Silent Prey

file open. Kays had been arrested twice for rape. Served two years the first time, acquitted the second time. He was suspected in as many as thirty attacks on the Upper West Side. He had had it down to a science, attacking women at night in locked parking garages. He apparently entered when a car exited, ducking under the descending door, then waited until he caught a woman alone in the dark. Half-dozen busts on drug-possession charges, assault, theft, drunkenness.
    “Kays,” Lily said, looking over his shoulder. “He should’ve gotten it five years earlier.”
    “Wrong thinking, mon capitaine, ” Lucas said, looking up at her. She handed him a Special Export.
    “Yeah, but it’s part of the problem: with the exception of the three killings I told you about, including Walt, which they can deny, most people in town would be rootin’ for these guys if they knew about them. Especially when they’re doing guys like Kays. I doubt we could find a jury that’d convict them.”
    “You mean it was all right, as long as they were hitting dirtbags?”
    “No. Just that if you kill somebody who deserves todie, and will anyway, someday, but maybe fuck up a hundred people’s lives before then . . . hurrying the due date along doesn’t seem that terrible. Compared to killing innocent people. But these guys aren’t hitting criminals anymore, they’re attacking . . . freedom.”
    “I can’t operate at that kind of rarefied theoretical level,” Lucas said, grinning at her.
    “It does sound like wimpy-ass bullshit, doesn’t it?” she said.
    “It does.”
    “But it isn’t,” she said.
    “All right.”
    “If you don’t feel it . . . why’d you sign on?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “ ’Cause you’re a good friend of mine.”
    “Is that enough?”
    “Sure. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the few good reasons for doing anything. I’d hate to kill somebody out of patriotism or duty; I could never be a warden and throw the switch on somebody. But in hot blood, to protect family or friends . . . that’s all right.”
    “Revenge?”
    He thought for a minute, then nodded. “Yeah, revenge is in there. I like hunting Bekker. I’m gonna get him.”
    “You and Barb Fell.”
    “Yup. Speaking of whom . . .” He dug in his jacket shirt pocket. “Look at these. The guy looks like a cop and she’s tight with him, or was.” He handed her two of the Polaroids he’d taken at Fell’s.
    “Oh, Barbara,” Lily muttered, looking at them, shaking her head. “I know this guy. Vaguely. He’s a lieutenant in Traffic. We’ll run him against the killings and see what we get.”
    “And I’ve got some names for you. Friends of hers. Idon’t know how many are cops, but if you could run them . . .”
    “Sure.”
     
    Lucas stayed until two o’clock, taking notes on a yellow legal pad, when Lily came in and asked, “Find anything?”
    “No. And you were right. These guys were the scum of the scum. How many people could put together a list like this?”
    “Hundreds,” she said. “But Barb Fell was at the intersection of a lot of possibilities.”
    Lucas nodded, ripped the sheets off the legal pad, folded them and stuck them in his jacket pocket. “I’ll keep working her.”
     
    Lily’s apartment was on the second floor of a converted townhouse. Lucas left at ten after two, the night just beginning to find the soft coolness that lay between the tropical days. He was a little tired, but still awake; at home he might have gone for a walk along the river, smoothing down for bedtime. In New York . . .
    The street was reasonably well lit; a taxi loitered in the next block. He turned that way and started walking, hands in his pockets.
    There were two of them.
    They were big, quick, like professional linebackers.
    The cars along the street were parked bumper-to-bumper. The guy behind the Citation got Lucas to turn toward him by dragging something metallic across the bumper, a chilling, ripping sound, like a knife dragged down a washboard.
    Lucas instinctively stepped away and half-turned, pivoting toward the sound. Something was happening: asound like that had to be intentional. His hand dropped to the small of his back, toward the weight of his .45.
    And as he turned, the second guy, the guy who’d hidden behind the stoop, charged onto the walk, slashed at Lucas’ elbow with a sap, hit him in the spine with a shoulder, and drove him into the Citation.
    The pain from the sap was like