Silent Prey

before, a storm that ended with dumb exhaustion. Wearily, she finished dressing, started for the door.
    And smelled Petty: Petty in the morgue, the stink of the blood and the body in her nose. She ran back to the bathroom, washed her face and her hands, over and over.
    Early the next morning, after the nightmare interlude with Gloria Petty, as she fought for an hour or two of sleep, she dreamed and saw herself on the marble bench, Walter Petty draped on her lap, broken, torn, his bloody teeth leering from the side of his face.  . . .
    Petty was gone.
     
    “Jesus.” Lucas was staring at her. “I didn’t know you had . . .”
    “What?” She tried to smile. “That kind of depth?”
    “That kind of old-time relationship. You know about me and Elle Kruger . . .”
    “The nun, yes. What would you do if somebody murdered her?” Lily asked.
    “Find whoever did it and kill him,” Lucas said quietly.
    “Yes,” Lily said, nodding, looking straight at him. “That’s what I want.”
    The late-afternoon sun had gone red, then a sullen orange. A heavy atmospheric hush, accompanied by a distant rumbling, announced the line of thunderstorms that Lucas had seen from the roof. When Lily first arrived, Lucas, sitting on the roof, had said, “You’re absolutely gorgeous.” She’d cooled the sense of contact with a quick, “Don’t start, Davenport.” But there was an underlying tension between them, and now it sprang upagain, riding with them as they moved out of the kitchen, into the living room.
    Lily perched on a couch, knees together, fumbled through her purse, found a roll of Certs, tipped a couple of them into her hand, then popped them into her mouth. “You’ve changed things,” she said, looking around the house.
    “After Shadow Love, the place was pretty shot up,” Lucas said. He dropped onto a leather recliner, sitting on the edge of it, leaning toward her. “Some wiring got wrecked and I needed a new floor. Plaster work. He was shooting that goddamn M-15, it was a mess.”
    Lily looked away: “That’s what they used on Walt. An M-15. A full clip: they emptied a full clip into him. They found pieces of him all over the block.”
    “Jesus . . .” Lucas groped for something else to say, but all he could find was, “How about you? Are you okay?”
    “Oh, sure,” she said, and fell silent.
    “The last time I saw you, you were on a guilt trip about your old man and the kids . . . .”
    “That’s not over. The guilt trip. Sometimes I feel so bad I get nauseous,” she said.
    “Do you see the kids?”
    “Not so much,” she said sadly, looking away from him. “I tried, but it was wrecking all of us. David was always . . . peering at me. And the boys blame me for leaving.”
    “Do you want to go back?”
    “I don’t love him,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t even like him very much. I look at him now, and it all seems like bullshit, the stuff that comes out of his mouth. And that’s weird, because it used to seem so smart. We’d go to parties and he’d spin up these post-Jungian theories of racism and class struggle, and these phonies wouldstand around with their heads going up and down like they were bobbing for apples. Then I’d go to work and see a report on some twelve-year-old who shot his mom because he wanted to sell the TV to buy crack, and she wouldn’t let him. Then I’d go back home and . . . shit. I couldn’t stand listening to him anymore. How can you live with somebody you can’t stand listening to?”
    “It’s hard,” he said. “Being a cop makes it worse. I think that’s why I spent so much time with Jennifer. She was a professional bullshit artist, but basically, she knew what was what. She spent the time on the streets.”
    “Yeah . . .”
    “So where’re you at?” he asked again.
    She looked at him unsteadily, not quite nervous, but apprehensive somehow. “I didn’t want to get into that right away—I wanted to get you committed first. Will you come?”
    “Somebody new?” he asked, his voice light.
    “Will you come?”
    “Maybe . . . so you’ve got someone.”
    “Sort of.”
    “Sort of? What’s that?” He hopped off the chair and took a turn around the room. He wasn’t angry, he thought, but he looked angry. He reached down and turned on the TV and a tinny, distant voice instantly cried, “Kirrrbeee Puck-it.” He snapped it off again. “What does ‘sort of’ mean? One foot on the floor at all times?