Night Prey

the man cutting toward the junkyard, and ran after him.
    Lost him in the piles of trash. Old cars, mostly from the sixties; he spotted the front end of a ’66 bottle-green Pontiac LeMans, just like the one he’d owned when he’d first been in uniform. Lucas stalked through the piles, taking his time: the guy couldn’t have gone over the fence, he’d have made some noise. He moved farther in: wrecks with hand-painted numbers on their doors, victims of forgotten county-fair enduro races.
    Heard a clank to his left, felt a wetness in his eyebrow. Reached up and touched it: blood. Whatever had fallen off the shelf had cut him, and he was bleeding fairly heavily. Didn’t hurt much, he thought. He moved farther left, around a pile, around another pile. . . .
    A thin biker in jeans, a smudged black T-shirt, and heavy boots looked up at the board fence around the yard. He was dark-complected, with a tan on top of that.
    The man goggled at Lucas’s bloody head. “Jesus, what happened to you?”
    “You knocked some shit on me,” Lucas said.
    The man showed a pleased smile, then looked at the top of the fence. “I’d never make it,” he said finally. He stepped back toward Lucas. “You gonna shoot me?”
    “No, we just want to talk.” Lucas slipped the pistol back in its holster.
    “Yeah, right,” the man said, showing his yellow teeth. Suddenly he was moving fast. “But I’m gonna kick your ass first.”
    Lucas touched the butt of his pistol as the man’s long wild swing came in. He lifted his left hand, batted the fist over his shoulder, hooked a short punch into the biker’s gut. The man had a stomach like an oak board. He grunted, took a step back, circled. “You can hit me all day in the fuckin’ gut,” he said. He’d made no attempt at Lucas’s pistol.
    Lucas shook his head, circling to his right. “No point. I’m gonna hit you in the fuckin’ head.”
    “Good luck.” The biker came in again, quick but inept, three fast roundhouse swings. Lucas stepped back once, twice, took the third shot on his left shoulder, then hooked a fast right to the man’s nose, felt the septum snap under the impact. The man dropped, one hand to his face, rolled onto his stomach, got shakily back to his feet, blood running out from under his hands. Lucas touched his own forehead.
    “You broke my nose,” the man said, looking at the blood on his fingers.
    “What’d you expect?” Lucas asked, probing his scalp with his fingertips. “You cut my head open.”
    “Not on purpose. You broke my fuckin’ nose on purpose,” he complained. Beneteau ran into the junkyard, looked at them. The man said, “I give up.”
     
     
     
    BENETEAU STOOD IN the parking lot and said quietly, “Earl says Joe is down at the house.” Earl was the man who’d fought Lucas. “He’s scared to death Bob’ll find out he told us.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. He held a first-aid pad against his scalp. He’d already soaked one of them through, and was on his second.
    “We’re gonna head down there,” Beneteau said. “Do you want to come? Or do you want to go into town and get that cut fixed up?”
    “I’m coming,” Lucas said. “How about the search warrants?”
    “We got them, both for this place and Joe’s and Bob’s. That’s a fine amount of speed back there, if that’s what it is,” Beneteau said.
    “That’s what it is,” Lucas said. “There’s probably six or eight ounces there on the floor.”
    “Biggest drug bust we’ve ever had,” Beneteau said with satisfaction. He looked at the porch, where Bob Hillerod and Earl sat on a bench, in handcuffs. They’d cut the customer loose; Beneteau was satisfied that he’d been there for cycle parts. “I’m kind of surprised Earl was involved with it.”
    “It’d be hard to prove that he was,” Lucas said. “I didn’t see him with the stuff. He says he was back there getting an alternator when everybody started running. He said one of the guys who went into the woods panicked, and threw the bag toward the toilet as they ran out the back. He might be telling the truth.”
    Beneteau looked at the woods and laughed a little. “We got those guys pinned in the marsh over there. Can’t see them, but I give them about fifteen minutes after the bugs come out tonight. If they last that long—they were wearing short-sleeved shirts.”
    “So let’s get Joe,” Lucas said.
     
     
     
    BENETEAU TURNED THE junkyard over to a half-dozen arriving deputies, including