John Sandford - Phantom prey

So he was whistling as he crossed the Hennepin Avenue bridge. He cheerfully chopped the nose off a Sprinter van, took the finger from the woman who was driving it, beat a red light by minus- fifteen feet, and dumped the car in a supermarket parking lot, leaving the BCA card on the dash.

The A1 was a block away, a brick building painted white, the paint gone dingy and gray, with a miniature theater- style marquee hanging over the door. The marquee said Surf amp; Turf, $9.99 and Happy Hour, 5-, which was either supposed to be cute, or the second number had fallen off.

Lucas ambled down the sidewalk, looking in the restaurant windows, checking the people on the street corners. The A1, when he came to it, looked respectably seedy; not a place where you’d go to start a fight, but not a place you’d propose to your girlfriend, either.

Inside, the purple carpet felt damp and spongy under his shoes. An anonymous jazz- piano tune was scratching its way out of overhead speakers, and a dim yellow light drizzled from red- shaded lamps running down the wall on his left, over a row of booths. Four of the booths were occupied by couples, and one by a single guy trying to read a newspaper. Two more men sat at the bar, with beers, an empty stool between them.

The bartender, a slope- shouldered, balding man with a rust- colored beard, was stacking wet glasses. Lucas leaned across the bar and asked, “Is Tom Harris in?”

The bartender yanked a couple of paper towels off a roll and wiped his hands. “Nope. He should be in later tonight. Eight, nine, like that.” He cocked his head. “You a cop?”

Lucas nodded. “I’m trying to get a line on a Goth woman. She supposedly was seen with Dick Ford the night he was killed.”

“You think she did it?"

"I’d just like to find her,” Lucas said. “Got any ideas?” The bartender shook his head. “I wasn’t here that night. Thank God. Might’ve been me.” “Anybody say anything about her…?”

“Yeah, you know. Bar talk. There’s some confusion, about whether she was somebody we know, or somebody we’ve never seen.”

Lucas said, “Run that by me again.” “There were three or four Goth women here that night,” the bar-

tender said, leaning forward, forearms on the bar. “That’s not unusual. You guys already checked them out.”

“I’m with the state, not Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I haven’t checked out anybody.”

“Then you oughta talk to Minneapolis,” the bartender said. “They figured out who the Goths were. People knew them. Then this rumor starts that there was another one. But we don’t know if there really was, or if somebody’s confused, and the rumor’s running on its own.”

“Huh,” Lucas said. “All sounds like bullshit to me,” said one of the guys at the bar. He looked like a failing insurance man, in a brown suit with a green nylon necktie rolled up at the tip. He’d had a few.

Lucas turned his head and said, “Yeah?"

"The more I hear about it, the hotter this chick gets,” the guy said

He hip- yanked his barstool around to face Lucas. “When you heard about her yesterday, nobody was sure who they were talking about. Now you talk to somebody, and she’s like what’s- her- name-the movie star with the big lips.”

“She’s got big lips?"

"That was just an example,” the barfly said. He took a calculated sip of beer, handling the glass carefully. The other man at the bar said, “Nobody said anything about her lips. They did say she had a terrific ass. They were sure about that."

"I heard that, too,” the bartender said.

“That narrows it down,” Lucas said. “Shit, if this was Wisconsin, it’d be a positive ID,” said the second barfly. “When did the rumor start?” Lucas asked. “I heard it yesterday afternoon, from the noon crew,” the bartender said. “Me, too,” the first barfly said, and the other one said, “Yup.” Lucas looked around, at the people in the booths. “Doesn’t look like a Goth hangout."

"Things change about seven o’clock,” the bartender said. “The business guys get out and night people start showing up."

"Oooo, scary,” said the second barfly. He burped. “Could you tell me even one name of somebody who actually thinks they saw her?” Lucas asked. The bartender sighed and said, “You really ought to talk to Tom.” The first barfly said, “Jesus Christ, Jerry. Dick got killed .” To Lucas, he said, “There’s a guy named Roy. He works at a liquor store over by Dinkytown. People say Roy talked to her.”

Lucas took out his notebook, jotted it down. “Roy, liquor store in Dinkytown.”

“Mike’s,” the bartender added. “Mike’s on Fourteenth?"

"I don’t know, I’ve never been there,” the bartender said. “I just know that Roy works at Mike’s."

"I’ve been there,” the second barfly said. “I don’t know the street, but it’s a hole- in- the- wall, kitty- corner from a Burger King."

"Got it,” Lucas said. He knew the place, but had never been inside

“How about a guy named Karl Lageson?” The bartender shook his head. “I don’t know that name."

"I think that’s Lurch,” the first barfly said to the bartender. To Lucas: “Big tall pale white guy. Deep eyes, big forehead. Looks like he ought to have a bolt in his neck. Don’t know about him, though.”

“I’ve seen him with Roy,” the second barfly said. “If Lurch is the guy you’re looking for.”

“Getting back to this Goth with the good ass,” the bartender said. “I know the Goths that the Minneapolis cops talked to. None of them have got what you’d call an amazing ass. I mean, not so you’d go around saying what an amazing ass she had.”

“So she might be new,” Lucas suggested. “The other Goth."

"Could be,” the bartender said. “Or maybe she’s just a figment of somebody’s imagination."

"A Fig Newton of the imagination; the little cookie that nobody knew,” the first barfly said. The second barfly burped again, scratched some cash out of his pocket, and said, “Gimme one more. Then cut me off. I gotta drive.” Lucas chatted with the three of them for another five minutes, noted their names, and headed out into the failing daylight, fishing his cell phone from his pocket, calling home. “Go ahead and eat without me,” he told Weather. “I’ll grab a sandwich. I’m doing some running around on Alyssa Austin.”

“Anything I should know?” Weather asked. “There’s a mystery woman,” Lucas said. “That’s always good,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it tonight.” He stopped at a sandwich shop across the street from the supermarket. He got a free newspaper on the way in; from order to delivery, through eating and reading, a half hour drained away. When he walked across the street to his car, it was fully dark. Mike’s was ten minutes away. He got tangled up around a minor traffic accident, and another ten minutes disappeared.

Mike’s was a wedge- shaped store stuck into the corner of a 1920s building with fake brown- brick siding made of tar shingles, neon beer signs in the windows, bars under the glass. A young woman was sitting on a stool behind the counter, talking on her cell phone, a pudgy salon- blonde with a thumbprint- sized bruise under one eye, a scattering of acne across her nose. She took the phone away from her face for a moment and asked, “D’you need help?”

Lucas held up his ID. “Need to talk to you about Roy.” She said into the phone, “I’ve got a cop here. I don’t know, it’s about Roy… I don’t know, hang on.” To Lucas, with the phone on her shoulder: “What about Roy?”

“Could you get off the phone for a minute?” Lucas asked. To the phone: “He wants me to get off the phone? Yeah, he is.” Lucas thought he’d heard a tinny “asshole” from the phone, and he rubbed his forehead. She picked that up and said, “Call you back.” Hung up and said, “Yeah?”