Rules of Prey

the lower bones in both legs, the bones in the arches of his feet, his jaw, his nose, and several ribs. He also kicked him in the balls a half-dozen times.
    While they were waiting for the ambulance, Bald woke up and Lucas gripped him by the shirt and told him that if he ever had any more trouble with him, he would cut off his nose, his tongue, and his dick. Lucas was suspended for investigation of possible use of excessive force. Bald was in the hospital for four months and a wheelchair for another six.
    If Bald had been psychotic, Lucas thought, he would have come after Lucas with a gun, a knife, or, if he was really crazy, with his fists, as soon as he could walk. He didn’t. He never looked at Lucas again, and walked wide around him.
    “Bald, you dickhead . . .” Lucas shouted. He kicked the front panel of the desk and it caved in. There was a clattering on a back stairs and he stopped kicking and Shirley Jensen hurried up the hallway toward the counter. Lucas put the P7 away.
    “You asshole,” Jensen yelled.
    “Shut up, Shirley,” Lucas said. “Where’s Bald?”
    “He’s not here.”
    “The other cunt said he was.”
    “He’s not, Davenport, I mean, Jesus Christ on a crutch, look at this mess . . .” Jensen was in her late forties, her face lined from years of sunlamps, bourbon, cigarettes, and potatoes. She was a hundred pounds overweight. The fat bobbled under her chin, on her shoulders and upper arms, and quivered like jelly beneath her gold lamé belt. Her face crinkled and Lucas thought she might cry.
    “I want to know where Sparky went.”
    “I didn’t know he was gone,” she said, still looking at the wreckage of the counter.
    Lucas leaned forward until his face was only four inches from her nose. Her Pan-Cake makeup was cracking like a dried-out Dakota lake bed. “Shirley, I’m going to tear this place up. My neck is on the line with this maddog killer, andSparky might have some information I need. I’m going to wait here . . .” He looked at his watch, as though timing her. “Five minutes. Then I’m coming over the counter. You go find out where he is.”
    “Sparky knows something about the maddog?” The idea startled her.
    “That was one of his girls who got ripped last night. The maddog’s starting on hookers. It’s a lot easier than scouting out the straights.”
    “Don’t kick my counter no more,” Shirley said, and she turned and waddled down the hallway and out of sight.
    A few seconds later the front door opened and Lucas stepped back and away from it. A narrow man with a gray face, thin shoulders, and a seventy-dollar suit stepped inside, blinked at the ruined counter, and looked at Lucas.
    “Jeez, what happened?”
    “There’s a police raid going on,” Lucas said cheerfully. “But if you just want to exercise, you know, like push-ups, and drink some fruit juice, that’s okay. Go on back.”
    The narrow man’s Adam’s apple bobbed twice and he said, “That’s okay,” and disappeared out the door. Lucas shrugged and dropped into one of the plastic chairs and picked up a Penthouse. “I didn’t believe things like this really happened,” he read, “ but before I tell you about it, maybe I should describe myself. I’m a junior at a big midwestern university and the coeds around here say I’m pretty well-equipped. A girlfriend once measured me out at nine inches of rock-hard— ”
    “Davenport . . .” Shirley emerged from the back.
    “Yeah.” He dropped the magazine on the table.
    “Don’t know where he is exactly, what hotel,” she said, “but it’s like in Cedar Rapids, some downtown hotel—”
    “Iowa?”
    “Yeah. He trolls through there a couple of times a year, Sioux City, Des Moines, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids. So one of his girls says he’s down there, she don’t know exactly the place, but she says it’s a hotel downtown.”
    “Okay.” Lucas nodded. “But if he’s not there . . .”
    “Fuck you, Davenport, you broke my desk.”
     
    Jennifer liked the flowers. Each table had two carnations, one red and one white, in a long-necked vase. The restaurant was run by a Vietnamese family, refugees who left a French restaurant behind in Saigon. The old man and his wife financed it, their kids ran the place and cooked, the in-laws worked the tables and bar and cash register, the ten-year-old grandchildren bused the tables and washed up.
    “The big problem with this place,” Jennifer said, “is that it’s about to be