Night Prey

that good, but some of the guys believe him,” Davis said. “He’s been pretty noisy about it, filing all kinds of appeals. He’s never stopped; he’s still doing it.”
     
     
     
    “DON’T LIKE PRISONS,” Connell said. The interview room had the feel of a dungeon.
    “Like the doors might not open again after you’re inside,” Lucas said.
    “That’s exactly it. I could stand it for about a week, and then they’d come to put me back in the cell, and I’d freak. I don’t think I’d make a full month. I’d kill myself,” Connell said.
    “People do,” Lucas said. “The saddest ones are the people they put on a suicide watch. They can’t get out, and they can’t get it over with. They just sit and suffer.”
    “Some of them deserve it.”
    Lucas disagreed. “I don’t know if anybody deserves that.”
     
     
     
    D . WAYNE PRICE was a large man in his early forties; his face looked as if it had been slowly and incompe tently formed with a ball-peen hammer. His forehead was shiny and pitted, with scars running up into his hairline. He had rough poreless skin under his eyes, scar tissue from being punched. His small round ears seemed to be fitted into slots in his head. When the escort brought him to the interview room, he smiled a convict’s obsequious smile, and his teeth were small and chipped. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with “Harley-Davidson” on the front.
    Lucas and Connell were sitting on a couple of slightly damaged green office chairs, facing a couch whose only notable quality was its brownness. The escort was a horse-faced older man with a buzz cut; he was carrying a yellow-backed book, said, “Sit,” to Price, as though he were a Labrador retriever, said, “How do” to Lucas and Connell, then dropped onto the other end of the couch with his book.
    “You smoke?” Connell asked Price.
    “Sure.” She fished in a pocket, handed him an open pack of Marlboros and a butane lighter. Price knocked a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and Connell said, voice soft, “So, this woman in Madison. You kill her?”
    “Never touched the bitch,” Price said, testing, his eyes lingering on her.
    “But you knew her,” Connell said.
    “I knew who she was,” Price said.
    “Sleep with her?” Lucas asked.
    “Nope. Never got that close,” Price said, looking at Lucas. “Had a nice ass on her, though.”
    “Where were you when she was killed?” asked Connell.
    “Drunk. My buddies dropped me off at my house, but I knew if I went inside I’d start barfin’, so I walked down to this convenience store for coffee. That’s what got me.”
    “Tell me,” said Connell.
    Price looked up at the ceiling, stuck the cigarette in his mouth, looked down at it long enough to light it, blew some smoke and closed his eyes, remembering. “I was out drinking with some buddies. Shit, we were drinking all afternoon and shootin’ pool. And so about eight o’clock my buddies brought me home ’cause I was too fuckin’ drunk to drink.”
    “That’s pretty drunk,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, pretty,” Price said. “Anyway, they dumped me off on my porch, and I sat there for a while, and when I could get going, I decided to go up to the corner and get some coffee. There was a 7-Eleven in one of them side-street shopping centers. There was like a drugstore and a cleaners and this bookstore. I was in the 7-Eleven, and she came down from the bookstore to get something. I was drunker’n shit, but I remembered her from some welding I done for her.”
    “Welding?”
    “Yeah.” Price laughed, the laugh trailing off into a cough. “She had this piece-of-shit ’79 Cadillac, cream over key-lime green, and the bumper fell off. Just fuckin’ fell off one day. The Cadillac place wanted like four hundred bucks to fix it, so she brought it over to my place and asked me what I could do. I welded the sonofabitch back on for twenty-two dollars. If that bumper hadn’t fell off, I’d be a free man today.”
    “So you remembered her,” Connell prompted. “In the store.”
    “Yeah. I said hello and come on to her a little bit, but she wasn’t having it, and she left. I sort of followed along.” Price’s voice was slow and dreamy, pulling details out of his memory. “She went down to this bookstore. I was so fuckin’ drunk, I kept thinking, Hell, I’m gonna get lucky with this chick. There was no chance. Even if she’d said, ‘Hell, yes,’ I was in no shape to . . . you know. Anyway, I