Rules of Prey

he dragged her up the stairs into the first bedroom and threw her on the bed. He taped her arms first, to the headboard, then her legs, apart, to the corner posts of the bed.
    He was breathing hard but he could feel the erection pounding at his groin, the excitement building in his throat.
    He stepped back and looked down at her. The knife, he thought. Hope there’s a good one. He went down to look in the kitchen.
    On the bed behind him, Jeannie Lewis moaned.

CHAPTER
4
    The Twin Cities’ horse track looks like a Greyhound bus station designed by a pastry chef. The fat cop, no architecture critic, liked it. He sat in the sun with a slice of pepperoni pizza in his lap, a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a portable radio in the other. He took the call on the portable just before the second race.
    “Right now?”
    “Right now.” Even with the interference, the voice was unmistakable and ragged as a bread knife.
    The fat cop looked at the thin one.
    “Christ, the fuckin’ chief. On the radio. ”
    “His procedure is fucked.” The thin cop was eating the last of a hot dog and had dribbled relish down the front of his sport coat. He brushed at it with an undersize napkin.
    “He wants Davenport,” said the fat one.
    “Something must have happened,” said the thin one. They were outside, on the deck. Lucas was on the blacktopped patio below, two sections over. He lazily sprawled over a wooden bench directly in front of the tote board and thirty feet from the dark soil of the track. A pretty woman in cowboy boots sat at the other end of the bench drinking beer from a plastic cup. The two cops went up the aisle to the top of the grandstand, down the staircase, and pushed through a small crowd at the base of the steps.
    “Davenport? Lucas?”
    Lucas turned, saw them, and smiled. “Hey. How’re you doing? Day at the races, huh?”
    “The chief wants to talk to you. Like right away.” The fatcop hadn’t thought of it until the last minute, but this could be hard to explain.
    “They pulled the surveillance?” Lucas asked. His teeth were showing.
    “You knew about it?” The fat cop lifted an eyebrow.
    “For a while. But I didn’t know why.” He looked at them expectantly.
    The thin cop shrugged. “We don’t know either.”
    “Hey, fuck you, Dick . . .” Lucas stood up with his fists balled, and the thin cop took a step back.
    “Honest to Christ, Lucas, we don’t know,” said the fat one. “It was all hush-hush.”
    Lucas turned and looked at him. “He said right now?”
    “He said right now. And he sounded like he meant it.”
    Lucas’ eyes defocused and he turned toward the track, staring sightlessly across the oval to the six-furlong starting gate. The jockeys were pressing their horses toward the gate and the crowd was starting to drift down the patio to the finish line.
    “It’s the maddog killer,” Lucas said after a moment.
    “Yeah,” said the fat cop. “It could be.”
    “Has to be. Goddammit, I don’t want that.” He thought about it for another few seconds and then suddenly smiled. “You guys got horses for this race?”
    The fat cop looked vaguely uneasy. “Uh, I got two bucks on Skybright Avenger.”
    “Jesus Christ, Bucky,” Lucas said in exasperation, “you’re risking two dollars to get back two dollars and forty cents if she wins. And she won’t.”
    “Well, I dunno . . .”
    “If you don’t know how to play . . .” Lucas shook his head. “Look, go put ten bucks on Pembroke Dancer. To win.”
    The two cops looked at each other.
    “Really?” said the thin one. “This is a maiden, you can’t know . . .”
    “Hey. It’s up to you, if you want to bet. And I’m staying for the race.”
    The two internal-affairs cops looked at each other, looked back at Lucas, then turned and hurried inside to the nearest betting windows. The thin one bet ten dollars. The fat one hesitated, staring into his wallet, licked his lips, took out three tens, licked his lips again, and pushed them across the counter. “Thirty on Pembroke Dancer,” he said. “To win.”
    Lucas was sprawled on the bench again and had started a conversation with the woman in the cowboy boots. When the surveillance cops got back, he moved down toward her but turned to the cops.
    “You bet?” he asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Don’t look so nervous, Bucky. It’s perfectly legal.”
    “Yeah, yeah. It ain’t that.”
    “Have you got a horse?” The woman in the cowboy boots leaned forward and