Shadow Prey

distant and sated. The door was partway open, and Lily looked out the window, then pushed it open with a foot and eased out onto the grass and pulled her skirt down. Lucas followed awkwardly, zipped up, then leaned forward and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed against his chest. They swayed together for a moment, then Lucas released her, looking dazed, and half staggered around the car.
    “We better get going,” he said.
    “Right . . . okay.” She got into the car, and Lucas started it and found the reverse gear. He slowly eased out onto the roadway, watching for traffic. The road was empty, but Lucas was preoccupied, so Lily saw them first.
    “What are they doing?” she asked.
    “What?” He looked in the same direction she was. The people who had been looking at the petroglyphs were lined up along the fence, facing them, repeatedly slapping their hands together.
    Lucas stared for a moment, perplexed, then caught it and threw back his head and laughed.
    “What?” asked Lily, still puzzled, looking at the line of people across the fence. “What are they doing?”
    “They’re applauding,” Lucas laughed.
    “Oh, no,” Lily said, her face flaming as they accelerated away. She looked back and after a moment added, “They certainly got their money’s worth . . . .”

CHAPTER
20
    In the car, Barbara looked him over.
    “Why am I doing this? Driving you?”
    “I’m looking for a guy,” Shadow Love said. “I want you to talk to him on the telephone.”
    “You’re not going to do anything, are you?”
    “No. Just want to talk,” Shadow Love said. He turned away and watched the street roll by. It took an hour of cruising and a half-dozen stops, with Barbara growing increasingly anxious, but Shadow Love finally spotted Larry Hart as he went into the Nub Inn.
    “Let’s find a phone,” Shadow Love said. “You know what to say.”
    “What’re you going to do?” Barbara asked.
    “I want to talk to him. See what he’s getting. If there’s any possibility that we’ll be seen, I’ll call it off. You can wait out of sight down the road. If anything goes wrong and they grab me, I just won’t show up and you can drive away.”
    “All right. Be careful, Shadow.”
    Shadow Love glanced at her. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. She knows what’s coming. The pistol he’d used to kill Yellow Hand pressed into his side. His fingers touched the cold stone knife in his pocket.
    • • •
    Hart took the bait. Barbara called him at the Nub Inn, explained that she’d seen him go inside, and said that she had some information. But she was scared, she said. Scared of the assassins, scared of the cops. She was an old client of his, she said, and knew him by sight. She said she’d meet him by the green dumpster outside the sheet-rock warehouse by the river.
    “You’ve got to come alone, Larry, please. The cops scare me, they’ll beat me up. I trust you, Larry, but the cops scare me.”
    “Okay. I’ll see you in ten minutes,” Hart said. “And don’t be scared. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
    She looked through the glass of the phone booth toward her car. Shadow Love was slumped in the passenger seat, and she could just see the top of his head. “Okay,” she said.
    It took Hart fifteen minutes to get out of the inn, into his car and down to the warehouse. “There he is,” Shadow Love said as Hart pulled over to the curb near the warehouse. They watched as he got out of the car, locked it, looked around and began walking cautiously toward the dumpster at the corner of the building.
    “Drive around the block, like I told you. I’ll look for cops,” Shadow Love said.
    Nothing moving on the street, nobody sitting in parked cars. Shadow Love took a breath. “Okay,” he said. “Up behind the warehouse. And then you go on down where I showed you, and wait.”
    When they finished circling the block, they were on the back side of the warehouse. Shadow Love got out of the car. “Take care,” Barbara said. “And be quick.”
    As she drove away, Shadow Love walked across a vacant lot littered with construction debris to the warehouse. He slipped carefully around the corner and was then directly behind the dumpster. Through a narrow space between the warehouse wall and the dumpster, he saw, for just a second, the dark sleeve of a man’s coat on the other side. Hart was wearing a black jacket. Shadow Love touched the pistol under his shirt and stepped