Silent Prey

him.
    Kennett was waiting in the passenger seat of a double-parked Mazda Navaho, wearing comfortable old khakis and a SoHo Surplus T-shirt.
    “Nice truck,” Lucas said to Lily as he crawled in back.
    “Kennett’s. Four-wheel drive must help testosterone production,” Lily said, walking around to the driver’s side and climbing in. “You’ve got one, don’t you?”
    “Not like this: this is sort of a Manhattan four-wheel drive,” he said, tongue in cheek. To Kennett he said, “I didn’t think you could drive.”
    “Got it before the last attack,” Kennett said. “I think the price is what brought the attack on. And don’t give me any shit about Manhattan four-by-fours, this is a fuckin’ workhorse . . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    They left Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerging in Jersey, took a right and then followed a bewildering zigzag path back to the waterfront. The marina was a modest affair, filling a dent in the riverbank, a few dozen boats separated from a parking lot by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Most of the boats were in concrete slips, halyards clinking softly against the aluminum masts like a forest of one-note wind chimes; a few more boats were anchored just offshore.
    “Look at this guy, putting up his ’chute,” Kennett said, climbing down from the truck. Lucas squeezed out behind him as Lily climbed out of the driver’s seat. Kennett pointed out toward the river, where two sailboats were tacking side-by-side down the Hudson, running in front of a steady northwest breeze, their sails tight with the wind. A man was standing on the foredeck of one of them, freeing a garish crimson-and-yellow sail. It filled like a parachute, and the boat leapt ahead.
    “You ever sailed?” Kennett asked.
    “A couple times, on Superior,” Lucas said, shading his eyes. “You feel like you’re on a runaway locomotive. It’s hard to believe they’re barely going as fast as a man can jog.”
    “A man doesn’t weigh twenty thousand pounds like that thing,” Kennett said, watching the lead boat. “That is a locomotive . . . .”
    They unloaded a cooler from the back of the truck and Lucas carried it across the parking lot, past a suntanned woman in a string bikini with a string of little girls behind her, like ducklings. The smallest of the kids, a tiny red-headed girl with a sandy butt and bare feet, squealed and danced on the hot tarmac while carrying a pair of flip-flops in her hands.
    Lily led the way through a narrow gate in the chain-link fence, Lucas right behind her, Kennett taking it slow, down to the water. Here and there, people were working on their boats, listening to radios as they worked. Most of the radios were tuned to rock stations, but not the same ones, and an aural rock-’n’-roll fest played pleasantly through the marina. Few of the boats actually seemed ready to go out, and the work was slow and social.
    “There she blows, so to speak,” Kennett said. The Lestrade was fat and graceful at the same time, like an overweight ballerina.
    “Nice,” Lucas said, uncertainly. He knew open fishing boats, but almost nothing about sailboats.
    “Island Packet 28—it is a nice boat,” Kennett said. “I got it instead of kids.”
    “Not too late for kids,” Lucas said. “I just had one myself.”
    “Wait, wait, wait.” Lily laughed. “I should have a say in this.”
    “Not necessarily,” Lucas said. He stepped carefully into the cockpit, balancing the cooler. “The goddamned town is overrun with nubile prospects. Find somebody with a nice set of knockers, you know, not too smart so you wouldn’t have to worry about the competition. Maybe with a fetish for housework . . .”
    “Fuck the sailing, let’s go back into town,” Kennett said.
    “God, I’m looking forward to this,” Lily said. “The flashing wit, the literary talk . . .”
     
    Lily and Lucas rigged the sails, with Kennett impatiently supervising. When he was bringing the sails up, Lucas took a moment to look through the boat: a big berth at the bow, a tidy, efficient galley, a lot of obviously custom-built bookshelves jammed with books. Even a portable phone.
    “You could live here,” Lucas said to Kennett.
    “I do, a lot of the time,” Kennett said. “I probably spend a hundred nights a year on the boat. Even when I can’t sail it, I just come over here and sit and read and sleep. Sleep like a baby.”
    Kennett took the boat out on the