Phantom Prey

her to her feet. The trainer nodded and said, “Not too bad, but you have to start finishing the routine.”
    “How many times have I missed?”
    The trainer, a woman a bit taller than Austin but just as fit, bones showing in her face, said, “Week before last, you only got halfway through.”
    “I’m doing good; if I only miss one in six, I’m doing good,” Austin said, and then, to the trainer, “Take a break. I’ve got to talk to this guy.”
    “You’re pretty hard-core,” Lucas said, letting his eyes walk around her body.
    “I can’t believe you’re walking around,” she said.
    “Ah, I’ve been hurt worse doing home repair.” He’d been using the line frequently, because he thought it was pretty good.
    Austin stepped over to a barre and pulled a towel off, mopped her face and her neck. “I’m a jock, I’ve always liked to sweat,” she said. “My problem is, I tend to work too much, and eat too little. Then my ass disappears. The people who come here definitely don’t want to see an assless CEO.”
    “You’re holding your own,” Lucas said. He quickly added, lest she misinterpret a comment that he intended as purely aesthetic, “That fifty thousand bucks that Frances took out . . . there’s something strange going on there. We need to find out where it went. She took it all in cash, and the way she did it . . .”
    He told her about his visit to the bank and she said, “I’ve no idea what that was about. I’ve never had fifty thousand in cash, myself, in my entire life. I mean, you can’t buy anything with it. Anything legal.”
    “We were wondering about that ourselves,” Lucas said. “Drugs . . . or maybe some kind of political thing. We’re trying to think of stuff.”
    She crossed her arms and looked down at the floor, tapping one foot, as though trying to work through it, then said, “Frances did this Goth thing, but you know what? She was really a pretty mainstream kid. She wasn’t a big risk-taker. She was a little risk-taker . . . and why would she finance something like drugs? She had all the money she needed. I assume you’re not suggesting that she used fifty thousand dollars’ worth of drugs.”
    “Could be done, but you’d see it.”
    “I never saw her loaded,” Austin said. “Never. Fifty thousand in cash, she would have had to be involved in distribution or something. And I can’t see that. Not at all. If you knew her, you’d know how crazy it seems.”
    “She wouldn’t have had to use it all at once,” Lucas said. “She could have been running on credit for a while, until she got her money, and then paid off her dealer.”
    “She wasn’t a druggie,” Austin said. “She just wasn’t.”
    “Do you know what a druggie looks like?” Lucas asked.
    “I do. We have women here, well-off people, who got involved with cocaine or pills, they come out of rehab and straight into here because the doctors tell them to. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t, but I get a sense of what druggies are like and Frances wasn’t like that. She may have smoked a joint on occasion, but who hasn’t?”
    Lucas noticed that Austin’s daughter was now in the past tense, but didn’t mention it.
    “She didn’t gamble.”
    “No.”
    “So where did the money go?”
    “I don’t know. It’s just not right. It’s just not right .”
    Lucas limped over to the barre and leaned his butt against it. Austin said, “You got shot in the same bar where Dick Ford was murdered. Near where this other boy was killed.”
    “Yup.”
    “So there must be something there.”
    “That’s what I think.” He felt a twinge from his groin, and winced a little.
    “ Why are you walking around?” Austin said. “Your face just went white as a sheet of paper.”
    “Because I’m bored and I wasn’t hurt that bad. And I’m interested: you know a guy, a friend of Frances’s, middle height, maybe five-eleven or so, black hair, black leather jacket, jeans, cheap sunglasses, a crooked mustache but maybe not, a hip-looking guy?”
    She cocked her head to one side. “Like a wannabe biker?”
    “Yeah. Sort of a broken-ass wannabe biker.”
    “God. He sounds like . . . quite a while back, I only saw him once, there was a guy named Larry,” she said. She held her hands to her lips. "No, that’s not right. It was an L name, but like a woman’s name . . . Lauren? Loren? Loren, I think. It sounds like him.”
    “Loren.”
    “Yes. I’m sure of it. When I saw him, he was