Broken Prey Read Free

and told him that no, she’d heard Jesus calling . . .
    “A traveler? Maybe,” Lucas said. Travelers were nightmares. They might kill for a lifetime and never get caught; one woman disappearing every month or so, most of them never found, buried in the woods or the mountains or out in the desert, no track to follow, nobody to pull the pieces together. “But real travelers tend to hide their victims, and that’s why you never hear much about them. This guy is advertising.”
    Elle: “I know.” Pause. “He won’t stop.”
    “No,” Lucas said. “He won’t.”

    A WEEK AFTER THAT CONVERSATION, a few minutes before noon, on a dry day with sunny skies, Lucas sat in a booth in a hot St. Paul bar looking at a lonely piece of cheeseburger, two untouched buns, and a Diet Coke.
    The bar was hot because there’d been a power outage, and when the power came back on, an errant surge had done something bad to the air conditioner. From time to time, Lucas could hear the manager, in his closet-sized office, screaming into a telephone, among the clash and tinkle of dishes and silverware, about warranties and who’d never get his work again, and that included his apartments.
    Two sweating lawyers sat across from Lucas and took turns jabbing their index fingers at his chest.
    “I’m telling you,” George Hyde said, jabbing, “this list has no credibility. No credibility. Am I getting through to you, Davenport? Am I coming in?”
    Hyde’s pal Ira Shapira said, “You know what? You leave the Beatles out, but you got folk on it. “Heart of Saturday Night”? That’s folk.”
    “Tom Waits would beat the shit out of you if he heard you say that,” Lucas said. “Besides, it’s a great song.” He lifted his empty glass to a barmaid, who nodded at him. “I’m not saying the list is perfect,” he said. “It’s just an attempt—”
    “The list is shit. It has no musical, historical, or ethical basis,” Hyde interrupted.
    “Or sexual,” Shapira added.

    LUCAS WAS A TALL MAN, restless, dark hair flecked with gray, with cool blue eyes. His face was touched with scars, including one that ran down through an eyebrow, and up into his hairline; and another that looked like a large upside-down apostrophe, where a little girl had shot him in the throat and a doctor had slashed his throat open so he could breathe. He had a chipped tooth and what he secretly thought was a pleasant, even pleasing smile—but a couple of women had told him that his smile frightened them a little.
    He was wearing a gray summer-weight wool-and-silk suit from Prada, over black shoes and with a pale blue silk golf shirt, open at the neck; a rich-jock look. He’d once been a college jock, a first-line defenseman with the University of Minnesota’s hockey team. Lucas was tough enough, but he’d picked up six pounds over the winter. They’d lingered all through the spring and into the summer, and he’d finally put himself on the South Beach Diet. An insane diet, he thought, but one that his wife had recommended, just before she left town.
    He leaned back, chewing the last bite of cheeseburger, yearning for the buns. He hadn’t had a carbohydrate in a week. Now he held his hands a foot apart, and after he’d swallowed, said, earnestly, rationally: “Listen, guys. Rock and its associated music divides into two great streams. In one, you’ve got Pat Boone, Doris Day, the Beatles, Donny and Marie Osmond, the Carpenters, Sonny and Cher, Elton John, and Tiffany, or whatever her name is—the chick with no stomach. Anybody that you might snap your fingers to. In the other stream, you’ve got Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Aerosmith, Tom Petty. Like that.” He touched himself on the chest. “That’s the one I prefer. I guess you guys are . . . finger snappers.”
    “Snappers?” Hyde shouted. A couple of guys at the bar turned to look at him, the bored, heavy-lidded howya-doin’ look. In the back, the manager