried a notebook in his hand. Koop waited five more minutes, watching, then went in. The guy was sitting in a booth with a cup of coffee, a young guy, looked like a college kid. Koop nodded at him, stopped for a cup of coffee himself, paid the girl behind the counter, and slid into the booth. “How’re you doing?”
    “It’s been a while,” the guy said.
    “Yeah, well . . .” Koop handed him a Holiday Inn brochure. The guy took it and looked inside.
    “Thanks,” he said. “You must’ve done okay.”
    Koop shrugged. He wasn’t much for chitchat. “Got anything else?”
    “Yeah. A good one.” The guy pushed the notebook at him. “I was pissing my pants waiting for you to call. We was moving some stuff into this house on Upper St. Dennis in St. Paul, you know where that is?”
    “Up the hill off West Seventh,” Koop said, pulling in the notebook. “Some nice houses up there. A little riffraff, too.”
    “This a nice house, man.” The guy’s head was bobbing. “ Nice. There was a guy from a safe company there. They’d just set a big fuckin’ safe in concrete, down in the basement, in a corner of a closet. I seen it myself.”
    “I don’t do safes. . . .” The notebook was too thick. Koop opened it and found a key impression in dried putty. He’d shown the guy how to do it. The impression was crisp, clean.
    “Wait a minute, for Christ’s sakes,” the guy said, holding up his hands. “So when he was talking to the safe guy, he was walking around with this piece of paper in his hand. When they finished, he came up and asked how long we were gonna be, ’cause he wanted to take a shower and shave, ’cause he was going out. We said we’d be a while yet, and he went up and took a shower in the bathroom. The bathroom off his bedroom. We were working right down the hall, my buddy was settin’ up a guest bed. So I stepped down the hall and looked into his bedroom. I could hear the shower going, and I saw this paper laying on the dresser with his billfold and watch, and I just took the chance, man. I zipped over and looked at it, and it was the fuckin’ combination. How about that, huh? I wrote it down. And listen, you know what this guy does? This guy runs half the automatic car washes in the Twin Cities. And he was braggin’ to us about going out to Vegas all the time. I bet that fuckin’ safe is stuffed.”
    “How about his family?” This sounded better; Koop would rather steal money than anything.
    “He’s divorced. Kids live with his old lady.”
    “The key’s good?”
    “Yeah, but, uh . . . There’s a security system on the door. I don’t know nothing about that.”
    Koop looked at the man for a minute, then nodded. “I’ll think about it.”
    “I could use some cash, get out of this fuckin’ place,” the guy said. “My parole’s up in September. Maybe go to Vegas myself.”
    “I’ll get back,” Koop said.
    He finished his drink, picked up the notebook, nodded to the guy, and walked out. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he glanced at his watch. Sara should be getting off. . . .
     
     
     
    KOOP HAD KILLED his mother.
    He’d killed her with a long, slender switchblade he’d found in a pawnshop in Seoul, Korea, where he’d been with the Army. When he’d gotten back to the States, he’d spent a long weekend hitchhiking