Phantom Prey

complex, looked at her watch, then wandered down into Nordstrom.
    Lucas stayed well back; a narrow-eyed saleswoman started tracking him as he cruised the women’s clothing, and finally she came over and asked, sharply, as though she were sure she couldn’t, “Can I help you find something, sir?”
    He took out his ID: “I’m a police officer. I’m working. Go away and don’t look at me.”
    She looked at the ID and then said, “Okay,” and walked away.
    Heather was looking at her watch again—it was 5:25 on Lucas’s watch—and headed for the store exit that led into the main mall. He followed her, still way back along the north wing of the first floor. At the center exit, she stopped at a bank of telephones and looked at her watch again. Now it was 5:28.
    Sonofabitch, Siggy Toms is calling her at 5:30, Lucas thought.
    He got on his cell and called Carol, but Carol was gone. Called the duty guy and told him to set up a phone trace, he’d have the number and the time coming. Then, he thought, a phone rang, because Heather turned and picked it up.
    Her face didn’t look that happy when she was talking. Not a lover’s face, he thought, although given her other love interest, maybe Siggy was a problem, rather than a solution.
    At that moment, a tall man, thin as a rail, wearing a battered white cowboy hat, a pearl-button shirt, and jeans worn nearly white with weather, stepped out of a store with a shopping bag, looked down toward Lucas, looked the other way, and wandered off.
    Something about him, Lucas thought. Where had he seen the guy? What the hell was it? Was he hooked to Heather Toms somehow? But the man went on past Heather without looking at her, bow-legged and clunky in his boots. . . .
    Thirty feet away, Heather was talking, her face and body animated; an argument? After a minute or so, she hung up, smiled, as if she’d accomplished something, and walked back toward Lucas. Lucas stepped inside a junk store—a store full of useless shit—and watched her walk past, and let her go.
    The man with the cowboy hat was gone.
    Don’t know what that was all about, the cowboy, he thought. Something though.
    And Siggy, he thought, as he walked down to check the phone, was coming.
    At the dinner table, over the sweet potatoes and pork chops, he told Weather about it. “. . . calling from a pay phone in Chattanooga. That’s a long day’s drive out of Miami—I bet he’s on the way.”
    “I’d hate to see the baby at risk,” she said. “If Siggy comes, do you have to take him at the apartment? With Heather there?”
    “We’ll take him when we see him,” Lucas said. “He is a bad guy.”
    “I’d like to be there,” Letty said. “Be a good story for the station.”
    “You are not going to be there,” Weather said.
    Letty had a half-assed high-school internship at Channel Three, through one of Lucas’s former lovers, the mother of his other daughter. She asked him, “What do you think?”
    Lucas said, “Over my dead body.”
    “Jeez Louise . . .”
    “When Siggy comes in, we won’t be fooling around,” Lucas said. “He’s been gone a year and more. He thinks he can sneak in here, and back out—he’s probably got some cash stashed here, that he couldn’t get at. But when we take him, he’s gonna know that he won’t get back out a second time. He’ll be inside for twenty or thirty, and the feds might tack more onto that. He’s not gonna be in a mood for any pissing around.”
    “Boy,” Letty said. “I’d give my left nut to be there.”
    “Forget it,” Lucas said, not rising to the “nut” bait.
    “You can let the SWAT guys take him,” Weather said to Lucas. “You’ve been shot enough this year.”
    “Got that right,” Lucas said.

20
    Lucas arrived at Willett’s house at nine-fifteen, a little later than he’d intended. The crime-scene crew had already gone in with the search warrant and was doing a preliminary walk-through with a dope-sniffing German shepherd. Lucas waited until they finished with the office nook off the kitchen, then got all the paper he could find, and began looking for Frances’s fifty thousand dollars.
    He didn’t find it—no receipts for large purchases, no bank deposits, no new warranties. On the other hand, if the fifty thousand had gone for dope, there wouldn’t be any of that—but there should either be a surge of money from somewhere, or there should be some dope. Willett hadn’t been carrying anything in the truck, money or