Wicked Prey

up the language and sold dope on the street and eventually started running two or three whores that nobody else wanted.
    Those were the big days of the crack wars, when everybody was buying the stores out of baking soda and everybody was cooking up the crack in the kitchen, twelve-year-olds were walking the streets with nines and bad attitudes. The cops were going crazy, and nobody really paid much attention to a small-time white guy living off marijuana and a short chain of low-rent women.
    But Whitcomb was living the gangsta life, with paisley shirts and wide-wale corduroy pants and green-dyed lizard-skin cowboy boots. Then one day he found out that one of his whores was talking to a cop about who was doing what, who was selling what, who might be getting what package from El Paso through UPS or FedEx, or what guy might be coming in from Chicago with a big suitcase, riding in on the ’dog . . . well, Whitcomb, with one too many gangsta musicals banging in his head, went for the pimp punishment: found her and cut her face up with a church key.
    The thing is, she’d been talking to Davenport.
    Davenport got him in the back of a bar and beat him like a big bass drum.
    Later Whitcomb had gotten accidentally involved with a guy who was a serial killer—really was an accident, in that street way, where all kinds of people bump into each other—had gotten involved in a shootout, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. That ended his sex life, but hadn’t changed his head that much. Davenport had been responsible for the shootout, in Whitcomb’s eyes; had been responsible for everything that had gone wrong in his life, including two stretches behind bars . . .
    He sat in the van and watched the cops and the protesters streaming up and down the hill, another guy in a wheelchair, one of those happy dildos you see around who don’t even seem to realize how fucked-up they are, and he tracked Letty through the park, as she talked to a woman at a tent, and then to a tall guy who looked like Davenport, but didn’t dress right, and then hooked up with two kids, boys, the kind whom Whitcomb hated, good-looking athletes who probably got good grades and had money and ate peanut butter sandwiches with Mom and Wally and the Beav . . .
    Briar sat behind the wheel, watching the crowd, until Whitcomb said, “There she goes. They’re going someplace. Get going that way . . . that way, dummy. Hurry . . .”
    * * *
    LETTY LEFT Lucas in the park and went off with John and Jeff, taking the front passenger seat in John’s car. John would have to concentrate on his driving—he’d only had his license for a month—and Jeff was safely stuffed in the back. No hands to deal with.
    She was going to have to start thinking about sex pretty soon, she knew, but now was too soon. When she really got back to school, maybe. A friend of hers, a month younger than she was, was already being thoroughly mauled by her boyfriend, bra up, pants down, and though there hadn’t yet been any actual intercourse, that wasn’t far off. She’d be giving it up during football season, unless something happened to the relationship, Letty thought. The girl was in love and that made it all a lot more complicated.
    Still, the whole thing made her uneasy. She’d get around to it, but . . . later. Not with John. He was too old, a senior. Jeff was in her grade, and had a shot, when he got rid of the braces. And she was still a little flat-chested. That bothered her a bit, that a boy might go in looking for a mountain and find a molehill.
    Weather had told her not to worry: “I know you can’t not worry about it—but, don’t worry about it. You’re not the big-boobed kind, and believe me, that’s better. The boys are going to like you fine. More than fine. You’re going to have to fight them off with a baseball bat.”
    Letty rode around with John and Jeff for a while, looking at the political freaks, and then John said, “You get any money off your old man?”
    “Yup. A twenty.”
    “You gonna treat?”
    * * *
    THEY WENT to the McDonald’s on West Seventh Street, down from the Xcel Center where the convention was being held. The guys got supersized and Letty went for a Quarter Pounder, no cheese, a small fries, and a Diet Coke, and they sat there and talked about the school year coming up, and who was going with whom, and who might like who else, and what they’d heard Harry was doing with Sally, and that Frank had made enough money working two