Shadow Prey

all.
    Cuervo counted the cash out in neat piles, ones, fives and tens. The odd twenty he put in his pocket. Coins he counted, noted and dumped into a Maxwell House coffee can. Cuervo was a fat man with small black eyes. When he lifted his heavy chin, three rolls of suet popped out on the back of his red neck. When he leaned forward, three more rolls popped out on his side, under his armpits. And when he farted, which was often, he unconsciously eased one obese cheek off the chair to reduce the compression. He didn’t think the movement either impolite or impolitic. If a woman was in the room, he said “Oops.” If the company was all male, he said nothing. Farting was something men did.
     
    A few minutes after five o’clock on October 5, an unseasonably warm day, the door slammed at the bottom of the stairs and a man started up. Cuervo put his fingertips on the Charter Arms .38 and half stood so he could see the visitor. The man on the stairs turned his face up and Cuervo relaxed.
    Leo Clark. An old customer. Like most of the Indians who rented Cuervo’s apartments, Leo was always back and forth from the reservations. He was a hard man, Leo was, with a face like a cinder block, but Cuervo never had trouble with him.
    Leo paused at the second landing, catching his breath, then came up the last flight. He was a Sioux, in his forties, a loner, dark from the summer sun. Long black braids trailed down his back and a piece of Navaho silver flashed from his belt. He came from the West somewhere: Rosebud, Standing Rock, someplace like that.
    “Leo, how are you?” Cuervo said without looking up. He had money in both hands, counting. “Need a place?”
    “Put your hands in your lap, Ray,” Leo said. Cuervo looked up. Leo was pointing a pistol at him.
    “Aw, man, don’t do this,” Cuervo groaned, straightening up. He didn’t look at his pistol, but he was thinking about it. “If you need a few bucks, I’ll loan it to you.”
    “Sure you will,” Leo said. “Two for one.” Cuervo did a little loansharking on the side. Bidness was bidness.
    “Come on, Leo.” Cuervo casually dropped the stack of bills on the desktop, freeing his gun hand. “You wanna spend your old age in the joint?”
    “If you move again, I’ll shoot holes in your head. I mean it, Ray,” Leo said. Cuervo checked the other man’s face. It was as cold and dark as a Mayan statue’s. Cuervo stopped moving.
    Leo edged around the desk. No more than three feet separated them, but the hole at the end of Leo’s pistol pointed unwaveringly at Ray Cuervo’s nose.
    “Just sit still. Take it easy,” Leo said. When he was behind the chair, he said, “I’m going to put a pair of handcuffs on you, Ray. I want you to put your hands behind the chair.”
    Cuervo followed instructions, turning his head to see what Leo was doing.
    “Look straight ahead,” Leo said, tapping him behind the ear with the gun barrel. Cuervo looked straight ahead. Leo stepped back, pushed the pistol into the waistband of his slacks and took an obsidian knife from his front pants pocket. The knife was seven inches of beautifully crafted black volcanic glass, taken from a cliff at Yellowstone National Park. Its edge was fluted and it was as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel.
    “Hey, Ray?” Leo said, stepping up closer to the slumlord. Cuervo farted, in either fear or exasperation, and the fetid smell filled the room. He didn’t bother to say “Oops.”
    “Yeah?” Cuervo looked straight ahead. Calculating. His legs were in the kneehole under the desk: it’d be hard to move in a hurry. Let it ride, he thought, just a couple more minutes. When Leo was putting on the cuffs, maybe theright move . . . The gun glittered on the desk a foot and a half from his eyes.
    “I lied about the handcuffs, Ray,” Leo said. He grabbed Cuervo by the hair above his forehead and jerked his head back. With a single powerful slash, Leo cut Ray Cuervo’s throat from ear to ear.
    Cuervo half stood and twisted free and groped helplessly at his neck with one hand while the other crawled frantically across his desk toward the Charter Arms .38. He knew even as he tried that he wouldn’t make it. Blood spurted from his severed carotid artery as though from a garden hose, spraying the leaves of green dollars on the desk, the Sports Illustrated broad with the tits, the brown linoleum floor.
    Ray Cuervo twisted and turned and fell, batting the Maxwell House coffee can off the desk. Coins pitched