John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"There's one on and she's real young," he whispered.

"Okay. Take off." Harold vanished. Lucas used the radio to make a prearranged call for patrol backup, pulled on a tweed shooting hat and a pair of windowpane glasses, got out of the car, locked it, and headed down the street to Frankie's.

Frankie's smelled of old beer and cheap wine. The front room, next to the street, was empty except for two unhappy-looking women sitting across from each other in a red leatherette booth. The bartender was wiping glasses and casually watched Lucas pick his way through the empty tables to the entry arch into the back room.

The back room was jammed, thirty or forty men and a half-dozen women in a cloud of cigarette smoke, clapping to the rock music that poured out of a jukebox. The girl was dancing on the bar, stripped down to a tiny brassiere and a pair of translucent blue underpants. Lucas shouldered his way through the crowd and spotted Frankie himself behind the bar, pushing out plastic glasses of beer as fast as the tap would pour them. Lucas tilted his head up at the girl. Eleven? Twelve? She did a bump and reached behind her back with one hand, her teeth biting her lower lip in a semiprofessional grin. She was feeding off the crowd's enthusiasm. With another bump, she popped the brassiere and slowly peeled it off, carefully covering her tiny breasts with her forearms as she did it. After a few more bumps she tossed the brassiere behind the bar and switched into a new dance, her exposed breasts bobbling in the flashing ceiling lights.

"Bottoms, bottoms, bottoms," the crowd was chanting, and the girl hooked her thumbs in the top of the pants and after coyly pulling them down an inch here and an inch there, turning, bending, peering out between her legs, she stood and slid them off, her back to the audience, and then turned to finish the dance.

And the bartender from the front screamed, "There're cops outside."

"Take off," yelled Frankie. As the crowd broke for the two doors, he reached up and grabbed the nude girl by the ankle. Lucas lurched forward and got his gun out, his elbows on the bar, and poked the muzzle of the weapon into Frankie's cheek.

"Don't make me have an accident, Frank," he said. "This weapon has a very light trigger pull." Frankie froze. Three uniformed cops ran in from the front, pressing customers to the wall as they passed. A dozen Ziploc bags of cocaine and crack hit the floor. Lucas looked up at the girl. "Get down," he said.

She leaned over and carefully spat in his face.

"So what happened to her?" Carla asked.

They sat on the edge of the dock, their feet hanging over the water. It was an hour before sunset and they had just walked down to the dock from the firing range in the woods. The afternoon was cool and quiet, the violet hue of the sky reflected in the water. Three hundred feet out, a musky fisherman was working a surface lure around the edges of a submerged island. The water was as flat as a tabletop and they could hear the paddle-wheel chop-chop-chop of the lure as the fisherman retrieved it.

"We dropped her off with child protection," Lucas said. "They'll try to figure out who her parents are, get her back there. Two weeks from now she'll run away again and start hooking or dancing or whatever. At her age, it's the only kind of job she can get."

"What about Frankie?"

"We wrote him up for everything we could think of. We'll get him on some of them, felonies. He'll do some time, lose his liquor license."

"Good. They ought to… I don't know. A twelve-year-old."

Lucas shrugged. "The average age of the hookers out on the street is probably fourteen. By sixteen they're getting too old. The younger they are, the more money they make; it's what the Johns want. Young stuff."

"Men are such perverts," Carla said, and Lucas laughed.

"What do you want to do, go fishing or go inside and fool around?" he asked.

"I've already been fishing," she said, wrinkling her nose at him.

The maddog's secretary served as the office's rumor-central. That might have helped him in office politics-if he had taken part in office politics-but he did not relate well to his secretary. He dealt with her with his eyes averted. He was aware of the habit and struggled to correct it, to look straight at her. He was unsuccessful and had taken to staring at the bridge of her nose. She knew that he was not looking into her eyes.

The situation was made more difficult by her appearance. She was far too pretty for the maddog. She had made it clear soon after his arrival that she would not welcome an approach. In his own way, he was grateful. If she had snared him, if she had been Chosen, she would have to die and that would violate one of the principal rules: Never kill anyone you know.

When he came into the office, three other women were clustered around her, talking.

"Did you hear, Louis?" One of the women in the cluster was speaking to him. Margaret Wilson was her name. She was an attorney who specialized in personal-injury law, and though she was not yet thirty, was rumored to be one of the best-paid attorneys in the office. She had hazel eyes, large breasts, and heavy thighs. She laughed too much, the maddog thought; actually, she frightened him a bit. He stopped.

"Hear what?" he asked.

"That gay guy they arrested, that they thought was the maddog killer? He's not the one."

"Yes. I saw it on the news last night. That's too bad. I thought they had him," the maddog said, struggling to keep his voice level. The police press conference, the portions he'd seen on TV3, had delighted him. He took another step toward his office.

"They say he can't get it up," said Wilson.

He stopped again, confused. "Pardon?"

"Channel Eight, Annie McGowan? The reporter with the short dark hair-bob like the ice skater. What's-her-name? She talked to somebody in the police. They say he's impotent and that's what's driving him to do it," she said. Was she taunting him? There seemed to be an element of challenge in her tone.

"Well, they were wrong about the homosexual…" the maddog started tentatively.

"It's all that pop psychology," the maddog's secretary said scornfully. "Everybody else says he rapes them. If he can't get it up, how does he…?"

"They never found any semen," said Wilson. "They think he uses something."

All the women looked at each other, and the maddog said, "Well," and went into his office and shut the door. He stood there, just for a second, suffused with rage. Impotence? Uses something? What were they talking about?

There was a burst of laughter from outside, and he knew they were laughing about him. Uses something. Probably like old Louis there, I wonder what Louis uses? they were saying. They didn't know who he was, what he was; they didn't know the power. And they were laughing at him.

He walked to his desk, dropped his briefcase, sat down, and stared at the duck print on the wall. Three mallards coming into a cattail swamp at dusk. The maddog stared at it without seeing it, the rage growing. There was another burst of laughter from beyond the door. If he'd had a pistol with him, he would have stepped into the hallway and killed them all.

He left the office at eleven-thirty and drove home to watch the noon news. He watched TV3 by preference, believing that what little dignity was allotted to news coverage by television could best be found there.

But he might have to change channels if this McGowan had special sources. He left his car in the driveway and hurried inside. He was a little early and had time to make a cup of hot soup before the news came on. He sat in the overstuffed chair in the living room sipping the salty hot concoction, and when the news came up, McGowan's was the lead story. It was apparently a rehash of the night before, with tape of McGowan interviewing the homosexual on the steps of the county jail and later repeating the impotence story. Her pretty, clear face was intent with the seriousness of her information; as the camera closed in on her face for the last shot, the maddog felt himself stir, even as the anger began to rekindle. He controlled it, breathing hard, and punched off the television. Annie McGowan. Her face hung in the bright afterimage of the television screen. She was an interesting one. Better than the blonde on TV3.