Shadow Prey

the magazine and pushed the magazine back into the butt of the pistol. She’d doneit smoothly, without thinking, Lucas thought. She’d spent some time with the gun.
    “The trouble with single-action weapons,” Lucas said, “is that shit happens and you’re caught with an empty chamber.”
    “Not if you’ve got half a brain,” she said. She was looking around at the litter. “I’ve learned to anticipate.”
    Lucas stopped and picked up an object that had been almost hidden by Yellow Hand’s mattress where it had pressed against the wall.
    Lily asked, “What?” and he tossed it to her. She turned it over in her hands. “Crack pipe. You said he was a crackhead.”
    “Yeah. But I wonder why he left it here? I wouldn’t think the boy would be without it. All of his other shit is gone.”
    “I don’t know. Nothing wrong with it. Yet,” Lily said. She dropped the glass pipe on the floor and stepped on it, crushing it.
     
    On the street again, Lucas suggested a check at Cuervo’s rental office. If there was anyone running the place, he told Lily, there might be some word of where Yellow Hand had gone. She nodded. “I’m following you,” she said.
    “I hope the dipshit hasn’t gone back to the res,” Lucas said as they climbed back in the car. “Yellow Hand would be hell to find out there, if he didn’t want to be found.”
    Lucas had been in Cuervo’s office a dozen times over the years. Nothing had changed in the shabby stairway that went up to it. The building had permanent bad breath, compounded of stale urine, wet plaster and catshit. As Lucas reached the top of the stairs, Cuervo’s office door opened on a chain and a woman looked out through the crack.
    “Who’re you?” Lucas asked.
    “Harriet Cuervo,” the woman snapped. All Lucas could see were her eyes, which were the color of acid-washed jeans, and a pale crescent of face. “Who in the hell are you to be asking?”
    “Police,” Lucas said. Lucas fished his badge case out of his jacket pocket and flashed the badge at her. Lily waitedbehind him, down a step. “We didn’t know you’d taken over Ray’s operation.”
    “Know now,” the woman grunted. The chain rattled off and she let the door swing open. Her husband’s murder had left a faint stain on the wooden floor and Harriet Cuervo was standing in the middle of it. She was wearing a print dress that fell straight from her neck to her knees. “I told the other cops everything I knew,” she said bluntly.
    “We’re looking for a different kind of information,” Lucas said. The woman went back around Cuervo’s old desk. Lucas stepped inside the office and glanced around. Something had changed, something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “We’re asking about one of his tenants.”
    “So what do you want to know?” she asked. She was five feet, nine inches tall and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds, all of it rawboned knobs. There were short vertical lines above and below her lips, as though they’d once been stitched shut.
    “You’ve got a renter named Yellow Hand, down at the Point?”
    “Sure. Yellow Hand.” She opened a ledger and ran a finger down an open column. “Paid up ’til tomorrow.”
    “You didn’t see him yesterday or today?”
    “Shit, I don’t do no surveys. I just rent the fuckin’ apartments,” she said. “If he don’t have the money tomorrow, out he goes. Today, I don’t care what he does.”
    “So you haven’t seen him?”
    “Nope.” She peered around Lucas at Lily. “She a cop too?”
    “Yeah.”
    Cuervo looked Lily up and down. “Dresses pretty good for a cop,” she sniffed.
    “If Yellow Hand doesn’t pay, do you go down and evict him yourself?” Lily asked curiously.
    “I got an associate,” Cuervo said.
    “Who’s that?” Lucas asked.
    “Bald Peterson.”
    “Yeah? I thought he’d left town.”
    “He’s come back. You know him?”
    “Yeah. We go back.”
    “Say . . .” Harriet Cuervo’s eyes narrowed and she made a gun of her index finger and thumb and pointed it at Lucas’ heart. “You ain’t the cop that pounded him, are you? Years ago? Like fuckin’ crippled him?”
    “We’ve had some disagreements,” Lucas said. “Tell him hello for me.” He took a step toward the door. “How about a guy named Shadow Love? You seen him around?”
    “Shadow Love? Never even heard of him.”
    “He was living up at the Point . . . .”
    She shrugged. “Didn’t rent from me,” she