Phantom Prey

pleading that he’d received a phone call from a man who told him that if his family moved in, his children would be taken from their grade schools, and their eyes would be put out with a red-hot poker.
    So the house sat there, empty, while Heather moved to a second-floor apartment on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. Her mother lived in the apartment next door, rolling around on a powered chair with a tank of oxygen. Heather’s mom was dying of congestive heart failure and wouldn’t make it through the year. She might not even make it through the month.
    When the old lady croaked, Lucas suspected, Heather and the child would be off to a warmer climate, like Zihuatanejo, or Monaco, where nobody would care about Siggy and his cocaine business in the Twin Cities.
    The bca had taken an apartment above a drugstore across the street from Heather’s and, for three months, kept up a regular watch. Then priorities changed, and the watch became sporadic. Lucas and Del took it over, as a hobby. The drugstore apartment was quiet, and Lucas could work there, and the couch was soft, and Del sometimes came by for a nap.
    Lucas’s group had broken the Toms case, and had made the arrests; had argued, through the prosecutor, that no bail should be allowed, that Toms was a flight risk.
    They’d lost the argument, and then Toms had bitch-slapped the BCA and the St. Paul cops at the Target store.
    THEN THERE WAS ANTSY.
    Siggy’s brother, Antanas—Antsy Toms—had been at loose ends since his brother vanished. The cops believed that Siggy had been the brains and the driving force behind the organization. Antsy was . . . his brother. What could anyone say?
    Antsy had a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty on one arm, and “US SEAL” on the other, with a dagger with blood dripping off it, though he’d never been in the military. He probably did have a dagger, though, and it probably did have blood dripping off it, from time to time.
    When God was passing out the brains, Siggy had been at the head of the line. Antsy, in the meantime, had been off getting F-U-C-K Y-O-U -! tattooed on the knuckles of his hands, upside down and backward from his point of view, but forward and right side up when he was sitting across a table from a cop.
    Antsy had done some enforcement work for Siggy, but hadn’t been arrested because he really, really didn’t know anything. Anything. When Siggy split, Antsy had taken up bouncing as a career, and methamphetamine as a hobby.
    Most recently, he’d drubbed the bejesus out of two St. Paul cops, one of whom was the daughter of a BCA agent stationed upstate in Bemidji. Antsy, like his brother, was still on the run, but the word was, he didn’t have the cash to go far.
    Antsy was still around; and he might also be calling on the beauteous Heather, looking for a little cash money—another reason to keep the surveillance going.
    So, here lucas was, observing the often-semi-naked or even fully naked Mrs. Toms every day or two, walking around in front of her open windows, one of the least body-conscious women Lucas had ever done surveillance on, waiting for the family to show up.
    He picked up the pregnancy in the third month, the baby bump under her upscale Pea in the Pod maternity clothing.
    Nobody had ever seen a boyfriend—so Siggy had been back, Lucas thought, and they’d missed him.
    In addition to a salesman’s natural affability, and his willingness to use wire cutters on slow-pay retail dealers, Siggy had been a genuine family man. He’d be back again.
    Just not today.
    Lucas looked down at the laptop, where he’d been wrestling with bureaucratic ratshit. He was late with the annual personnel evaluations, and some time-serving wretch, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, whose life work involved collecting evaluation forms, was torturing him with e-mails and phone messages.
    And what, really, could he say about Del? Or about Virgil? Or about Jenkins and Shrake?
    The questionnaire asked if Del presented himself in a manner that conformed to standards of good practice as outlined in Minnesota state regulations. In fact, the last time Lucas had seen Del, he’s been unshaven, hungover, three months late for a haircut, and was wearing torn jeans, worn sneaks, and a sweatshirt that said, *underwear not included .
    Virgil, Lucas knew, drove around the state pulling a boat and trailer and almost daily went fishing or hunting on state time, the better to focus investigative vibrations—a technique that