Rules of Prey

looked down the bench at Lucas. She had violet eyes.
    “Just a guess,” Lucas said lazily.
    “Is this, like, a private guess?”
    “We’ve all got a couple of bucks on Pembroke Dancer,” Lucas said.
    The woman with the violet eyes had a Racing Form on the bench beside her, but instead of looking at it, she looked up at the sky and her lips moved silently and then she turned her head and said, “She had a terrific workout at six furlongs. The track was listed as fast but it probably wasn’t that good.”
    “Hmm,” said Lucas.
    She looked at the tote board for a few seconds and said, “Excuse me, I gotta go powder my nose.”
    She left, hurrying. The fat cop was still licking his lips and watching the tote board. The odds on Pembroke Dancer were twenty to one. Three other horses, Stripper’s Colors, Skybright Avenger, and Tonite Delite, had strong races in the past three weeks. Pembroke Dancer had been shipped in from Arkansas two weeks earlier. In her first race she finished sixth.
    “What’s the story on this horse?” asked the fat cop.
    “A tip from a friend.” Lucas gestured over his shoulderwith his thumb, up toward the press box. “One of the handicappers got a call from Vegas. Guy walked into a horse parlor a half-hour ago and bet ten thousand on Pembroke Dancer to win. Somebody knows something.”
    “Jesus. So why’d he lose his last race so bad?”
    “She.”
    “Huh?”
    “She. Dancer’s a filly. And I don’t know why she lost. Might be anything. Maybe the jock was dragging his feet.”
    The tote board flickered and the odds on Pembroke Dancer went up to twenty-two to one.
    “How much you bet, Lucas?” the fat cop asked.
    “It’s an exacta. I wheeled Dancer with the other nine horses. A hundred each way, so I have nine hundred riding.”
    “Jesus.” The fat man licked his lips again. He had another twenty in his wallet and thought about it. Across the track, the first of the horses was led into the gate and the fat cop settled back. Thirty was already too much. If he lost it, he’d be lunching on Cheetos for a week.
    “So you got anything good?” asked Lucas. “What was this thing about Billy Case and the rookie?”
    The fat cop laughed. “Fuckin’ Case.”
    “There was this woman lawyer,” said the thin one, “and one day she looks out her office window, which is on the back of an old house that they made into offices. The back of her office looks at the back of the business buildings on the next street over. In fact, it looks right down this walkway between these buildings. At the other end of this walkway there’s a fence with a gate in it, like blocking the walkway from the street. So you can’t see into the walkway from the street. But you can see into it from this lawyer’s office, you know? So anyway, she looks down there, and here’s this cop, in full uniform, getting his knob polished by this spade chick.
    “So this lawyer’s watching and the guy gets off and zips up and he and the spade chick go through this gate in the little fence, back onto the street. This lawyer, she’s cool, she thinks maybe they’re in love. But the next day, there’s two of them, both cops, and the spade chick, and she’s polishingboth of them. So now the lawyer’s pissed. She gets this giant camera from her husband, and the next day, sure enough, they’re back with another chick, a white girl this time. So the lawyer takes some pictures and she brings this roll of Kodachrome in to the chief.”
    The first of the horses was guided into the back of the gate and locked. The woman with the violet eyes got back and settled at the end of the bench. The thin cop rambled on. “So the chief sends it down to the lab,” he said, “and they’re only like the best pictures anybody ever took of a knob-job. I could of sold them for ten bucks apiece. So the chief and the prosecutors decide there’s some problem with the chain of evidence and we wind up in this lawyer’s office with a video unit. Sure enough, here they come. But this time they got both the spade chick and the white chick. This is like in Cinemascope or something. Panavision.”
    “So what’s going to happen?” Lucas asked.
    The fat one shrugged. “They’re gone.”
    “How much time did they have in?”
    “Case had six years, but I don’t give a shit. He had a bad jacket. We think he and a security guard was boosting stereos and CD players out of a Sears warehouse a few months back. But I feel sorry for the