Rules of Prey

Then he sat down, worked for fifteen seconds, and was back up with “Willie and the Hand Jive.” He danced in the dark room by himself, watching the song time counting down on the digital CD clock. When “Hand Jive” ended, he sat down again, called up a file on his IBM, read out the specs, and went back to the numbers after an almost unconscious glance at the clock. Twelve-fifteen.
    Lucas lived in a three-bedroom ranch home, stone and cedar, across Mississippi Boulevard and a hundred feet above the river. When the leaves were off the trees in the fall and winter, he could see the lights of Minneapolis from his living room.
    It was a big house. At first, he worried that it was too big, that he should buy a condominium. Something over by the lakes, where he could watch the singles out jogging, skating, sailing.
    But he bought the house and never regretted it. He paid $120,000 for it, cash, in 1980. Now it was worth twice that. And in the back of his head, as he pushed into his thirties and contemplated the prospect of forty, he still thought of children and a place for them.
    Besides, as it turned out, he quickly filled up the space. A beat-up Ford four-wheel-drive joined the five-year-old Porsche in the garage. The family room became a small gym, with free weights and a heavy bag, and a wooden floor where he did kata, the formal exercises of karate.
    The den was converted to a library, with sixteen hundred novels and nonfiction works and another two hundred small volumes of poetry. A deep leather chair with a hassock for his feet, and a good light, were the main furnishings. For those times when reading didn’t appeal, he’d built in a twenty-five-inch color television, videotape player, and sound system.
    Tools, laundry appliances, and outdoor sports gear were stored in the basement, along with a sophisticated reloading bench and a firearms locker. The locker was actually a turn-of-the-century bank safe. An expert cracksman could open it in twenty minutes, but Lucas didn’t expect any expert cracksmen to visit his basement. A snatch-and-run burglar wouldn’t have a chance against the old box.
    Lucas owned thirteen guns. His daily working weapon was a nine-millimeter Heckler & Koch P7 with a thirteen-shot clip. He also carried, on occasion, a nine-millimeter Beretta 92F. Those, and the small ankle gun, were kept on a concealed shelf in his workroom desk.
    The basement locker contained two Colt .45 Gold Cups, both further customized by a Texas gunsmith for combat target competition, and three .22’s, including a Ruger Mark II with a five-and-a-half-inch bull barrel, a Browning International Medalist, and the only nonautomatic, a bolt-action Anschutz Exemplar.
    In the bottom of the locker, carefully oiled, wrapped, and packaged, were four pistols he’d picked up on the job. Street guns, untraceable to anyone in particular. The last weapon, also kept in the locker, was a Browning Citori over-and-under twenty-gauge shotgun, the upland version. He used it for hunting.
    Of the rest of the house, the two smaller bedrooms actually had beds in them.
    The master bedroom became his workroom, with a drawing table, drafting instruments, and the IBM. There were two walls of books on weapons and armies—on Alexander and Napoleon and Lee and Hitler and Mao, details of Bronze Age spears and Russian tanks and science-fiction fantasies that discussed seeker-killer shells, rail guns, plasma rifles, and nova bombs. Ideas that he would weave into the net of a game. The slicers flitted through Lucas’ mind like splinters as he worked over the drawing table, hammering out the numbers.
    When the phone rang, he jumped. It seldom rang; few people had the number. Thirty-odd more this evening, he thought, laying his pencil on the table. He glanced at the clock: twelve-twenty-two. He stepped across the room, turned down the CD player, started the tape recorder he’d attached to the receiver, and picked up the extension.
    “Yes?”
    “Davenport?” A man’s voice. Middle-aged, or a little past it.
    “Yeah.”
    “You taping this?” Vaguely familiar. He knew this man.
    “No.”
    “How do I know that?”
    “You don’t. What can I tell you?”
    There was a pause; then the voice said, “I took the Smith, but I want to talk to you about it face-to-face.”
    “Let’s do it now,” said Lucas. “This is a very heavy situation.”
    “The deal is like you said this afternoon?”
    “That’s right,” Lucas said. “It won’t go