"It's that fuckin' Randy Whitcomb," he said. "The fancy man."

"You know him?" Marshall asked.

Lucas nodded and said, "Yeah… it's not really that big a town. You hang around here long enough, and you get to know a lot of the characters."

"You think he could…?"

Lucas shrugged. "Randy could do almost anything. He's a fuckin' pimp, we know he beats the shit out of his girls from time to time, and he's cut up a couple of them. Probably has killed somebody, or even a couple of people."

"Crazy motherfucker," Del agreed from the back. "But…"

"Yeah. Not really his style. The guy we're looking for is nuts, but he's under control, deliberate. Randy's completely out of control," Lucas said. "The other thing is, he would have been too young when your niece was taken. Randy's still gotta be in his early twenties. Twenty-one, twenty-two."

"So maybe he was just passing the jewelry along."

"If he only took three hundred for it, for the necklace and the ring, then he probably got it for free, or the next thing to it. If Randy didn't do it, the guy who gave him the jewelry knows who did."

"So we look up this Randy," Marshall said comfortably. "We find him, we're right there."

"Trouble is, the word was going around that Randy moved to L.A.," Del said. "He's supposedly been gone for a couple of months."

"Gotta find him," Lucas said. "He's a key."

"Somebody's gotta find him," Del said. "Not you."

Lucas nodded. "Okay."

Marshall picked up the interplay. "What happened?"

"I once arrested Randy a little too enthusiastically," Lucas said. "It created a situation."

Del snorted. "Shit. It got your ass fired, is what it did. Randy looked like a carpet that had been beat with an ax."

"But you're back," said Marshall. "You got unfired."

"Just about took an act of God," Del said. To Lucas: "But I'll get him. I'll look up some of his pals tonight and confer with them."

"I'm coming," said Marshall.

"You don't have any-"

"I don't give a shit," Marshall said. "I'm coming."

Del nodded. "Okay. You can watch. Gonna catch us a fancy man."

14

RANDY WHITCOMB, HIS clothes aside, resembled a photograph of a Civil War soldier: pale, rawboned, head slightly misshapen-not distorted, exactly, but simply lopsided-thin nose, broken a time or two, thin lips, crooked teeth, the skin of his face touched with pocks, the result of an early and violent encounter with acne.

He looked like a mean white hillbilly. He didn't let that stop him.

Randy Whitcomb was a fancy man. He liked blackthorn walking sticks with gold-nugget heads, big broad-rimmed llama-felt hats, gold chains, and red sport coats with black collars spiked with gold threads. Tall boots made of alligator skin, with three-inch heels. Moleskin pants. Not just cars: motorcars.

He'd driven a crimson Jaguar for a while in L.A.-a short while, before both the car and L.A. got too hot-and carefully called it a "Jag-u-war," a pronunciation he picked up from a radio advertisement. Randy thought he was a black pimp, though he was, in fact, a white boy from the suburbs of Minneapolis. His background didn't keep him from talking ghetto-black and laying down lines of hip-hop when he had a little crack rolling through his veins.

Randy was twenty-two but looked forty-two, with lines in his forehead, at his eyes, slashing down his cheeks. Cocaine, speed, PCP, all that shit will make you old. Randy sold dope, ran an occasional whore, and was James Qatar's fence.

Through some process that Qatar didn't totally understand, Randy would exchange jewelry and other high-value stolen goods-handguns, mostly-for dope out of Chicago. He would peddle some of the dope and eat the rest.

The stolen jewelry sold in Chicago for half of what it was worth, Randy said, and the Chicago people gave Randy only half of what they could get for it. So Randy could only give Qatar half of what he could get from the Chicago people-an eighth of the real value. But that was crime, Qatar thought. That's the way things worked.

"You get me guns instead of this other shit, I get you real money," he said. "None of this half-and-half-and-half shit with a good nine-millimeter." But Qatar wouldn't touch handguns: Handguns could be traced with minute precision.

Qatar had met Randy through an improbable accident: A hip marketing professor who did a little cocaine had put them together on the back porch of his house during a Fourth of July barbecue, dropping a broad hint that Randy was a criminal friend. Then Randy and Qatar had embarked on a complicated, circumspect conversation, which ended with Qatar asking about underground jewelry sales.

"I can do that," Randy said. "I got the connection down to Chicago."

"Chicago."

"That's where the boys are," Randy said.

"Okay… Do you have a card?"

Randy's forehead furrowed, and Qatar thought he might have blushed. "You think I should?"

"Well, I'd like to get in touch with you, maybe," Qatar said. "Nothing stolen, but I would like to get rid of it quietly."

"If it ain't stolen, you'd be stupid to sell it to me. You could just take it to a jewel store. Get a lot more for it."

"I need to keep it very quiet. If a jeweler up here ever put it in an estate sale, and my in-laws ever saw it, I'd be in real trouble."

Randy saw through it-the stuff was stolen-but if Qatar wanted to bullshit, that was his problem. "I give you my cell phone number," he said. "By the by… where would I go to get a card?"

The next time they met, Randy had business cards, and Qatar had gotten $1,500 for what he supposed was ten or twelve thousand dollars' worth of mediocre jewelry he'd taken off a woman from Iowa.

What Qatar didn't know was that Randy really didn't have a fencing connection in Chicago; he sold it on the street in Minneapolis, to whoever would take it. What Qatar didn't know wouldn't hurt him, Randy thought. Besides, why should he give a shit about Qatar?

QATAR HAD CALLED Randy's beeper in the afternoon and had gotten an address in St. Paul, on Selby. He wouldn't be home until late, Randy said. After midnight.

Qatar looked at his watch when he arrived outside Randy's. Ten past twelve. Randy lived in a yuppie-looking town house, gray and white, in a long line of town houses that looked like they'd had government design input. The place was not what Qatar expected.

But Randy answered the door. He was wearing a red silk dressing robe and had a brown-tinted joint stuck in an onyx cigarette holder. His mouth was an angry slash. "Who d'fuck are you?" he asked.

"Uh, Randy, I called…" Qatar stepped back, half turned.

"Shit you called. What'd you call about?" Randy's eyes seemed fogged; he was wrong, and it was more than a little hash. Qatar backed away another step.

Randy took a step after him, and Qatar looked quickly up and down the street. He didn't need this. "This afternoon I called. I've got some jewelry."

The fog seemed to lift an inch. "Jim," he said. "You're Jim."

"I better go… You look like you need some sleep."

Randy suddenly laughed, a long, deep rolling peal, as though he were an aged blues singer doing a cameo in a white movie. "Don't need no sleep. I don't need no sleep." He turned angry. "You sayin' I need sleep?"

"Listen…"

"C'mon. In." Randy had stepped close, and he caught Qatar's arm just above the elbow. His hand felt like a mechanical claw. "Got the slick crib. Wait'll you see inside. You're Jim, Jim."

Qatar was dragged along, afraid to protest, into the town house and up a flight of stairs. "Mostly garage down there," Randy said. At the top of the stairs, he said, "Check it out."

Qatar whistled, genuinely amazed.

Scarlet flocked-wallpapered walls were punctuated by three faux-antique mirrors with foam-plastic frames painted to resemble gilded wood. A fifty-two-inch widescreen TV was pushed against one wall, sitting on a black furry rug in front of a white furry couch. On the wall to the left of the TV was a fireplace with a steel surround. Ertй graphics hung everywhere.