Wicked Prey

it. One of the women said, you know, they weren’t smuggling illegal drugs—the drugs were legal both here and in Canada. What they were smuggling was illegal prices. They were doing right, even if it was against the law. These people, this money . . . you know, they’re going to buy votes or something.”
    Weather said, “I can’t help you on the morality thing. I can give you something to think about—whether or not there’s all this money involved, you’ve got a lead on a gang that killed some cops. It’s worth bringing them down no matter how much money might be involved.”
    “What do I tell the Minneapolis guys?”
    “Tell them . . . something’s going on. Something’s going on, and that this gang sounds like the gang that Lily Bucket Seat was talking about.”
    Lucas thought about it: “Okay, you’re right. If this is Lily’s gang, they need to be taken down. But I’ve got to tell Minneapolis something—I can’t send them up against Cohn without knowing.”
    She nodded: “There’s gonna be some tap dancing, though. You won’t get through this without your best Fred Astaire.”
    * * *
    LETTY WANDERED into the kitchen, wrapped in a ratty blue terry-cloth robe, looking sleepy, rubbing one hand through her tangled blond hair. “Smells good,” she said. “God, I need some caffeine.”
    Lucas grinned at her and said, “Long night?”
    “I should have read it last month . . . Is there any Coke?” She opened the refrigerator and peered inside. She’d been assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird over the summer, and to write a paper on it, and had let it go until the last minute.
    “How much more do you have to read?” Weather asked.
    “Eighty pages,” she said, twisting the cap off a bottle of Coke. “But I’ve got to get over to the station. I’m getting a camera, I’m going to do a piece on the kids up at the Capitol. I mean, like, you know, people my age in politics.”
    Lucas dropped his eyelids and made a snoring sound, and Weather snapped: “Lucas!”
    “Ah, he’s right,” Letty said. “Another thumb-sucker. But, I get the camera time. The kids at school freak out. Emily Grissom can’t stand it. She thinks I’m sleeping with somebody over there.”
    “Ah, God,” Weather said, outraged. “Letty, do you really have to do this stuff? You could be a surgeon, or—well, you probably wouldn’t want to be a lawyer . . .”
    Lucas stood up, kissed Weather on the forehead, and said, “Thanks,” and “Counsel your daughter,” and headed out the door.
    As he went, he heard Letty ask, “Mom, could you give me a lift over to the station? I need to get there early . . .”
    * * *
    A MINNEAPOLIS COP named Rick Jones had caught the robberies. Lucas found him at the Dairy Delight, a downtown ice-cream stand modeled after a Dairy Queen, getting a chocolate-dipped vanilla cone. Jones was a tall, slender black man with a shaved head and a diamond earring. He not only thought he looked like a pro basketball player, but he actually did . He was wearing jeans, a loose gray army T-shirt, running shoes, and dark wraparound sunglasses.
    “Lucas motherfucking Davenport,” he said, as Lucas wandered up.
    “That’d be mister motherfucking Davenport to the likes of you,” Lucas said. He checked the menu behind the Dairy Delight window, ordered a small hot fudge softie from the girl behind the counter, and said to Jones, “I was just over at the office. They say you caught those robberies at the High Hat.”
    “Yeah. I said to myself, ‘RJ, there’s something going on here that you don’t know about.’ And guess what—here comes Davenport.”
    “Well, you’re right about that,” Lucas said. “I got my ass jerked out of bed by a guy who works for the governor. These folks were here for the convention . . .”
    “That’s what they told me,” Jones said.
    “. . . representing some big-time special interests. They get hit, they start making phone calls. I don’t like it any better than you do, but they did get hit.”
    “They lied to me about it,” Jones said. “I asked them how much was stolen, they said, you know, ‘hundreds of dollars.’ I was like, right—you’re in a six-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suite, and they got your money clip.”
    Lucas didn’t try to deny it. “Anyway . . .”
    Jones was crunching through the chocolate, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and said, “So they sent you along to put a wrench on my nuts.”
    “No, they sent me along to look