Shadow Prey (11 page)

The black spot grew and Shadow Love felt dizzy with the humiliation of it. Like a dog. His pace picked up, until he was almost running; then he slowed again, threw his head back and groaned, aloud. Fuckin'dog. He balled a fist and hit himself on the cheekbone, hard. The pain cut through his anger. The black spot shrank.

Like a fuckin' dog, you crawled like a fuckin' dog....

Shadow Love was not dumb. His fathers were running their war and would need him. He couldn't be taken by the cops, not for something as stupid as a fistfight. But it ate at him, the way Davenport had treated him. Made him be nice...

Shadow Love bought a pistol from a teenaged burglar. It wasn't much of a gun, but he didn't need much of a gun. He gave the kid twenty bucks, slipped the pistol into his waistband and headed back to the Point. He would need a new place to stay, he thought. He couldn't move in with his fathers: they were already jammed into a tiny efficiency. Besides, they didn't want him in their war.

A place to stay. The last time he was in town, he'd have gone to Ray Cuervo....

Yellow Hand's day had been miserable. Davenport had started it, kicking him out of a stupor. A stupor he'd valued. The longer he was asleep, the longer he could put off his problem. Yellow Hand needed his crack. He rolled his upper lip and bit it, thinking about the rush....

After Davenport had gone, Shadow Love had put on his boots and jacket and left without a word. The old white woman had fallen back on her mattress and soon was snoring away with her man, who had never woken up. Yellow Hand had made it out on the street a half-hour later. He'd cruised the local K Mart, but left with the feeling he was being watched. It was the same way at a Target store. Nothing obvious, just white guys in rayon neckties...

He wished Gineele and Howdy were still in town. If Gin-eele and Howdy hadn't gone to Florida, they'd all be rich.

Gineele was very black. When she was working, she wore her hair in corn rows and sported fluorescent pink lipstick. She had a nasty scar on her right cheek, the end product of an ill-considered fight with a man who had a beer can opener in his hand. The scar scared the shit out of everybody.

If Gineele was bad, Howdy was a nightmare. Howdy was white, so white he looked as if he'd been painted. A quick glance at his eyes suggested that this boy was snorting something awful. Ether, maybe. Or jet fuel. Toxic waste. In any case, his eyes were always cranked wide, his mouth was always open, his tongue flicking out like a snake's. To complement his insane face, Howdy wore steel rings around his neck, black leather cuffs with spikes, and knee-high leather boots. He was twenty years old-you could see the youth in his carriage-but his hair was dead-white and fine as spun silk. When Howdy and Gineele went into a K Mart, the white guys in the rayon neckties went crazy. While the two decoys caromed around the store, Yellow Hand took boom-boxes out the front door by the cartload.

Jesus. Yellow Hand really needed them....

An hour after he hit the street, he scored a clock-radio and three calculators at a Walgreen's drugstore. He cashed them for a chunk, smoked it, floated away to never-never land. But it was a soiled trip, because even as he went out he was anticipating the cold reality of the crash.

Early in the evening, he tried to steal a toolbox from a filling station. He almost made it. As he was turning the corner, a guy by the gas pumps spotted him and yelled. The box was too heavy to run with, so he dumped it and hauled ass through two blocks of backyards. The gas jockey called the cops and Yellow Hand spent an hour hiding under a boat trailer as a squad car cruised the neighborhood. By the time he started back to the Point, it was fully dark. He had to think. He had to plan. He had only two more days at the Point; then he'd need money for the rent. The nights were getting cold.

Shadow Love was smoking a cigarette when Yellow Hand came in.

"Loan me a couple bucks?" Yellow Hand begged.

"I don't have no money to spend on crack," Shadow Love said. He reached for the hardpack of Marlboros. "I can give you a smoke."

"Aw, man, I wouldn't buy no crack," Yellow Hand whined. "I need to eat. I ain't had nothin' to eat all day." He took the cigarette and Shadow Love held a paper match for him.

"Tell you what," Shadow Love said after a moment, fixing Yellow Hand with his pale eyes. "We can walk up to that taco joint by the river road. I'll buy you a half-dozen tacos."

"That's a long way, man," Yellow Hand complained.

"Fuck ya, then," Shadow Love said. "I'm going. Thanks for lettin' me stay." He'd paid Yellow Hand three dollars to use the mattress.

"All right, all right," Yellow Hand said. "I'm coming. I'm so fuckin' hungry...."

Walking slow, they took twenty minutes to get from the Point to the Mississippi. The river was a hundred feet below them and Shadow Love sidestepped down the slope.

"Where are you going, man?" Yellow Hand asked, puzzled.

"Down to the water. Come on. It's not much further this way." Shadow Love thought about Yellow Hand and Davenport. Yellow Hand had told the cop about the newspaper clipping: that was something. The black spot popped up.

"We gotta climb back up, man," Yellow Hand complained.

"Come on," Shadow Love snapped. The black spot floated out in front of him. His heart was pounding, and the rising power flowed through his blood like gold. He wasn't arguing anymore. Yellow Hand looked back toward the lights of the street, undecided, and finally followed, still bitching under his breath.

They crossed a river access road and continued down to the water, where the riverbank was supported by a concrete wall. Shadow Love stepped onto the wall, drew in a breath of the river air and exhaled. Smelled real. He turned to Yellow Hand, who had climbed onto the wall behind him.

"Lights look great from down here, don't they?" Shadow Love asked. "Look at the reflections in the water."

"I guess," Yellow Hand said, puzzled.

"Look over there, under the bridge," Shadow Love said.

Yellow Hand turned to look. Shadow Love stepped closer, taking the pistol from his waistband. He put it behind Yellow Hand's ear, waited a delicious second, then another and a third, thrilling to the darkness of the act; when he couldn't stand it anymore, the glorious tension, he pulled the trigger.

There was a sharp pop and Yellow Hand went down like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Shadow Love had intended that the body fall into the river. Instead it landed on the concrete wall. It took a minute to get it off the edge, into the water.

Yellow Hand's shirt ballooned up around his body, supporting it, a white lump in the current. Then there was a bubble, and another, and Yellow Hand was gone.

A traitor to the people. The man who'd put the hunter cop onto the Bluebird picture.

While Leo Clark sat at a truck stop and wept, Shadow Love sat in the taco stand eating ravenously, hunched over his food like a wolf. His body sang with the kill.

Chapter
7

Lucas worked on Drorg until four in the morning, and Daniel called at eight. When the phone rang, Lucas rolled onto his side, thrashing at the nightstand like a drowning swimmer. He hit the phone and the receiver bounced on the floor, and he took another moment to find it.

"Davenport? What the hell... ?"

"Dropped the phone," Lucas said sleepily. "What happened?"

"They did another one. A federal judge in Oklahoma City."

"Shit." Lucas yawned and sat up. "The way you're talking, the killer got away."

"Yeah. He had braids, like..."

"... the guy who did Cuervo. So there had to be at least three of them, counting Bluebird."

"Yeah. Anderson's getting everything he can out of the Oklahoma cops. And those pictures-we're getting them at nine. We'll meet in Wink's office."

"No problems?"

"Aw, we gotta go through the usual bullshit, but we'll get them," Daniel said.

"Somebody ought to call Lily," Lucas said.

"My secretary'll take care of it. There's one more thing...."

"What?"

"The feds are in it."

Lucas groaned. "Aw, no, please..."

"Yeah. With both feet. Made the announcement an hour ago. I talked to the Minneapolis agent-in-charge and he says Lawrence Duberville Clay himself is taking a personal interest."

"Sonofabitch. Can we keep them off the street? Those guys could screw up a wet dream."

"I'll suggest that they focus on intelligence, but it won't work," Daniel said. "Clay thinks he can ride the crime business into the attorney general's job, and maybe the presidency. The papers are calling these killings 'domestic terrorism.' That'll get him out here for sure, just like when he went out to Chicago on that dope deal, and L. A. for the Green Army bust. When he gets here, he'll want some action."

"Fuck him. Let him find his own action."

"Try to be nice, all right? And in the meantime, let's get these pictures from the Trib and start hammering the street. If we nail these cocksuckers, Lawrence Duberville won't have any reason to come out."

They met with StarTribune executives in the office of Louis Wink, the paper's bald-as-a-cueball editor. Harold Probst, the publisher, and Kelly Lawrence, the city editor, sat in. Lily arrived on Daniel's arm; his elbow, Lucas noticed, was pressing Lily's breast. Daniel wore a gray suit that was virtually a mirror image of Wink's, and a self-satisfied smile. The meeting lasted ten minutes.

"The reason I object is that it brings up the question of whether we're an arm of the police. It damages our credibility," said the round-faced Lawrence.

"With who?" Lily asked heatedly. She was dressed in a rough silk blouse and another tweed skirt. She either had the world's best complexion or did the world's best makeup, Lucas thought.

"With people on the street," said the city editor. Law- rence was wearing a rumpled cotton dress that was just the wrong color of blue for her eyes. Lily looked so much better that Lucas wished she'd waited outside.

"Oh, bullshit," Lily snapped. "You have this great big goddamned building full of yuppies in penny loafers and you're worried about damaging your reputation with street people? Jesus H. Christ on a crutch."

"Take it easy," Lucas said soothingly. "She's right. It's a sensitive question."

"We wouldn't even ask, if the crimes weren't so horrendous. They killed a federal judge last night; butchered him. They killed one of the brightest up-and-coming politicians in the country and two people here," Daniel said in a syrupy voice. He turned to Lily. "The fact is, the press is in ;i very delicate situation."

He turned back to Wink and Probst, where the power was. "All we want to do is look at the face of the man that Lily thinks might be the New York killer. And we want to look at the people around him, so we can question them. You might very well have run all of those pictures in the paper, for anyone to see. You promised confidentiality to nobody. In fact, they were soliciting attention by their very presence at this confrontation."

"Well, that's right," said Probst. A flash of irritation crossed Wink's face. Probst had come up on the advertising side.

"And you'll get a tremendous story out of it," Lucas put in. "You'll stick it right up the Pioneer Press's ass."

Lawrence, the city editor, brightened, but Lily continued to stew. "And if you don't we'll go to court and drag it out of you anyway," she snarled.

"Hey..." Wink sat up.

Daniel broke in before he could go any further. He pointed a finger at Lily's face and said, "No, we won't, Lieutenant. If they decide against us in this room, we'll look for other pictures, but we won't go to court. And if you keep this up, I'll ship your ass back to New York faster than you can say 'Avenue of the Americas.' "

Lily opened her mouth and just as suddenly snapped it shut. "Okay," she said. She glanced at Wink. "Sorry."

Daniel smiled his most charming smile at Wink and said, "Please?"

"I think... we should get some prints in here," Wink said. He nodded at Lawrence. "Get them."

They all sat silently until the city editor came back with three manila envelopes and handed them to Wink. Wink opened one, took out a set of eight-by-ten prints, looked at them, then passed them to Daniel. Daniel dealt them out across the table to Lily, who stood up, spread them out and began studying them.

"It's him," she said after a moment. She tapped one of the faces. "That's my man."

They got two sets of photos and stopped on the street corner before Daniel walked back to City Hall.

"Larry Hart is coming over this afternoon. He had to get his case load closed out," Daniel said to Lucas. "I'll get him a set of photographs. He may know somebody."

"All right. And I'll show my set around."

Daniel nodded and looked at Lily. "You should watch your temper. You almost lost it for us."

"Newsies piss me off," she said. "You were getting pushed around."

"I wasn't getting pushed. Everybody knew what would happen. We had to go through the ritual," Daniel said mildly.

"Okay. It's your turf. I apologize," she said.

"You should apologize. Being a hell of guy, I accept," Daniel said, and started off across the street.