Free Broken Prey by John Sandford Page A

love affairs.”
    “But straight: male on female.”
    “Straight. Sanders says no-way, no-how would Rice ever have gotten friendly with a gay guy. But I figure, you could meet some bad people at the Rockyard. There’s always a little shit going through there, a little cocaine, a little meth, and you could probably buy yourself an untraceable pistol if you asked just right.”
    “All right. We just went past there. We’ll hit it on the way back.”
    “Good.”
    “Anybody gonna give us shit?” Lucas asked.
    “No, no, it’s not that tough. It’s just a little . . . sleazy.”
    “With some guys who like to fight.”
    “Occasionally.”

6
    OWATONNA IS A SMALL CITY known to a few architecture buffs for a Louis Sullivan jewel-box bank. They got lost for a while, running down edge-of-town streets, and finally found Charlie Pope’s trailer in a weedy mobile-home park down a dead-end road.
    Pope’s trailer was a mess. An aging Airstream travel-trailer, once silver, it had been hit by something—a falling tree?—that had put a dent across the top; the whole thing sat maybe five degrees off level, the tires shot, steel wheels visible through the rotting rubber. Weeds grew window-high around it, and a box elder tree flaked bark, leaves, and red bugs onto it.
    As they pulled into the trailer park’s visitor parking lot, a blade-thin black cat ran out from one of the other homes, paused, one foot in the air, to look at them, and then disappeared into the brush behind Pope’s place. Some of the mobile homes in the park were well kept, with neatly cut yards; most were not. Either way, Pope’s place was the neighborhood slum.
     
    MARK FOX WAS SITTING on the hood of his Jeep, which was tucked in an overgrown parking slot next to Pope’s trailer. Fox was a tall, thin, cowboy-looking guy with a weathered face, black roper boots, a black T-shirt, and a denim jacket and jeans. He was smoking a cigarette when they pulled up. He crushed it into a rust spot on the hood of the Jeep as they got out of the Porsche.
    “Must’ve been more money coming out of the legislature than I thought, cops riding around in a Porsche,” he said as they shook hands.
    Lucas shrugged: “Guy’s gotta have a four-wheel drive to get around in, this part of the country.”
    Sloan rolled his eyes and said, “We know the guy for three seconds and the bullshit starts . . . This is Pope’s place?”
    Fox looked at the trailer and said, “Yup. Such as it is. Come on in.”
    “I sorta know why he ran for it,” Sloan said. “If I lived here, I’d run for it, too.”
    “Ah, it’s different inside,” Fox said. “It’s worse.”
     
    HE TOOK THEM INSIDE. A sour odor of human dirt hung about the place, with a underlying tone of sewage: there might be a cracked sewer pipe somewhere, or something wrong with the septic system. Sloan said, wrinkling his nose, “Smells like an armpit with an onion in it.”
    Fox: “Or an asshole.”
    “Hold that thought,” Lucas said.
    The three of them were too much for the tiny kitchen, and Fox continued six feet down the trailer into a nominal living room. The kitchen was made of dented metal cupboards, a stove the size of a breadboard, and a yellowed microwave. Fox said, “When he cut the bracelet off, he left it here on the floor. No sign of him. I put out a bulletin but never heard back from anybody.”
    “Nobody’s seen him here in the park?”
    “I checked, nobody’s seen him—and if he’d been here, they would have. He was a hard guy to miss.”
    “And the park’s about the size of my dick,” Sloan said.
    “Everybody assumes he took off,” Fox said. “But, as far as anybody knows, he doesn’t have a car.”
    “No car,” Lucas said. He glanced at Sloan, who shook his head. If he didn’t have a car, how was he moving around?
    “Not as far as I know,” Fox said. “He rides the buses. Charlie hasn’t made enough since he got back to buy much. Last time we talked, he said he was