Rules of Prey

the air pretty quick, six minutes—”
    “Six minutes, Jesus,” said Daniel, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed. He was talking calmly, but his voice was shaky. “If one of the surveillance crews had called the instant it started going down, it would have been rebroadcast and we’d have had cars on the way before Blaney got on the air. That would have eliminated the foul-up by the dispatcher. We’d have been eight minutes or nine minutes faster. If Lucas is right and he was parked up near the entrance to the Interstate, he was downtown having a drink by the time we started looking for his car.”
    There was a long silence.
    “What about this Werschel guy?” asked one of the deputy chiefs.
    Daniel opened an eye and looked at an assistant city attorney who sat at the back of the room, a briefcase between his feet.
    “We haven’t figured it out yet,” the attorney said. “There’s going to be some kind of lawsuit, but we were clearly within our rights to go into his yard in pursuit of the killer. Technically, his dogs should have been restrained, no matter how high the fence was. And when he came out and opened fire, Sickles was clearly within his rights to defend himself and his partner. He did right.”
    “So we got no problem there,” said one of the deputy chiefs.
    “A jury might give the wife a few bucks, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” the attorney said.
    “Our problem,” Daniel said in his remote voice, “is that this killer is still running around loose, and we look like a bunch of clowns running around killing civilians and each other. To say nothing of beating each other up afterward.”
    There was another silence. “Let’s get back to work,” Daniel said finally. “Lucas? I want to talk to you.”
     
    “What else you got?” he asked when they were alone.
    “Not a thing. I had . . . a feeling about the McGowan thing—”
    “Bullshit, Lucas, you set her up and you know it and I know it, and God help me, if we could do it again I’d say go ahead. It should have worked. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.” Daniel pounded the top of his desk. “We had him in the palm of our hand. We had the fucker.”
    “I blew it,” Lucas said moodily. “That gunfight went up and I came across the fence and saw Werschel lying there and I knew he wasn’t the maddog because the maddog was all dressed in black. And Sally was down and still pumping some blood and Sickles was there to help her, and the other guys, and I should have kept going. I should have gone over the back fence after the maddog and left Sally to the other guys. I thought that. I had this impulse to keep going, but Sally was pumping blood and nobody else was moving . . .”
    “You did all right,” Daniel said, stopping the litany. “Hey, a cop got blown up right in front of you. It’s only human to stop.”
    “I fucked up,” Lucas said. “And now I don’t have a thing to go on.”
    “Nails,” Daniel said.
    “What?”
    “I can hear the media getting out the nails. We’re going to be crucified.”
    “It’s pretty hard to give a shit anymore,” Lucas said.
    “Wait for a couple days. You’ll start giving a shit.” He hesitated. “You say Channel Eight got some film of you and Cochrane?”
    “Yeah. God damn, I’m sorry about that. He’s a rookie. I just lost it.”
    “From what I hear, it’s going to be pretty hard to take back what you said. Most of the cops out there think you’re right. And Sally had some years in. If Cochrane had just taken it easy, he’d have been right down that alley before the maddog knew you were coming. You’d have squeezed him between you and nobody would ever have gone into the yard with those fuckin’ dogs.”
    “Doesn’t make it better to know how close we came,” Lucas said.
    “Get some sleep and get back here in the afternoon,” Daniel said. “This thing should start shaking out by then. We’ll know what to expect from the media. And we can start figuring out what to do next.”
    “I can’t tell you what to do,” Lucas said. “I’m running on empty.”

CHAPTER
23
    They didn’t come for him.
    Somewhere, in the back of his head, he couldn’t believe it, that they didn’t come for him.
    He staggered through the connecting door from the garage into his apartment, took a step into the front room, realized that he was tracking sticky yellow clay onto the carpet, and stopped. He stood for a minute, breathing, reorganizing, then carefully stepped back