Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

CHAPTER

18

Barbara Gow’s house had gray siding, once white, and a red asbestos-shingle roof. A single box elder stood in the front yard and a swayback garage hunkered hopelessly in back. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded her holdings.

“It looks pretty bad,” she said sadly. They were ten minutes off the expressway, in a neighborhood of tired yards. The postwar frame houses were crumbling from age, poor quality and neglect: roofs were missing shingles, eaves showed patches of dry rot. In the dim illumination of the streetlights, they could see kids’ bikes dumped unceremoniously on the weedy lawns. The cars parked in the streets were exhausted hulks. Oil stains marked the driveways like Rorschachs of failure.

“When I bought it, I called it a cottage,” she said as they rolled into the driveway. “God damn, it makes me sad. To think you can live in a place for thirty years, and in the end, not care about it.”

Sam Crow closed one eye and stared at her with the other, gauging the level of her unhappiness. In the end, he grunted, got out of the car and lifted the garage door.

“I hope Shadow Love’s okay,” she said anxiously as she pulled into the garage.

She had picked them up ten minutes after Sam called her. As they headed back to her house, they crossed the street that the apartment was on. There were cars in the street. Cops. The raid was under way.

“He was due back,” Sam said as they got out of the car. “With all those cops in the street . . .”

“If he wasn’t there when they arrived . . .”

“If they didn’t get him, we should be hearing from him,” said Aaron.

Barbara’s house was musty. She was never a housekeeper, and she smoked: the interior, once bright, was overlaid with a yellowing patina of tobacco tar. Sam Crow dragged the duffel bag up the stairs. Aaron headed for a sitting room that had a foldout couch.

“You guys got any money?” Barbara asked when Sam came back down.

“A couple of hundred,” he said, shrugging.

“I’ll need help with the groceries if you stay here long.”

“Shouldn’t be too long. A week, maybe.”

Twenty minutes later, Shadow Love called. Barbara said, “Yes, they’re here. They’re okay,” and handed the phone to Sam.

“We were afraid they got you,” Sam said.

“I almost walked right into them,” Shadow Love said. He was in a bar six blocks from the Crows’ apartment. “I was thinking about something else, I was almost on the block when I realized something was wrong, with all those cars. I watched for a while, I was worried I’d see them taking you out.”

“You coming here?” Sam asked.

“I better. I don’t know where they got their information, but if they’re tracking me . . . I’ll see you in a half-hour.”

When Shadow Love arrived, Barbara stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek and took him straight into the kitchen for a sandwich.

“Somebody betrayed us,” Shadow Love said. “That fuckin’ Hart was in the street outside the apartment. He’s passing out money now. The hunter cop too.”

“We’re not doing as well as I hoped,” Sam confessed. “I’d hoped Billy would get at least one more and that John would make it out of Brookings . . . .”

“Leo’s still out and I’m available,” Shadow Love said. “And you can’t complain about the media. Christ, they’re all over the goddamned Midwest. I saw a thing on television from Arizona, people out on the reservations there, talking . . . .”

“So it’s working,” Aaron said, looking at his cousin.

“For now, anyway,” Sam said.

Later that night, Sam watched Barbara move around the bedroom and thought, She’s old.

Sixty, anyway. Two years younger than he was. He remembered her from the early fifties, the Ojibway bohemian student of French existentialists, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, her fresh heart-shaped face without makeup, her books in a green cloth sack carried over her shoulder. Her beret. She wore a crimson beret, pulled down over one eye, smoked Gauloises and Gitanes and sometimes Players, and talked about Camus.

Barbara Gow had grown up on the Iron Range, the product of an Ojibway father and a Serbian mother. Her father worked in the open-pit mines during the day and for the union at night. Her mother’s Bible sat in a small bookcase in the living room. Next to it was her father’s Das Kapital.

As a teenager, she had done clerical work for the union. After her mother died, leaving a small insurance policy, she’d moved to Minneapolis and started at the university. She liked the university and the talk, the theory. She liked it better when she heard the news from existential France.

Sam could still see all of that in her, behind the wrinkled face and slumping shoulders. She shivered nude in the cold air and pulled on a housecoat, then turned and smiled at him, the smile lighting his heart.

“I’m surprised that thing still works, much as you abuse it,” she said. Sam’s penis curled comfortably on his pelvis. It felt happy, he thought.

“It’ll always work for you,” Sam said. He lay on top of the blankets, on top of the handmade quilt, impervious to the cold.

She laughed and left the room, and a moment later he heard the water start in the bathroom. Sam lay on the bed, wishing he could stay for a year or two years or five, wrapped in the quilt. Scared. That’s what it was, he thought. He put the thought out of his mind, rolled off the bed and walked to the bathroom. Barbara was sitting on the toilet. He stepped in front of the vanity and turned on the water to wash himself.

“Shadow Love’s still watching that movie,” Barbara said. The sounds of TV gunfire drifted up the stairs.

“Zulu,” said Sam. “Big fight in Africa, a hundred years ago. He says it was better than the Custer fight.”

Barbara stood up and flushed the toilet as Sam dried himself with a towel. “Is this the end?” she asked quietly as they walked back into the bedroom.

He knew what she meant, but pretended he did not. “The end?”

“Don’t give me any bullshit. Are you going to die?”

He shrugged. “Shadow Love says so.”

“Then you will,” Barbara said. “Unless you go away. Now.”

Sam shook his head. “Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“The thing is, these other people have died. If it comes my turn and I don’t fight, it’ll be like I turned my back on them.”

“You’ve got a gun?”

“Yeah.”

“And this is all necessary?”

“Yes. And it’s almost necessary that we . . . die. The people need this story. You know, when we were kids, I knew people who rode with Crazy Horse. Who’s alive now to talk to the kids? The only legends they have are dope dealers . . . .”

“So you’re ready.”

“No, of course not,” Sam admitted. “When I think about dying . . . I can’t think about dying. I’m not ready.”

“Nobody ever is,” Barbara said. “I look at myself in the mirror, on the door . . .” She pushed the bedroom door shut, and the full-length mirror mounted on the back reflected the two of them, naked, looking into it. “ . . . and I see this old woman, shriveled up like last year’s potato. A clerk at the historical society, all gray and bent over. But I feel like I’m eighteen. I want to go out and run in the park with the wind in my hair, and I want to roll around on the grass with you and Aaron and hear Aaron putting the bullshit on me, trying to get into my pants . . . and I can’t do any of that because I’m old. And I’m going to die. I don’t want to be old and I don’t want to die, but I will . . . . I’m not ready, but I’m going.”

“I’m glad we had this talk,” Sam said wryly. “It really cheered me up.”

She sighed. “Yeah. Well, the way you talk, I think when the time comes, you’ll use the gun.”

Shadow Love paced.

Sam lay at Barbara’s right hand, asleep, his breathing deep and easy, but all during the night Barbara could hear Shadow Love pacing the length of the downstairs hallway. The television came on, was turned off, came on again. More pacing. He’d always been like that.

Almost forty years earlier, Barbara had lived a half block from Rosie Love, and had met the Crows at her house. They had been radical hard-cases even then, smoking cigarettes all night, drinking, talking about the BIA cops and the FBI and what they were doing on the reservations.

When Shadow was born, Barbara was the godmother. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Shadow Love walking the city sidewalks in his cheap shorts and undersize striped polo shirt, his pale eyes calculating the world around him. Even as a child, he had had the fire. He was never the biggest kid on the block, but none of the other kids fooled with him. Shadow Love was electric. Shadow Love was crazy. Barbara loved him as she would her own child, and she lay in her bed and listened to him pace. She looked at the clock at 3:35, and then she drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, she found him sitting, asleep, in the big chair in the living room, the chair she once called her mantrap. She tiptoed past the doorway toward the kitchen, and his voice called to her as she passed: “Don’t sneak.”

“I thought you were asleep,” she said. She stepped back to the doorway. He was on his feet. Light was coming in the window behind him and he loomed in it, a dark figure with a halo.

“I was, for a while.” He yawned and stretched. “Is this house wired for cable?”

“Yeah, I got it for a while. But when there was nothing on, I had them turn it off.”

“How about if I give you the money and you have them turn it back on? HBO or Cinemax or Showtime. Maybe all of them. When the heat gets heavy, we’ll really be cooped up.”

“I’ll call them this morning,” she said.

At midmorning, after breakfast, Barbara got a stool, a towel and a pair of scissors and cut Sam’s and Shadow Love’s hair. Aaron sat and watched in amusement as the hair fell in black wisps around their shoulders and onto the floor. He told Sam that when old men get their hair cut, they lose their potency.

“Nothin’ wrong with my dick,” Sam said. “Ask Barb.” He tried to slap her on the butt. She dodged his hand and Shadow Love flinched. “Watch it, God damn it, you’re going to stick the scissors in my ear.”

When she finished, Shadow Love put on a long-sleeved cowboy shirt, sunglasses and a baseball cap.

“I still look pretty fuckin’ Indian, don’t I?”

“Get rid of the sunglasses,” Barbara said. “Your eyes could pass for blue. You could be a tanned white man.”

“I could use some ID,” Shadow Love said, tossing the sunglasses on the kitchen table.

“Just a minute,” Barbara said. She went upstairs and came back a few minutes later with a man’s billfold, all flat and tired and shaped to another butt. “It was my brother’s,” she said. “He died two years ago.”

The driver’s license was impossible. Her brother had been four years older than she, and bald and heavy. Even with the bad picture, there was no way Shadow Love could claim to be the man in the photo.

“All this other stuff is good,” he said, thumbing through it. Harold Gow had credit cards from Amoco, Visa and a local department store. He had a membership card from an HMO, a Honeywell employee’s ID without a photo, a Social Security card, a Minnesota watercraft license, a credit-union card, a Prudential claim card, two old fishing licenses, and other odd bits and pieces of paper. “If they shake me down, I’ll tell them I lost my license on a DWI. When an Indian tells them that, they believe you.”

“What about you guys?” Barbara asked the Crows.

Sam shrugged. “We got driver’s licenses and Social Security cards under our born names. I don’t know if the cops have those figured out yet, but they will.”

“Then you shouldn’t go out on the street. At least not during the day,” Barbara said.

“I’ve got to talk to people, find out what’s going on,” Shadow Love said.

“You be careful,” Barbara said.

Shadow Love was in a bar on Lake Street when an Indian man came in and ordered a beer. The man glanced sideways at Shadow Love and then ignored him.

“That Welfare guy’s down at Bell’s Apartments handing out money again,” the Indian man told the bartender.

“Christ, half the town is drinking on him,” the bartender said. “I wonder where they’re getting all the loot?”

“I bet it’s the CIA.”

“Boy, if it’s the CIA, somebody’s in trouble,” the bartender said wisely. “I met some of those boys in ’Nam. You don’t want to fuck with them.”

“Bad medicine,” the Indian man said.

A man at the back of the bar yelled, “Nine-ball?” and the Indian man called, “Yeah, I’m coming,” took the beer and wandered back. The bartender wiped the spot he’d been leaning on with a wet rag and shook his head.

“The CIA. Man, that’s bad business,” he said to Shadow Love.

“That’s bullshit, is what it is,” Shadow Love said.

He finished his beer, slid off the stool and walked outside. The sun was shining and he stopped, squinting against the bright light. He thought for a moment, then turned west and ambled down Lake Street toward the apartments.

Bell’s Apartments were an ugly remnant of a sixties housing program. The architect had tried to disguise an underlying prison-camp barrenness by giving each apartment a different-colored door. Now, years later, the colored doors together looked like a set of teeth with a few punched out.

Behind the building, an abandoned playground squatted in a rectangle of dead weeds. The hand-push merry-go-round had broken off its hub years before and had rusted into place, like a bad minimalist sculpture. The basketball court offered pitted blacktop and bare hoops. The swing sets had lost all but two swings.

Shadow Love sat in one of the swings and watched Larry Hart working his way down to the first floor of the building. Hart would look at a piece of paper in his hand, knock on a door, talk to whoever answered, then move on. Sometimes he talked for ten seconds, sometimes for five minutes. Several times he laughed, and once he went inside and came back out a few minutes later, chewing something. Frybread.

The problem, Shadow Love thought, was that there were too many people in on the Crows’ secret. Leo and John and Barbara, and a bunch of wives who might know or have guessed something.

The Crows had been proselytizing for years. Though they had stayed resolutely in the background, their names were known, as was the extreme nature of their gospel. Once those names popped up on a police computer as suspects, they’d go right to the top of the hunters’ list. That normally wouldn’t be too much of a problem. The cops’ resources in the Indian community were minimal.

Hart was something else. Shadow Love had known him in high school, but only from a distance, in the days when the boys in one grade didn’t mix with the boys in the grades above. Hart had been popular then, with both Indians and whites. He still was. He was one of the people and he had friends and he had money.

Shadow Love watched him working down through the building, heard him laughing, and before Hart reached the bottom level, Shadow Love knew that something would have to be done.

• • •

Hart saw Shadow Love sitting in the swing as he walked toward the steps that would take him to the bottom floor, but he didn’t recognize him. He watched the man swinging, then dropped into a blind section of the stairwell. Five seconds later, when he came out of the stairwell, the man was gone.

Hart shivered. The man must have simply gotten off the swing, walked around the bush at the edge of the playground and gone down the street. But that was not the effect Hart felt. The man was there when he went into the stairwell and gone a few seconds later. He had vanished, leaving behind a swing that still rocked back and forth from his energy.

It was as though he had disappeared, as Mexican wizards were said to do, changing into crows and hawks and jumping straight up in the air.

Indian demons.

Hart shivered again.

A block away, Shadow Love was on the phone.

“Barb? Could you pick me up?”

CHAPTER

19

Lucas woke in the dark, listening, and finally identified the sound that had woken him. He reached across the bed and touched her.

“Crying?”

“I can’t help it,” she squeaked.

“A little guilt, maybe.”

She choked, unable to answer for a moment. Then came a muffled “Maybe.” She rolled over to face him, her knees pulled up in fetal position. “I’ve never done this before.”

“You told me that,” he said into the dark. He groped around for a moment, found the switch on the bedside lamp and turned it on. Her head was down, her face concealed.

“The thing is, I knew I would be. Unfaithful. That one night, in my room, I almost didn’t stop you. I shouldn’t have. But it was . . . too quick. I couldn’t handle it,” she said. “Then when Hood went down and I was freaked out and you were freaked out and I got out of town . . . . On the way to New York, on the plane, I cried. I thought I wouldn’t see you again, wouldn’t get to sleep with you. But I was relieved, you know. When they told me I had to come back, I was crying again. David thought I was crying because I didn’t want to come back. But I was crying because I knew what would happen. I was so . . . hungry.”

“Hey, look. I’ve been through this,” Lucas said. “I feel bad about it sometimes, but I can’t stay away from women. A shrink would probably find something weird is wrong with me. But I just . . . want women. It’s like you said, I get hungry. I can’t stop it. It’s a drug, you crave it.”

“Just the sex?” She rolled over a bit, her head cocked toward him, watching his eyes.

“No. The woman. The back-and-forth. Hanging around. The sex. Everything.”

“You’re a relationship junkie. Always need something new.”

“No, that’s not quite right. There’s a woman in Minneapolis, I think I’ve gotten in bed with her once or twice a year since I was a rookie. Sixteen, eighteen years. I see her and I want her. I call her up, she calls me up, I want her. It’s not newness. It’s something else.”

“Is she married?”

“Yeah. For fifteen years, must be. Has a couple of kids.”

“That is strange.” There was a moment of silence, then she said, “Part of the guilt is that I don’t feel worse than I do. You know what I mean? I liked it. I haven’t had sex that good since . . . I don’t know. Ever, I think. It was like a blackout. With David, it’s soft and gentle and the orgasms come, most of the time anyway, but nothing feels . . . driven. Everything is always under control. David is thin and doesn’t have much hair. You’re hard, and you’ve got all this body hair. It’s like . . . it’s so different.”

“Too much analysis,” Lucas said after a moment. She reached out and touched his face. “I just wanna fuck,” he said in a gravelly parody of lust.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. She pulled herself closer to him, snuggled on his arm. “Do you think the guilt will go away?”

“I’m pretty sure of it,” he said.

“That’s what I think too,” she said.

They left early, Lucas grumpy in the morning sunlight, but touching her often, on the elbow, the cheek, the neck, brushing hair out of her face. “Let’s go for a while. We can stop on the road for breakfast. I can’t eat when I’m up this early,” he grumbled.

“Your internal clock is screwed up,” Lily said as they settled into the Porsche. “You need to get reoriented.”

“Nothing happens in the morning, so why get up?” Lucas said. “All the bad people are out at night. And most of the good ones, as far as that goes.”

“Let’s just try to make it back to the Cities in one piece,” she said as he spun the drive wheels and left the motel parking lot. “If you want me to drive . . .”

“No, no.”

They drove straight into the morning sun. Lily was feeling chatty and craned her neck at the oddities of the prairie.

“I’m going back a different way, a little further south,” Lucas said. “I like to see as many roads as I can. I don’t get out here very often.”

“That’s fine.”

“It won’t add much time,” he said.

The day started cold but rapidly warmed up. A few minutes after they crossed the Minnesota line, Lucas pulled into a roadside diner. They were the only customers. A fat woman worked in the kitchen behind a chest-high stainless-steel counter. They saw only her head. The counterman was a thin, big-eyed man wearing a dirty apron. He had two days of beard and rolled a Lucky Strike, half smoked and now unlit, between his thin lips. Lucas ordered two hard-fried eggs and bacon.

“I’d recommend that,” he said to Lily.

“I’ll have the eggs, anyway,” she said. The waiter yelled back to the cook and then stumped off to a chair and picked up the local weekly.

“Have you been here before?” Lily asked quietly when the waiter’s back was turned.

“No.”

“So how can you recommend the bacon and eggs?”

Lucas looked around the diner. Paint was peeling off the ceiling and a black mold was attacking the seams of the aging wallpaper. “Because they’ve got to fry it and that ought to sterilize it,” he said under his breath.

She glanced around and suddenly giggled, and Lucas thought he might be in love.

After breakfast, when they were back in the car, the talk slowed and Lily moved her seat to a reclined position. Her eyes fell shut.

“A nap?” asked Lucas.

“Relaxing,” she said. Her breathing grew steady, and Lucas drove on. Lily dozed but didn’t sleep, opening her eyes and sitting forward at turns and stops. After a while, she found the steady soft vibration of the car had become arousing. She opened her eyes just a crack. Lucas had put on sunglasses and was driving with a steady, relaxed watchfulness. Now and then he turned his head to look at passing attractions that she couldn’t see from her low position. She reached out and put a hand on his leg.

“Uh-oh,” he said. He glanced at her and grinned. “The animal is alive.”

“Just thinking,” she said. She stroked his thigh, her eyes closed again, letting herself feel the coarse weave of his jeans.

“Dammit,” Lucas said after a few more minutes. “My dick is going to break off.” He pushed himself up in the seat, reached down the front of his pants and changed things around. She laughed, and when he sat down, she put her hand back in his lap. He was erect, his penis reaching up beneath his fly to his belt.

“Ooo, too bad we’re in a car,” she said.

He looked over at her, grinned and said, “You’ve played this game before?”

“What game?” She stroked and he pushed her hand away.

“You’re done,” he said. “It’s my turn. Take off your panty hose.”

“Lucas . . .” she said. She sounded shocked, but she sat upright and looked out the car windows. They were alone on the rural highway.

“Come on, chicken. Off with the pants.”

She looked at the speedometer. A steady sixty miles per hour. “You could kill us.”

“Nope. I’ve played before.”

“Mr. Experience, huh?”

“Come on, come on, you’re bullshitting now. Off with the pants. Or live with the consequences.”

“What consequences?”

“Deep in your heart, you’ll know that I know you’re chicken.”

“All right, Davenport.” She pushed herself off the seat, and with some difficulty pulled off her panty hose.

“Now the pants.”

She pushed herself up again and took off her underpants.

“Here, I’ll take them,” Lucas said. Without thinking, she handed him the pants; he quickly dropped his window and threw them out.

“Davenport, for Christ’s sakes . . .” She was looking back down the highway where the underpants had disappeared into a roadside ditch.

“I’ll buy you new ones.”

“Goddamn right,” she said.

“So now you lean back and close your eyes.” She looked at him and felt a blush crawling up her face. “Come on,” he said.

She leaned back and his hand touched her thighs, the fingers just trailing along, from the joint of her hip to her knee, and back again. It was warm in the car and she felt the blood moving to her groin. Her mouth dropped open and the warmth continued to build.

“Oh, boy,” she said after a few minutes. “Boy . . .”

“Moan for me,” he said.

“What?”

“Moan for me. One good moan and Davenport stops the car.”

She reached over and touched him. He felt huge under the jeans and she giggled. “I’ve got to stop giggling,” she said lazily. She reached out again; then Lucas hit the brake and she rocked forward.

“What?” She looked wildly out the window.

“Jeffers petroglyphs,” he said. “I’ve heard about them, but I’ve never seen them.”

“What?” Lily was gasping, like a fish out of water. The car rocked as Lucas pulled into a grass-covered parking area. She pulled her skirt down.

“Indian carvings on some exposed rock,” Lucas said. There were two other cars in the parking area, although a sign said the petroglyph monument was closed for the season. Lucas hopped out of the car and Lily got out on her side. In the distance, across a fence, they could see a half-dozen people looking down at a slab of reddish rock.

“Must have climbed the fence,” Lucas said. “Come on.”

Lucas vaulted the gate, then helped Lily clamber over.

“Christ, this is the last time I wear a dress on the road. And I feel so bare . . . you and your fucking games,” she said. “From now on, it’s tennis shoes and pants.”

“You look good in a dress,” he said as they walked up a graveled path. “You look terrific. And you look great without the underpants.”

The petroglyphs were scratched into the flat surfaces of exposed red rock. There were outlines of hands, drawings of animals and birds, unknown symbols.

“Look how small their hands were,” Lily said. She stooped and placed her own hand over one of the glyphs. Her hand was larger.

“Maybe it was a kid or a woman,” Lucas said.

“Maybe.” She stood straight and looked around at the rolling prairie and the adjoining cornfield. “I wonder what in the hell they would have been doing out here. There’s nothing here.”

“I don’t know.” Lucas looked around. The sky seemed huge, and he felt as though he were standing on the point of the planet. “You’ve got this rise, you can see forever. But I suppose it was really the rock. Further out west, there’s an Indian quarry. It’s old. The Indians would take out a soft red rock called pipestone. They made pipes and other stuff out of it.”

The petroglyphs were carved on a gently sloping hillside and Lucas wandered with Lily down the slope, passing the other visitors. The others were on their hands and knees, tracing out the glyphs with their fingers. One woman was doing a charcoal rubbing on brown paper, transferring the designs. Two of them said hello. Lucas and Lily nodded.

“We’ve got to get going pretty soon if we want to make that meeting,” Lucas said finally, glancing at his watch.

“Okay.”

They walked slowly back to the car, the prairie wind blowing Lily’s hair around her face. At the fence, she put one foot on the wire, and Lucas caught her from behind and squeezed.

“One small kiss,” he said.

She turned and tipped up her face. The kiss started small and turned warmer, until they were dancing around slowly in the tall grass. She pushed him away after a moment and, breathing hard, looked down.

“These shoes . . . these heels, I’m going to twist my ankle.”

“All right. Let’s go.” He helped her over the fence, then followed. As they walked to the car, he slipped his arm around her waist.

“I’m still turned on from fooling around in the car,” he said.

“Hey. It’s only three hours back to the Cities,” she said playfully.

“And about two meetings after that.”

“Tough luck, Davenport . . .”

He led her around the car, opened the passenger-side door, caught her by the arm, sat in the car and pulled her on top of him. “Come on.”

“What?” She struggled for a moment, but he pulled her in.

“They can’t see us from the road, and those other people are looking at the rocks,” he said. “Face me.”

“Lucas . . .” But she turned to face him.

“C’mon.”

“I don’t know how . . .”

“Just bend your knees up and sit, that’s good, that’s good.”

“The car’s too small, Lucas . . . .”

“That’s fine, you’re fine. Jeez, has anybody ever told you that you’ve got one of the great asses in Western history?”

“Lucas, we can’t . . .”

“Ah . . .”

She sat astride him, facing him, her knees apart, just enough room to move a half-dozen inches, and he began to rock, and she felt the morning’s play coalescing around her. She closed her eyes, and rocked, and rocked, and the orgasm gathered and flowed and washed over her. She came back only when she heard Lucas say, “Oh, man, man . . .”

“Lucas,” she said, and she giggled again and caught herself. She never giggled and now she was giggling every fifteen minutes.

“I needed that,” he said. He was sweating and his eyes looked distant and sated. The door was partway open, and Lily looked out the window, then pushed it open with a foot and eased out onto the grass and pulled her skirt down. Lucas followed awkwardly, zipped up, then leaned forward and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed against his chest. They swayed together for a moment, then Lucas released her, looking dazed, and half staggered around the car.

“We better get going,” he said.

“Right . . . okay.” She got into the car, and Lucas started it and found the reverse gear. He slowly eased out onto the roadway, watching for traffic. The road was empty, but Lucas was preoccupied, so Lily saw them first.

“What are they doing?” she asked.

“What?” He looked in the same direction she was. The people who had been looking at the petroglyphs were lined up along the fence, facing them, repeatedly slapping their hands together.

Lucas stared for a moment, perplexed, then caught it and threw back his head and laughed.

“What?” asked Lily, still puzzled, looking at the line of people across the fence. “What are they doing?”

“They’re applauding,” Lucas laughed.

“Oh, no,” Lily said, her face flaming as they accelerated away. She looked back and after a moment added, “They certainly got their money’s worth . . . .”