John Sandford - Silken Prey

His feet were churning like a machine, Lucas noticed as he took off after the other man, but his legs were so short that he was only making about two feet per churn; Lucas caught him in a hundred feet. He didn’t want to make the mistake of having a knife or gun pulled on him, so when he was close behind, and Clay turned to look at him, he hit Clay on the back of the neck and sent him sprawling, hands first, into the street.

Clay rolled over and looked up the muzzle of Del’s pistol. “How you doin’, James,” Del said. “You’re under arrest for murder.”

“They’re lying to you,” Clay said. He was very short, maybe five-two, and thin.

“Who’s lying to us?” Lucas asked.

“The Chicago cops. I had not a single fuckin’ thing to do with any of that.”

“Tell the Chicago cops that,” Lucas said. “Roll over on your face, keep your arms out . . . you know the routine.”

Lucas patted him down, took a short folding knife out of Clay’s back pocket, handed it to Del. Del cuffed him, and they stood him up and Lucas held on to the cuff link while Del gave him a more thorough pat-down.

A young white kid, maybe ten, rode up on a fenderless half-sized bicycle, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He stopped and asked, “You guys cops?”

“Yes,” Del said. “You go on home, son.”

“Blow me,” the kid said, and rode away.

“That’s righteous, that’s righteous,” Clay shouted after the kid, who gave him the finger.

“I guess he doesn’t like any of us,” Del said.

They put Clay up against Lucas’s Lexus, and Lucas called Cochran. Cochran came up and Lucas said, “We got Clay for you.”

“What? How’d you do that?”

“By accident, mostly.” He explained about Smackie’s.

Cochran said, “All right. I’ll come down there myself and pick him up.”

“Good. Because I hate to write reports,” Lucas said. “He’s your guy.”

• • •

LUCAS HAD BEEN BOTHERED by Clay’s reaction to the arrest. He told him, “You stand right there. If I’ve got to chase you down again, it won’t be any patty-cake slap on the neck like last time. You understand that?”

Clay said, “Hey, man, you gotta listen to this. I never—”

“Shut up,” Lucas said.

He and Del moved off ten steps, and Lucas said, “If he killed Roman . . .”

“I know,” Del said. “He’s been around. If he killed her, it should have been nothing but, ‘I wanna lawyer.’”

“Maybe he’s stupid,” Lucas said, glancing at Clay.

“He is stupid, but not that stupid,” Del said. “Doesn’t take that much firepower to remember ‘I wanna lawyer.’”

“Yeah.” Lucas scratched his chin. “I’d like to ask him something . . . see his reaction.”

“You give away too much, you’re going to piss off Turk.”

“Little rain falls in everybody’s life,” Lucas said.

Lucas ambled back to Clay and said, “You’re toast. We got the DNA. Why’d you do it? You get paid? Or was it because it looked easy?”

“What’d I do?” Clay asked, and Lucas got the impression that he really was confused.

“Gimme a break,” Lucas said. “You been around. You know what the deal is. You’re a smart guy—you killed that old lady and you took her purse and her other stuff. What’d you do with the gun?”

Clay’s eyes had widened, and he shook his head. “What are you talking about, man? I never killed no old lady. What the fuck you talking about?”

“Up on the north side? Middle of the night? This coming back to you, now? One shot, right in the heart? Did you think she was like, attacking you? That she had a gun?”

“What? I never killed nobody. Nobody.” He looked from Lucas to Del and shook his head.

“Where you living, James?” Del asked. “You living with your mom?”

“I gotta place. Look, I’m doing all right. I got a part-time gig with this guy. . . . I didn’t kill nobody. I don’t got a gun.”

Lucas pushed him, and Clay said he took messages around town for some guy, whose name he didn’t know. Translated, that meant that he was delivering dope; in any case, he had a job.

“When we go up to your place, we’re going to find the other glove, won’t we?” Del asked.

“Other glove? Hey . . . you got my glove?”

“You’re missing one, right?” Del asked.

“Yeah, I missing one. How’d you know that?”

“A little birdie whispered it to me.”

“Somebody took my glove. Or maybe I dropped it,” Clay protested. “I was wearing it up to Smackie’s. I was walking home, it gotten cold, I takes my gloves out, and I only got one. I say, ‘What’s this shit?’ I go back to Smackie’s, but there’s no glove, and nobody saw it. . . . You saying you found my glove?”

“Yes. Under the old lady’s body,” Del said.

“Man, you’re crazy. You’re fuckin’ insane, man.” He looked at the two of them, then said the magic words: “I wanna lawyer.”

Del looked at Lucas and said, “Turk’s gonna be pissed.”

• • •

COCHRAN WASN’T COMPLETELY UPSET with the preemptive interrogation for the simple reason that he had the glove with the DNA, and a glove with DNA was about all a jury required. He and another cop picked up Clay, listened to Lucas’s unformed doubts, said “Thank you,” and headed off to the Hennepin County jail.

“What’re you going to do?” Del asked.

“Probably piss off Turk some more. I’m going to talk to Jamie Moore, see if he’ll get Clay to talk to me again.”

When Turk was gone, Del started back to Smackie’s.

“Where’re you going?” Lucas asked.

“See if the bartender knows about that glove,” Del said.

“Good.” Lucas went along.

The bartender, however, didn’t know about the glove. “But I’m behind the bar. You have to ask Irma.”

“The waitress?”

“Yeah, the waitress.”

“You got a phone number?” Del asked.

He did, and they got it, and went outside to make the call.

Irma was on a bus, on the way to work. Lucas put her on the cell-phone speaker, identified himself, and said, “We just arrested one of your customers, a guy named James Clay,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know that name,” she said.

“He’s a short guy with some scars on his face, tattoo around his neck, deals a little dope,” Lucas said.

“Colored guy?”

“Yeah. Got cornrows,” Lucas said.

“Okay, yeah, I know who he is.”

“He says the other night, he was in your place, and he lost a glove in there, and didn’t find out until after he left, but then he went back to look for it. You remember anything like that?”

“Well, yeah. He asked me if I seen a glove on the floor, but I didn’t.”

“Okay. How about this? Was there a guy in there, maybe five-ten, six-foot tall, sort of blond, blond mustache?”

“Oh, yeah. All the time.”

Lucas’s heart jumped. But: “All the time?”

“Hey, this is Minneapolis. I see about thirty guys like that. All the time.”

That wasn’t good. Irma said she’d be at work in forty-five minutes, and Lucas said he might stop by with a photograph.

• • •

ON THE WAY BACK to Lucas’s house, he told Del what he’d learned about Grant’s bodyguards, and explained why he hadn’t involved Del from the start: the danger of messing with politicians.

“I appreciate the thought, but I can take care of myself,” Del grumped.

“No, you can’t, not anymore,” Lucas said. “If I get fired, I’m okay. Even with this depression, or whatever you want to call it, I make more off my investments than I earn from the BCA. If you get fired, what’re you gonna do? Get a job as a bank guard? Stick up liquor stores? There aren’t a hell of a lot of openings for guys with your job description: ‘Hang around bars and bullshit people and sometimes arrest them.’”