Rules of Prey

down at the file again.
    “Who’s the dude at the counter?” Lucas asked.
    The supervisor looked around him at the maddog, who dropped the file in the return basket and headed for the door. “Attorney. Can’t remember the firm, but he’s been around a lot lately. He had that Barin kid, you know, that rich kid who drove into the crowd . . .”
    “Yeah.” The maddog disappeared through the door andLucas dismissed him. “Jefferson Sparks. Bad guy. Pimp. I need the latest on him.”
    “I’ll get it. You can use Lori’s desk. She’s out sick,” the supervisor said, pointing at an empty desk behind the business counter.
    Sparks had three recent files, each with a slender sheaf of flimsies. Lucas read through them and found a half-dozen references to the Silk Hat Health Club. He picked up the phone, called vice, and asked for the detective he had talked to that morning.
    “Is the Silk Hat still run by Shirley Jensen?” he asked when the detective came on the line.
    “Yup.”
    “I find the name in a couple of places in Sparky’s file. Could that be where his women are working?”
    “Could be. Come to think of it, Shirley used to do the books on the Butterfly.”
    “Thanks. I’ll run out there.”
    “Stay in touch.”
    Lucas hung up, tossed the files in the return basket, and glanced at his watch. Just after noon. Shirley should be working.
    The Silk Hat was a black-painted storefront squeezed between a used-clothing store and a furniture-rental agency. The neon sign in the window said “Si k Hat t ealth Club” and the glass in both the window and door had been painted as black as the siding. There was a small wrought-iron door light over the door and a wise guy had spray-painted it red. Or maybe not a wise guy, Lucas thought. Maybe the owner.
    Lucas pushed through the door into a small waiting room. Two plastic chairs sat on a red shag carpet behind a coffee table. A fish tank full of guppies perched on the sill of the blacked-out window. There were a half-dozen well-thumbed copies of Penthouse magazine on the coffee table. The chairs were facing a six-foot-long business counter that looked like it might have been stolen from a doctor’s office. A door beside the counter led into the back of the store.
    As Lucas stepped into the waiting room, he heard a buzzersound in the back, and a few seconds later a young woman in a low-cut black dress stepped up behind the counter. She was chewing gum, and a june-bug tattoo was just visible on the swell of her left breast. She looked like Betty Boop but smelled like Juicy Fruit.
    “Yah?”
    “I want to talk to Shirley,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t know if she’s here.”
    “Tell her Lucas Davenport is waiting and if she doesn’t get her fat ass out here, I’m going to fuck the place up.”
    The woman looked at him for a second, working her jaw until the gum snapped. She was not impressed. “Pretty tough,” she said laconically. “I got a guy here you might want to talk to. Before you fuck the place up.”
    “Who?”
    She looked him over and decided he might recognize the name. “Bald Peterson.”
    “Bald? Yeah. Tell him to get his ass out here too,” Lucas said enthusiastically. He reached under his jacket and took out the P7 and the woman’s eyes widened and she put up her hands as though to fend off a bullet. Lucas grinned at her and kicked the front panel of the counter and it splintered and he kicked it again and the woman turned and started running toward the back.
    “Bald, you cocksucker, come out here,” Lucas shouted into the back. He reached across the counter, grabbed the bottom side of the top sheet and pulled and it came up with a groan and he let it go and he kicked the front panel again and a piece of board broke off. “Bald, you motherfucker . . .”
    Bald Peterson was six and a half feet tall and weighed two hundred and seventy pounds. He had had a minor career as a boxer, a slightly bigger one on the pro wrestling tour. Some people on Lake Street were sure he was psychotic. Lucas was sure he was not. Bald had attacked Lucas once, years before, when Lucas was still on patrol. It happened in a parking lot outside a nightclub, one-on-one. Bald used his fists. Lucas used a nine-inch lead-weighted sap wrapped in bull leather. Bald went down in six seconds of the first round. And afterhe went down, Lucas used his feet and a heavy steel flashlight and broke several of the bones in Bald’s arms, most of the bones in his hands,