Shadow Prey

door.
    She looked down at the 911, surprised. “Is this your car?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I thought we were crossing the street,” Lily said as she stepped back to the curb.
    Lucas got in and popped open her door; she climbed inside and fastened the seat belt. “Not many New York cops would have the guts to drive around in a Porsche. Everybody would figure he was in the bag,” she said.
    “I’ve got some money of my own,” Lucas said.
    “Even so, you wouldn’t have to buy a Porsche with it,” Lily said primly. “You could buy a perfectly good car forten or fifteen thousand and give the other twenty or thirty thousand to charity. You could give it to the Little Sisters of the Poor.”
    “I thought about that,” Lucas said. He gunned the Porsche through an illegal U-turn and punched it up to forty in the twenty-five-mile-per-hour business zone. “And I decided, fuck ’em.”
    Lily threw back her head and laughed. Lucas grinned at her and thought that maybe she was carrying a few too many pounds, but maybe that wasn’t all bad.
     
    They took the photographs to the Indian Center, showed them around. Two of the men in the photos were known by face but not by name. Nobody knew where they lived. Lucas called Anderson, told him about the tentative IDs, and Anderson promised to get more photos on the street.
    After leaving the Indian Center, they stopped at an Indian-dominated public housing project, where Lucas knew two old men who worked as caretakers. They got no new IDs. The hostility was palpable.
    “They don’t like cops,” Lily said as they left.
    “Nobody around here likes cops,” Lucas said, looking back at the decrepit buildings. “When they see us, we’re mostly getting their cars towed away in the winter. They don’t like us, but at least they’re not against us. But this is something else. This time, they’re against us.”
    “Maybe they got reasons,” Lily said. She was looking out the window at a group of Indian children sitting on the porch of a decaying clapboard house. “Those kids ought to be in school. What you’ve got here, Davenport, is a clean slum. The people are fucked up, but the street gets cleaned twice a week.”
    They spent the rest of the morning running the photos down Lucas’ Indian acquaintances. Lily trailed behind, not saying much, studying the faces of the Indians, listening to them, the Indians looking curiously back.
    “They think you might be an Indian, or part Indian, but they’re not sure until they hear your voice,” Lucas said between stops. “You look a little Indian.”
    “I don’t sound Indian.”
    “You sound Lawn Guyland.”
    “There’s an Indian reservation on Long Island,” she said.
    “No shit? Jesus, I’d like to hear those people talk . . . .”
    Late in the morning, Lucas drove to Yellow Hand’s apartment at the Point, describing him to Lily as they went. Outside, on the stoop, he reached back and freed the P7 in its holster.
    “Is this trouble?” she asked.
    “I doubt it,” he said. “But you know.”
    “Okay.” When they were inside the door, she slipped her hand into a mufflike opening in her shoulder bag, took out a short Colt Officer’s Model .45 and jacked a shell into the chamber.
    “A forty-five?” Lucas said as she put it back in the purse.
    “I’m not strong enough to wrestle with assholes,” she said bluntly. “If I shoot somebody, I want him to go down. Not that the P7 isn’t a nice little gun. But it’s a bit light for serious work.”
    “Not if you can shoot,” Lucas said through his teeth as he headed up the stairs.
    “I can shoot the eyes out of a moving pigeon,” she said. “And not hit the feathers.”
    The door on the top floor was open. Nobody home. Lucas eased inside, looked around, then tramped across a litter of paper, orange peels and empty personal-size catsup packs from McDonald’s. “This is where he was,” Lucas said, kicking Yellow Hand’s mattress.
    “Place feels vacant,” Lily said. She touched one of the empty catsup packs with the toe of her shoe. Street people stole them from fast-food joints and used the catsup to make tomato soup. “They’re really hurting for money.”
    “Crackheads,” Lucas said.
    Lily nodded. She took the Colt out of the purse, pulled the magazine, stuck it between the little and ring fingers of her gun hand, cupped the ejection port with her free hand and jacked the slide. The chambered round ejected into her palm. She snapped it back into