Rules of Prey

out until later if you’re right or wrong. Sometimes you never find out. And what’s right one day is wrong the next.”
    She stopped talking and Lucas took a swig of beer and watched her. “You know what you need?” he said finally.
    “What? A good fuck?” she asked sarcastically.
    “I wasn’t going to say that.”
    “Then what?”
    “What you need is to leave the job for a while, get married, move in here.”
    “You think being a housewife is going to fix things?” She looked almost amused.
    “I didn’t say housewife. You said housewife. I was going to suggest that you move in here and not do a fuckin’ thing. Take a class. Think things over. Take a trip to Paris before the kid gets here. Something. That argument this afternoon, those fake tears, my God, that’s so tough it’s not human.”
    “The tears weren’t fake,” she said. “The alibi was, afterward. I was thinking, I couldn’t break down and cry on thejob. Then I got home, and I thought, why not? I mean, I’m not stupid. You gave me that little lecture about Smithe, you think I don’t know I might have hurt him? I admit it. I might have hurt him. But I’m not sure. I’m—”
    “But look at what you’re putting yourself through the wringer for. You got the name out to Kennedy, and for what? A ten-minute lead on the other reporters? Christ . . .”
    “I know, I know all that. That’s why I’m over here. I’m screwed up. I don’t know that I’m wrong, but I’m not sure that I’m right. I’m living in murk and I can’t stop.”
    Lucas shook his head. “I don’t know what to do.”
    “Well.” She took her leg off the love seat. “Could you come over and sit next to me for a minute?”
    “Um . . .” Lucas stood up, walked around the table, and sat down next to her.
    “Put your arm up around my shoulder.”
    He put his arm around her shoulder and she snuggled her face into his chest.
    “You ready for this?” she asked in an oddly high-pitched, squeaky voice.
    He tried to pull back and look down at her, but she clung to him. “Ready for what?”
    She pressed her face against him even more firmly, and after a few seconds, began to weep.
    No sex, she said later. Just sleep. He was almost asleep when she said quietly, “I’m glad you’re the daddy.”

CHAPTER
11
    Louis Vullion did not laugh.
    Home late the night of the announcement, he neglected to look at his videotapes and learned of the arrest the next morning in the Star-Tribune.
    “This is not right,” he said, transfixed in the middle of his living room. He was wearing pajamas and leather slippers. A shock of hair stood straight up from his head, still mussed from the night.
    “This is not right, ” he hissed. He balled up the paper and hurled it into the kitchen.
    “These people are idiots,” the maddog screamed.
    He turned to the tapes and watched the announcement unfold, his rage growing. Then the face of Jennifer Carey, with her statement that the game inventor, the lieutenant, Lucas Davenport, disagreed, thought they had the wrong man.
    “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
    He ran the tape back and played it again. “Yes.”
    “I should call him,” he said to himself. He glanced at the clock. “No hurry. I should think about it,” he said.
    Don’t make a mistake now. Could this be a ploy? Was the gamesman setting him up? No. That simply wasn’t possible. The game was free-form, but there were some rules; Davenport, or the other cops—whoever—wouldn’t dare permit this man, this gay, to be crucified as part of a ploy. But why was he arrested? Except for the gamesman, Davenport, the police seemed confident that they had a case. How could this mistake happen?
    “So stupid,” the maddog said to the eggshell-white walls. “They are so fucking dumb.”
     
    He couldn’t think of anything else. He sat at his desk and stared blindly at the papers there, until his shared secretary asked if he was feeling unwell.
    “Yes, a little, I guess; something I ate, I think,” he told her. “I’ve got the Barin arraignment and then I think I’ll take the rest of the work home. Something closer to the, ah, facilities.”
    Barin was a teenage twit who had drunk too much and had driven his car into a crowd of people waiting on a corner to cross a street. Nobody had been killed, but several had been hospitalized. Barin’s driver’s license had been suspended before the latest accident, also for drunken driving, and he had served two days in jail for