Night Prey

him to pick some other front. Anything would have been better. He coulda been a car-parts salesman or a bartender, or anything. He had to be a fuckin’ street guy.”
    “Yeah . . . so what’d you want?”
    “Got a match?” Del asked.
    “You wanted a match?”
    Del grinned past the unlit cigarette and said, “C’mon inside. Look at something.”
    Lucas followed him through the warehouse, down a narrow pathway through holes in half-burned partitions, past stacks of charred wooden pallets. Toward the back, he could see the black plastic sheet where the body was, and the stench of burned pork grew sharper. Del took him to a fallen plasterboard interior wall, where the remnants of a narrow wooden box held three small-diameter pipes, each about five feet long.
    “Are these what I think they are?” Del asked.
    Lucas squatted next to the box, picked up one of the pipes, looked at the screw-threading at one end, tipped up the other end, and looked inside at the rifling. “Yeah, they are—if you think they’re fifty-cal replacement barrels.” He dropped the barrel back on the others, duckwalked a couple of feet to another flattened box, picked up a piece of machinery. “This is a lock,” he said. “Bolt-action single-shot fifty-cal. Broken. Looks like a stress-line crack, bad piece of steel . . . What was in this place?”
    “A machine shop, supposedly.”
    “Yeah, a machine shop,” Lucas said. “They were turning out these locks, I bet. Gettin’ the barrels from somewhere else—you wouldn’t normally see them on single-shots, they’re too heavy. We ought to have the identification guys look at them, see if we can figure out where they came from, and who got them at this end.” He dropped the broken lock on the floor, stood up, and tipped his head toward the body. “What was this guy into?”
    “The Seeds, is what his friends say.”
    Lucas, exasperated, shook his head. “All we need is those assholes hanging around.”
    “They’re getting into politics,” Del said. “Want to kill themselves some black folks.”
    “Yeah. You want to look into this?”
    “That’s why I got you out here,” Del said, nodding. “You see the guns, you smell the pork, how can you say no?”
    “All right. But you check with me every fuckin’ fifteen minutes,” Lucas said, tapping him on the chest. “I want to know everything you’re doing. Every name you find, every face you see. Any sign of trouble, you back away and talk to me. They’re dumb motherfuckers, but they’ll kill you.”
    Del nodded, said, “You’re sure you don’t have a match?”
    “I’m serious, Del,” Lucas said. “You fuck me around, I’ll put your ass back in a uniform. You’ll be directing traffic outside a parking ramp. Your old lady’s knocked up and I don’t wanna be raising your kid.”
    “I really need a fuckin’ match,” Del said.
    The Seeds: the Hayseed Mafia, the Bad Seed M.C. Fifty or sixty stickup men, car thieves, smugglers, truck hijackers, Harley freaks, mostly out of northwest Wisconsin, related by blood or marriage or simply shared jail cells. Straw-haired baby-faced country assholes: have guns, will travel. And they were lately infected by a virulent germ of apocalyptic anti-black weirdness, and were suspected of killing a minor black hood outside a pool hall in Minneapolis.
    “Why would they have the fifty-cals?” Del asked.
    “Maybe they’re building a Waco up in the woods.”
    “The thought crossed my mind,” Del said.
     
     
     
    WHEN THEY GOT back outside, a Minneapolis squad was shifting through the lines of fire trucks, local cop cars, and sheriff’s vehicles. The squad stopped almost on their feet, and Sloan climbed out, bent over to the driver, a uniformed sergeant, and said, “Keep the change.”
    “Blow me,” the driver said genially, and eased away.
    Sloan was a narrow man with a slatlike face. He wore a hundred-fifty-dollar tan summer suit, brown shoes a shade too yellow, and a fedora the color of beef gravy. “How do, Lucas,” he said. His eyes shifted to Del. “Del, you look like shit, my man.”
    “Where’d you get the hat?” Lucas asked. “Is it too late to take it back?”
    “My wife bought it for me,” Sloan said, sliding his fingertips along the brim. “She says it complements my ebullient personality.”
    Del said, “Still got her head up her ass, huh?”
    “Careful,” Sloan said, offended. “You’re talking about my hat.” He looked at Lucas. “We gotta go