Phantom Prey

cables?”
    “I’d buy that,” Lucas said. “We’ll call.”
    Next, he called Odd’s Tow and asked for Ricky, and was told by the woman who answered the phone that Ricky wasn’t working. Excellent.
    Odd’s tow and Wrecking was built on a hump of dirt off Highway 52, the dirt held together by a comprehensive coat of oil slicks. The office was a rectangular shed with one window and a hand-painted sign that said Odd’s, and a red neon sign inside the window said Open. A dozen junked cars sat in the weeds next to a blue-metal garage. There were three tow trucks in sight, two inside the garage, one sitting in the yard next to the office.
    Lucas parked on one side of the office door, and Del on the other, and Lucas led the way inside, where a fleshy woman with big dark hair sat behind a desk sorting by hand through yellow slips of paper. A plaque on her desk said Linda. She looked up when they came in, asked, “Can I help you?”
    “Are you the manager?” Lucas asked.
    “No . . . the manager . . .” She looked toward one of two internal doors and shouted, “Hey. Odd.”
    A chair scraped across a concrete floor in the office and a heavyset man with pink cheeks and straw-colored hair stuck his head out of the office. “Help you?”
    Lucas identified himself and said, “We need to ask you some questions about one of your employees.”
    “Welp”—it sounded like welp— “won’t be the first time. Come on in. Is this about Jerry?”
    “Why do you ask?” Del said.
    “He’s been sort of spooky the last couple days. I’ve kinda wondered if he’s been up to something,” Odd said. He was wearing an oil-stained flight suit, and took a pack of Marlboros out of a leg pocket and shook out a cigarette.
    “Like what?” Del asked.
    Odd settled behind a beat-up wooden desk, with a sign on it that said Odd Angstrom, pointed at a couple of plastic chairs, and said, “Well, you know, ever since he got out, we’ve wondered if he might go back to his old ways. Made some good money—heh, heh. EBay’s the world’s best fence, huh? No more ten-cents-on-the-dollar.”
    Linda had left her desk and came in and leaned on the doorjamb. “That goddamned Jerry. He’s never going straight. Good worker, but he doesn’t see himself getting along on forty thousand a year, if you know what I mean.”
    Del and Lucas looked from Odd to Linda, and then Lucas said, “We’re not here about Jerry.”
    Now Odd and Linda looked at each other, and Odd hacked once, a smoker’s laugh, and said, “I guess we coulda gone all day without mentioning Jerry,” and Linda cackled and said, “Got that right.”
    Odd said, “So who’s it about?”
    “You gotta guy named Ricky Davis?”
    Odd frowned. “Ricky, huh? What’d he do?”
    “We don’t know if he did anything. We’re just looking around based on some lab work. Do you have any record of what he might have been doing—his calls—last December?”
    Linda nodded. “Sure. What date?”
    Lucas gave her the date, and she went back to her desk, and all three men stepped out to watch. She pounded on an old Dell computer, brought up a spreadsheet, rolled it for a couple of minutes, then put her finger on a greasy screen and said, “Yeah, he was working. Had three calls . . . let me see. Yeah, he came on at three o’clock, left at eleven. He was the only guy on that afternoon, sort of tangled up in the Christmas holidays. Must’ve been snowing—he had two ditch calls and one tow.”
    “Can you tell which truck he was using?”
    “Yup.” She touched the screen again and said, “He’s usually in Two . . . yup, he was in Two.”
    “Could we take a look at Two?”
    “Ain’t gonna be anything left from December,” Odd said.
    “Like to take a look anyway,” Lucas said.
    Odd led them back to the garage and pointed. Two was a black 2001 Ford 550 diesel with a dual winch on the back. They walked around it, and Lucas stuck his hand over the side and dragged his fingers across the bed, held them up in front of his face, rubbed his fingers. All the oil you could want. The winch lines were shiny, but gritty: there would be, Lucas thought, metal filings in the oil.
    “What do you think?” Del asked.
    “I think I gotta find a place to wash my hands; and we should call Dakota County, get their lab people up here,” Lucas said.
    “Not gonna take the truck, are they?” Odd asked.
    “If they have to, you’d be compensated,” Lucas said.
    Odd brightened: “Welp, that’d