Wicked Prey

partying pretty hard,” Briar said.
    “On what?” Lucas asked.
    “Maybe . . . a little amp,” Briar said.
    “A little? Or a lot?” the cop asked.
    “Three zippies,” she said.
    Enough to kill the average pony, Lucas thought.
    “What about you?” the cop asked her.
    “They don’t allow me. If I smoke, I can’t work.” She looked at Lucas. “Randy was going to take Letty and do stuff to her.”
    “Yeah? Did she know that?” Lucas asked.
    “I think so,” Briar said. “We mostly talked about my situation.”
    “Who’s Letty?” the cop asked. “What’s your situation?”
    Lucas shook his head: “This is really screwed up. Letty’s my daughter. I don’t know where the hell she is . . .” He looked at Briar, then at Ranch. “If she’s hurt . . .”
    Briar stepped away from him.
    * * *
    THE AMBULANCE pulled into the yard, its headlights sweeping across them, as the second cop, the one who’d gone down the hill, climbed back using his hands as well as his feet to keep his balance. Red-faced and out of breath, he said, “He’s alive, but his head looks funny. He might have broken his neck.”
    One of the paramedics walked over from the ambulance and looked over the edge. “Holy cripes,” she said. “Maybe we ought to come up from the bottom.”
    The second cop shook his head. “He’s less than halfway down, and it’s even steeper below him. Gotta hurry, guys, he’s hurt.”
    The paramedics got a lightweight carry stretcher, a backboard, a cervical extrication collar, and safety straps, and went over the edge with the second cop.
    The St. Paul cop with Lucas asked, “What are we doing here?”
    Lucas shook his head: “Not my case. We picked up Briar earlier today . . .”
    He told the cop about the scene at the motel, and the cop listened to it all, and then said, “What about your daughter?”
    “I’m looking for her. She was down at the convention, but she was supposed to be home hours ago.”
    Lucas looked at Briar again, but Briar said, “We haven’t seen her. Honest. Not since day before last.”
    “How do you know her?” the cop asked. “How’s she involved?”
    “She’s not,” Lucas and Briar said simultaneously.
    Briar said, “She works for a TV station. She found me downtown. She wanted to interview me.”
    Lucas said to the cop, “She was trying to do a story on young . . . prostitutes. For Channel Three.”
    “Oh, yeah,” the cop said. “I know her—the good-looking blond chick.”
    “She’s fourteen,” Lucas said.
    The cop was unembarrassed: good-looking is good-looking. “You a young prostitute?” he asked Briar.
    “I’m just a kid,” she said.
    Ranch, naked except for his Jockey shorts, dug his hand in his pants, scratched himself and said: “Some pretty good pussy, though.”
    Lucas and the cop both turned to him, and Lucas asked, “What’d you say?”
    “Pretty . . . uh . . .”
    “They raped me,” Briar said. “Or, Ranch did. I think.”
    “You think?” the cop asked. “You’re not sure?”
    “Does it count if they do it in your butt?”
    The cop rubbed his forehead and said, “Yeah, that counts.” He said to Ranch, “Turn around.” Ranch, head bobbing, turned around, and the cop cuffed him. “Hey, dude, that’s pretty fuckin’ . . . rude.”
    Briar said, “Randy made him do it.”

    LUCAS’S PHONE rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket and checked the number: Letty.
    “Where the fuck are you?” he snarled, without preamble.
    “I’m at the Capitol,” she said. “I didn’t realize how late it was. I’m sorry—I’m going home now.”
    “You’re at the Capitol?” He wasn’t sure he believed her.
    “Yeah. I did some tape on some political kids here. For the weekend. Frat boys for Obama.”
    Lucas felt as though he were strangling: “You get home. Get home. Goddamnit, Letty . . .”
    “I’m going,” she said meekly.
    Too meekly, Lucas thought, but she’d hung up, and he wouldn’t call her back in the presence of the St. Paul cop.
    “That was her?” Briar asked brightly.
    “Yeah. She’s at the Capitol,” Lucas said.
    “Glad she’s okay,” Briar said.
    The cop shook his head, but didn’t press. He had enough problems, without picking at one that seemed to have solved itself. You could ruin a perfectly good evening, he believed, with one extra ill-placed question. He stepped away, got on his radio, and said, “We need another ambulance and we’re gonna need a rape kit at Regions, better alert