Rules of Prey

mess with the cops’ minds? A hooker, like in Dallas? No need to hurry, but it was a thought.
    He was drifting along, deep in thought, when a voice called his name.
    “Hey, Louie. Louie. Over here.”
    He turned. Bethany Jankalo, God help him. One of the associates. Tall, blonde, slightly buck-toothed. Loud. And, he’d been told, eminently available. She was on the arm of aprofessorial type, who stood tall, sucked a pipe, and looked at the maddog with disdain.
    “We’re going to the Mélange opening,” Jankalo brayed. She had a wide mouth and was wearing fluorescent pink lipstick. “Come on. It’s a lot of laughs.”
    Jesus, he thought, and she’s an attorney.
    But he fell in with them, Jankalo running her mouth, her escort sucking his pipe, which appeared to be empty and made slurping sounds as he worked it. Together they walked down a block, to a gallery in a gray brick building. There was a small crowd on the walk outside. Jankalo led the way through, using her shoulders like a linebacker. Inside, middle-aged professionals carried plastic glasses of white wine through the gallery while staring blankly at the canvases that lined the eggshell-white walls.
    “Who dropped the pizza?” Jankalo laughed as she looked at the first piece. Her escort winced. “What a bunch of shit.”
     
    Some of it was not.
    The maddog did not know about art; wasn’t interested in it. On the walls of his office, he had two duck prints, taken from the annual federal waterfowl stamps. He’d been told they were good investments.
    But now his eyes were opened. Most of the work was, indeed, very bad. But Larson Deiree did riveting nudes posed against bizarre situational backdrops. Their contorted bodies caught in explicitly sexual offerings, the recipients of the offers, men in overcoats and broadbrimmed hats and wing-tip shoes, their faces averted, shown as alienated strangers. Power transactions; the women as unequivocal prizes. The maddog was fascinated.
    “Have a wine and a cracker, Louie,” Jankalo said, handing him a glass of pale yellow fluid and a stack of poker-chip-size crackers.
    “Sort of like ‘I argued before the Supreme Court in my Living Bra,’ huh?” she asked, looking at the Deiree painting behind him.
    “I . . .” The maddog groped for words.
    “You what?” Jankalo said. “You like that?”
    “Well . . .”
    “Louie, you’re a pervert,” she said, her voice so loud it was virtually a shout. The maddog glanced around. Nobody was paying any attention. “That’s my kind of man.”
    “I like it. It makes an argument,” the maddog said. He surprised himself. He didn’t think in those terms.
    “Oh, bullshit, Louie,” Jankalo shouted. “He’s just hanging some snatch out there to hype the sales.”
    The maddog turned away.
    “Louie . . .”
    He thought about killing her. All in an instant, he thought about it.
    It would have a certain artistic spontaneity to it. It would, in a way, follow the maxim that he not establish a pattern, because it would not be calculated and planned. And it would be amusing. Jankalo, he didn’t doubt, would largely cooperate, right up to the moment the knife went in. He felt a stirring in his groin.
    “Louie, you can be such an asshole,” Jankalo said, and walked away. She had said, Louie, you’re a pervert . . . my kind of man. An offer? If so, he’d let it dangle too long. She was headed back to her professor. The maddog was not good in social situations. He took a bite of cracker and looked around, straight into the eyes of Carla Ruiz.
    He looked away.
    He did not want to catch her eye. The maddog believed that eye contact was telling: that she might look him in the eye and suddenly know. They had, after all, shared a considerable intimacy.
    He maneuvered so that he could watch her from angles, past others. The cut on her forehead looked bad, the bruises going yellow. The maddog was still badly bruised himself, green streaks on his back and one arm.
    Maybe he should come back on her.
    No. That would violate too many rules. And the need to do her had passed.
    But it was tempting; for revenge, if nothing else, like the farmgirl he’d blown off the horse. The thought of killing made him tingle, pulled at him, like a nicotine addict who had gone too long between cigarettes.
    The need would grow. Better start doing research Monday. At the latest.

CHAPTER
9
    Jennifer Carey was staring at him in the dark again.
    “What?” he asked.
    “What,