Silken Prey

parked directly in front of the house, behind a SWAT van, and Lucas, Del, and the vice cop ambled across the lawn and up the porch steps. Joan Busch was sitting on a ratty brown couch, looking both high and discouraged. Five men and a woman were facing a couple of different walls, hands on the walls, and had already been patted down. One man lay behind a couch, unmoving. The whole place smelled like weed, like an old motel room might smell of cigarette smoke.
    “What happened to him?” Del asked, nodding at the unconscious man.
    “He was like that when we came in,” the SWAT leader said. “He’s breathing, but he’s not waking up. We’ve got an ambulance on the way.”
    “Must be Bill,” Lucas said.
    All seven of the house’s inhabitants were stoned to some degree; when Lucas checked IDs, he found a Michael and a very, very white guy named Joe. The other woman, whose name was Charlotte Brown, said that she lived upstairs. Lucas told her to sit on the couch next to Busch, and then, after talking to the vice guy, they cut loose everybody except the two women, and Michael and Joe.
    The freed men were taken outside one at a time by the vice guy, so that he could tell them that they were being released on his say-so, and that they owed him big time. A few minutes later, an ambulance showed up, and the unconscious guy was trundled out.
    When that was done, Lucas and Del took the other four into the kitchen, one at a time, for questioning.
    Michael and Busch were confused about the night that Clay was supposed to be in the house. They thought they might remember him, but were not sure exactly of the when: “That sucker comes and goes,” Busch said. “In and out all the time.”
    He’d never come in the house with a gun, Busch said, “Because he knows if he do, that’s the end of him. I throw his ass out and never let him come back. Cops don’t mind a little weed, but they death on guns.”
    Brown, though, remembered something about Clay trying to start a game of strip poker. “I said, ‘You so short, why’d I play strip poker with you?’ and he said, ‘Only my body short, ’cause all my growth went somewhere else.’ Made me laugh, but I said, ‘I ain’t playin’ strip poker with
nobody
in this house.’”
    She said he was still there when she went upstairs, sometime well after midnight, but was gone when she came back down about noon.
    Joe remembered him, too. “He was sleepin’ on the floor when I got up. He was snorin’ like a chain saw, you could hear him out in the street.”
    That was at six o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts. “I got to be to work at eight o’clock so I set my phone at six o’clock so I could go home and get washed up. The phone went off and he never moved, he snored right through it.”
    How high had Clay been the night before?
    “He had this piece of hash he wanted to trade for a couple rocks, but nobody would trade him—I didn’t have any myself—so he took out his pipe and smoked it,” Joe said. “He was pretty high, best as I remember, but I don’t remember too clear.”
    Was it possible that he could have gone away during the night and come back?
    “Well, it’s possible, but I don’t know why he would,” Joe said. “He didn’t have any money to buy anything. All he had was that little piece of hash, wasn’t bigger than about a nickel.”
    “How do you know he didn’t have any money?” Del asked.
    “’Cause somebody had one little rock and wanted twelve dollars for it, and he said he could only pay later and they said, ‘Bullshit,’ and he turned his pockets out, and he didn’t have but eighty cents or something. And that little piece of hash.”
    “He have a gun?”
    “Not that I seen.”
    •   •   •
    W HEN THEY WERE FINISHED with them, they got their names, addresses, cell phone numbers—they all had phones—and told them not to leave town for a while. “Be the first chance you have to get a guy out of trouble, instead of in,” Del said.
    Out on the sidewalk, Lucas said, “Turk
will
be pissed. Clay’s stoned on hash at two o’clock in the morning, and he’s sound asleep at six. He’s got no gun, and he doesn’t have enough money even to catch a bus, so how does he get to North Minneapolis from way down here?”
    “That’s if everybody’s remembering the right night,” Del said. “Between the four of them, they couldn’t
count
to four.”
    “I promise you something, Del,” Lucas said. “Helen Roman