Sudden Prey

hanging up on us,” Sloan said pleasantly. “You hear about all those cops’ husbands and wives getting shot today?”
    “Everybody heard,” she said.
    “My wife was one of them,” Del said. “She’s in the hospital now, and she’s hurting. We want you to know how serious this is—so why don’t you just open up the garage and we’ll go on up and talk to Daymon.”
    She looked from Del to Sloan to Lucas, and said, “He’d kick my ass if I done that. I mean, he’d kick me so bad.”
    Del looked at Lucas and nodded: he would.
    “What happened to your hand?” Lucas asked. Jasmine wasn’t carrying a bakery sack; her hand was professionally wrapped in a huge white bandage.
    She looked down at it, and her lip trembled: “Paper cutter,” she said. “Cut my finger right off.” She started to blubber. “It was just layin’ there, and I knew it was off, and then the blood squirted out . . .”
    Lucas said, “Jeez, that’s too bad. Look, Daymon must have an unlisted number, right? Of course he does.”
    He nodded, and she nodded. He took a cellular phone out of his pocket.
    “So why don’t you dial him up, and tell him we’re down here by the garage, and then he can go brush his teeth or whatever, and we can go on up.”
    “I’ll try,” she said, after a moment.
     
     
     
    HARP LET THEM up, unhappy about it. The apartment smelled of marijuana, but nothing fresh, just old curtain-and-rug contacts, enough to get you started if you’d gone to college in the sixties. Harp was waiting for them in the kitchen, his butt against the edge of the table, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked at Jasmine as if she were at fault, and she said, “Honey, they snatched me right off the street, they knew you was up here . . .”
    Del said, “That’s right, Day; we were coming up, one way or another.”
    “What you want?” Harp grunted.
    “You heard about the killings?”
    “Didn’t do it,” Harp said.
    Lucas felt a tingle: Harp was a little too tough. “We know you didn’t do it personally, but we think you might have a connection,” Lucas said. “Two of the people involved met down in your laundromat. We have a witness. We want to know why these two white assholes would come halfway across the country to meet in Daymon Harp’s laundromat.”
    “You think I’d help them peckerwoods?” Harp asked indignantly. “I been inside with those motherfuckers. Daymon Harp ain’t helping them no way, no place, no time.”
    “How’d you know they were peckerwoods?” Sloan asked. “We didn’t say they were peckerwoods.”
    “They all over the TV,” Harp said. “They’re Seeds, right? I know all about it—you can’t get nothin’ but TV news. They canceled Star Trek. ”
    “Who’s your cop friend?” Lucas asked.
    Harp’s eyelid flickered, a quick twitch. “What kind of bullshit you talkin’?”
    They pushed him for twenty minutes, but he wouldn’t move. He knew nothing, saw nothing, had heard nothing. On the way out the door, Lucas said to Jasmine, “Take care of the hand.”
     
     
     
    OUTSIDE, THEY HURRIED along to the truck, blown by the breeze. Sloan said, “I don’t know what he knows, but I think he’s got a corner on something.”
    “I’ll talk to Narcotics. We’ll shut him down,” Lucas said. He looked back up at the apartment lights. “Twenty-four hours, maybe he’ll be ready.”
    Del shook his head: “He can’t talk. Too many dead people, now. If he’s got a connection, he’ll do everything he can to bury it.” He looked back at the apartment: “I’ll bet you anything he books it.”
     
     
     
    LACHAISE HAD CALLED Stadic with the number of his new cell phone: Stadic had been in the office, and he scribbled it down, stuck the paper in his wallet.
    Two hours later, the shit hit the fan. He tried calling the number, but there was no answer. Then he was swept up in the chaos of the response, and eventually found himself wearing a doorman’s uniform, working the door at the hotel where the families were hidden. No time to call . . .
    At ten o’clock the night of the attacks, the bank time and temperature sign down the block said -2°. Stadic traded his doorman’s uniform for street clothes and hurried down the street to his car. The ferocity of the attacks had stunned him. Near panic, he’d spent the evening pacing in and out of the Sandhurst, wondering whether he should run for it. He had almost enough money . . .
    But he realized, with a little thought,