Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  When it was all washed and dried, she repacked and started out again, downtown this time, to the ladies’ room in the skyway. It was still early, and she had the place to herself. She washed in patches, at the sink, then got impatient, soaked the whole towel, retreated to one of the bathroom stalls, stripped, washed herself clean, and put on the clean clothes. The old clothes, the dirty clothes, she stuffed in the pack on top of the money. Everything went in the bag except the army coat, which was too big.

  Still nobody in the rest room.

  Taking a chance—if the cops caught you, they’d toss you back out on the street—she washed her hair in the rest-room sink, using hand soap from the dispenser. She patted her hair dry with paper towels and looked at herself in the mirror. She was presentable, but just barely. She looked, she thought, like a woman just back from three weeks in the wilderness. Or maybe six weeks. Or ten. But when she left the skyway restroom, she was mostly clean, and barely resembled the woman who’d gone in.

  On the way down the street, she took the dirty clothes out of her pack and dropped them in a trash basket. She carried the army coat, still unwilling to give it up.

  Her first stop was at a drugstore. Under the careful eye of a sales clerk, she bought deodorant, razor blades and a razor, fingernail clippers, tweezers, a hairbrush and comb, a bottle of soap, and two tubes of lipstick. She was about to check out when she caught sight of herself in a mirror on a Camel’s display; she went back into the store and bought a bottle of moisturizing lotion.

  The next stop was the Westerway Motel, where she’d stayed three or four times when she had the money, before she hit bottom. The place was dank, the beds were crappy, but the price was right and the showers were just as good as the showers at the Radisson. Most important, they’d let her in.

  At the Westerway, she stood in the shower for fifteen minutes. She would have taken a bath, but the tub was so grimy that it frightened her. Besides, somebody had stolen the drain plug. Who in the fuck, she wondered, jabbing at the furry hole with her big toe, would steal a drain plug? Never mind. When she was thoroughly clean, she began grooming herself. Nothing she could do about her hair, she thought: she looked like a witch.

  Clean, dry, nails clipped, deodorized, and moisturized, she headed downtown. Stopped at a bank, where she changed three hundreds into twenties. Passed a test, too: a woman rubbed one of the hundreds with a test pen, and they were fine. If they’d been fake, Trey thought, she’d have had a heart attack.

  She would catch a cab, she thought, and head up to a sporting-goods store across the highway from the Miller Hill Mall, and buy a real pack, the kind young women sometimes traveled with. An expensive one.

  On the way down the street, she passed Hair Today, and saw the sign in the window that said, “We Take Walk-Ins,” and she walked in.

  By noon, she had a cut and a ’do that would take her anyplace in Minnesota; she still had that burned-out, feral face, but you couldn’t see that from behind.

  And by two o’clock, she had a new backpack full of new clothes from the Miller Hill Mall, two delicate pearl earrings, and a selection of expensive facial creams and moisturizers.

  Back at the Westerway, she gathered up the few remaining pieces of her old identity, her old pack and the coat, and carried them out to a trash can. As she was about to dump them in, she saw Mary Wheaton rattling down the street with her cart.

  The coat, she thought, was perfectly good . . .

  “Mary . . .”

  The older woman turned and looked and kept going. Trey caught up with her: “Mary. You want my coat?”

  Wheaton looked at her nearsightedly, then looked at the coat. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m . . . just a person. You want the coat?”

  Wheaton took the coat, shook it, looked at it, and said, “You don’t want it?”

  “No more.”

  Wheaton nodded, put the coat in the cart, and rattled away without a backward glance. She and Trey had talked a dozen times, and Wheaton knew her. This time she showed no sign of recognition.

  Back at the Westerway, she looked in the mirror: she was changing, she thought. She tried to spot one thing that made the difference, but finally decided it wasn’t one thing—it was a haircut that looked paid for, rather than done with manicure scissors or a knife; it was a face that looked cared for, instead of desert dry and flaking; it was an uprightness.

  The next morning she left the Westerway, walked downtown, and caught a cab to the airport. She didn’t have a reservation, so she had to sit in the terminal for six hours, until she got a seat on a Northwest flight to Minneapolis.

  She took a cab from the airport to the University of Minnesota, where she bought a used Corolla for cash from a Lebanese graduate student who seemed nothing less than grateful for the money. Not a great car, with 85,000 miles, but it would do. As soon as she got the paper on it, she’d trade up: changing $50,000 into usable money wasn’t all that easy, but she knew a few tricks from her doper days.

  From Minneapolis, she moved on to Hudson, Wisconsin, on the Minnesota border twelve miles from St. Paul, where she knew a motel that would take cash, and wouldn’t ask to see a credit card. Again, not a great place, but she was developing a base.

  The next move: an apartment in the city, a bank account, and credit card applications. She saw the applications everywhere, and took them.

  SHE WAS STILL in Hudson, waiting to be approved for an apartment in suburban St. Paul, when she sat down to eat French toast and link sausages in the Hudson Country Kitchen, and opened the paper to the story from Duluth.

  Mary Wheaton was dead . . .

  She sat and leaked tears for a while, read the rest of the story, looked at photographs of the cops standing outside her old hut in Duluth, then firmed up and finished her breakfast.

  She’d go see about the apartment, and then she’d think.

  Something had to be done.

  8

  LUCAS WOKE WITH A START.

  There was a noise somewhere, in the room. The room was dimly lit, the light coming from cracks at the sides of the blackout curtain, so it must be after dawn. He glanced at the illuminated face of the bedside clock: eight in the morning. The sound wasn’t threatening, there was no intruder in the room, but what . . . ?

  He groped until he found the bedside light, turned it on. The sound was coming from the telephone: not a ring, but a low, strangled jingle, as if somebody had punched the phone in the solar plexus and it hadn’t gotten its voice back.

  He picked it up. “Yeah?” His voice sounded like a rusty coffin hinge in a horror movie.

  “You told me to call,” Reasons said. “I’m just leaving my house.”

  He stifled the impulse to moan. “Is there any air outside?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’ll be down in the lobby in twenty minutes. Did you call Nadya?”

  “Yup. She sounds like she’s been up for a while.”

  “I have been too, I’ve been up for hours,” Lucas said. He yawned. He’d never been an early riser. “I was doing my push-ups.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Reasons said.

  LUCAS CLEANED UP, put on a fresh shirt and sport coat, got a bottle of Diet Coke from the machine down the hall, and found Nadya and Reasons standing opposite the elevator doors in the lobby.

  “Breakfast?” Reasons asked, looking at the Coke.

  “Of champions,” Lucas said. Then he had to explain to Nadya. “See, there was this cereal, there still is this cereal . . .”

  When he was finished explaining, she didn’t see why it was funny.

  “Well, it wasn’t, very.”

  “Give it up,” Reasons said.

  Lucas asked Nadya, “Did you hear anything about the computer?”

  “No. The question is traveling through the bureaucracy.”

  THE RANGE IS the remnant of both an ancient sea and an ancient mountain range, more or less an hour northwest of Duluth; it’s the largest iron-ore lode in the U.S. T
he Range runs from northeast to southwest, and sitting atop it is a string of small iron-mining cities—Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Biwabik, Hibbing. The cities are cold, hardworking, blue-collar, economically depressed, and addicted to hockey.

  The town of Virginia was straight up Highway 53 from Duluth, across gently rolling countryside covered with birch and aspen—some of the aspen just beginning to turn yellow—interspersed with blue-and-green-colored fir, spruce, tamarack, and occasional rigidly ordered stands of plantation pine. Lucas drove and Reasons played with the navigation system for a while, and finally said, “So what?”

  “It works when you’re trying to find an address,” Lucas said. “Out on the open highway, it doesn’t do much. Tells you what direction you’re traveling.”

  “Does this cost extra?” Nadya asked.

  “A little bit,” Lucas said.

  “A lot,” Reasons said.

  “If it doesn’t help, why do you have it?”

  “It looks neat,” Reasons said.

  Nadya yawned, and went back to the New York Times, while working methodically through three bottles of spring water. She’d gotten a teensy bit in the bag the night before, drinking two vodka martinis without any rest after the trip. “Help me sleep,” she’d muttered as Reasons and Lucas steered her out of the elevator down to her door.

  She’d complained of dehydration as they were leaving Duluth, so they stopped for the water and the newspapers, and both Reasons, with the Star Tribune, and Nadya, with the Times, took turns reading bits and pieces to Lucas. When they were finished with the paper, Reasons and Nadya began a kind of teasing chatter.

  Lucas, looking between them, thought, Hmmm.

  VIRGINIA’S DOWNTOWN SECTION was made up of five long blocks of 1900-era red-and-yellow-brick two- and three-story buildings. Inside the five blocks, as Lucas remembered them, you could find anything you needed and most of what you wanted: you could eat American or Mexican, get drunk, acquire a tattoo, wreck your car, get busted, hire a lawyer, and get your car fixed without going off the street. You could get saved by Jesus on a Wednesday evening and then walk a hundred feet across the way and get a dirty magazine; you could buy a Jenn-Air range or a Sub-Zero refrigerator or a used paperback, a homemade quilt or a doughnut, a chain saw or an ice-cream cone or a pack of Gitanes or Players. There was an ample supply of bars, ranging from places where you’d take your aged Aunt Sally to outright dives.

  Lucas had always thought it might be the best main drag in Minnesota, and maybe the whole Midwest. He’d visited the place a dozen times between eighth grade and his senior year in high school, as a hockey player, and remembered with some fondness the brutally cold nights after the games when he and a half dozen friends went out looking for underage beer and hot women. They’d never gone home dry, and, as far as Lucas knew, nobody had ever gotten laid, despite expansive and ingenious lies about close calls, about barmaids and Virginia cheerleaders.

  They arrived a little before ten o’clock in the morning. He was happy to see the street was still intact.

  SPIVAK’S TAP WAS halfway down the ranks from cocktail lounge to dive. They parked in front, and got out, the sun hot on their backs despite the cool air, and Nadya said, “More signs.”

  “What’s this thing you’ve got for signs?” Reasons asked.

  “I have nothing for signs, but there are so many,” she said. “Most people here, most men, have signs on their shirts. Why do you need so many signs?”

  Reasons said, “Beats the hell out of me.”

  Lucas looked up at the front of the bar. “This guy—his name is Spivak?”

  Reasons had called the owner the night before, and told him that they were coming, but not the purpose of the visit. He said, “Right. Anthony Spivak.”

  Nadya asked, “He will have a toilet here, yes?” and Lucas said, “Yes,” and they followed Reasons inside.

  SPIVAK’S WAS an unembarrassed beer joint, with clunky plank floors, a long mahogany bar, jars of pickled eggs and pigs’ feet, two dozen booths with high backs upholstered in red leatherette, an area near a jukebox where you could dance, if you were so inclined, a couple of stuffed muskies, and an old, six-foot-long painting of a plump pink nude woman behind the bar, holding a strategically placed white ostrich feather. Lucas remembered both the painting and the feather.

  Spivak was sitting at the end of the bar with a spiral notebook, a calculator, and a beer. He was a broad, short man, with a square pink face, square yellow teeth, and white hair growing out of his head, ears, and nose. He had a fat nose that looked as though it had been broken a couple of times. A blond woman with tired eyes stood behind the bar, taking glasses out of a stainless-steel sink, wiping them dry with a bar towel. Two guys in ball caps and plaid shirts sat in one of the booths, talking over their beers.

  When they walked in, Spivak looked up, closed the spiral notebook, and asked, “Are you the folks from Duluth?”

  “Yeah.” Reasons nodded. He introduced Lucas and Nadya. Lucas raised a hand and Nadya nodded.

  “Come on in the back,” Spivak said. They followed him past the rest rooms, which had signs that said SETTERS and POINTERS, and which had to be explained to Nadya, who then disappeared into Setters; and then into the back, where four long tables were scattered among sixteen chairs in a party room. They took a table and Spivak cleared some chairs and said, “Could I get you something—on the house?”

  “Ah, no, thanks,” Reasons said. “We needed to talk to you about something that happened up here last week, but we’ve got to wait until Nadya gets back.”

  “She’s got an accent,” Spivak said, as they settled in at the table. “Where she from?”

  “Russia.”

  “Russia.” The corners of his mouth turned down as his eyebrows went up. “Huh. She’s not a cop?”

  “Yeah, she is,” said Lucas. “She’s part of this whole . . . We’ll tell you about it in a minute.” He looked around: “I used to come here as a kid—it hasn’t changed much. Did the can always say Setters and Pointers?”

  Spivak said, “A long time ago, it used to say Bucks and Does, but then in the seventies, some Indian guys said ‘Bucks’ was racist, so my dad changed it.”

  “But bucks means . . . deer bucks, right?”

  “Well, yeah, but, you know, it was the seventies, Jane Fonda, all that,” Spivak said. “And we used to get quite a few guys from Nett Lake in here drinking, they worked in the mines . . .”

  “Nett Lake is an Indian reservation,” Reasons told Lucas, who said, “I know.”

  Spivak asked Lucas, “You used to come in here?”

  “Yeah, playing hockey. We were always going around looking for beer afterwards.”

  “You probably got a few here,” Spivak said. “Dad always thought that if you were old enough to skate, a little beer wouldn’t hurt you. When was this?”

  “Late seventies.”

  Spivak nodded. “I would’ve missed you—I was the sixties. Things were different back then . . . So are the Wild gonna do anything this year?”

  THEY TALKED HOCKEY for a couple of minutes, until Nadya came back, and when she was seated, Reasons said to Spivak, using his formal cop explanatory voice, “About fifteen days ago, a Russian guy came in here and apparently got together with some people at a meeting here in your bar. We’d like to know what you remember about that.”

  Spivak frowned. “A Russian? I don’t remember a Russian specifically.”

  “He was a tough-looking guy in a leather jacket, heavy five-o’clock shadow, big square head like a milk carton,” Lucas said. “Looked like a mean sonofabitch.”

  “You were sure he was here?” Spivak asked uncertainly.

  “We got an American Express card receipt from here,” Reasons said. “For a hundred and forty-five dollars.”

  “Ohhh . . .” Spivak’s eyebrows went up again, but his eyes slid away. “Yeah. Okay. In fact, they were sitting right here. There must have been five or six guys. I didn’t know the guy was Russia
n, though.”

  “What’d they do?”

  Spivak shrugged: “Drank. Talked. In English, not Russian. What I remember was, when they were finished, they all tossed some money in a pot and the one guy, he must’ve been your Russian, collected the money, and then paid with his Amex. I mean, I was thinking it was sort of a scam, somebody would get stuck with an expense account when all the guys paid for themselves.”

  “We need specifics,” Lucas said. “Did you know any of them?”

  “No. Didn’t know a single one.” He frowned. “That’s a little unusual. This is mostly a town joint. But it happens. We get tourists, whatever. Fishermen on their way north to Canada, sometimes they meet up here.”

  “They were Americans,” Nadya said.

  “Yeah, I guess. They spoke English. They looked like they were from around here.”

  “Were they talking about their families, or their business, or what?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know, I didn’t pay any attention. Let me think.” He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tipped his head back. After a moment, he opened his eyes and said, slowly, “Okay. When I was in here, most of the time it was the Russian guy and another guy who were doing the talking. The guy in the leather jacket. The other guy was like a big lumberjack-looking guy, plaid shirt, big shoulders, red hair. The other guys, I don’t know—they looked like guys. One of them had a Green Bay hat.”

  “What is this?” Nadya asked Lucas.

  “Sports team hat,” Lucas said, watching Spivak, his eyes, listening to his voice. Spivak was lying to them for some reason.

  They pressed him, but the barkeep gave them nothing more. The people at the meeting were, he said, “just a bunch of guys. Didn’t disturb anybody, didn’t get drunk, came, drank, paid, and left. I wish I had more of them like that.”

  Lucas asked, “Who all was working that night. Could we get a list?”

  “Well, I guess. I’d have to go back and look,” he said reluctantly. “We don’t use everybody every night . . .”