Silent Prey

Atlanta, like a gritty gray rug. Ten minutes later, they were down.
    The Atlanta airport was straight from RoboCop, with feminine machine voices issuing a variety of warnings just below the level of consciousness, and steel escalators dropping into sterile tile hallways. He was glad to get out, though the flight to Charleston was bad. He fought the fear and managed to compose himself by the time the plane was on the ground.
    Pike was waiting inside the small terminal, a stolid black man wearing a green cotton jacket over a white shirt and khaki pants. When his jacket moved, Lucas could see a half-dozen ballpoint pens clipped to his shirt pocket and a small revolver on his belt.
    “Lucas Davenport,” Lucas said, shaking hands.
    “I gotta car,” Pike said, leading the way. “How’s New York?”
    “Hotter’n here,” Lucas said.
    “This is nothin’,” Pike said. “You ought to be here in August.”
    “That’s what they say in New York . . . .”
    They left the airport at speed. Lucas, disoriented, asked, “Where’s the ocean?”
    “Straight ahead, but the city’s not really on the ocean. It’s kind of like . . . Manhattan, actually,” Pike said. “There’s a river coming in on both sides, and they meet, and that’s the harbor, and then you gotta go on out past the Fort to get into the ocean.”
    “Fort Sumter?”
    “That’s it,” Pike said.
    “I’d like to see it sometime. I’ve been going to battlefields. Tell me about Reed.”
    Pike whipped past a gray Maxima, took an off-ramp, then turned left at the bottom. The street was cracked, the borders overgrown with weeds and scrub. “Reed is a stupid motherfucker,” he said matter-of-factly. “I getmad talking about it. His old man has lived here all his life, runs a garage and gas station, does the best body work in town, and makes a ton of money. And Red did good in high school. Did good on his tests and got into Columbia University on a scholarship. The silly fuck goes up to New York and starts putting junk up his nose, the cocaine. Hanging out in Harlem, coming back here and talking shit. Then he didn’t come back anymore. The word was, he was putting it up his nose full-time.”
    “Huh. How long’s he been back?”
    “Few weeks,” Pike said. “I feel bad for his folks.”
    “Is he staying?”
    “I don’t know. When he first got back, there were a couple of rumbles from Narcotics that he was hanging out with the wrong people. But I haven’t heard that lately. Maybe something changed.”
    Lucas hadn’t thought about what Charleston might look like, but as they drove through, he decided it was just right: Old South. Clapboard houses with peeling paint, and weird trees; bushes with plants that had leaves like leather, and spikes. A few palms. A lot of dirt. Hot.
    The Reed garage was a gray concrete-block building sitting side by side with a Mobil gas station and convenience store. All but one set of the gas pumps had a car parked next to them, and uniformed attendants moved around cleaning windshields and checking oil. “You come in here, they wipe your windshield, check your oil, put air in your tires. The only place you’ll find it,” Pike said. “That’s why Don Reed makes the money he does.”
    He killed the engine in the body shop’s parking lot and Lucas followed him into the shop office. The office smelled of motor oil, but was neatly kept, with plastic customer chairs facing a round table stacked with magazines. Behind a counter, a large man was hunched over ayellow-screen computer, poking at a keyboard one finger at a time. He looked up when they came in and said, “Hey, Darius.”
    “Hey, Don. Is Red around?”
    Reed straightened up, his smile slipping off his face. “He done somethin’?”
    Pike shook his head and Lucas said, “No. I’m from New York. Your son witnessed a shooting. He was a passerby. I just need to talk to him for a couple of minutes.”
    “You sure?” Reed asked, a hostile tone scratching through. “I got a lawyer . . .”
    “Look: You don’t know me, so . . . But I’m telling you, with a witness standing here, that all I want to do is talk. There’s no warrant, no anything. He’s not a suspect.”
    Reed regarded Lucas coolly, then finally nodded. “All right, come on. He’s out back.”
    Red Reed was coming out of a paint room when they found him, a plastic mask and hat covering his head. When he saw his father and the two cops, he pulled off the protective gear and