Night Prey

and up by five-thirty.
    Lucas did business for a while, then prowled the house, finally went down to the basement for a small off-duty gun, clipped it under his waistband and pulled his golf shirt over it. “I’m going out for a while,” he said.
    Weather looked up from the bed. “I thought the case was over.”
    “Ehh. I’m looking for a guy.”
    “So take it easy,” she said. She had a yellow pencil clenched between her teeth, and spoke around it; she looked cute, but he picked up the tiny spark of fear in her eyes.
    He grinned and said, “No sweat. I’ll tell you straight out when there might be a problem.”
    “Sure.”
    Lucas’s house was on the east bank of the Mississippi, in a quiet neighborhood of tall dying elms and a few oaks, with the new maples and ginkgoes and ash trees replacing the disappearing elms. At night, the streets were alive with middle-class joggers working off the office flab, and couples strolling hand in hand along the dimly lit walkways. When Lucas stopped in the street to shift gears, he heard a woman laugh somewhere not too far away; he almost went back inside to Weather.
    Instead, he headed to the Marshall-Lake Bridge, crossed the Mississippi, and a mile farther on was deep into the Lake Street strip. He cruised the cocktail lounges, porno stores, junk shops, rental-furniture places, check-cashing joints, and low-end fast-food franchises that ran through a brutally ugly landscape of cheap lighted signs. Children wandered around at all times of day and night, mixing with the suburban coke-seekers, dealers, drunks, raggedy-hip insurance salesmen, and a few lost souls from St. Paul, desperately seeking the shortcut home. A pair of cops pulled up alongside the Porsche at a stoplight and looked him over, thinking Dope dealer. He rolled down his window and the driver grinned and said something, and the passenger-side cop rolled down his window and said, “Davenport?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Great car, man.”
    The driver called across his partner, “Hey, dude, you got a little rock? I could use a taste, mon.”
     
     
     
    FRANKLIN AVENUE WAS as rugged as Lake Street, but darker. Lucas pulled a slip of paper from his pocket, turned on a reading light, checked the address he had for Junky Doog, and went looking for it. Half the buildings were missing their numbers. When he found the right place, there was a light in the window and a half-dozen people sitting on the porch outside.
    Lucas parked, climbed out, and the talk on the porch stopped. He walked halfway up the broken front sidewalk and stopped. “There a guy named Junky Doog who lives here?”
    A heavyset Indian woman heaved herself out of a lawn chair. “Not now. All my family live here now.”
    “Do you know him?”
    “No, I don’t, Mr. Police.” She was polite. “We’ve been here almost four months and never heard the name.”
    Lucas nodded. “Okay.” He believed her.
    Lucas started crawling bars, talking to bartenders and customers. He’d lost time on the street, and the players had changed. Here and there, somebody picked him out, said his name, held up a hand: the faces and names came back, but the information was sparse.
    He started back home, saw the Blue Bull on a side street, and decided to make a last stop.
    A half-dozen cars were parked at odd attitudes around the bar’s tiny parking lot, as though they’d been abandoned to avoid a bombing run. The Blue Bull’s windows were tinted, so that patrons could see who was coming in from the lot without being seen themselves. Lucas left the Porsche at a fire hydrant on the street, sniffed the night air—creosote and tar—and went inside.
    The Blue Bull could sell cheap drinks, the owner said, because he avoided high overhead. He avoided it by never fixing anything. The pool table had grooves that would roll a ball though a thirty-degree arc into a corner pocket. The overhead fans hadn’t moved since the sixties. The jukebox had broken halfway through a Guy Lom bardo record, and hadn’t moved since.
    Nor did the decor change: red-flocked whorehouse wallpaper with a patina of beer and tobacco smoke. The obese bartender, however, was new. Lucas dropped on a stool and the bartender wiped his way over. “Yeah?”
    “Carl Stupella still work here?” Lucas asked.
    The bartender coughed before answering, turning his head away, not bothering to cover his mouth. Spit flew down the bar. “Carl’s dead,” he said, recovering.
    “Dead?”
    “Yeah. Choked on a