Free Rules of Prey by John Sandford

the net worried him. He thought of his street people as a garden that needed constant cultivation—money, threats, immunity, even friendship—lest the weeds of temptation begin to sprout.
     
    At noon Lucas called Anderson and was told that the meeting had been set.
    “Four o’clock?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ll see you before that. Talk it over.”
    “Okay.”
    He ate lunch at a McDonald’s on University Avenue, sharing it with a junkie who nodded and nodded and finally fell asleep in his french fries. Lucas left him slumped over the table. The pimple-faced teenager behind the counter watched the bum with the half-hung eyes of a sixteen-year-old who had already seen everything and was willing to leave it alone.
    Ruiz’ warehouse studio was ten minutes away, a shabby brick cube with industrial-style windows that looked like dirty checkerboards. The only elevator was designed for freightand was driven by another teenager, this one with a complexion as vacant as his eyes and a boombox the size of a coffee table. Lucas rode the elevator up five stories, found Ruiz’ door, and rapped on it. Carla Ruiz looked out at him over the door chain and he showed her the gold shield.
    “Where’s the rose?” she asked. Lucas had the shield in one hand and a briefcase in the other.
    “Hey, I forgot. Supposed to be in my teeth, right?” Lucas grinned at her. She smiled back a small smile and unhooked the chain.
    “I’m a mess,” she said as she opened the door. She had an oval face and brilliant white teeth to go with her dark eyes and shoulder-length black hair. She was wearing a loose peasant blouse over a bright Mexican skirt. The gun-sight gash on her forehead was still healing, an angry red weal around the ragged black line of the cut. Bruises around her eyes and on one side of her face had faded from black-and-blue to a greenish yellow.
    Lucas stepped inside and pocketed the shield. As she closed the door he looked closely at her face, reaching out with an index finger to turn her chin up.
    “They’re okay,” he said. “Once they turn yellow, they’re on the way out. Another week and they’ll be gone.”
    “The cut won’t be.”
    “Look at this,” Lucas said, tracing the scar line down his forehead and across his eye socket. “When it happened, this wire fishing leader was buried right in my face. Now all that’s left is the line. Yours will be thinner. With some bangs, nobody’ll ever see it.”
    Suddenly aware of how close they were standing, Ruiz stepped back and then walked around him into the studio.
    “I’ve been interviewed about six times,” she said, touching the cut on her forehead. “I think I’m talked out.”
    “That’s okay,” said Lucas. “I don’t work quite like the other guys. My questions will be a little different.”
    “I read about you in the paper,” she said. “The story said you’ve killed five people.”
    Lucas shrugged. “It’s not that I wanted to.”
    “It seems like a lot. My ex-husband’s father was a policeman. He never shot his gun at anybody in his whole career.”
    “What can I tell you?” Lucas said. “I’ve been working in areas where it happens. If you work mostly in burglary or homicide, you can go a whole career without ever firing your gun. If you work in dope or vice, it’s different.”
    “Okay.”
    She pulled a dinette chair out from a table and gestured at it, and sat on the other side. “What do you want to know?”
    “Do you feel safe?” he asked as he put his briefcase on the table and opened it.
    “I don’t know. They say he got in by slipping the locks, so the landlord put on all new locks. The policeman who was here said they’re good. And they gave me a phone and I have a special alarm code for 911. I just say ‘Carla’ and the cops are supposed to come running. The station is just across the street. Everybody in the building knows what happened and everybody’s looking for strangers. But you know . . . I don’t feel all