Phantom Prey

tumbling out of a nineties boom box. Waits was working through “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” and the bluesy piano fit with Lucas’s mood.
    Across the street, a woman tiptoed into her bedroom, stopped to look into a baby bed. Smiled silently; then unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off her narrow shoulders, hung it on a chair, then reached back between her shoulder blades to pop her brassiere.
    A pair of Canon image-stabilized binoculars sat on the desk next to Lucas’s laptop. Lucas picked them up and watched as she dug through a chest of drawers. Must be cool in the apartment; her nipples were nicely erect. She was a brown-haired girl, of the brown-eyed tribe, with a long supple back that showed every vertebrae down to the notch of her butt. She’d kept herself in shape.
    She came up with a T-shirt and then a heavy blue sweatshirt and pulled them over her head. Her pregnancy was progressing well, Lucas observed. She must be about four months along now, and was faithful about her biweekly visits to the obstetrician.
    Bummer. If she was putting on a sweatshirt, no bra, she wasn’t going out. Heather was intensely fashion-conscious, a woman who wore high heels to Starbucks. Neither was she tarting herself up, so Siggy was not on his way over.
    Sigitas Toms, Siggy to his pals and the cops, had been the Twin Cities’s largest-volume cocaine dealer, pushing the stuff through his contacts in the real estate, stockbroking, and used-car businesses. He’d been netting two million a year, tax free, at the end, with money stashed all over the United States and Europe.
    When he was busted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul police, he’d told the arresting officers that he wouldn’t be going to prison. They all had a good laugh at that, Siggy included. He was the affable sort, right up to the time he pulled your dick off with a pair of wire cutters.
    Two hours after he bailed out of jail, he vanished.
    He’d been under a loose two-man surveillance at the time, one BCA guy and one St. Paul detective. From the jail, he’d gone home to a warm front-porch greeting from Heather. An hour later, hair still wet from what the cops assumed was a postcoital shower, he’d emerged from the house, carrying a slip of paper—a shopping list. Pampers, baby powder. He climbed into his Lexus and drove to the Woodbury Target store.
    The watchers weren’t too worried when they lost him in the bed and bath department, pushing his cherry red cart between the high stacks of towels and bath mats and sheets, because there’s only one way out of a Target, the front, and that was covered, right?
    Besides, you’d naturally lose a guy for a minute or two in a Target . . . but when they couldn’t locate him in a minute or two, they got anxious, and began running up and down, frightening the shoppers— or guests , as Target called them in the letter of complaint that they sent to the director of the BCA and the St. Paul chief of police.
    Turns out, Target does have a back door, but not for customers. Siggy hadn’t had permission to use it, but callously had anyway; a cold-blooded criminal, for sure.
    He’d had a car waiting and nobody had ever seen him again.
    Well. Somebody had seen him, just not the cops.
    His wife, heather, née Anderson, pled ignorance of everything. She thought Siggy was a humble car salesman, she said from the steps of their highly leveraged two-point-eight-million-dollar teal-and -coffee-painted McMansion. Doesn’t everybody have a house like this? The house had been part of Siggy’s three-million-dollar bond. When he skipped, the court found out, there was an unre-marked second mortgage, and with the slump in housing prices, the two mortgages were underwater. Or, as they say in California, upside down. If the court foreclosed, it’d mostly be foreclosing on air.
    So there was Heather, twisting her hands in regret. There was the Ramsey County attorney, mumbling into his torts. And somewhere, was Siggy—a tear for poor Siggy, growing a beard in Mexico or Paraguay or Belize, drinking salty margaritas and cerveza blanca and watching the tourists walk hand in hand down the beach in flip-flops, pining for the old homestead in Woodbury, with its driveway ring of hosta plants, basketball net to the side, its legal writs.
    Heather was pushed out of the house eight months after Siggy disappeared. A buyer was found, a radiologist, but the radiologist backed out at the last minute,