Silent Prey

know? But an ordinary guy couldn’t get any alms. You needed to be special. So they’d take kids and burn their eyes out or smash their arms and legs with hammers. They had to make thempitiful enough to get money in a whole city full of beggars . . . .”
    Thin looked up at him, still saying nothing.
    “So we’re getting there, too,” Thick said, looking back at the woman on the street. “Who’s gonna give money to your average panhandler when you walk by something like that every day?” He half turned to look back at the woman.
    “Dollar,” the woman wailed, “Dollar . . .”
    Thick was worried. Thin was talking about running out. He glanced at his partner. Thin’s eyes were angry, fixed straight ahead. Thinking . . .
    Thick was carrying a large, flat, cardboard box. It wasn’t particularly heavy, but the shape was awkward, and he slowed to hitch it up under his arm.
    “I wouldn’t mind . . .” Thick started, then let it go. He reached up to scratch his face, but he was wearing thin, flesh-colored surgeon’s gloves, and he couldn’t effectively scratch. They moved along, quickly, to an apartment building across the street from the steak house. Thick had the key in his free hand and opened the door.
    Thin said, “I can’t do it.”
    “We gotta. Jesus Christ, if we don’t we’re fuckin’ dead, all of us . . . .”
    “Listen . . .”
    “Off the street, off the street . . .”
    Inside the door, the hall and landing were dimly lit by a yellow sixty-watt bulb. The stairs were immediately to the right, and Thick started up. Thin, undecided, looked back out at the street, then, reluctantly, because Thick was already moving, followed. At the top of the stairs, they stopped in the hallway for a moment and listened, then went to the front apartment and opened the door with a key. The only light in the apartment came throughthe yellowed shades on the front windows, from the street. The place smelled of dead air, old coffee grounds, and dry plants. The owners had been in Rome for a week, to see the Pope. They’d go to the Holy Land afterward. The Holy Land in July. They’d burn their brains out, if they had any, which they probably didn’t, if they were going to the Holy Land in July.
    Thin shut the door behind them and said, “Listen . . .”
    “If you weren’t going to do it, why’d you come this far?”
    “Because you got us into it. I don’t want you to get fucked up.”
    “Jesus . . .” Thick shook his head and stepped carefully through the dark room to the windows and lifted a shade. “Get the rifle.”
    “I’m not . . .”
    “All right, I’ll do it. Jesus, if that’s the way you feel about it, go. Get the fuck out,” Thick said, anger riding his voice. He was older than Thin by twenty-three years and two days, his face stamped with the cuts and gullies of a life on the street. He picked up the box he’d carried in. “Go.”
    Thin hesitated, watching. The box was five feet long by three wide, but only eight inches deep. It might have held a mirror, or even a painting, but it didn’t—it held a Colt AR-15 with a flash suppressor, a twenty-shot magazine, a two-power light-gathering scope, and a laser sight. The weapon, manufactured as a semiautomatic, had been converted to selectible fire, semiauto or full auto, by a machinist in Providence.
    Thick had spent an afternoon in the Adirondacks shooting plastic milk jugs from a perch high on the bank of a gully. The gallon-sized jugs closely simulated the kill zone of a man’s chest from any angle. Thick usedhand-loaded cartridges, and he was a very good shot. When hit by one of Thick’s hot loads, the milk jugs literally exploded.
    Thick used a penknife to cut the twine that held the box shut, stripped off a couple of pieces of tape, opened it, and took the weapon out of the sponge-rubber packing. New scope mounts weren’t as delicate as those he’d grown up with, but there was no point in taking chances. He hadn’t. A fully loaded magazine was packed with the weapon. Each cartridge had been polished with a chamois to eliminate fingerprints. Thick slapped the magazine home with his rubber-gloved hands.
    “Get the couch,” Thick said. “Hurry it up.”
    “No: he’s a cop. If he wasn’t a cop . . .”
    “Bullshit.” Thick went to the windows, looked out on the empty street, then unlocked one of them and carefully raised it until it was fully open. Then he turned, glanced at Thin, and