Rules of Prey

carefully covering her tiny breasts with her forearms as she did it. After a few more bumps she tossed the brassiere behind the bar and switched into a new dance, her exposed breasts bobbling in the flashing ceiling lights.
    “Bottoms, bottoms, bottoms,” the crowd was chanting, and the girl hooked her thumbs in the top of the pants and after coyly pulling them down an inch here and an inch there, turning, bending, peering out between her legs, she stood and slid them off, her back to the audience, and then turned to finish the dance.
    And the bartender from the front screamed, “There’re cops outside.”
    “Take off,” yelled Frankie. As the crowd broke for the two doors, he reached up and grabbed the nude girl by the ankle. Lucas lurched forward and got his gun out, his elbows on the bar, and poked the muzzle of the weapon into Frankie’s cheek.
    “Don’t make me have an accident, Frank,” he said. “This weapon has a very light trigger pull.” Frankie froze. Three uniformed cops ran in from the front, pressing customers to the wall as they passed. A dozen Zip loc bags of cocaine and crack hit the floor. Lucas looked up at the girl. “Get down,” he said.
    She leaned over and carefully spat in his face.
    • • •
    “So what happened to her?” Carla asked.
    They sat on the edge of the dock, their feet hanging over the water. It was an hour before sunset and they had just walked down to the dock from the firing range in the woods. The afternoon was cool and quiet, the violet hue of the sky reflected in the water. Three hundred feet out, a musky fisherman was working a surface lure around the edges of a submerged island. The water was as flat as a tabletop and they could hear the paddle-wheel chop-chop-chop of the lure as the fisherman retrieved it.
    “We dropped her off with child protection,” Lucas said.
    “They’ll try to figure out who her parents are, get her back there. Two weeks from now she’ll run away again and start hooking or dancing or whatever. At her age, it’s the only kind of job she can get.”
    “What about Frankie?”
    “We wrote him up for everything we could think of. We’ll get him on some of them, felonies. He’ll do some time, lose his liquor license.”
    “Good. They ought to . . . I don’t know. A twelve-year-old.”
    Lucas shrugged. “The average age of the hookers out on the street is probably fourteen. By sixteen they’re getting too old. The younger they are, the more money they make; it’s what the johns want. Young stuff.”
    “Men are such perverts,” Carla said, and Lucas laughed.
    “What do you want to do, go fishing or go inside and fool around?” he asked.
    “I’ve already been fishing,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him.

CHAPTER
13
    The maddog’s secretary served as the office’s rumor-central. That might have helped him in office politics—if he had taken part in office politics—but he did not relate well to his secretary. He dealt with her with his eyes averted. He was aware of the habit and struggled to correct it, to look straight at her. He was unsuccessful and had taken to staring at the bridge of her nose. She knew that he was not looking into her eyes.
    The situation was made more difficult by her appearance. She was far too pretty for the maddog. She had made it clear soon after his arrival that she would not welcome an approach. In his own way, he was grateful. If she had snared him, if she had been Chosen, she would have to die and that would violate one of the principal rules: Never kill anyone you know.
    When he came into the office, three other women were clustered around her, talking.
    “Did you hear, Louis?” One of the women in the cluster was speaking to him. Margaret Wilson was her name. She was an attorney who specialized in personal-injury law, and though she was not yet thirty, was rumored to be one of the best-paid attorneys in the office. She had hazel eyes, large breasts, and heavy thighs. She laughed too much, the maddog thought; actually, she frightened him a bit. He stopped.
    “Hear what?” he asked.
    “That gay guy they arrested, that they thought was the maddog killer? He’s not the one.”
    “Yes. I saw it on the news last night. That’s too bad. Ithought they had him,” the maddog said, struggling to keep his voice level. The police press conference, the portions he’d seen on TV3, had delighted him. He took another step toward his office.
    “They say he can’t get it up,” said