Shadow Prey

said. He looked around the bare apartment. “Where’s the feeb?”
    “He went out. Said he was coming back. He seems kinda touchy about his chair, if that’s what you were thinking,” said the thin cop.
    “Yeah?”
    “Stacks of newspaper down the hall,” Lily said.
     
    One of the magazines had a debate on ten-millimeter automatic pistols. A gun writer suggested that it was the perfect defensive cartridge, producing twice the muzzle energy of typical nine-millimeter and .45 ACP rounds and almost half again as much as the .357 Magnum. The writer’s opponent, a Los Angeles cop, worried that the ten-millimeter was a little too hot, tending to punch holes not only through the target but also through the crowd at the bus stop two blocks away. Lucas couldn’t follow the details of the argument. His mind kept straying to the shape of Lily’s neck, the edge of her cheek from the side and slightly behind, the curve of her wrist. Her lip. He remembered Sloan saying something about her overbite, and he smiled just a bit and nibbled at his own lip.
    “What’re you smiling about?” Lily asked.
    “Nothing,” Lucas said. “Magazine.”
    She heaved herself to her feet, stretched, yawned and wandered over. “Hot-hot-hot,” she said. “It’s a ten-MM?”
    Lucas closed the magazine. “Dumb fucks,” he said.
    Anderson called on the portable a few minutes after one o’clock: The killer in Oklahoma City had vanished. Kieffer had talked to FBI agents in South Dakota about the rumors Hart had heard of a midnight ceremony, Anderson added, but nobody had much.
    “There’s some question about whether there ever was such a thing,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Kieffer talked to the lead investigator out there and this guy thinks the rumors came out of the confrontation with the bikers. One night the Indians surrounded Bear Butte, wouldn’t let the bikers down the road around it. The bikers supposedly saw fires and so on, and heard drum music—and that eventually got turned into this secret-ceremony business.”
    “So it could be another dead end,” Lily said.
    “That’s what Kieffer says.”
     
    “I could be watching The Young and the Restless, ” Lily said twenty minutes later.
    “Go for a walk?” Lucas suggested.
    “All right. Take a portable.”
    They went out the alley, two blocks to a 7-Eleven, bought Diet Cokes and started back.
    “So fuckin’ boring,” Lily complained.
    “You don’t have to sit there. He probably won’t be in until this evening,” Lucas said.
    “I feel like I oughta be there,” Lily said. “He’s my man.”
    On the way back, Lucas took a small gun-cleaning kit out of the Porsche. Inside the apartment, he spread newspapers on the floor, sat cross-legged, broke down his P7 and began cleaning it. Lily went back to her stack of newspapers for a few minutes, then moved over across from him.
    “Mind if I use it?” she asked after watching for a moment.
    “Go ahead.”
    “Thanks.” She took her .45 out of her purse, popped the magazine, checked the chamber to make sure it was empty and began stripping it. “I break a fingernail about once a week on this damn barrel bushing,” she said. She stuck her tongue out in concentration, rotated the bushing over the recoil spring plug and eased the spring out.
    “Pass the nitro,” she said.
    Lucas handed her the cleaning solvent.
    “This stuff smells better than gasoline,” she said. “It could turn me into a sniffer.”
    “Gives me headaches,” Lucas said. “It smells good but I can’t handle it.” He noticed that her .45 was spotless before she began cleaning it. His P7 didn’t need the work either, but it was something to do.
    “Ever shot a P7?” he asked idly.
    “The other one. The eight-shot. The big one, like yours, has a lot of firepower, but I can’t get my hand around the butt. I don’t like the way it carries either. Too fat.”
    “That’s not exactly a Tinker Toy you’ve got there,” he said, nodding at her Colt.
    “No, but the shape of the butt is different. It’s skinnier. That’s what I need. It’s easier to handle.”
    “I really don’t like that single-action for street work,” Lucas said conversationally. “It’s fine if you’re target-shooting, but if you’re only worried about hitting a torso . . . I like the double-action.”
    “You could try one of the forty-five Smiths.”
    “They’re supposed to be good guns,” Lucas agreed. “I probably would have, if the P7