Phantom Prey

that Roy works at Mike’s.”
    “I’ve been there,” the second barfly said. “I don’t know the street, but it’s a hole-in-the-wall, kitty-corner from a Burger King.”
    “Got it,” Lucas said. He knew the place, but had never been inside.
    “How about a guy named Karl Lageson?”
    The bartender shook his head. “I don’t know that name.”
    “I think that’s Lurch,” the first barfly said to the bartender. To Lucas: “Big tall pale white guy. Deep eyes, big forehead. Looks like he ought to have a bolt in his neck. Don’t know about him, though.”
    “I’ve seen him with Roy,” the second barfly said. “If Lurch is the guy you’re looking for.”
    “Getting back to this Goth with the good ass,” the bartender said. “I know the Goths that the Minneapolis cops talked to. None of them have got what you’d call an amazing ass. I mean, not so you’d go around saying what an amazing ass she had.”
    “So she might be new,” Lucas suggested. “The other Goth.”
    “Could be,” the bartender said. “Or maybe she’s just a figment of somebody’s imagination.”
    “A Fig Newton of the imagination; the little cookie that nobody knew,” the first barfly said.
    The second barfly burped again, scratched some cash out of his pocket, and said, “Gimme one more. Then cut me off. I gotta drive.”
    Lucas chatted with the three of them for another five minutes, noted their names, and headed out into the failing daylight, fishing his cell phone from his pocket, calling home. “Go ahead and eat without me,” he told Weather. “I’ll grab a sandwich. I’m doing some running around on Alyssa Austin.”
    “Anything I should know?” Weather asked.
    “There’s a mystery woman,” Lucas said.
    “That’s always good,” she said.
    “I’ll tell you about it tonight.”
    He stopped at a sandwich shop across the street from the supermarket. He got a free newspaper on the way in; from order to delivery, through eating and reading, a half hour drained away. When he walked across the street to his car, it was fully dark. Mike’s was ten minutes away. He got tangled up around a minor traffic accident, and another ten minutes disappeared.
    Mike’s was a wedge-shaped store stuck into the corner of a 1920s building with fake brown-brick siding made of tar shingles, neon beer signs in the windows, bars under the glass. A young woman was sitting on a stool behind the counter, talking on her cell phone, a pudgy salon-blonde with a thumbprint-sized bruise under one eye, a scattering of acne across her nose. She took the phone away from her face for a moment and asked, “D’you need help?”
    Lucas held up his ID. “Need to talk to you about Roy.”
    She said into the phone, “I’ve got a cop here. I don’t know, it’s about Roy. . . . I don’t know, hang on.” To Lucas, with the phone on her shoulder: “What about Roy?”
    “Could you get off the phone for a minute?” Lucas asked.
    To the phone: “He wants me to get off the phone? Yeah, he is.” Lucas thought he’d heard a tinny “asshole” from the phone, and he rubbed his forehead. She picked that up and said, “Call you back.” Hung up and said, “Yeah?”
    “I’m looking for an employee of yours named Roy,” Lucas said.
    “He went home.”
    “You got a phone number for him?” Lucas asked.
    “I’m not allowed to give that out.”
    “I’m a cop. You’re allowed to give it to me,” Lucas said.
    She rolled her eyes, as though she were being tried by the feeble-minded. “I’m not allowed to give to anybody .”
    “You want to stop giving me a hard time here?”
    “Me? You’re the asshole.”
    Lucas looked at her for a moment; she was enjoying herself, jerking around a cop. He contemplated her for a second, then took out his cell phone, hit a speed-dial number, waited for a second, then said, “This is Lucas Davenport, with the BCA. . . . Yeah, hi, Rog. Look, could you send a squad around to Mike’s Liquor on Fourteenth, over in Dinkytown? I’m working that Ford murder thing, I got a witness giving me a hard time. I’d like to get the name and a number for the owner, I might want to pick him up later. Yeah, thanks. Just probably transport her downtown, give her some time in the tank to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to you.”
    He hung up the phone and she shouted, “Transport me ?” Lucas turned away, walked over to the door and looked out. She shouted, “Wait a minute. Transport me? What the fuck are you