Phantom Prey

wearing a white T-shirt with the black jacket and black jeans and black hair, and I thought, you know, Here’s a guy who could manipulate his way into a young girl’s pants, and he’d be pretty heartless about it. But I don’t think she was seeing him. I don’t think they had any kind of physical relationship. At least, not at the time I saw him. They didn’t have that . . . intimacy about them.”
    “Loren,” Lucas said. “No last name?”
    “No. I only saw him that one time, they came by the house in Frances’s car, but . . .”
    “He came by the house?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes, just for a while,” she said.
    “Did he look it over?”
    “Well, they carried some things from Frances’s room down to her car . . . but you know, I don’t really remember him that well. As it turns out, I never saw him again. He didn’t seem like Frances’s type. That’s why I remember him at all, because . . . he seemed like somebody to be wary of.”
    “How old?” Lucas asked.
    “Late twenties, probably. Early thirties at the most,” she said.
    “Get the feeling that he was local?”
    “I didn’t get any feeling for that.” Her forehead wrinkled, and then she said, “I didn’t notice an accent. So probably local.”
    “That’s something.”
    She looked up at him and said, “I never would have remembered to tell you about him. It was too long ago, and I only saw him that one time. All I’ve got left is a kind of ghost image.”

10
    He’d gotten no further on the fifty thousand dollars, but he had a name: Loren. Back at the office, he ran the name through the DMV computer and found, unexpectedly, that there were hundreds of Lorens in Minnesota. He called out to his secretary, “Hey, Carol— where’s Sandy?”
    Carol came to the door: “She doesn’t work today. She’s got classes in the morning . . . you might be able to get her on her cell phone.”
    He got the number and dialed, and Sandy came up in a few seconds. He explained the problem. “Get all the Lorens, filter them for age twenty-five to middle thirties, then look at the ID photos and get me dark hair.”
    “Maybe I should look at the university records, too,” Sandy suggested. “If she was going to school, could have been an out-of-state school friend.”
    “You’ve got access?” Lucas asked.
    “I do, but you can’t tell,” she said.
    “How long?”
    “I’ve got a link at home now . . . an hour?”
    “We gotta pay you more,” he said.
    When he was off the line, he walked down and got a can of diet Coke, stretching his leg, ran into Shrake, who said, “What the hell happened?” So he had to tell Shrake about it, and then Jenkins showed up and said, “You got in the papers again, you goddamn publicity dog.”
    “I was badly wounded,” Lucas said.
    “You didn’t shoot anybody,” Jenkins said. “You didn’t even try to shoot anybody.”
    “The guy was gone before I got my gun out,” Lucas said. “I was doing a two-step around the incoming.”
    “You should have shot somebody ,” Jenkins said. “Anybody. This makes us look bad. Like pussies.”
    Shrake closed one eye and said to Jenkins, “Maybe you oughta let up. Our boy don’t look that happy.”
    Jenkins: “So what? Fuck him. If you don’t kick a guy when he’s down, you’re stupid.”
    Shrake asked Lucas, “You okay?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “He missed my balls by two inches, and if it’d been an inch the other way, he’d have blown out my femoral artery. I have no idea who he is, what he wants. But he goddamn near killed me.”
    “He’s a nimrod,” Shrake said. “He gave you everything he had and just nicked you.”
    “That makes it worse, almost,” Lucas said. “I was almost killed by a fuck-up.”
    “Not worse,” Jenkins said, shaking a finger. “If he comes back for you, you’ll get him. If he’d been a pro, or a cop, or anybody who knows about guns, he’d have waited right outside that door for you, and he would’ve shot you from two feet and you’d be dead now. He was scared of you. He was standing back far enough to run away.”
    “Does this involve the Austin thing?” Shrake asked.
    “Christ, I hope so,” Lucas said. “If it’s not that, I’ve got no idea what it would be.”
    Jenkins to Shrake: “Maybe we ought to see if Antsy has another brother. Or a special Lithuanian pal.”
    Lucas shook his head: “Any pal of Antsy would have been better at it. This guy was a total fuckin’ amateur. I don’t