Silent Prey

No skin off my butt. I’ll tell everybody I know and ask them to pass the word.”
    “He’s probably around the Village, but could be anywhere between the civic center and Central Park. That’s about all we know. That’s where the word’s got to be,” Lucas said.
    “That’s my territory,” Smith said. “Is that all?”
    Lucas glanced at Fell, then said, “No. I gotta ask you something else. You might not want to talk about it with another witness here.” He tipped his head at Fell. “But if you don’t mind if she stayed . . .”
    Fell frowned at him, and Smith said, “What’s the deal?”
    “Back when I first got here, I banged up your place. Tried to get your attention . . .”
    “Well, that worked,” Smith said ruefully.
    “Yeah. A couple of days later, I got the snot beat outof me when I was coming out of a friend’s place. I need to know if that was you. Off the record. If it was, it’s no problem, I swear it.”
    Smith dropped his croissant on the plate and laughed. “Jesus Christ, it wasn’t me. I read about it, though—but it wasn’t me.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re the kind of guy that shit happens to, getting beat up,” Smith said.
    Lucas looked at Fell. “Could you hike down to the end of the block for a minute?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, studying him.
    “C’mon,” Lucas said.
    “Are you Internal Affairs?”
    “Fuck no, I told you,” Lucas said impatiently. “C’mon, take a hike.”
    Fell pushed back her chair, picked up her purse and stalked away.
    “She’s pissed,” Smith said, looking from Fell to Lucas and back to Fell. “Are you screwing her?”
    Lucas ignored the question: “There’s a big-dog shoot-out going on. Inside the department. And I’m tangled up in it. Now. The people who jumped me might be one set of those big dogs. That’s why I really need to know.”
    “Listen . . .”
    “Just a minute,” Lucas said, putting up a hand. “I want to put it to you as simple as I can. If you tell me no, it wasn’t you, and I find out that it was, I’ll come back and hurt you. All right? I really will, because I’ve gotta know the truth of this. Not knowing the truth could get me killed. On the other hand, if you say yes, it was you, there’s no problem. I’ll take the lumps.”
    Smith shook his head in disbelief, a half-smile fixed onhis face. “The answer is still no. I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even particularly happy to see the story in the paper, because I thought you might come back on me.”
    Lucas nodded, and Smith spread his hands, lifted his shoulders: “I’m a businessman. I don’t want any shit. I don’t want any muscle around. I hate people with guns. Everybody’s got a fuckin’ gun.” He stared off across Sixth Avenue, the traffic waiting for the light at Central Park South, then looked back at Lucas. “No. Wasn’t me.”
    “All right,” Lucas said. “So get the word out to the junkies on Bekker. You might also point out that there’s a twenty-five-thousand-dollar crime-stoppers award for his capture.”
    Lucas turned away from Smith and walked down the street to Fell. “I wish I could read lips,” she said. “I’d give a lot to know what you just told him.”
    “I told him why I wanted to know if those were his guys who came after me,” Lucas said.
    “Tell me,” she said.
    “No. And I’m not Internal Affairs.”
     
    They spent the day walking through the Village and SoHo, drifting in and out of shops, talking to Fell’s contacts on the street, chatting with uniform cops in Washington Square, watching the street action on Broadway. They found the bookstore where Bekker had been spotted, a long, narrow shop with a narrow front window and a weathered, paint-peeled door three steps up. A sign in the door said “Open All Night, 365 Nights a Year.”
    The clerk who had talked to Bekker wasn’t working, but happened by on his bike a few seconds after they asked for him. A thin man with a goatee and a book ofpoetry, he looked like a latter-day Beat, his face animated as he told them about the encounter.
    “He’s a good-looking woman, I’ll tell you that,” the clerk said. “But you can look at somebody and know what kind of book they’re going to buy, and I never picked her—him—out for the one he found. Torture and shit. I thought maybe he was, like, an NYU professor or something, and that’s why he bought it . . . .”
    Down the sidewalk, Fell