Silent Prey

barely looking up when they came in.
    “How are you?” Lucas asked. “Doing any good?”
    “What d’ya want?”
    “We need to talk to Manny,” Lucas said. She started to heave herself to her feet, but Lucas put a hand in front of her head. “Go ahead with the tickets. We can get him.”
    Sloan had moved to the door between the waiting area and the workroom. “He’s here,” he said to Lucas.
    They went back together. Johnson saw them, picked up a rag, wiped his hands. He was at least seven feet tall, Lucas thought. “Manny? We need to talk to you about Burrell Thomas.”
    “What’s he done?” Johnson’s voice was deep and roiled, like oil drums rolling off a truck.
    “Nothing, far as we know. But he was bunked down at the jail next to Michael Bekker, the nut case.”
    “Yeah, Rayon told me,” the tall man said.
    “You know where we can reach him?”
    “No, I don’t know where he’s living, but I could probably find him, tonight, if I walked around the neighborhood for a while. He usually goes down to Hennepin after nine.”
    “Bekker’s chopping people up,” Sloan said. “I meanchopping them up. I don’t know if Burrell’s got trouble with the cops, but if there’s any way he could help us . . .”
    “What?”.
    Sloan shrugged, picked up a can of WD-40, turned it in his hand, and shrugged. “We might be able to take a little pressure off, if he has another run-in with the cops. Or if your friend out there, if she . . .”
    Johnson looked them over for a minute, then said, “You got a phone number?”
    “Yeah,” Sloan said. He fished a card out of his pocket. “Call me there.”
    “Like tonight,” Lucas said. “This guy Bekker . . .”
    “Yeah, I know,” Johnson said. He slipped Sloan’s card in his shirt pocket. “I’ll call you, one way or another.”
     
    The drive to Stillwater cut another hour out of the day; the interview took ten minutes. Payton looked like an ex-college lineman, square, running to fat. He wasn’t interested in talking. “What the fuck’d the cops ever do for me? I’m a sick man, and here I am in this cage. You guys can fuck yourselves.”
    They left him talking to himself, muttering curses at the floor.
    “How’re you gonna threaten him? Tell him you’re gonna put him in jail?” Sloan asked as they walked back through the parking lot.
    Lucas glanced back at the penitentiary. It looked like an old Catholic high school, he decided, inside and out, until you heard the steel doors open and shut. Then you knew it couldn’t be anything but the joint . . . .
    Johnson called Sloan’s number a little after six o’clock. Burrell would talk and he’d meet Lucas at Penn’s Bar, on Hennepin. Johnson would come down, to introduce them.
    “Um, I got some shit to do at home,” Sloan said.
    “Hey, take off,” Lucas said. “And thanks.”
    They shook hands, and Sloan said, “Don’t take no wooden women.”
     
    Penn’s bar had a sagging wooden floor and a thin mustachioed bartender who poured drinks, washed glasses, ran the cash register and kept one eye on the door. A solitary black hooker leaned on the bar, smoking a cigarette and reading a comic book, ignoring a half-drunk, pale-green daiquiri. The hooker picked up Lucas’ eyes for a second, saw something she didn’t like, and went back to her comic.
    Farther toward the back, four men and two women stood around a coin-op pool table. Layers of cigarette smoke floated around them like the ghosts of autumn leaves. Lucas walked past the bar to the back, past the pool table, past a beat-up pay phone hung in an alcove next to a cigarette machine. He looked in the men’s john, came back, walked around the crowd at the pool table. The men wore jeans and vests, with big wallets chained to their belts, and looked at him sideways as he went through. Johnson wasn’t there. Neither was anyone who might be Burrell.
    “What can I do you for?” the bartender asked, drying his hands on a mustard-stained towel.
    “Bottle of Leinie’s,” Lucas said.
    The bartender fished it out of a cooler and dropped it wet on the bar: “Two bucks.” And then, tipping his head toward the back, “Looking for someone?”
    “Yeah.” Lucas paid and sat on a stool. The back-bar mirror ended before it got that far down, and Lucas stared into the fake walnut paneling opposite his stool, hitting on the beer, trying to straighten his schedule out.
    If he didn’t find Burrell quick, he’d have to stay over a