Night Prey

ambulance coming?”
    “They’re on the way,” the fat man said. He took a step toward Junky. “Junky, man, give me the knife.”
    “Gonna cut him,” Junky said, stepping toward Lucas. He stumbled, and Lucas moved in, caught his bad arm, turned him, caught his shabby knife-arm sleeve from behind, turned him more, grabbed the good hand and shook the knife out.
    “You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer,” Lucas said. He pushed the fat man away, picked up the knife, folded it and dropped it in his pocket. “You understand that? You’re under arrest.”
    Junky looked at him, then nodded.
    “Sit down,” Lucas said. Junky shambled over and sat on the flat concrete stoop outside the shack. Lucas turned to the fat man. “You saw that. Remember what you saw.”
    The fat man looked at him doubtfully and said, “I don’t think he would have hurt you.”
    “Arresting him is the best I can do for him,” Lucas said quietly. “They’ll put him inside, clean him up, take care of him.”
    The fat man thought about it, nodded. The phone rang, and he went back inside. Lucas, Greave, and Junky waited in silence until Junky looked up suddenly and said, “Davenport. What do you want?”
    His voice was clear, controlled, his eyes focused.
    “Somebody’s cuttin’ women,” Lucas said. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t you.”
    “I cut some women, long time ago,” Junky said. “There was this one, she had beautiful . . . you know. I made a grapevine on them.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    “Long time ago; they liked it,” he said.
    Lucas shook his head.
    “Somebody cuttin’ on women?” Junky asked.
    “Yeah, somebody’s cuttin’ on women.”
    After another moment of silence, Greave asked Junky, “Why would they do that? Why would he be cuttin’ women?” In the distance, over the sound of the trucks moving toward the working edge of the fill, they could hear a siren. The fat man must have made it an emergency.
    “You got to,” Junky said solemnly to Greave. “If you don’t cut them, especially the pretty ones, they get out of hand. You can’t have women getting outa hand.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. You cut ’em, they stay put, that’s for sure. They stay put.”
    “So why would you go a long time and not cut any women, then start cuttin’ a lot of women?”
    “I didn’t do that,” Junky said. He cast a defensive eye at Greave.
    “No. The guy we’re looking for did that.”
    Lucas looked on curiously as the man in the lavender Italian suit chatted with the man with no toes, like they were sharing a cappuccino outside a café.
    “He just started up?” Junky asked.
    “Yup.”
    Junky thought about that, pawing his face with his good hand, then his head bobbed, as though he’d worked it out. “ ’Cause a woman turns you on, that’s why. Maybe you see a woman and she turns you on. Gets you by the pecker. You go around with your pecker up for a few days, and you gotta do something. You know, you gotta cut some women.”
    “Some woman turns you on?”
    “Yup.”
    “So then you cut her.”
    “Well.” Junky seemed to look inside himself. “Maybe not her, exactly. Sometimes you can’t cut her. There was this one. . . .” He seemed to drift away, lost in the past. Then: “But you gotta cut somebody, see? If you don’t cut somebody, your pecker stays up.”
    “So what?”
    “So what? You can’t go around with your pecker up all the time. You can’t.”
    “I wish I could,” Greave cracked.
    Junky got angry, intent, his face quivering. “You can’t. You can’t go around like that.”
    “Okay. . . .”
    The ambulance bumped into the landfill, followed a few seconds later by a sheriff’s car.
    “Come on, Junky, we’re gonna put you in the hospital,” Lucas said.
    Junky said to Greave, pulling at Greave’s pant leg with his good hand, “But you got to get her, sooner or later. Sooner or later, you got to get the one that put your pecker up. See, if she goes around putting your pecker up, anytime she wants, she’s outa hand. She’s just outa hand, and you gotta cut her.”
    “Okay. . . .”
    Lucas filed a complaint with the sheriff’s deputy who followed the ambulance in, and Junky was hauled away.
     
     
     
    “I ’M GLAD I came with you,” Greave said. “Got to see a dump, and a guy cutting himself up like a provolone.”
    Lucas shook his head and said, “You did pretty good back there. You’ve got a nice line of bullshit.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Talking