Shadow Prey

said. “Must’ve been one of those other flatheads let him in. You know how it goes.”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said as he turned away again. “Sorry about Ray.”
    “It’s nice somebody is, ’cause I ain’t,” Cuervo said flatly. Her face showed some animation for the first time. “I was trying to think what I remembered best about Ray. One thing, you know? And you know what come to mind? He had a bunch of porno videotapes. He had one called Airtight Brunette. You know what an airtight brunette is? That’s one who is filled up everyplace, if you know what I mean. Three guys. Anyway, his favorite part was when this guy ’jaculates on the brunette’s chest. He was running that back and forth, back and forth. Everytime he stopped the VCR and rewound the tape, the regular TV show come on. You know what that was?”
    “Uh, no, I wouldn’t,” Lucas said. He glanced quickly at Lily, who was staring at Cuervo, fascinated.
    “ Sesame Street. Big Bird was finding out how doctors take your blood pressure. So this guy ’jaculates on the brunette’s chest and we get Big Bird. And he ’jaculates again and we get Big Bird. It was like that for fifteen minutes. ’ Jaculate, Big Bird, ’jaculate, Big Bird.”
    She stopped to take a breath. “That,” she said, “is how I remember Ray.”
    “Okay. Well, jeez, we gotta get going,” Lucas said desperately. He pushed Lily out the door toward the stairs. Theywere ten steps down when Harriet Cuervo came to the landing.
    “I wanted to have kids,” she shouted down at them.
     
    Lily grinned at him as they walked back to the car. “Nice girl,” she said. “We wouldn’t do much better in New York.”
    “Fuckin’ gerbil,” Lucas grumbled.
    “Did you see the calendar on the wall? Big Boys’ Buns?”
    Lucas snapped his fingers. “I knew there was something different about the place,” he said. “Ray used to have this old Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar. A wet-T-shirt shot. These great . . . ah . . .”
    “Tits?”
    “Right. Anyway, it was always the same picture. He found one he liked and stopped right there.”
    “So what we got is a change in management, but no change in style,” Lily said.
    “You got it.”
     
    In the car, Lucas checked the time. They had been on the street for three hours. “We ought to think about lunch.”
    “Is there a deli in town?” Lily asked.
    Lucas grinned at her. “Can’t stand to be away?”
    “It’s not that,” she said. “I’ve been eating hotel food for too long. Everything tastes like oatmeal.”
    “All right, a deli,” Lucas agreed. “There’s one a couple blocks from my place, over in St. Paul. Got a restaurant in the back.”
    They headed east on Lake, across the Mississippi, then south down along the river through a forest of maples, elms and oaks, past a couple of colleges.
    “All religious colleges. Highest density of virgins in the Twin Cities, right here,” Lucas said.
    “Your neighborhood too. What a shame; what a workload,” she said.
    “What’s that mean?” Lucas asked.
    “When I told people I was planning to go out with you, they all gave me the look. Like, Uh-oh, into the hands of Lothario.”
    “Bullshit,” said Lucas.
    • • •
    The deli was in a yellow cinder-block building with a parking lot in back. When they got out of the car, an old woman was watching them through a restaurant window while she gnawed on the end of a whole pickle. Lily’s face lit up when she saw it.
    “That pickle . . . There’s a marginal chance that this place could be all right,” she said. Inside, she scanned the sandwich menu, then ordered a corned beef and cheese combo with coleslaw, a side order of french fries, a seven-layer salad and a raspberry-flavored Perrier.
    “A thousand calories,” she said five minutes later, looking ruefully at the brown plastic tray the counterman had just delivered. The counterman snorted as he turned away. “What, you think more than a thousand?” she called after him.
    “Honey, the sandwich is six, seven hundred and that’s only half of it,” the counterman said.
    “I don’t want to hear it,” Lily said, turning back to the food.
    Lucas got a sausage on rye, a bag of potato chips and a Diet Coke and led the way to the back.
    “I’m an eater,” Lily said as they slid into the booth. “I’ll weigh two hundred pounds when they bury me.”
    “You look all right,” Lucas said.
    Her eyes came up. “I’d look great with ten less