"Yeah. Anyway, we’re gonna keep you here today at least, over-
night, and maybe tomorrow, depending,” the doc said. “There was some crap in the wound, material from your jeans. I got it pretty clean, but we want to watch it.”
“Is it gonna hurt?"
"On a scale of one to ten, about a five, to start, then going to a three, and then fading away,” the surgeon said. “But it’ll go away pretty quick. You’ll be good as new in a couple of weeks. Or three or four. Depending.”
Weather showed up. She’d gone home when Lucas had been given a sleeping aid the night before, mostly to comfort the kids, and hustled back in as the surgeon was leaving. They talked for two minutes, out of Lucas’s earshot, and he heard them laughing, and then Weather came in and said, “You stay in bed all day, and all night, pee in a bottle like a good boy, and maybe go home tomorrow.”
“What were you laughing about?” Lucas asked. “Ah, nothing."
"What?"
"Ah, it’s pretty funny."
"What’s funny?"
"Well, they didn’t know what they were going to have to do to you last night, so when they put you on the table, they scrubbed you up and… shaved. You got what we call a winky cut.”
“Aww…” Lucas pulled the robe apart and looked. A nether Mohawk, actually, both sides shaved, with a strip left up the middle. “Awww, man…”
They gave him Egg Beaters and a muffin for breakfast, which the breakfast lady said was heart- healthy, but seemed to Lucas to be nutrition deadly. There couldn’t have been more than fifty calories in it.
“Quit complaining,” Weather said. “There are little children starving in Texas.”
Anson showed up at eight o’clock, as Weather was gathering up her purse to leave. She stayed to listen. Lucas told the story again, in minute detail and gave Anson his car keys, and Anson said he’d have a cop drive the Porsche over to Lucas’s place. “He might want to take a dogleg through Milwaukee, first. He’s kind of a motorhead,” he said, and Lucas said, “He probably shouldn’t; I’m not in that good a mood.”
“You saw the shooter."
"Yeah, but I couldn’t positively identify him if I saw him again,” Lucas said. “I saw him twice, once when he stuck his head in the door, and once in the alley. He had a mustache and sunglasses, and the sunglasses should have tipped me off… In the alley, I only got to look at him for half a second before I started tap- dancing.”
And he remembered: “By the way, about two minutes after I got shot, in the ambulance, I called Alyssa Austin. She was at home.”
“So she’s not the fairy,” Anson said. “She could be, but then the woman in the alley wasn’t. And I have no idea who else she’d be, or the guy with the mustache, or why they’d want to shoot at me. I’ll tell you something else: I think the mustache might have been a Halloween mustache. I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking about when he looked at me in the bar, and there was something wrong with it.”
Anson had heard about the raid on Antsy Toms and wondered if the shooter might have been a Lithuanian crazy, getting some payback. But they couldn’t figure out how one of Antsy’s pals would know that Lucas would be at the A1.
“One of the Goths might have called the shooter when I came in-and it’s possible that they thought that I was you,” Lucas told Anson. “You were walking around talking to all those guys today… you might want to take it a little easy.”
“I’ll think about that,” Anson said.
“So what’d you get out of the alley?"
"No shells, so the guy was using a revolver. A.38. We’ve got three slugs, two of them pretty bad ricochets-he seemed to be shooting way low, we’ve got at least one hit right about where your feet would have been. The third one was higher and went into a nice soft wood two- by- four at the corner of the door. It’s in pretty good shape, so if we can find the pistol, we can match it up.”
“Excellent,” Lucas said. “And we got a half- assed witness,” Anson said. “A guy walking back home with a sandwich heard the shots, and he looked back down the street and saw two people running, one tall and one short, man and a woman. Just what you saw. He also saw their vehicle. He doesn’t know what kind, but it was a pickup.”
“That’s something,” Lucas said. “But not much.” When Anson was gone, Weather asked, “Antsy Toms? What was that?” But Lucas had drifted away from her, rerunning the shooting in his head. The shooter had been too far from him-too far for accurate shooting. Probably sixty or seventy feet. Lucas could see him jerking at the trigger with each shot, the gun barrel all over the place.
And in that mind’s-eye image, Lucas counted off the shots: he’d been shot at, he thought, six times, and hit once. He might have been hit in the head or the heart or he might not have been hit at all-the shooter was a fuckin’ amateur, and he’d been nervous and probably scared and maybe desperate.
What had Lucas done to make anybody desperate? “Antsy Toms,” Weather repeated. “Isn’t he the guy who beat up those officers?”HIS BOSS, Rose Marie Roux, came by for a look: “Jesus, Lucas, you’re supposed to be the brains of the operation. You’re not supposed to get shot in alleys. Not any more. Those days are over.”
“Hey, I didn’t go looking for it.” He got the flash again: the guy’s hand pumping out the bullets. How long? A second and a half?
“Then what were you doing in the alley?"
"Working. And this isn’t much-shit, I’ve been hurt worse than this doing home repair,” he said. The governor’s chief hatchet man called, and Carol, his secretary, called, crying, and then Del stopped by, and the governor himself called. Del wanted to look at the bullet hole, but was satisfied by looking at the bruising. “Nasty. But remember that time Gutmann got shot through both cheeks of his ass…?”
Alyssa Austin called, and wanted to come see him, but he told her he was too tired.
Lucas spent much of the day watching TV and reading the papers, saw pictures of himself on all the nightly newscasts-top story on two stations-and tried to think about the case, but found himself sleeping, instead. The photo kit of the fairy was featured as the possible Female Assassin, and a Goth, interviewed at the shooting site behind the A1, described her as gorgeous, and the TV guy inflated that to “mysterious raven-haired beauty.”
Weather came and went. Sometimes, her chair was empty, and he’d close his eyes for just a second, and when he opened them, she’d be there.
After a second restless night, the surgeon came in at the end of his shift, looked at the wound, pronounced it not bad, and told him that he could go home, but he’d still have to be signed off by the medicine guy, who’d given him a couple of prescriptions for pain pills. The wound itself was a harsh line of stitches, purple and black, and around it, a bruise the size of his hand, and growing.
He had Egg Beaters again, and read stories about himself in the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune. Ruffe, the crime reporter, had taken care of him, but the editorial page had done a snide, “Davenport, Again” story, which recalled that Lucas had once beaten up a pimp and had had to leave the Minneapolis police force for a while. The paper did not mention that the pimp had church- keyed one of Lucas’s street sources.
Weather showed up and said, “They redid that story about me doing the tracheotomy.”
“Yeah, I saw.” The story about him getting shot in the throat by a little girl, his life saved with a pocketknife… Hardly ever thought about that anymore, but when he touched his throat, he could still feel the scar that Weather had left behind. She asked him once if he’d married her because of it, and he’d grinned and said, “No, but if you hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have married you.”
“What?"
"Think about it.”
He finally got out at 11 A.M., wheeled to Weather’s car in a wheelchair, given a crutch for the last four feet. In the car, as he settled down, she said, “If you were a little smarter, I’d worry about post- traumatic shock.” Her eyes caught his when she said it.
&nb
sp; “That’s no way to talk to a patient,” he said. The fact was, he hurt more this second morning than he had the first morning- after. His leg now felt as though he’d been hit with a baseball bat, rather than a pointer. He was grateful for the painkillers.
He stayed home for the day, and made the housekeeper lie for him: when the phone rang, and it was media, she told them he was at work. He first lay in bed and then on the couch in the living room, and read a book called The Seasons of Tulul, by Egon Lass, about living with Bedouins, and a cop novel, Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill.
He couldn’t get comfortable with the leg, and the housekeeper bothered him with food, as though she were feeding a favored canary. The pain in the leg seemed to be diminishing when he made two trips to the bathroom, but flared up again late in the day.
They all ate dinner together, and Letty talked about bullet wounds she’d seen, which were numerous, considering her age, and compared his current wound to a hangnail.
He snapped at her: “It might be a hangnail, but it hurts like hell,” and she suddenly got teary, and pushed away from the table and stalked out of the room and when he called, “Hey,” she called back, “I was just trying to cheer you up.”
Weather said, “Ah, jeez,” and Sam exhaled and looked suddenly sad.
“Better tomorrow,” Lucas said. Another restless night, but this time, thinking about Letty and Sam. The third morning after the shooting, the pain was still there, but more of an ache, like a bruise, than a cutting pain; like the pain you get forty- five seconds after being hit by a fastball. Weather redressed the wound and pronounced him improved. The wound had sealed, with no obvious inflammation showing, and she said that it was superficial and shouldn’t be dangerous.
“Good. I’m going downtown."
"Take the truck,” she said. “You won’t want to use a clutch.” Letty made a point of kissing him on the forehead before she left, which really did make him feel better, if elderly. Sam ran into a wall and creased an eyebrow and thought not much of it. Sam ran into things a lot and called the subsequent wounds “bimps.”
Before he left, he read the Star Tribune’s second- day story about the shooting, which was a rewrite of the first day’s, leaving out the history, and adding only that the police had learned nothing more.
The Star- Tribune had asked the governor for a comment, and he’d said, “Sometimes, in these matters, we have to take risks, and sometimes we get hurt. I’m told Lucas is already on his feet, and I expect he’ll get right back out there and nail this guy.” The governor sounded as though he’d been behind Lucas’s left shoulder, with a gun in his hand.
He got the crutch and went out to the truck.
Lucas limped into the office and Carol asked, “Oh my God, what are you doing here?”
“Working."
"That crutch looks like a waste of time.” He looked at it. “Yeah.” He called Austin: “I’ve got to see you, the earlier the better. Where are you?"
"In my car, I’m almost at the Wanderwood location, it’s up by North Oaks. I’ll be here for a couple of hours, if you could stop by there?”
“Sure. Half an hour, probably.” When he left, Carol was coming back up the hallway carrying an old- fashioned wooden cane. She gave it to him and said, “Try this."
"Ah, for Christ’s sakes, I’m not elderly."
"Try it.” He tried it, and it helped. “What a pain in the ass,” he said. “If it’ll make you happy…” He strolled down to the elevator, twirling it like a baton, but after he got downstairs, used it to walk out to the car. It took a few pounds off the leg, and that helped. A lot.
Fuckin’ women.
Wanderwood was a well-kept, yellow-painted concrete-block building that shared a parking lot with a Caribou Coffee shop. He left the cane in the truck, thinking that he could suppress the urge to limp, took two steps, and went back for the cane. Inside, a receptionist looked him over and said, “You’re not here about the mirrors.”
“No. I’m here to see Alyssa Austin. She’s expecting me."
"Hang on one second,” the receptionist said, and disappeared down a tiled hallway. Lucas looked around: there was just the faintest tang of sweat about the place, but it might have come from a spray bottle. Otherwise, it smelled like Chanel, or some other kind of French perfume.
Expensive-looking easy chairs were arranged around a tree- trunk coffee table, very ecological- looking, in the waiting area. The table held an apricot-colored orchid in a plain terra- cotta pot, and a stack of appropriate magazines: In Style, Vanity Fair, Fitness, Marie Claire, Allure, Vogue. Nothing with a car on the cover, or even a suggestion that a car existed.
He paged through Fitness for a moment, then the receptionist reappeared and said, “Come on back.”
She took him past a small open workout area, where a half- dozen women rode bikes or ran on treadmills, to a private workout room where Austin was working with a trainer, doing Pilates. She was flat on her stomach doing foot- and- hand lifts with light weights in her hands, sweating like a dog, but when she finished, she did a kind of snap push- up that bounced her to her feet. The trainer nodded and said, “Not too bad, but you have to start finishing the routine.”
“How many times have I missed?” The trainer, a woman a bit taller than Austin but just as fit, bones showing in her face, said, “Week before last, you only got halfway through.”
“I’m doing good; if I only miss one in six, I’m doing good,” Austin said, and then, to the trainer, “Take a break. I’ve got to talk to this guy.”
“You’re pretty hard- core,” Lucas said, letting his eyes walk around her body.
“I can’t believe you’re walking around,” she said. “Ah, I’ve been hurt worse doing home repair.” He’d been using the line frequently, because he thought it was pretty good. Austin stepped over to a barre and pulled a towel off, mopped her face and her neck. “I’m a jock, I’ve always liked to sweat,” she said. “My problem is, I tend to work too much, and eat too little. Then my ass disappears. The people who come here definitely don’t want to see an assless CEO.”
“You’re holding your own,” Lucas said. He quickly added, lest she misinterpret a comment that he intended as purely aesthetic, “That fifty thousand bucks that Frances took out… there’s something strange going on there. We need to find out where it went. She took it all in cash, and the way she did it…”
He told her about his visit to the bank and she said, “I’ve no idea what that was about. I’ve never had fifty thousand in cash, myself, in my entire life. I mean, you can’t buy anything with it. Anything legal.”
“We were wondering about that ourselves,” Lucas said. “Drugs… or maybe some kind of political thing. We’re trying to think of stuff.”
She crossed her arms and looked down at the floor, tapping one foot, as though trying to work through it, then said, “Frances did this Goth thing, but you know what? She was really a pretty mainstream kid. She wasn’t a big risk- taker. She was a little risk- taker… and why would she finance something like drugs? She had all the money she needed. I assume you’re not suggesting that she used fifty thousand dollars’ worth of drugs.”
“Could be done, but you’d see it."
"I never saw her loaded,” Austin said. “Never. Fifty thousand in cash, she would have had to be involved in distribution or something. And I can’t see that. Not at all. If you knew her, you’d know how crazy it seems.”
“She wouldn’t have had to use it all at once,” Lucas said. “She could have been running on credit for a while, until she got her money, and then paid off her dealer.”
“She wasn’t a druggie,” Austin said. “She just wasn’t."
"Do you know what a druggie looks like?” Lucas asked. “I do. We have women here, well- off people, who got involved with cocaine or pills, they come out of rehab and straight into here because the doctors tell them to. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t, but I get a sense of what druggies are like and Frances wa
sn’t like that. She may have smoked a joint on occasion, but who hasn’t?”
Lucas noticed that Austin’s daughter was now in the past tense, but didn’t mention it.
“She didn’t gamble."
"No."
"So where did the money go?"
"I don’t know. It’s just not right. It’s just not right.” Lucas limped over to the barre and leaned his butt against it. Austin said, “You got shot in the same bar where Dick Ford was murdered. Near where this other boy was killed.”
“Yup."
"So there must be something there."
"That’s what I think.” He felt a twinge from his groin, and winced a little. “Why are you walking around?” Austin said. “Your face just went white as a sheet of paper."
"Because I’m bored and I wasn’t hurt that bad. And I’m interested: you know a guy, a friend of Frances’s, middle height, maybe five- eleven or so, black hair, black leather jacket, jeans, cheap sunglasses, a crooked mustache but maybe not, a hip- looking guy?”
She cocked her head to one side. “Like a wannabe biker?"
"Yeah. Sort of a broken- ass wannabe biker."
"God. He sounds like… quite a while back, I only saw him once, there was a guy named Larry,” she said. She held her hands to her lips. “No, that’s not right. It was an L name, but like a woman’s name… Lauren? Loren? Loren, I think. It sounds like him.”
“Loren."
"Yes. I’m sure of it. When I saw him, he was wearing a white T- shirt with the black jacket and black jeans and black hair, and I thought, you know, Here’s a guy who could manipulate his way into a young girl’s pants, and he’d be pretty heartless about it. But I don’t think she was seeing him. I don’t think they had any kind of physical relationship. At least, not at the time I saw him. They didn’t have that… intimacy about them.”
“Loren,” Lucas said. “No last name?"
"No. I only saw him that one time, they came by the house in Frances’s car, but…"
"He came by the house?” Lucas asked. “Yes, just for a while,” she said. “Did he look it over?"
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