Silent Prey

his pocket and pulled out a strip of paper and unfolded it. The Times story. “You did a good job yesterday. Modest, you give credit to everyone, you stress how smart Bekker can be. Not bad. They bought it. Have you read the files? On this other thing?”
    “I’m starting tonight, at Lily’s.”
    “Any thoughts so far? From what you’ve seen?” O’Dell pressed.
    “I don’t see Fell in it.”
    “Oh?” O’Dell’s eyebrows went up. “I can assure you that she is, somehow. Why would you think otherwise?”
    “She’s just not right. How did you find her?”
    “Computer. We ran the dead guys against the cops who busted them. She came up several times. Repeatedly, in a couple of cases. Too many times for it to be a coincidence,” O’Dell said.
    “Okay. I can see her nominating somebody. I just can’t see her setting up a hit. She’s not real devious.”
    “Do you like her?” asked Lily.
    “Yeah.”
    “Will that get in the way?” O’Dell asked.
    “No.”
    O’Dell glanced at Lily and she said, “I don’t think it will. Lucas fucks over both men and women impartially.”
    “Hey, you know I get a little tired . . .” Lucas said irritably.
    “Fell looks like another Davenport kill,” Lily said. She tried for humor, but there was an edge to it.
    “Hey, hey . . .” O’Dell said.
    “Look, Lily, you know goddamned well . . .” Lucas said.
    “Stop, stop, not in a restaurant,” O’Dell said. “Jesus . . .”
    “Okay,” said Lily. She and Lucas had locked up, and now she broke her eyes away.
    The waiter returned with a plate piled with French toast and a small tureen of hot maple syrup. A pat of butter floated on the syrup. He unloaded the French toast in front of O’Dell, and coffee cups in front of Lucas and Lily. O’Dell tucked a napkin into his collar and started on the toast.
    “There’s something more going on here,” O’Dell said, when the waiter had gone. “These three hits we’re most worried about, the lawyer, the activist, and Petty himself—I believe these guys may be coming out. The shooters.”
    “What?” Lucas glanced at Lily, who stared impassively at O’Dell.
    “That’s my sense, my political sense,” O’Dell said. He popped a dripping square of toast into his mouth, chewed, leaned back and watched Lucas with his small eyes. “They’re deliberately letting us know that they’re out there and that they aren’t to be fooled with. The word is getting around. Has been for a couple of months. You hear this shit, ‘Robin Hood and his Merry Men,’ or ‘Batman Strikes Again,’ whenever some asshole is taken off. There are a lot of people who’d like the idea that they’re out there. Doing what’s necessary. Half the people in town would be cheering them on, if they knew.”
    “And the other half would be in the streets, tearing the place apart,” Lily said to Lucas. She turned her head to O’Dell. “There’s the other thing, too, with Bekker.”
    “What?” asked Lucas, looking between them.
    “We’re told that this is real,” she said. She fished in her purse, took out a folded square of paper and handed it to him. A Xerox copy of a letter, addressed to the editor of the New York Times.
    Lucas glanced down at the signature: Bekker. One word, an aristocratic conceit and scrawl.
 . . . taken to task for what I consider absolutely essential experiments into the transcendental nature of Man, and accused of crimes; so be it. I will stand on my intellectual record, and though accused of crimes, as Galileo was, I will, like him, be vindicated by a future generation.
    Though accused of crimes, I am innocent, and I will have no truck with criminals. It is in that spirit that I write. On Friday night last, I witnessed an apparent gangland shooting . . . .
    “Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, looking at Lily. “Was this one of the killings you were talking about?”
    “Walt,” she said.
    Lucas went back to the letter. Bekker had seen the two killers clearly.
 . . . would describe him as white, thick, square-faced with a gray, well-trimmed mustache extending the full length of his upper lip, weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, six feet, two inches tall, sixty-one years old. As a trained forensic pathologist, I would wager that I am not wrong by more than fivepounds either way, or by more than an inch in height, or two years in age.
    The description of the other one, the one I have called Thin, I will hold to myself, for my own