Silent Prey

can’t make that decision.”
    “Sure I can. And somebody has to,” Kennett said, looking at her. “Your average junkie does fifty or a hundred burglaries for every time he gets caught, and for small burglaries, chances are he’ll be right back out on the street. Plea-bargains out, or he’ll do thirty days or six months or something. Not enough. If we let all the onetime passion killers out of prison and put all the junkies inside, Manhattan would be a garden spot. Even the ones we took off . . . Christ, we knocked down a thousand violent crimes a year, just the ones we took down.”
    “How many were there?”
    He shook his head. “You don’t need to know. But that’s why.”
    “That’s why you shot Petty? So we’d have a garden spot?”
    Kennett turned away. “We didn’t like doing that. But we had no choice . . . . O’Dell is trying to frame me, by the way. Supposedly had a witness who saw me when Waites was gunned down.”
    “I know.”
    His eyebrows went up. “You know?”
    “Davenport found the kid who supposedly saw you. Found him in Charleston and broke him down. He knows it was phony.”
    Kennett smiled. “When he went to Minneapolis, he went to Charleston the next day. I thought it was weird that he took the day off—weird for a guy like Davenport.”
    “How about the others? Waites was a loudmouth, but . . .”
    “They nurtured it, the festering. My God, look over there, look at that city, think what it could be . . . .”
    She looked across the water at the twinkling lights, like the lights of the Milky Way, seen large. “And you sold it out. And used me like a fucking Kleenex.”
    “Bullshit,” he said. His face was getting red.
    “When Walt was killed, I came over here and cried on your shoulder, and you took care of all the arrangements and patted me on the head and took me down below and made love to me, comforting me. I can’t believe I did it.”
    “Yeah, well . . .”
    “Well, what?”
    “That’s life.” His teeth were clenched. “Now, go on, Lily, get the hell out of here.”
    Lily stood, took a step toward the dock. Then another step, toward Kennett.
    “What . . .” Kennett began.
    She hit him, open-handed, hard: a slap that almost knocked him down. He took a step toward her, hand on his face, and caught her arm. “Lily, dammit!”
    “Let go of me,” she said. She tried to pull away, but he held on, and for a moment, they struggled together, his face getting redder; then suddenly, he pinched his shoulders and let his hand drop away.
    He turned, seeming to crouch, then went to his knees. “Oh, Jesus,” he gasped. “Lily . . . in my bag, down below . . .”
    His pills. His pills were in the bag. She started to turn toward the cabin.
    A spasm hit him and he went flat in the cockpit, his face straining, the tendons standing out in his neck. “Lily . . .”
    She stopped. Looked at the cabin and then back at him. And then carefully, as if in slow motion, she climbed out of the boat, stood on the dock a second, looked at the city and then back down at Kennett. His face was chalky, his mouth open, straining, his eyes large and staring. His hand scrabbled along the deck, as though he were trying to get hold of it. “Lily . . .”
    “Say hello to Bekker,” she said.

CHAPTER
32
    O’Dell sat in his semidarkened office, an air of satisfaction about him, like a bullfrog who’d snapped up a particularly tasty fly. “I really don’t give a fuck what you think,” he told Lucas.
    “Which makes me want to come across the desk and slap the shit out of you,” Lucas snarled.
    “The New York jails aren’t pretty,” O’Dell said, mildly. “I could guarantee you a tour . . . .”
    Lucas shook his head. “Nah. You wouldn’t do that. I spent too much time with Red Reed. We had witnesses. So I slap the shit out of you, you put me in jail, and I tell the papers about Reed, and tell them that you hid a key witness in the murder of a well-known black politician. You’d be right in there with me.”
    O’Dell seemed to think about it for a minute, then sighed and half closed his heavy-lidded eyes. “All right. But look, if you’re gonna slap the shit out of me, why don’t we get it over with? I need some sleep.”
    They sat quietly for a minute, then Lucas said, “You know I won’t. But you owe me, God damn it. You gotme whacked by Kennett’s hoods. What I want to know is, how much was set up? Did you know it was Kennett? Is