Shadow Prey

Daniel wanted to keep the police presence in the neighborhood to a minimum. “The FBI’s all over the streets. They must have half a dozen agents going through the community,” she said.
    “Isn’t he going to tell them about identifying Hood?”
    “Yeah. He’s already talked to a guy.” She glanced at her watch. “There’s a meeting in half an hour. We’re supposed to be there. Sloan should be back and Larry Hart’s coming in sometime this morning,” Lily said. She was quivering with energy. “God damn, I was afraid I’d be here for a month. I could be out of here tomorrow, if we get him.”
    “Did Daniel say who the FBI guy is?” Lucas asked.
    “Uh, yeah. A guy named . . .” She looked at her notes. “Kieffer.”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “Not good?” She looked up at him and he shook his head, frowning.
    “He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him. Gary Kieffer is a most righteous man. Most righteous.”
    “Well, get your phony smile in place, then, because we’re meeting with him in twenty-seven minutes.” She looked at her watch again, then at his nearly empty coffee cup. “Where can we get more coffee and a decent Danish?”
     
    They walked through the tunnel from City Hall to the Hennepin County Government Center, took a couple of escalators to the Skyway level, walked along the Skyway to the Pillsbury building. Standing on the escalator a step above him, she could look straight into his eyes; she asked if he had had a long night.
    “No, not particularly.” He glanced at her. “Why?”
    “You look a little beat.”
    “I don’t get up early. I usually don’t get going until about noon.” He yawned again to prove it.
    “What about your girlfriend? Is she a night person too?”
    “Yeah. She spent half her life reporting for the ten-o’clock news, which meant she got off work about eleven. That’s how we met. We’d bump into each other at late-night restaurants.”
    Going across the Skyway, Lily looked through the windows at the glossy downtown skyscrapers, monuments to the colored-glass industry. “I’ve never been in this part of the country,” she said. “I made a couple of cross-country trips when I was doing the hippie thing, back in college, but we always went south of here. Through Iowa or Missouri, on the way out to California.”
    “It’s out of the way, Minnesota is,” Lucas conceded. “Lake Michigan hangs down there and cuts us off, with Wisconsin and the Dakotas. You’ve got to want to come here. And I suppose you don’t often get out of the Center of the Universe.”
    “I do, once in a while,” she said mildly, refusing to rise to the bait. “But it’s usually on vacation, down to the Bahamas or the Keys or out to Bermuda. We went to Hawaii once. We just don’t get into the middle part of the country.”
    “It’s the last refuge of American civilization, you know—out here, between the mountains,” Lucas said, looking out the windows. “Most of the population is literate, most people still trust their governments, and most of the governments are reasonably good. The citizens control the streets. We’ve got poverty, but it’s manageable. We’ve got dope, but we’ve still got a handle on it. It’s okay.”
    “You mean like Detroit?”
    “There are a couple of spots out of control . . .”
    “And South Chicago and Gary and East St. Louis . . .”
    “ . . . but basically, it ain’t bad. You get the feeling that nobody even knows what goes on in New York or Los Angeles and that nobody really cares. The politicians have to lie and steal just to get elected.”
    “I think my brain would shrivel up and die if I was livinghere. It’s so fuckin’ peaceful I don’t know what I’d do,” Lily said. She looked down at a street-cleaning machine. “The night I came in, I got here late, after midnight. I caught a cab at the airport and went downtown, and I started seeing these women walking around alone or waiting for buses by themselves. Everywhere. Jesus. That’s such . . . an odd sight.”
    “Hmph,” Lucas said.
    They left the Skyway and got on an escalator to the main floor of the Pillsbury building. “You have a little hickey on your neck,” she said lightly. “I thought maybe that’s why you looked so tired.”
    They sat in the dining area of a bakery, Lily eating a Danish with a glass of milk, Lucas staring out the window over a cup of coffee.
    “Wish I was out there with Sloan,” she said finally.
    “Why? He can