Rules of Prey

shaking his head.
    Lucas Davenport ambled out of the depths of the store with a Daily Racing Form and laid two dollars and twelve cents on the counter.
    “Fuckin’ kids,” the counterman said to nobody, craning his neck to see further up the street. He heard Lucas’ money hit the counter and turned. His basset-hound face tried for a grin and settled for a wrinkle. “How’s things?” he wheezed.
    “What’s going on?” Lucas asked, looking past the counterman into the street.
    “Couple of kids on skateboards.” The counterman had emphysema and his clogged lungs could manage only short sentences. “Riding behind a bus.” Whistle. “If they hit a manhole cover . . .” Suck wind. “They’re dead.”
    Lucas looked again. There were no kids in the street.
    “They’re gone,” the counterman said morosely. He picked up the Racing Form and read the first paragraph of the leadarticle. “You check the sale table?” Wheeze. “Some guy brought in some poems.” He pronounced it “pomes.”
    “Yeah?” Lucas walked around to the side of the counter and checked the ranks of battered books on the table. Huddled between two hardback surveys of twentieth-century literature he found, to his delight, a slim clothbound volume of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Lucas never went hunting for poetry; never bought anything new. He waited to find it by chance, and surprisingly often did, orphan songs huddled in collections of texts on thermoelectrical engineering or biochemistry.
    This Emily Dickinson cost one dollar when it was printed in 1958 by an obscure publishing house located on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Thirty years later it cost eighty cents in a University Avenue bookstore in St. Paul.
    “So what about this pony?” Gurgle. “This Wabasha Warrior?” The counterman tapped the Racing Form. “Bred in Minnesota.”
    “That’s what I think,” Lucas said.
    “What?”
    “Bred in Minnesota. They should whip its ass down to the Alpo factory. Of course, there is a silver lining . . .”
    The counterman waited. He didn’t have the breath for repartee.
    “If Warrior gets any kind of favorite-son action,” Lucas said, “it’ll push up the odds on the winner.”
    “That’ll be . . .”
    “Try Sun and Halfpence. No guarantee, but the numbers are right.” Lucas pushed the Emily Dickinson across the counter with the eighty-cent sticker price and five cents tax. “Let me get out of the store before you call your book, okay? I don’t want to get busted for conspiracy to tout.”
    “Whatever you say.” Suck. “Lieutenant,” the counterman said. He tugged his forelock.
    Lucas carried the Emily Dickinson back to Minneapolis and parked in the public garage across from City Hall. He walked around the wretchedly ugly old pile of liverish granite, across another street, past a reflecting pool, and into theHennepin County Government Center. He took an escalator down to the cafeteria, bought a red apple from a vending machine, went back up and out the far side of the building to the lawn. He sat on the grass between the white birch trees in the warm August sunshine and ate the apple and read:
. . . but no man moved me till the tide
     Went past my simple shoe
     And past my apron and my belt
     And past my bodice too,
     And made as he would eat me up
     As wholly as a dew
     Upon a dandelion’s sleeve
     And then I started too.
    Lucas smiled and crunched on the apple. When he looked up, a young dark-haired woman was crossing the plaza, pushing a double baby carriage. The twins were dressed in identical pink wrappings and swayed from side to side as their mother strutted them across the plaza. Mama had large breasts and a small waist and her black hair swung back and forth across her fair cheeks like a silken curtain. She wore a plum-colored skirt and silky beige blouse and she was so beautiful that Lucas smiled again, a wave of pleasure washing through him.
    Then another one walked by, in the opposite direction, a blonde with a short punky haircut and a revealing knit dress, tawdry in an engaging way. Lucas watched her walk and sighed with the rhythm of it.
     
    Lucas was dressed in a white tennis shirt, khaki slacks, over-the-calf blue socks, and slip-on deck shoes with long leather ties. He wore the tennis shirt outside his slacks so the gun wouldn’t show. He was slender and dark-complexioned, with straight black hair going gray at the temples