Silent Prey

why did Foen take a cab? She was running across the street to get Cokes for everybody. Her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up at nine-thirty, when she got off.”
    “Maybe . . . fuck, I don’t know.”
    “And look at Cortese. Cortese walks out of this club and across Sixth Avenue, down Fifty-ninth Street toward the Plaza. His friends saw him go in at the Sixth Avenue end. He apparently never arrived at the other end, because there was a phone message for him at the Plaza from nine o’clock on, and he never got it. So he gets picked up on Fifty-ninth between Fifth and Sixth. What happened in there? Why would he flag a cab? He only had to go a few hundred feet.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. And it’s dark in there, so maybe he got jumped. But you gotta be careful when you start looking for logic, man . . . .”
    “I know, I know . . . .”
    “It could be anything. Maybe Cortese left his friends because he was looking for a little action.”
    Lucas shook his head. “He sounds awful straight.”
    “So does Garber . . . I don’t know.”
    “Keep reading,” said Lucas.
    She was watching him, he thought. Odd glances, wary. “Is there something wrong?” he asked finally.
    After a moment, she asked, “Are you really here working on Bekker?”
    “Well . . .” He spread his arms to the stack of paper on the table. “Yeah. Why?”
    “Oh, the more I think about it, the odder it seems. We’ll catch him, you know.”
    “Sure, I know,” Lucas said. “I’m mostly here for the publicity thing. Take some heat off.”
    “That doesn’t seem quite right either,” Fell said. She studied him. “I don’t know about you. You hang out with O’Dell. You’re not Internal Affairs?”
    “What?” He pulled back, surprised. “Jesus, Barbara. No. I’m not Internal Affairs.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Hey. You know what happened to me in Minneapolis?”
    “You supposedly beat up somebody. A kid.”
    “A pimp. He’d cut up a woman with a church key, one of my snitches. Everybody on the street knew about it and I had to do something. So I did. He turned out to be a juvenile—I guess I knew that—and I got hammered by Internal Affairs. There was nothing particularly fair about it. I was just doing what I had to do, and everybody knew it. I got fucked because fucking me was safer than not fucking me. But I’m not Internal Affairs. You can check, easy enough.”
    “No, no.”
    She went back to her papers, and Lucas to his, but a minute later he said, “Jesus, Internal Affairs.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Well . . .”
     
    They took a break, walked two blocks down, bumping hips, and got a booth in a Slice-o’-Pie pizza joint, withgallon-sized paper cups of Diet Pepsi. She liked him: Lucas knew it and let the talk drift toward the personal. He told her about his onetime long-distance relationship with Lily; about the ambiguity now. About his kid.
    “I wouldn’t mind having a kid,” Fell said. “My fuckin’ biological alarm clock is banging like Big Ben.”
    “How old are you?” he asked.
    “Thirty-six.”
    “Any fatherhood prospects on the horizon?”
    “Not at the moment,” she said. “All I meet are cops and crooks, and I don’t want a cop or a crook.”
    “Hard to meet people?”
    “Meeting them isn’t the problem. The problem is, the guys I like, don’t like me. Eventually. Like five years ago, I was going out with this lawyer dude. Not a big-time lawyer, just a guy. Divorced. Long hair, did a lot of pro bono. And pretty hip. You know.”
    “Yeah. Exactly. Nice neckties.”
    “Yeah. He was looking around to get remarried. I mighta. But then one day I was out decoying and this big asshole comes onto me really hard, gets me on a wall, whacks me—he’s getting off on whacking me. And I go down and I’ve got this little hideout piece on my leg, this .25 auto, and he’s just bending over to pick me up and I stick the piece in his teeth and his eyes get about the size of dishpans and I back him off, he’s saying, ‘Hold it, hold it . . .’ ”
    “Where’s your backup?”
    “They’re just running up. They put the guy on the wall and one of them says, ‘Jesus, Fell, you’re gonna have a mouse bigger’n Mickey’—the asshole’d whacked me right under the eye, right on the eye-socket bone, you know?” She rubbed her eye socket, and Lucas nodded. “Hurt like hell. And I say, ‘Yeah?’ And they got the guyleaning on the wall with his legs apart, and