Silent Prey

choke down the fear. The back plates were old and dirty.
    But the gunfire.
    Had to think. Jesus, he needed help. He felt for the matchbox. No, that wouldn’t be right. He needed speed. Uppers, to help him think.
    Sirens.
    Somewhere behind him. He wasn’t sure quite where he was anymore, took a left, moving away, coming up to a major intersection. He looked up at the street signs. Broadway. What was the other? He rolled forward a few feet. Bleecker. Okay. Good. Straight ahead, along Bleecker. Had to get the body out. A darker block, a deep-red building with niches, but no place to pull over. Another fifty feet . . . there.
    He pulled to the curb, hopped out, and looked around. Nobody. He could hear somebody talking, loud, but it sounded like a drunk. He hurried around the car, shifted the body out and dropped it in a doorway. Looked up: the ceiling in the deep doorway was decorated with intricate designs in white terra-cotta; the designs caught his mind, dragged it into the maze of curves . . . .
    Another siren brought him back. It was somewhere down Bleecker, but he couldn’t see the lights. He hurried back to the car, sweating, climbed inside, and looked back through the open door at the mortal remains of Louis Cortese. From any more than a few feet, the body looked like a bum sleeping on the sidewalk. And there were hundreds of bums in the area.
    He risked a last look at the terra-cotta, felt the pull, then tore his eyes away and slammed the door. Hunched over the steering wheel, he headed for home.
     
    Thick picked up the pay phone and dialed the number scrawled on a scrap of paper. He let the phone ring twice,hung up, waited a few seconds, dialed again, let it ring twice more, hung up again.
    Thin was waiting in the car, didn’t speak.
    “It’ll be okay,” Thick said.
    After a very long time, Thin said, “No, it won’t.”
    “It’s fine,” the big man said. “You did good.”
     
    When Bekker got to the Lacey building, he parked the car, went down into the basement, stripped off his clothes, scrubbed his face, changed into a sweat suit. And thought about the killing he’d seen. New York was a dangerous place—someone really ought to do something about it . . . . There was some cleanup to do in the operating theater. He worked at it for ten minutes, with a sponge and paper towels and a can of universal cleaner. When he was done, he wrapped all the paper and put it in the garbage. He remembered the blood just as he was about to turn out the lights. He picked up the bottle and tipped it into a drain, the blood as purple and thick as antifreeze.
    Again he reached for the lights, and saw the four small nubbins of skin sitting on top of an anesthetic tank. Of course, he’d put them there, just a convenient place at the time.
    He picked them up. Shriveled, with the long shiny lashes, they looked like a new species of arachnid, a new one-sided spider. They were, of course, something much more mundane: Cortese’s eyelids. He peered at them in the palm of his hand. He’d never seen them like this, so separate, so disembodied.
    Ha. Another one. Another joke. He looked in the stainless-steel cabinet, laughed and held his belly, and pointed a finger at himself. Disembodied  . . .
    He went back to them, the eyelids. Fascinating.

CHAPTER
4
    Lucas was lying on the roof of his house, the shingles warm against his shoulder blades, eyes closed, not quite snoozing. He’d put down one full flat of green fiberglass shingles and didn’t feel like starting another. A breeze ruffled the fine black hair on his forearms; the humid air was pregnant with an afternoon storm and pink-and-gray thunderheads were popping up to the west.
    With his eyes closed, Lucas could hear the after-work joggers padding along the sidewalk across the street, the rattle of roller blades, radios from passing cars. If he opened his eyes and looked straight up, he might see an eagle soaring on the thermals above the river bluffs. If he looked down, the Mississippi was there, across the street and below the bluff, like a fat brown snake curling in the sunshine. A catsup-colored buoy bobbed in the muddy water, directing boat traffic into the Ford lock.
    It all felt fine, like it could go on forever, up on the roof.
    When the taxi pulled into the driveway, he thought about it instead of looking to see who it was. Nobody heknew was likely to come calling unexpectedly. His life had come to that: no surprises.
    The car door slammed,