Shadow Prey

behind Daniel’s desk and gazed around the crowded office. He looked like an athlete gone to fat, Lucas thought. You wouldn’t call him porky, but you could get away with “heavyset.”
    “I always like to talk to local police officers, especially in serious situations like this where everything depends on cooperation. I spent several years on the streets as a patrolman—got to the rank of sergeant, in fact . . .” Clay began, and he nodded at a uniform sergeant standing in the corner of the room. He was a solid speaker, picking out each local cop in turn, fixing him with his eyes, soliciting agreement and cooperation. Lily glanced up at Lucas after Clay had given them the treatment, and cracked a smile.
    “Good technique,” she whispered.
    Lucas shrugged.
    “ . . . wide experience with Indians, and I will tell you this. Indian rules are not our rules, are not the rules of a rational, progressive society. That statement—I’d prefer to keep it in this room—is not a matter of prejudice, although it can be twisted to sound that way. But it’s a solid fact; and mostIndians themselves recognize it. But we don’t have two sets of rules in America. We have law, and it applies to everybody . . . .”
    “ Heil Hitler, ” Lucas muttered.
     
    When they finished, Clay whipped out of the building in his cloud of bodyguards.
    “Let’s go look at his hotel,” Lucas suggested.
    “All right,” Lily said. “Though I’m starting to have my doubts. His guys are pretty good.”
     
    Clay’s chief of security was a nondescript, pale-eyed man who looked like a desk clerk until he moved. Then he looked like a viper.
    “We’ve got it nailed down,” he said after Lucas and Lily identified themselves. “But if you think you might see something, I’d be happy to walk you through.”
    “Why?” asked Lucas.
    “Why what?”
    “Why are you happy to walk us through, if it’s all nailed down?”
    “I never figured myself to be the smartest guy in the world,” the security man said. “I can always learn something.”
    Lucas looked at him for a minute, then turned to Lily. “You’re right. They’re good,” he said.
    They took the tour anyway. Clay was on the fourteenth floor. There were higher buildings around, but none closer than a half-mile.
    “Couldn’t take him through a window,” the security man said.
    “How about something set up in advance? Clay’s stayed at this hotel before, right?”
    “Like what?”
    Lucas shrugged. “A bomb in an elevator?”
    “We sniffed the place out. Routine,” the security man said.
    “How about a suicide run? The Crows are crazy . . . .”
    “We’ve checked the staff, of course. No Indians at all, nobody with the kind of background that we’d worry about.Most of them are career people, been here a while. A few new people on the desk and kitchen staff, but we screen them out when the boss comes and goes . . . . And when he does come and go, we check the lobby and the street first. He’s in and out in a hurry, with no warning. So it wouldn’t be anybody on the street.”
    “Hmmph,” said Lucas.
    They were headed back down in the elevator and Lucas asked, “Is there any way to get up on top of the elevator from the basement or the roof, ride up that way?”
    The security man allowed himself a small grin. “I’m not going to talk about that,” he said, glancing at Lucas. “But in a word, no.”
    “You’ve got the elevators wired,” said Lily.
    The security man shrugged as the elevator stopped at the third floor. An elderly woman wearing a fur wrap got on, peered nearsightedly at the lighted buttons and finally pushed the button for the second floor. A room-service waiter pushed a dinner cart past the elevators just as the doors were closing.
    “How about a disguise?” Lucas asked after the old lady had gotten off. “What if somebody came in disguised as an old lady . . .”
    “Metal detectors would pick up the gun.”
    “ . . . and had a gun stashed on the third floor. Rode up to the third floor, picked it up and then went up to fourteen . . .”
    The security man shrugged again. “That’s a fantasy. And when they got up there, they’d have to shoot their way past three trained agents. And the boss is armed, and he knows how to use it.”
    Lucas nodded. “All right. But I got a bad feeling,” he said.
    He and Lily left the security man in the lobby and headed for the doors. Just as they were about to go out, Lucas