Silent Prey

talk to you, privately.”
    Whitechurch shook his head. “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
    “We can talk here or I can call a squad and we can go over to Midtown South.”
    “Talk about what?” Whitechurch shot a glance at the supervisor.
    “Let’s find a place,” Lucas suggested.
    They found a place in the hospital workshop, sitting on battered office chairs, Whitechurch spinning himself in quarter-turns with the heel of one foot. “I honest to God don’t know . . . .”
    Five hundred cases of paper, they said.
    “I ain’t gonna talk about nothing like that,” he said, his Jersey accent as thick as mayonnaise. “You want to talk about this other guy, Bekker, I’d help you any way I can. But I don’t know nothing about him, or any medical gear. I wouldn’t touch that shit . . . .” He caught himself. “Listen, I don’t take nothing out of here, but if I did, I wouldn’t take that stuff. I mean, people might die because of it.”
    “If we catch the guy who’s helping Bekker . . . that guy’s going down as an accessory. Attica, and I’ll tell you what, man: there’d be no fuckin’ parole, not for somebody who helped this asshole . . . .”
    “Jesus Christ, I’d tell you,” Whitechurch said. He was sweating. “Listen, I know a couple of people who might know something about this . . . .”
     
    “What do you think?” Fell asked.
    “He covered himself pretty well. I don’t know. We got names, anyway. We’ll come back to him. Let him stew . . . .” Whitechurch had given them two more names. Both men were working.
    “Jakes is an orderly—he oughta be around,” the assistant administrator said. She was getting into the hunt, falling into Fell’s laconic speech pattern. “Williams—I’ll have to look him up.”
    They found Harvey Jakes moving sheets out of the laundry.
    “I don’t know about this shit,” he said. He was worried. “Listen, I don’t know why you’d come looking to me. I never been up on anything, never took anything, where’d you get my name . . .”
    Williams was worse. Williams worked in the laundry, and was stupid. “Said what?”
    “Said you boosted stuff out of here and . . .”
    “Said what?”
    Lucas looked at him closely, then at Fell, and shook his head. “He’s not faking.”
    “What?” Williams looked slowly from one to the other, and they sent him back to his laundry.
     
    “We’re into a black market—pretty casual, hard to pin down, picking up the occasional opportunity,” Fell said as they ambled down the hall. Like the rest of New York, the Bellevue interior was mostly a patch, painted white with black trim. “Doesn’t feel like a real tight ring. Whitechurch might be bigger, if he really organized a truck to haul that paper out of there. Jakes and Williams are small-time, if they’re stealing anything at all.”
    “That’s about right,” Lucas said. “Whitechurch might be something, though.”
    “Want to go back on him?”
    “We should,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “But I fuckin’ hurt . . . .”
    “You keep poking at your cheek,” she said. She reached out and touched the bruise, and her light hand didn’t hurt at all. “So what are we doing?”
    “I’m going back to the hotel. I need a nap, I feel like shit,” Lucas said.
    “We’re stuck?”
    “Except for Whitechurch, I don’t know where we go,” Lucas said. “Let’s think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

CHAPTER
11
    At the Lakota, Lucas examined his swollen cheek in the mirror. The color of the bruise was deepening, a purple blotch that dominated the side of his face, shiny in the middle, rougher toward the edges. He touched the abraded skin and winced. He’d been hit before, and knew what would happen: the abrasions would scab over while the skin around them turned yellow-green, and in a week, he’d look even worse; he’d look like Frankenstein. He shook his head at himself, tried a tentative grin, ate a half-dozen aspirin and slept for two hours. When he woke, the headache had faded, but his stomach was queasy. He gobbled four more aspirin, showered, brushed his teeth, fished an oversize Bienfang art pad from under the bed and got a wide-tipped Magic Marker from his briefcase. He wrote:
Bekker.
Needs money.
Needs drugs.
Lives Midtown w/friend?
Has vehicle.
Hasn’t been seen. Disguise?
Chemist skills.
Medical skills.
Contact at Bellevue.
Night.
    He tacked the chart to a wall and lay on