Phantom Prey

up, the sheets falling to his waist, showing off his rib cage. His body was slender as a rake. “I can feel it. She was jealous of Frances. Her parents broke up, they don’t care whether she lives or dies. She’s over there by herself, nothing to do, no place to go. Frances had two parents who loved her, and the money. So the fat girl gets involved in this club thing, she’s going to be cool, she’s going to be a club owner, or operator, hang out with the bands . . . and Frances finally says she can’t have it. Can’t have any of it. Jealousy and hate.”
    “Maybe.”
    “For sure,” Loren said. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s on the list.”
    “We have more scouting,” Fairy said. “We have Dick Ford, we have Roy Carter, and Patty . . .”
    “So we take a week, and think. Then we move again. If we don’t, the energy will fritter away. Just fritter away.”
    She talked to Ford again, for ten minutes, at the A1, passing through. And finally, a third time, just at closing. Went to the bar, drank a beer, and he touched her hand, and touched it again, and the knife was like the Sword of Freya in her belt. When she finished the beer, as Ford was calling to the patrons to “Drink up and go home,” she drifted out the back door and looked back, caught his eyes with hers.
    The alley was paved with red bricks, covered with the grime of a century of wear; she wanted to lean on something while she waited, but everything was dirty, so instead, she wandered in little circles, rocked back and forth, hoping that nobody else would come through the door.
    A thought: I could leave right now . She could leave, and nothing would happen. She could sell the car—or not, who’d care?—and be done with it.
    She toyed with the thought, then let it drift away. Dropped her hand to the knife. She’d spent some time with it, sharpening the edge until it was like a razor. She yawned: nervous.
    Then Ford came through the door. He might have worked on his smile, inside, in the restroom mirror, because it was perfect—an effort to generate a bit of wry charm, in an uncertain situation with a good-looking woman. “So, what’s up?”
    He was wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, which was good, and beneath it, a canvas shirt. She got close and let him feel her smallness, her cuddliness, while her right hand slid along the handle of the knife. “I can’t stay away from the Frances Austin thing,” she said. “I thought you . . . could tell me about it.”
    “Frances Austin?” He frowned: not what he expected. “You’re sort of stuck on that, huh?”
    There was one light in the alley, and they were almost beneath it. She caught a corner of his jacket sleeve, and tugged him closer to the open end of the alley, toward the street, but deeper into the dark. Turned him, set him up against the wall, pressed into him, said, “You were her friend. You must have some ideas about what happened.”
    “No, I really don’t. . . . Not so much.”
    She whispered, “Don’t give me that bullshit,” and she jammed the knife into his gut, just about at the navel, and then, as she’d imagined it, pulled it up toward his heart, the blade cutting more easily than she’d expected, and she put all her muscle into it, up on her tiptoes, using both hands on the knife handle. Ford swung his arms at her, but they were soft and straight, like zombie arms, uncoordinated, shock with pain, and she moved around them and pulled on the knife, pulled it up to his breastbone, and then out.
    He slumped back against the dirty wall, staring at her, made gargling sounds, his hands stretching down toward the earth, and then he slumped over sideways and fell on his side, and spewed blood.
    She squatted, listened to him die, then wiped the knife on his shirt and spit on him: “That’s for Frances,” she said.
    She walked away, down the empty alley, carrying the knife. Got in the car, drove six blocks in silence, until Loren said, “He’s gone. I felt him go.”
    “Yes.”
    “Pull over.”
    “Why?” But she pulled over.
    “Because I’m gonna fuck you,” Loren said.
    And he did, and when the orgasm washed over her, it smelled purely of fresh blood.

2
    The day was slipping from gray into dark, the sun going down to the southwest over the Mississippi, and the rain kept coming—a cold, driving torrent that pounded the windows.
    Lucas Davenport sat at a desk, in a dim room, staring at the lap-top screen and listening to Tom Waits, the sound