Winter Prey

terror.
    Mueller said something to Carr and they talked for a moment, then Carr shook his head. Lucas heard him say “Three of them up north . . . .”
    The father had been looking around the yard, as though his son might walk out of the woods. Instead of the boy, he saw Lucas and stepped toward him. “You sonofabitch,” he screamed, eyes rolling. A deputy caught him, jostled him, stayed between them. Faces in the yard turned toward Lucas. “Where’s my boy, where’s my boy?” Mueller screamed.
    Carr came over and said, “You better leave. Take my truck. Call Lacey, tell him to get Gene, and the three of you go on out to Harper’s place. There’s nothing you can do here.”
    “Must be something,” Lucas said. A deputy was talking to Mueller, Mueller’s eyes still fixed on Lucas.
    “There’s nothing,” Carr said. “Just get out. Go on down to Harper’s like we planned.”

    Lucas met Lacey and Climpt at the 77 Tap, a bar ten miles east of Grant. The bar was an old one, a simple cube with shingle siding and a few dark windows up above, living rooms upstairs for the owner. An antique gas pump sat to one side of the place, with a set of rusting, unused bait tanks, all of it awash in snow. A Leinenkugel’s sign provided most of the exterior lighting.
    Inside, the bar smelled of fried fish and old beer; an Elton John song was playing on the jukebox. Lacey and Climpt were sitting in one of the three booths.
    “No sign of the kid?” Lacey asked as he slid out of the booth. Climpt threw two dollars on the table and stood up behind him, chewing on a wooden matchstick.
    “Not when I left,” Lucas said.
    Lacey and Climpt looked at each other and Climpt shook his head. “If he ain’t at somebody’s house . . .”
    “Yeah.”
    “Ain’t your fault,” Climpt said, looking levelly at Lucas. “What’re you supposed to do?”
    “Yeah.” Lucas shook his head and they started for the door. “So tell me about Harper.”
    Lacey was pulling on his gloves. “He’s our local hood. He spent two years in prison over in Minnesota for ag assault—this was way back, must’ve been a couple of years after he got out of high school. He’s been in jail since then, maybe three or four times.”
    “For?”
    “Brawling, mostly. Fighting in bars. He’d pick out somebody, get on them, goad them into a fight and then hurt them. You know the type. He’s beat up some women we know of, but they never wanted to do anything about it. Either because they were still hoping to get together with him or because they were scared. You know.”
    “Yeah.”
    “He’s carried a gun off and on, smokes a little marijuana, maybe does a little coke, we’ve heard both,” Lacey continued. “He says he needs the gun to protect himselfwhen he’s taking cash home from the station.”
    “He’s a felon,” Lucas said.
    “Got his rights back,” Lacey said. “Shouldn’t of. There’s been rumors that when he’s been hard up for money, he’d go down to the Cities and knock over a liquor store or a 7-Eleven. Maybe that’s just bar talk.”
    “Maybe,” Climpt grunted. He looked at Lucas: “He’s not like a TV bully. He’s a bully, but he’s not a coward. He’s a mean sonofabitch.”

    Climpt and Lacey rode together, and Lucas followed them out, occasional muted cop chatter burbling out of the radio. The roads had cleared except for icy corners and intersections, and traffic was light because of the cold. They made good time.
    Knuckle Lake popped up as a fuzzy ball of light far away down the highway, brightening and separating into business signs and streetlights as they got closer. There were a half dozen buildings scattered around the four corners: a motel, two bars, a general store, a cafe, and the Amoco station. The station was brightly lit, with snow piled twenty feet high along the back property lines. One car sat at a gas pump, engine off, the driver elsewhere. An old Chevy was visible through the windows of the single repair bay. They stopped in front of the big window, the other two trucks swinging in behind. A teenager in a ragged trench coat and tennis shoes peered through the glass at them: he was all by himself, like a guppie in a well-lit aquarium.
    Lucas followed Climpt inside. Climpt nodded at the kid and said, “Hello, Tommy. How you doing?”
    “Okay, just fine, Mr. Climpt,” the kid said. He was nervous, and a shock of straw-colored hair fell out from under his watch cap, his Adam’s apple