Shadow Prey

They rolled across the bed, she fumbling with his belt, he with his hand now beneath her dress, pulling at her underpants.
    “My God, a garter belt, what’s it made out of, steel mesh? I can’t . . .”
    “Slow down, slow down . . . .”
    “No.”
    He got the garter belt off one leg, though it was still twisted around her ankle, and then her underpants were off one leg, and his hands were on her. Finally he entered her and she nearly screamed with the intensity of the feeling . . . and sometime later, she thought, she did scream.
     
    “Christ, I wish I still smoked,” he said. He’d turned on a bedside lamp and was sitting up, still mostly dressed. She was gasping for air. Like a carp, she thought. She’d never seen one, but had read in good books about carp gasping for air on riverbanks. He looked down at her. “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah. My God . . .”
    “Can I . . . let me take some of this stuff . . .”
    After the violence of the first episode, he was suddenly tender, moving her body, lifting her, stripping off her remaining clothing. She felt almost like a child, until he kissed her on the front of her thigh, just where it joined her hip, and the fire ran through her belly again and she gasped. Lucas was on her again and the bedside lamp seemed to grow dimmer. Then again, after a while, she thought, she may have screamed again.
     
    “Did I scream?” she blurted. She stood facing the shower head, the water beating off her breasts. Lucas stood behind her. She could feel him pressing against her buttocks, his soapy hand on her stomach.
    “I don’t know. I thought it was me,” he said.
    She giggled. “What are you doing?”
    “Just washing.”
    “I think you already washed there.”
    “A little more couldn’t hurt.”
    She closed her eyes and leaned back against him, his soapy hand moving, and it started once again . . . .

CHAPTER
18
    Barbara Gow’s house had gray siding, once white, and a red asbestos-shingle roof. A single box elder stood in the front yard and a swayback garage hunkered hopelessly in back. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded her holdings.
    “It looks pretty bad,” she said sadly. They were ten minutes off the expressway, in a neighborhood of tired yards. The postwar frame houses were crumbling from age, poor quality and neglect: roofs were missing shingles, eaves showed patches of dry rot. In the dim illumination of the streetlights, they could see kids’ bikes dumped unceremoniously on the weedy lawns. The cars parked in the streets were exhausted hulks. Oil stains marked the driveways like Rorschachs of failure.
    “When I bought it, I called it a cottage,” she said as they rolled into the driveway. “God damn, it makes me sad. To think you can live in a place for thirty years, and in the end, not care about it.”
    Sam Crow closed one eye and stared at her with the other, gauging the level of her unhappiness. In the end, he grunted, got out of the car and lifted the garage door.
    “I hope Shadow Love’s okay,” she said anxiously as she pulled into the garage.
    She had picked them up ten minutes after Sam called her.As they headed back to her house, they crossed the street that the apartment was on. There were cars in the street. Cops. The raid was under way.
    “He was due back,” Sam said as they got out of the car. “With all those cops in the street . . .”
    “If he wasn’t there when they arrived . . .”
    “If they didn’t get him, we should be hearing from him,” said Aaron.
    Barbara’s house was musty. She was never a housekeeper, and she smoked: the interior, once bright, was overlaid with a yellowing patina of tobacco tar. Sam Crow dragged the duffel bag up the stairs. Aaron headed for a sitting room that had a foldout couch.
    “You guys got any money?” Barbara asked when Sam came back down.
    “A couple of hundred,” he said, shrugging.
    “I’ll need help with the groceries if you stay here long.”
    “Shouldn’t be too long. A week, maybe.”
    Twenty minutes later, Shadow Love called. Barbara said, “Yes, they’re here. They’re okay,” and handed the phone to Sam.
    “We were afraid they got you,” Sam said.
    “I almost walked right into them,” Shadow Love said. He was in a bar six blocks from the Crows’ apartment. “I was thinking about something else, I was almost on the block when I realized something was wrong, with all those cars. I watched for a while, I was worried I’d see