Rules of Prey Read Free Page B

or biochemistry.
    This Emily Dickinson cost one dollar when it was printed in 1958 by an obscure publishing house located on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Thirty years later it cost eighty cents in a University Avenue bookstore in St. Paul.
    “So what about this pony?” Gurgle. “This Wabasha Warrior?” The counterman tapped the Racing Form. “Bred in Minnesota.”
    “That’s what I think,” Lucas said.
    “What?”
    “Bred in Minnesota. They should whip its ass down to the Alpo factory. Of course, there is a silver lining . . .”
    The counterman waited. He didn’t have the breath for repartee.
    “If Warrior gets any kind of favorite-son action,” Lucas said, “it’ll push up the odds on the winner.”
    “That’ll be . . .”
    “Try Sun and Halfpence. No guarantee, but the numbers are right.” Lucas pushed the Emily Dickinson across the counter with the eighty-cent sticker price and five cents tax. “Let me get out of the store before you call your book, okay? I don’t want to get busted for conspiracy to tout.”
    “Whatever you say.” Suck. “Lieutenant,” the counterman said. He tugged his forelock.
    Lucas carried the Emily Dickinson back to Minneapolis and parked in the public garage across from City Hall. He walked around the wretchedly ugly old pile of liverish granite, across another street, past a reflecting pool, and into theHennepin County Government Center. He took an escalator down to the cafeteria, bought a red apple from a vending machine, went back up and out the far side of the building to the lawn. He sat on the grass between the white birch trees in the warm August sunshine and ate the apple and read:
. . . but no man moved me till the tide
     Went past my simple shoe
     And past my apron and my belt
     And past my bodice too,
     And made as he would eat me up
     As wholly as a dew
     Upon a dandelion’s sleeve
     And then I started too.
    Lucas smiled and crunched on the apple. When he looked up, a young dark-haired woman was crossing the plaza, pushing a double baby carriage. The twins were dressed in identical pink wrappings and swayed from side to side as their mother strutted them across the plaza. Mama had large breasts and a small waist and her black hair swung back and forth across her fair cheeks like a silken curtain. She wore a plum-colored skirt and silky beige blouse and she was so beautiful that Lucas smiled again, a wave of pleasure washing through him.
    Then another one walked by, in the opposite direction, a blonde with a short punky haircut and a revealing knit dress, tawdry in an engaging way. Lucas watched her walk and sighed with the rhythm of it.
     
    Lucas was dressed in a white tennis shirt, khaki slacks, over-the-calf blue socks, and slip-on deck shoes with long leather ties. He wore the tennis shirt outside his slacks so the gun wouldn’t show. He was slender and dark-complexioned, with straight black hair going gray at the temples and a long nose over a crooked smile. One of his central upper incisors had been chipped and he never had it capped. He might have been an Indian except for his blue eyes.
    His eyes were warm and forgiving. The warmth was somehow emphasized by the vertical white scar that started at his hairline, ran down to his right eye socket, jumped over the eye, and continued down his cheek to the corner of his mouth. The scar gave him a raffish air, but left behind a touch of innocence, like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. Lucas wished he could tell young women that the scar had come from a broken bottle in a bar fight at Subic Bay, where he had never been, or Bangkok, where he had never been either. The scar had come from a fishing leader that snapped out of a rotting snag on the St. Croix River and he told them so. Some believed him. Most thought he was covering something up, like a bar fight East of Suez.
    Though his eyes were warm, his smile betrayed him.
    He once went with a