Buried Prey

Carter was short of his quota on traffic tickets that month, so they hid at the bottom of a hill and knocked off three speeders in forty-five minutes, which put him back square. It wasn’t a quota, it was a performance metric. The chief said so, with a straight face.

They hit a convenience store on Lyndale, scowled at the dope dealers, who moseyed off, and Carter got a fried cherry pie and a Pepsi. They rolled away, and the dope dealers moseyed back. A half-hour later, they checked out a report of a fight in the parking lot of a bar. There’d been one, all right, but everybody ran when the car pulled up, and there were no bodies and no blood, and nobody knew who was involved.

They got a couple more soft drinks, Diet Coke for Lucas, another Pepsi for Carter, and moved along, arguing Coke versus Pepsi, took a call about another fight, this one at an antique store.

When they got there, two women, one heavy and one thin, both with fashionable blond haircuts, were squared off on the sidewalk, the dealer between them, a clerk peering out from the gold-leafed doorway. The fight hadn’t actually taken place yet, and Lucas and Carter separated the two women, one of whom told the other, “You’re lucky the cops got here, or I would have stuffed that chiffonier right up your fat butt.”

“Oh, yeah, bitch-face, let me tell you . . .” What she told her couldn’t be reported in any of the better home furnishings magazines, Lucas thought, as it included four of the seven words George Carlin said you couldn’t use on television. The fat one was definitely ready to go, until Carter said, “If we have to take you in, they will discover any chiffoniers you got up there. It’s called a body-cavity search, and you won’t like it.”

That cooled them off, and they left in their respective Mercedeses.

“It’s the heat that does it,” Carter observed to the antique dealer.

“Maybe not,” the dealer said. “It’s a gorgeous chiffonier.”

“WHAT THE FUCK is a chiffonier?” Lucas asked, as they rolled away.

“One of those coffee-serving things,” Carter said. “You know, that go around in circles.”

Lucas studied him for a moment, then said, “You got no idea what a chiffonier is.”

“That’s true.”

“But I liked the way you handled it. That strip-search line,” Lucas said. “Took it right out of them.”

“Like I said: keep the peace,” Carter said.

“Really. You shoulda been a cop or something.”

AT FIVE O’CLOCK, Lucas spotted a man named Justice Johnson, who’d beaten up his old lady once too often; a warrant had been issued. They corralled him in the recessed entry of a locksmith’s shop. He’d been eating a raw onion, as though it were an apple, and it bounced away into the gutter as they cuffed him. He didn’t bother to fight, and bitched and moaned about his woman, who, he said, did nothing but pick at him.

“Bitch said I’m a dumbass,” Johnson said from the backseat of the squad. He was breathing out onion fumes, which were not diminished in any way by his overindulgence in Drakkar Noir.

“You are a dumbass, Justice,” Carter said.

“Hey, she ain’t supposed to say it,” Johnson said. “She’s supposed to take my side, but she never does. All she does is bitch, you ain’t done this, you ain’t done that. . . .”

“So you beat her up,” Lucas said.

“I slapped her.”

“Broke her nose,” said Carter.

“Didn’t mean to do that.”

“Shut up, dumbass,” Lucas said. “And quit breathing on me.”

He didn’t. He sat looking out the window for a minute, then said, “I think I’m peeing my pants.”

“Ah, Jesus, don’t do that,” Lucas said.

“Gotcha, cop,” Johnson said. He laughed for a minute, going huh-huh-huh, then said, “And my name ain’t Jesus. You think I look like a fuckin’ Puerto Rican?”

“You shoulda made the cuffs tighter,” Carter said.

“I shoulda put them around his fuckin’ windpipe,” Lucas said.

They booked him into the Hennepin County jail.

AT TWENTY MINUTES after six o’clock, they took a call on two missing girls. It was still full daylight, and the dispatchers sent them down to the Mississippi, below the I-94 bridge. The two girls had been known to play along the river, although they’d been warned against it by their parents.

In the three years Lucas had been a cop, he’d seen most of what he’d ever see from a patrol car: murders, actual and attempted, the aftermath of robberies and burglaries, and even a couple of those in progress, as well as suicides, fights, mini-riots, car and foot chases, even an emergency pregnancy run, the woman screaming for help from the backseat. The baby arrived one minute after Lucas put the car at the emergency room door, delivered by a doc and a couple of nurses right on the gurney. The baby, rumor had it, had been named Otto, after the car ride.

Carter said, “That’s always the rumor. That they called him Otto.”

“It’s a pretty good rumor,” Lucas said. “I’ve been telling it to everybody.”

There’d been a couple of lost kids over the years, but they’d been quickly found. These two had vanished between four and five o’clock, when kids were walking home for dinner, not heading down to the river.