Winter Prey

Harper said. He straightened, let the left hand drop. “You’re the big city guy, uh? Big city guy, big city asshole gonna blow my nuts off.” He took another step back, the anger spreading from his eyes over his face, ready to go again.
    “Come on, motherfucker,” Lucas said. He lifted the .45 out to the side. “You put your own boy out on the corner givin’ blowjobs to fat guys, there’s nobody in this county’d blame me if I spread your brains all over the house. So you wanna do it? Come on, come on . . .”
    “You’re fuckin’ nuts,” Harper said. But his voice had changed again, uncertainty near the surface, and his eyes shifted past Lucas to Climpt. “Why are you fuckin’ with me, Gene?”
    “The LaCourt girl, the one who was killed, had a picture of your boy, naked, with a grown-up male,” Climpt said.
    Lucas dropped the gun to his side, moved forward, one foot inside, shoulder against the door, forcing Harper back. “She showed it around and then the family was wiped out,” he said. “We want to look at Jim’s things, see if there’s anything that might indicate who it was.”
    “Sure as shit wasn’t me.”
    “We’re looking for a guy who’s blond and a little fat,” Lucas said. He stepped through the storm door into a mudroom, crowding Harper, who backed through an inner door into the kitchen. Climpt was a step behind. “You don’t have any friends that look like that, do you?”
    Climpt called out to the truck, “Henry, c’mon.”
    “I want to see that warrant,” Harper said, backingfarther into the kitchen. The kitchen smelled of onions and bad meat and old soured milk.
    “Henry’s got it,” Climpt said. Harper looked past Lucas as Lacey walked up. Lacey pulled a paper out of his pocket and handed it to Lucas, who handed it to Harper. While Harper looked at it, Lucas decocked the .45. At the latching sound, Harper looked up and said, “Smith and Wesson. Is that the .40 or the .45?”
    “The .45,” Lucas said.
    “I’d have gone with the .40,” Harper said as the two deputies came in behind Carr. He’d gone into the asshole-cooperative mode, an almost imperceptible groveling learned in prisons.
    “Right,” said Lucas, ignoring the comment. He put the pistol back in his coat pocket. “Where’s the kid’s room?”
    “You don’t think I know about guns? I . . .”
    “I don’t give a fuck what you know,” Lucas snapped. “Where’s the kid’s room?”
    Harper muttered shit, crumbled the warrant in his hand and threw it on the floor, turned and led them through a narrow archway into the living room. The TV was tuned to professional wrestling, and a cardboard tray, stained orange from the sauce of an instant spaghetti dinner, sat on a round oak table with an empty crockery coffee cup. Harper brushed past it, into a hallway. The first door on the right was open, into a bathroom; the next door, to the left, was half-open, and Harper pulled it closed. “That’s mine. Nothin’ of Jim’s in there.”
    At the last door, on the right, he stopped and gestured with his thumb: “That was Jim’s.”
    Lucas pushed the door open. Jim Harper had been dead for more than two months, but his room was like he’d left it: a pair of dirty jeans, a t-shirt and pair of underpants tossed in a corner, now covered with dust. The bed was unmade, a discolored flat-sheet and an olive-drab Army blanket tangled on a yellowed fitted sheet. The pillow was small, gray, dotted with what might have been blood. Lucas looked closer: blood, all right, but only in small spots, as though the kid had acne and picked at the sores. Clotheswere pinched in the drawers of the single bureau, and two of the drawers hung open.
    “The cops already been through it, messed it up,” Harper said over Lucas’ shoulder. “Didn’t find anything.”
    Lucas looked back down the hall at Lacey. “Henry, why don’t you and Mr. Harper here go sit and watch some TV? Gene and I’ll look around.”
    “Hey . . .” Harper said.
    “Shut up,” said Lucas.

    “They turned the room over and didn’t find anything,” Lucas said to Climpt. “If you were a kid, hiding something, where’d you put it?”
    “What I’ve been thinking is, Russ’s such an asshole, why would a kid hide anything from him? Nothing the kid could do would bother him much.”
    Lucas shrugged. “Maybe he’d hide something just so he could keep it.”
    “That’s a point,” Climpt said. After a moment: “I always hid stuff