Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

CHAPTER

6

Leo Clark was a drunk by the time he was fifteen. At forty, he had been twenty-two years on the street, begging nickels and dimes from the rich burghers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. A lifetime lost.

Then one bitterly cold night in St. Paul, he and another drunk, a white man, were turned out of the mission after an argument with a clerk. They stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of rye whiskey. After some argument, they walked down to the railroad tracks. An old tunnel had been boarded up, but the boards were loose. They pried them back and crawled inside.

Late that night, Leo went out, found sticks of creosote-covered scrap lumber along the tracks, dragged it back to the tunnel and started a fire. The two men finished the whiskey in the stinking smoke. Their cheeks, hands and stomachs felt like fire, but their legs and feet were blocks of ice.

The white man had an idea. Up along the bluffs on the Mississippi, he said, were storm sewers that led into the tunnel system under the city. If they could crawl back there, they could lie up on steam pipes. The tunnels would be as warm as the mission and it wouldn’t cost them a dime. They could get a Coleman lantern, a few books . . . .

When Leo Clark woke the next morning, the white man was dead. He was lying facedown on the cold ground and had taken a few convulsive bites of the earth as he died: his mouth was half full of oily dirt. Leo Clark could see one of his eyes. It was open, and as flat and silvery and empty as the dime that the steam tunnels wouldn’t cost him.

“He died in a fuckin’ cave, man; they let him die in a fuckin’ hole in the ground,” Leo told the cops. The cops didn’t give a shit. Nobody else did either: the body went unclaimed, and was eventually dumped in a pauper’s grave. Dental X rays were filed with the medical examiner in the improbable case that somebody, someday, showed up looking for the dead man.

After the white man died in the cave, Leo Clark stopped drinking. It didn’t happen all at once, but a year later he was sober. He drifted west, back to the res. Became a spiritual man, but with a twist of hate for people who would let men die in holes in the ground. He was forty-six years old, with a face and hands like oak, when he met the Crows.

Leo Clark hid in a corner of a dimly lit parking ramp, between the bumper of a Nissan Maxima and the outer wall of the ramp. He was thirty feet from the locked steel door that led into the apartment building.

A few minutes earlier, he had looped a piece of twelve-pound-test monofilament fishing line around the doorknob. He led the line to the bottom of the door, fastened it with a piece of Magic mending tape and trailed it on to the Maxima. In the low light, the line was invisible. He was waiting for somebody to walk through the door—going in, he hoped, but out would be okay, as long as it wasn’t to the Maxima. That would be embarrassing.

Leo Clark lay bathed in the odors of exhaust and oil and thought about his mission. When he had killed Ray Cuervo, the overwhelming emotion had been fear—fear of failure, fear of the cops. He’d known Ray personally, had suffered from his greed, and anger and hate had been there too. But this judge? The judge had been bribed by an oil company in a lawsuit involving the illegal disposal of toxic wastes at the Lost Trees reservation. Leo Clark knew that, but he didn’t feel it. All he felt was the space in his chest. A . . . sadness? Was that what it was?

He had thought his years on the street had burned all of that away: that he’d lost all but the most elemental survival emotions. Fear. Hate. Anger. He wasn’t sure whether this discovery, this renewal of feeling, this sadness, was a gift or a curse. He would have to think about that: Leo Clark was a careful man.

As for the judge, it would make no difference. He had been weighed and he would die.

Leo Clark had been waiting for twenty minutes when a car pulled into an empty space halfway down the garage. A woman. He could hear her high heels rapping on the concrete. She had her keys in her hand. She opened the door into the building, stepped inside. The door began to swing shut and Leo pulled in the line, popping off the Magic mending tape, putting tension on the line, easing the door shut . . . but not quite enough to latch. He kept up the tension, waiting, waiting, giving the woman time for the elevator, hoping that nobody else came out . . . .

After three minutes, he slid from beneath the car. Keeping the line tight, he walked to the door and eased it open. Nobody in the elevator lobby. He stepped inside, walked past the elevator to the fire stairs, and went up.

The judge was on the sixth floor, one of three apartments. Leo listened at the fire door, heard nothing. Opened the door, looked through, stepped into the empty hallway. Six C. He found the door, rapped softly, though he was sure it was empty. No answer. After another quick look around, he took a bar from his jacket, slipped it into the crack between the door and the jamb and slowly put his weight to it. The door held, held; then there was a low ripping sound and it popped open. Leo stepped inside, into the dark room. Found a chair, sat down and let the sadness flow through him.

Judge Merrill Ball and his girlfriend, whose name was Cindy, returned a few minutes after one in the morning. The judge had his key in the lock before he noticed the damage to the door.

“Jesus, it looks like . . .” he started, but the door flew open, freezing him. Leo Clark was there, his long black braids down on his chest, his eyes wide and straining, his mouth half open, his hand driving up. And in his hand, the razor-edged stone knife . . .

An hour later, in a truck stop off I-35 north of Oklahoma City, Leo Clark sat at the wheel of his car and wept.

Shadow Love walked into the wind, his shoulders hunched, his running shoes crunching through the fallen maple leaves. The black spot floated out ahead of him.

The black spot.

When Shadow Love was a child, his mother had taken him to a neighbor’s home. The house smelled of cooking gas and boiled greens, and he could remember the neighbor’s fat white legs as she sat on a kitchen table, sobbing. Her husband had a black spot on his lungs. The size of a dime. Nothing to be done, the woman said. Make him comfortable, the doctors said. Shadow Love remembered his mother, gripping the other woman around the shoulders . . . .

And now he had a name for the thing on his mind. The black spot.

Sometimes the invisible people would talk to his mother, plucking at her arms and face and her dress and even her shoes, to get her attention, to tell her what Shadow Love had done. He couldn’t remember doing all those things, but the invisible people said he had. They were never wrong, Rosie Love said. They saw everything, knew everything. His mother would beat him with a broom handle for doing those things. She would chase him and pound him on the back, the shoulders, the legs. Afterward, when the invisible people had gone, she would fall on him weeping, begging forgiveness, trying to rub off the bruises as if they were shoe polish . . . .

The black spot had come with the invisible people. When Shadow Love got angry, the black spot popped up in front of his eyes, a hole in the world. He never told his mother about the black spot: she would tell the invisible people and they would demand a punishment. And he never showed his anger, for the same reason. Defiance was the worst of all sins, and the invisible people would howl for his blood.

At some point, the invisible people stopped coming. His mother killed them with alcohol, Shadow Love thought. Her bouts of drunkenness were bad enough, but nowhere near as bad as the invisible people. Although the invisible people were gone, the black spot stayed . . . .

And now it floated in front of his eyes. The fuckin’ cop. Davenport. He treated them like dirt. He came in and pointed his finger. Made them sit. Like a trained dog. Sit, he said. Speak, he said. Arf.

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 Gineele 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 boomboxes 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 swim-mer. 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. Lawrence 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 a 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.

Lily looked after him. “He’s a piece of work,” she said after a moment.

“He’s okay. He can be an asshole, but he isn’t stupid,” Lucas said.

“So who’s this Larry Hart?” Lily asked.

“He’s a Welfare guy, a Sioux. Good guy, knows the streets, probably knows a thousand Indians. He’s fairly large in Indian politics. He’s written some articles, goes out to all the powwows and so on.”

“We need him. I spent six hours on the street yesterday and didn’t learn a thing. The guy I was with—”

“Shearson?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t know an Indian from a fire hydrant. Christ, it was almost embarrassing,” she said, shaking her head.

“You’re not going back out with him?”

“No.” She looked at him without a sign of a smile. “Besides his woefully inadequate IQ, we had a little problem yesterday.”

“Well . . .”

“I thought I might ride along with you. You’re showing the pictures around, right?”

“Yeah.” Lucas scratched his head. He didn’t like working with a partner: he sometimes made deals that were best kept private. But Lily was from New York and shouldn’t be a problem that way. “All right, I guess. I’m parked down this way.”

“Everybody says you’ve got the best contacts in the Indian community,” Lily said as they walked along. Lucas kept looking at her and tripped on an uneven sidewalk slab. She grinned, still looking straight ahead.

“I know about eight guys. Maybe ten. And not well,” Lucas said when he recovered.

“You came up with the picture from the paper,” she pointed out.

“I had a guy I could squeeze.” Lucas stepped off the curb and walked around the nose of his Porsche. Lily walked behind him.

“Uh, around there,” he said, pointing back to the passenger-side door.

She looked down at the 911, surprised. “Is this your car?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought we were crossing the street,” Lily said as she stepped back to the curb.

Lucas got in and popped open her door; she climbed inside and fastened the seat belt. “Not many New York cops would have the guts to drive around in a Porsche. Everybody would figure he was in the bag,” she said.

“I’ve got some money of my own,” Lucas said.

“Even so, you wouldn’t have to buy a Porsche with it,” Lily said primly. “You could buy a perfectly good car for ten or fifteen thousand and give the other twenty or thirty thousand to charity. You could give it to the Little Sisters of the Poor.”

“I thought about that,” Lucas said. He gunned the Porsche through an illegal U-turn and punched it up to forty in the twenty-five-mile-per-hour business zone. “And I decided, fuck ’em.”

Lily threw back her head and laughed. Lucas grinned at her and thought that maybe she was carrying a few too many pounds, but maybe that wasn’t all bad.

They took the photographs to the Indian Center, showed them around. Two of the men in the photos were known by face but not by name. Nobody knew where they lived. Lucas called Anderson, told him about the tentative IDs, and Anderson promised to get more photos on the street.

After leaving the Indian Center, they stopped at an Indian-dominated public housing project, where Lucas knew two old men who worked as caretakers. They got no new IDs. The hostility was palpable.

“They don’t like cops,” Lily said as they left.

“Nobody around here likes cops,” Lucas said, looking back at the decrepit buildings. “When they see us, we’re mostly getting their cars towed away in the winter. They don’t like us, but at least they’re not against us. But this is something else. This time, they’re against us.”

“Maybe they got reasons,” Lily said. She was looking out the window at a group of Indian children sitting on the porch of a decaying clapboard house. “Those kids ought to be in school. What you’ve got here, Davenport, is a clean slum. The people are fucked up, but the street gets cleaned twice a week.”

They spent the rest of the morning running the photos down Lucas’ Indian acquaintances. Lily trailed behind, not saying much, studying the faces of the Indians, listening to them, the Indians looking curiously back.

“They think you might be an Indian, or part Indian, but they’re not sure until they hear your voice,” Lucas said between stops. “You look a little Indian.”

“I don’t sound Indian.”

“You sound Lawn Guyland.”

“There’s an Indian reservation on Long Island,” she said.

“No shit? Jesus, I’d like to hear those people talk . . . .”

Late in the morning, Lucas drove to Yellow Hand’s apartment at the Point, describing him to Lily as they went. Outside, on the stoop, he reached back and freed the P7 in its holster.

“Is this trouble?” she asked.

“I doubt it,” he said. “But you know.”

“Okay.” When they were inside the door, she slipped her hand into a mufflike opening in her shoulder bag, took out a short Colt Officer’s Model .45 and jacked a shell into the chamber.

“A forty-five?” Lucas said as she put it back in the purse.

“I’m not strong enough to wrestle with assholes,” she said bluntly. “If I shoot somebody, I want him to go down. Not that the P7 isn’t a nice little gun. But it’s a bit light for serious work.”

“Not if you can shoot,” Lucas said through his teeth as he headed up the stairs.

“I can shoot the eyes out of a moving pigeon,” she said. “And not hit the feathers.”

The door on the top floor was open. Nobody home. Lucas eased inside, looked around, then tramped across a litter of paper, orange peels and empty personal-size catsup packs from McDonald’s. “This is where he was,” Lucas said, kicking Yellow Hand’s mattress.

“Place feels vacant,” Lily said. She touched one of the empty catsup packs with the toe of her shoe. Street people stole them from fast-food joints and used the catsup to make tomato soup. “They’re really hurting for money.”

“Crackheads,” Lucas said.

Lily nodded. She took the Colt out of the purse, pulled the magazine, stuck it between the little and ring fingers of her gun hand, cupped the ejection port with her free hand and jacked the slide. The chambered round ejected into her palm. She snapped it back into the magazine and pushed the magazine back into the butt of the pistol. She’d done it smoothly, without thinking, Lucas thought. She’d spent some time with the gun.

“The trouble with single-action weapons,” Lucas said, “is that shit happens and you’re caught with an empty chamber.”

“Not if you’ve got half a brain,” she said. She was looking around at the litter. “I’ve learned to anticipate.”

Lucas stopped and picked up an object that had been almost hidden by Yellow Hand’s mattress where it had pressed against the wall.

Lily asked, “What?” and he tossed it to her. She turned it over in her hands. “Crack pipe. You said he was a crackhead.”

“Yeah. But I wonder why he left it here? I wouldn’t think the boy would be without it. All of his other shit is gone.”

“I don’t know. Nothing wrong with it. Yet,” Lily said. She dropped the glass pipe on the floor and stepped on it, crushing it.

On the street again, Lucas suggested a check at Cuervo’s rental office. If there was anyone running the place, he told Lily, there might be some word of where Yellow Hand had gone. She nodded. “I’m following you,” she said.

“I hope the dipshit hasn’t gone back to the res,” Lucas said as they climbed back in the car. “Yellow Hand would be hell to find out there, if he didn’t want to be found.”

Lucas had been in Cuervo’s office a dozen times over the years. Nothing had changed in the shabby stairway that went up to it. The building had permanent bad breath, compounded of stale urine, wet plaster and catshit. As Lucas reached the top of the stairs, Cuervo’s office door opened on a chain and a woman looked out through the crack.

“Who’re you?” Lucas asked.

“Harriet Cuervo,” the woman snapped. All Lucas could see were her eyes, which were the color of acid-washed jeans, and a pale crescent of face. “Who in the hell are you to be asking?”

“Police,” Lucas said. Lucas fished his badge case out of his jacket pocket and flashed the badge at her. Lily waited behind him, down a step. “We didn’t know you’d taken over Ray’s operation.”

“Know now,” the woman grunted. The chain rattled off and she let the door swing open. Her husband’s murder had left a faint stain on the wooden floor and Harriet Cuervo was standing in the middle of it. She was wearing a print dress that fell straight from her neck to her knees. “I told the other cops everything I knew,” she said bluntly.

“We’re looking for a different kind of information,” Lucas said. The woman went back around Cuervo’s old desk. Lucas stepped inside the office and glanced around. Something had changed, something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “We’re asking about one of his tenants.”

“So what do you want to know?” she asked. She was five feet, nine inches tall and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds, all of it rawboned knobs. There were short vertical lines above and below her lips, as though they’d once been stitched shut.