Free Shadow Prey by John Sandford

everyone would be impossible, Lucas thought. The funeral had been too big and too many people were simply spectators. He noticed a white woman drifting along the edges of the crowd. She was taller than most women and a little heavy, he thought. She glanced his way, and from a distance, she was a sulky, dark-haired madonna, with an oval face and long heavy eyebrows.
    He was still following her progress through the fringe of the crowd when Sloan ambled up and said, “Hello, there.” Lucas turned to say hello. When he turned back to the funeral crowd a moment later, the dark-haired woman was gone.
    “You talk to Bluebird’s old lady?” Lucas asked.
    “I tried,” Sloan said. “I couldn’t get her alone. She had all these people around, saying, ‘Don’t talk to the cops, honey. Your man is a hero.’ They’re shutting her down.”
    “Maybe later, huh?”
    “Maybe, but I don’t think we’ll get much,” Sloan said. “Where’re you parked?”
    “Around the corner.”
    “So am I.” They picked their way between graves, down the shallow slope toward the street. Some of the graves were well tended, others were weedy. One limestone gravemarkerwas so old that the name had eroded away, leaving only the fading word FATHER. “I was talking to one of the people at her house. The guy said Bluebird hadn’t been around that much. In fact, he and his old lady were probably on the edge of breaking up,” Sloan said.
    “Not too promising,” Lucas agreed.
    “So what’re you doing?”
    “Running around picking up bullshit,” Lucas said. He looked one last time for the dark-haired woman but didn’t see her. “I’m headed over to the Point. Yellow Hand’s up there. Maybe he’s heard something more.”
    “It’s worth a try,” Sloan said, discouraged.
    “He’s my last shot. Nobody wants to talk.”
    “That’s what I get,” Sloan said. “They’re rootin’ for the other side.”
     
    The Point was a row of red-brick townhouses that had been converted to single-floor apartments. Lucas stepped inside the door, pushed it shut and sniffed. Boiled cabbage, a few days old. Canned corn. Oatmeal. Fish. He reached back to his hip, slipped the Heckler and Koch P7 out of its holster and put it in his sport coat pocket.
    Yellow Hand’s room was five floors up, in what had once been a common-storage attic. Lucas stopped on the landing at the fourth floor, caught his breath and finished the climb with his hand on the P7. The door at the top of the stairs was closed. He tried the knob without knocking, turned it and pushed the door open.
    A man was sitting on a mattress reading a copy of People magazine. An Indian, wearing a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, and jeans and white socks. An army field jacket lay next to the mattress, along with a pair of cowboy boots, a green ginger-ale can, another copy of People and a battered volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Lucas stepped inside.
    “Who are you?” the man asked. His forearms were tattooed—a rose inside a heart on the arm nearer to Lucas, an eagle’s wing on the other. Another mattress lay across the room with two people on it, asleep, a man and a woman. The man wore jockey shorts, the woman a rose-coloredrayon slip. Her dress lay neatly folded by the mattress and next to that were two chipped cups with a coil heater inside one of them. The floor was littered with scraps of paper, old magazines, empty food packages and cans. The room stank of marijuana and soup.
    “Cop,” said Lucas. He stepped fully into the room and looked off to his left. A third mattress. Yellow Hand, asleep. “Looking for Yellow Hand.”
    “He’s passed out,” said the tattooed man.
    “Drinking?”
    “Yeah.” The man rolled off the mattress and picked up his jacket. Lucas pointed a finger at him.
    “Stick around for a minute, okay?”
    “Sure, no problem. You got a cigarette?”
    “No.”
    The woman on the second mattress stirred, rolled onto her back