Phantom Prey

seemed to work.
    Jenkins and Shrake carried leather-wrapped saps. Jenkins called his the Hillary-Whacker, in case, he said, he should ever encounter the junior senator from New York.
    Should all of this go into a file?
    Lucas sighed , stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and looked out the window. The last of the snow was being washed out by the rain, and only a few hard lumps of ice remained behind the curbs, where the snowplow piles had been. If the rain continued, the ice would be gone by morning. On the other hand, if the temps had been ten degrees lower, the storm would have produced twenty inches of snow, instead of two inches of rain.
    He didn’t need that. He was done with winter.
    Until the middle of February, it seemed that the snow would keep coming forever. Not much at one time, but an inch or two, every third day, enough that he had to fire up the snowblower and clear off the driveway before his wife drove on the snow and packed it down.
    In mid-February, it got warm. Two rainy weeks in the forties and fifties, and the snow was gone. That’s when the end-of-winter blues got him. March was a tough month in the Cities. Dress warm, and the day got warm and you sweated. Dress cool, and the day turned cold, and you froze. Cars were rolling lumps of dirt, impossible to keep clean. Everybody was fat and slow, and crabby.
    Lucas had been playing winter ball in a cops-and-bureaucrats league at the St. Paul YMCA. Some of the bureaucrats were wolverines—hesitate on a shot and they’d have two fingers up your nose and one hand in your shorts. So he was in shape, the theory being that you wouldn’t get the winter blues if you worked out a lot.
    But that was theory, and mostly wrong. He needed the sun, and for more than a week in Cancun.
    Lucas had jet-black hair salted with streaks of gray, and his face was pale with the winter. He had strong shoulders and a hawk’s beak nose, blue eyes, and a couple of notable scars on his face and neck. Traces of the job.
    His paternal ancestors, somewhere back through the centuries, had paddled wild fur out of the North Woods, mink and beaver and otter and martin and fisher, across Superior and the lesser Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence. A bunch of mean Frenchmen; and finally one of them said, “Screw this Canadian bullshit,” and moved to the States.
    When that happened was not exactly clear, but Lucas’s father had suggested that when it did, the immigrant might have had a case of blended whiskey on his shoulder. . . .
    His mother’s side was Irish and Welsh, and a bit of German; but Lucas wasn’t a genealogist and mostly didn’t care who’d done what back when.
    He picked up the glasses and looked through the window across the street at Heather Toms, who was in the kitchen making a smoothie, and doing a little dance step at the same time. She’d done her exercises every day, and while she’d once smoked the occasional cigarette, or maybe a doobie—always on the balcony, so the first baby wouldn’t get secondhand smoke—she’d quit with the pregnancy.
    Lucas quite approved of the way she was conducting herself, aside from the aiding and abetting of her murderous husband and drug-psycho brother-in-law.
    Nothing was going to happen, he thought. Time to go home . . .
    Lucas lived ten minutes from Heather’s apartment, west across St. Paul’s Highland district, in a new house on Mississippi River Boulevard, which wasn’t a boulevard. He and his wife, Weather, had designed and built the home themselves, to fit them. They’d done well, he thought, with a rambling two-story structure and ample garage, of stone and cedar shingles, and climbing ivy stretching up the siding.
    He’d been home for fifteen minutes, yawning, listening to the rain in the quiet of the house, picking through a copy of Musky Hunter , when he felt, rather than heard, the garage doors going up. Weather.
    He checked his watch: she was early.
    He ambled through the house and met her coming through the door carrying two grocery sacks. She looked around and asked, “Where is everybody?,” meaning their toddler son and the live-in housekeeper. Their ward, Letty, was at school.
    “Same place you were, I guess—went to the supermarket.”
    “Well, poop,” Weather said. She plopped the bags down on the food-prep island. “We’re gonna wind up with about thirty bananas.”
    Lucas snuggled up behind her and kissed her on the neck and she relaxed back against him, hair damp from the