Silent Prey

can’t know about the place. Here, if somebody hijacks a goddamn Best Buy truck and takes off fifty Sonys, we got an idea where they’re going. Out there . . . Shit, you could make a list of suspects longer than your dick, and that’d only be the guys that you personally know might handle it. And then there are probably a hundred times that many guys that you don’t know. I mean, a list longer than my dick.”
    “We’re talking long lists here,” Sloan said.
    “It’s strange,” said Lucas. “It’s like being up at the top of the IDS Building and looking out a window where you can’t see the ground. You get disoriented and you feel like you’re falling.”
    “How ’bout that Bekker, though?” Sloan said enthusiastically. “He’s a fuckin’ star, and we knew him back when.”
    • • •
    Tommy Krey was sitting on a wooden chair in his attorney’s office. His attorney wore a yellow-brown double-knit suit and a heavily waxed hairdo the precise shade of the suit. He shook hands with Sloan and Lucas; his hands were damp, and Lucas smothered a grin when he saw Sloan surreptitiously wipe his hand on his pant leg.
    “What can Tommy do for yuz?” the lawyer asked, folding his hands on his desk, trying to look bright and businesslike. Krey looked half bored, skeptical, picked his teeth.
    “He can tell us what he and Michael Bekker talked about in jail,” Lucas said.
    “What are the chances of knocking down this car-theft . . .”
    “You’re gonna have to do that on your own,” Lucas said, looking from the lawyer to Krey and back again. “Maybe Sloan goes in and tells the judge you helped on a big case, but there’s no guarantees.”
    The lawyer looked at Krey and lifted his eyebrows. “What d’you think?”
    “Yeah, fuck, I don’t care,” Krey said. He flipped his toothpick at the basket, rimmed it out, and it fell on the carpet. The lawyer frowned at it. “We talked about every fuckin’ thing,” Krey said. “And I’ll tell you what: I been beatin’ my brains out ever since he went out to New York, trying to figure out if he gave me, like, any clues. And he didn’t. All we did was bullshit.”
    “Nothing about friends in New York, about disguises . . . ?”
    “Naw, nothing. I mean, if I knew something, I’d a been downtown trying to deal. I know that his buddy, the guy who did the other kills, was an actor . . . so maybe it is disguises.”
    “What was he like in there? I mean, was he freaked out . . . ?”
    “He cried all the time. He couldn’t live without his shit, you know? It hurt him. I thought it was bullshit when I first went in, but it wasn’t bullshit. He used to cry for hours, sometimes. He’s totally fuckin’ nuts, man.”
    “How about this Clyde Payton? He was in for some kind of dope deal, he was around Bekker.”
    “Yeah, he came in the day before I made bail. I don’t know; I think he was a wacko like Bekker. Square, but wacko, you know? Kind of scary. He was some kind of businessman, and he gets onto the dope. The next thing he knows, he’s busting into drugstores trying to steal prescription shit. He mostly sat around and cursed people out while I was there, but sometimes he’d get like a stone. He figured he was going to Stillwater.”
    “He did,” said Sloan.
    “Dumb fuck,” said Krey.
    “How about Burrell Thomas?”
    “Now, there’s something,” Krey said, brightening. “Bekker and Burrell talked a lot. Rayon’s one smart nigger.”
     
    Burrell’s address was a vacant house, the doors pulled down, the floor littered with Zip-Loc plastic bags. They crunched across broken glass up an open stairway, found a burned mattress in one room, nothing in the other, and a bathtub that’d been used as a toilet. Flies swarmed in an open window as Sloan reeled back from the bathroom door.
    “We gotta find Manny Johnson,” Sloan said.
    “He used to work at Dos Auto Glass,” Lucas said. “Not a bad guy. I don’t think he’s got a sheet, but that woman of his . . .”
    “Yeah.” Manny’s girlfriend called herself Rock Hudson. “She took twenty-five grand out of a high-stakes game down at the Loin last month. That’s going around.”
    “She’s a piece of work,” Lucas agreed.
    They found both Manny and Rock at the auto glass. The woman was sitting in a plastic chair with a box full of scratch-off lottery tickets, scratching off the silver with a jackknife blade, dropping the bad ones on the floor.
    “Cops,” she said,