Phantom Prey (14 page)

The bank was painted in tints and shades of brown; if you didn't look at it carefully, it might not have been there--in a fantasy novel, it would have been the gate to an alternate reality.

The vice president in charge of the branch, a tall, balding man with weasel-like teeth, took the subpoena and produced a piece of paper, an account file.

"This is it?" Lucas asked, turning it over. "One side of a piece of paper?"

"An unusual account," the vice president said. "What do you think she's up to?"

Lucas shook his head. "She's dead."

The vice president's hand went to his lips. "Not . . . She wasn't withdrawing . . . Somebody wasn't taking out . . . ?"

"No, no. She was killed after the last withdrawal. A month or so afterwards. And this is still open, right?" He held the paper up. "Nobody's gotten in touch about an estate?"

"No. There's nothing in her file at all. No notations. We did issue a check-cashing card."

"And it's open."

"It's still open, but only has a hundred dollars in it. The fifty
-
thousand-dollar deposit was withdrawn in cash, starting two weeks after it was deposited. Then nothing more."

"Hmm."

"That's what I thought, when I saw it," the vice president said. "Of course, this is all automated, and it's not big enough to draw any particular attention. But, look here . . ."

He reached out for the file, and Lucas let it go, and the vice president put it on the desktop, upside down from himself, so Lucas could read it, and used a pen to point out the individual lines of the withdrawal records.

"We have five branches: this one, plus one at Maplewood, one at Signal Hills, one in Woodbury, and one down at Midway. The money was taken out twenty-five hundred dollars at a time, in cash. Twenty withdrawals, one a day. Look at this code--this tells you the branch where the withdrawal was made. The first was taken out here, the next in Maplewood, the next at Midway, the next at Signal Hills. And so on. Every week for four weeks."

"Why would they do that?"

"My thought was, she didn't want to be seen taking out too much money at once," the vice president said. "I looked in my computer records, and I can tell you that she never saw any teller twice. Since we only have two or three working at a time, that doesn't work out statistically."

"So she was avoiding the tellers she'd seen before," Lucas said.

"That's my idea," the vice president said.

"Thank you," Lucas said. He started away, then turned back. "The fifty thousand wasn't the first deposit?"

"That's on the paper," the vice president said. "The account was opened with five hundred dollars. There were two one-hundred-dollar withdrawals on the check card, then nothing for two months, then the big check, then nothing for two weeks, then four weeks of daily withdrawals."

Fifty grand. What had she been buying? Maybe nothing. Maybe she was putting together some case money, a stash. Shit, maybe she was a terrorist. A rich Caucasian Goth terrorist, buying RPGs. Maybe she was going to war against the Republicans. Lucas smiled to himself: maybe not.

So what had she been buying? Or why would she need case money? He couldn't remember the names, looked in his notebook: Denise Robinson, Mark McGuire. Hung out with her, might have wanted to start a business. Wanted her for the money? Something to push.

He went home
for dinner, the kitchen warm and smelling good, like potatoes and salmon, Sam making a hash of his hash, Letty working on algebra while she ate ("If a train is going sixty-five miles an hour to the east, and another train is going forty-five miles an hour to the west . . ."), and took time out to grouse about not getting a cell phone, because everybody else had one, and Weather, quiet, amused, and at the same time, tired from a seven-hour-long operation, talking about going to bed early. A happy moment: if he'd ever thought of commissioning a painting of his family, that would be the moment.

"I've got to run out," Lucas said, when things had settled down to coffee. "Down to the A1, see if I can catch a few of Frances's friends, people we haven't touched yet. There's some weird stuff coming out."

"You could have another piece of pie," Weather said. "A small piece."

Felt so good, in a quiet way.

He left at eight, feeling a tug back toward the brightly lit windows, but going on into the dark, in the Porsche, around the corner, and then up Cretin to I-94.

He found a
place in the street to park the car, under a streetlight.

The A1 had changed, just as the bartender had said it would. The lights had been turned down, and the crowd was younger and quieter and dressed in black. The bartender was the same guy: Jerry. Lucas nodded at him and asked, "Can you point me at anybody who knew Frances Austin?"

The bartender asked, "What kind of beer do you drink?"

"Leinie's?"

The bartender nodded and pulled a bottle of Honey Weiss out of a cooler and said, quietly, "Take a drink and then turn and look around, but not like I told you. There's a guy over there with a black cowboylike hat. He knew her. But don't go right over."

Lucas took a sip of the beer and nodded, and the bartender went down the bar, to the only other customer sitting on a stool. Lucas took another sip, then turned and looked at the rooms, clusters of black
-
garbed Goths on their night out, mostly wine with a little beer here and there, quiet enough. The guy picked out by Jerry wasn't wearing anything like a cowboy hat, Lucas thought; it was the kind of hat you'd wear with a cape, or with a pencil-thin mustache. Lucas turned back around, took another sip, and the bartender laughed with the other guy down the bar. Good time to move. . . .

Lucas stepped over to the booth where the hat guy was, with two other Goths, one male and one female, and took out his ID and said, "I'm an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension." He held out the ID, and the three of them looked at it doubtfully, and he said, "Some of you knew Frances Austin, and I'm trying to figure out what happened there. f 've got a photo kit. . . . Could you tell me if this is Frances?"

The girl said, "I didn't know her," but the two guys did, and they shared the photo kit, and both shook their heads. "It looks a little like her, but the hair's wrong, and this woman is skinnier than Frances. She had a little heft to her. Not fat, but she wasn't this small."

The hat guy looked over the back of the booth and said, "Hey, Darrell, look at this."

In a couple of minutes, a half-dozen Goths had checked the photo kit, and asked why he didn't have a regular photograph, and then one of them said, "This isn't Frances. This is the fairy Goth. I heard you guys were looking for her."

Lucas nodded. "The fairy Goth. You sure?"

"Yeah. I saw her," the guy said. "In this picture she looks a little like Frances, but she doesn't look like her in real life. She's smaller and skinnier and darker."

"You know both of them."

He shook his head. "I don't know the fairy, I just saw her one night. I didn't know anybody was looking for her until tonight." He glanced at the bartender. "Jerry told me. Anyway, they are definitely different people."

"Well, shoot," Lucas said. But he'd known that. Frances Austin was dead. He spent a couple of minutes taking down names.

Then, an odd event.

A dark-haired man, with a funny fuzzy mustache, in sunglasses and a leather jacket, stepped through the back door and looked directly at Lucas, held his eyes until he saw Lucas look up at him, held them for another beat, then backed out through the door.

Wanted to talk privately?

Lucas said, "Excuse me," and went after him.

The alley behind the building, where Dick Ford had been killed, was illuminated by a single electric lamp above the A1 door, and by a streetlight down at the end of the alley. The mustachioed man was down there, at the end of the alley, looking at the door when Lucas came through, and behind him a slender dark-haired woman who darted out of sight. Lucas took a step that way, aware of the litter and the Coke can to his left, the uneven brick surface, and then the man made a gesture with his right hand, and everything seemed to go sideways.

In the first millisecond, Lucas continued with the step he was halfway into; in the second millisecond he recognized the gesture; and in the third millisecond he may have thought, Gun . . . and his hand started moving toward the pistol on his hip. Then the man opened fire, white sparkles and firecracker bangs and Lucas caught the closing steel door with his hand and lurched back behind it, feeling pain in his left leg, and he sagged against the wall, fumbling his pistol out.

He was hurt and bleeding, he thought, and he peeked, heard people shouting in the club, and he saw the man running out of the alley. There was something wrong with him, fire in his leg, but Lucas lurched that way, and he thought about getting hit in the groin and all the arteries down there and he followed his pistol down the alley, limping, hopping, hurting, then he was at the corner and he heard a car accelerating hard, around the corner, a half-block away, out of sight, an
d t
hen he thought,
Hope it didn't hit me in the balls hope it didn't hit me in the
balls...

And the pain came in a wave.

He lurched back to the bar and the crowd growing around the door, waving his pistol with one hand, and he groaned, "I got shot," and he sat down in the alley just outside the door, under the light, and people were shouting about ambulances and cops, and one of the Goth women said, "I'm a nurse, let me look at it," and she and one of the Goth guys got his jeans down and they looked at his bloody thigh.

"No artery," she said, looking up at him. "You're bleeding. We've got to get you to the hospital, but it's not pumping, it's not pumping, it's through-and-through." She shouted over her shoulder, "Ask Jerry if he's got a first-aid kit." And to Lucas: "We gotta get some pressure on it. Get some pressure on it."

Jerry shouted, "Cops are on the way, ambulance on the way."

The cops were there in one minute: a red-faced blond and his black partner, who looked down and said, "Holy shit, Davenport, man, what happened?"

"Motherfucker mustache guy shot me," Lucas said.

The Goth nurse was pressing an antique gauze pad, from a thirty
-
year-old first-aid kit, against the hole in his thigh. "I'm working the Austin case, ahhh . . . and the Dick Ford case, with Harry Anson," Lucas told the cop. The leg was on fire, was burning up. He grunted to the nurse, "Goddamn, that hurts. That hurts." And to the cop again, "Call Anson. Guy ambushed me. Middle height, black hair, mustache, black leather jacket, had a car parked around the corner. Might have a limp. Jesus, that hurts."

The ambulance was there a minute later and they put him on a gurney and ran him out, and the EMT started running down his list
,
asking about aspirin and street drugs and heart medications, and Lucas answered and then got his cell phone out and the EMT said, "You can't use that here," and Lucas said, "Bullshit. I'm gonna call my wife before anybody else does."

He did and it was confusing, but she was coming. Because his mind was still operating in some cold not-quite-shocked mode, he made one more call, almost fumbling the phone as he worked down through his call list. But he got it, finally, and Alyssa Austin answered the phone. He hung up without saying anything: but Austin was at home. If the woman he saw running away was the fairy, and it could have been, then Austin was not her.

The ambulance made a swooping move and one of the EMTs said something he didn't understand, and then the doors were popping open: the hospital. He'd been there before, rolling down a hallway looking up at the passing lights, talking to the docs in their scrubs. One of the docs said, "Sir, you understand me? Sir? It's more than a couple of stitches, you've got a hole there and I'm going to have to clean it out? Do you understand that, sir?"

They were pulling his pants off as they talked and Lucas asked, "What'd it hit?"

"Your leg; I'm going to have to clean it out, okay? We have your permission to clean it out?"

"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."

"Do you take a heart aspirin or Plavix or Coumadin, any drugs that you think might affect . . ."

Some time passed; he didn't know exactly how much, and then he was moving again. He was out of his clothing and there was something cold and wet on his leg and belly and nurses were pushing and pulling on him, transferring him to an operating table, and a masked man looked down at him and then he went away for a while. . . .

Weather was sitting white-faced in a chair next to the bed when he came back. He was in a recovery room, and she must've gotten in on her physician's ID. He groaned, "Ah, man," and she stood up clutching a purse to her chest and she began to weep and said, "Oh, God you scared me, goddamn, you scared me. . . ."

Lucas said, "I'm gonna kill that motherfucker."

Chapter
9.

At the surgeon's insistence
--backed up by a brook-no-argument Weather--Lucas stayed in the hospital overnight, all the next day and the next night, forced to sleep on his back, which he never did. By the end of it, he had a crippling ache at the juncture of his back and butt.