Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 41 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

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“You don’t have a gun, do you, bitch?” Shadow Love screamed. The cry was as hard and sharp as a sliver of glass and Lily gasped involuntarily. He heard the gasp and froze. She was close by. He could feel it. Very close. Where? He swung an arm out to the right, then his gun hand to the left. And he touched her, raked the back of her calf with his gun hand as she went through the door, into the outer room, and he pivoted and fired the pistol once through the door . . . .

No, she thought. He must have heard . . .

She took a fast step through the door, high, over him, in case his legs were still in the doorway, and was pushing off with her back leg when his hand struck her calf. Shit. She dodged sideways; there was a flash and a deafening crack, and she twisted sideways toward the television set, crawling . . . .

“Noooo . . .” The scream clutched at Lily as she hit a body in the dark. Soft . . . woman . . . She had just registered the thought as the other woman, sobbing frantically, clubbed at her and she went down, twisting, back on her hands and knees, crawling toward the television, reaching out, sweeping the carpet for the purse . . . .

The muzzle blast blinded him for a second, but now he knew for sure: She had no gun and was heading for the door. The maid’s scream froze him, then Shadow Love struggled to his feet, groping for the wall and a light switch. He found the wall and ran his hand toward the switch, watching the doorway in case the cop tried for the door.

And then, in the instant before he would turn on the light . . .

He heard the slide.

There was no other sound like it. A .45, at full cock.

And then Lily, her voice like a gravedigger’s: “I’m out here, motherfucker. Go ahead—turn on the light.”

Shadow Love, poised in the doorway, felt the voice coming from his left. One chance: he took it. With the gun in his hand he launched himself straight through the dark toward the other door, where he could hear the maid sobbing. Two steps, three, and then he hit her. She was standing and she screamed, and he held her for an instant as he found the door, gripped the knob and then thrust the woman toward the place Lily’s voice had come from. He felt the maid go, stumbling, and he wrenched open the door. As he went through, he fired once, toward the two women, and then ran toward the stairs, waiting for the bite from the .45 . . . .

Light from the hallway flooded the room, and Lily saw movement toward her and realized it was too small to be Shadow Love: maid.

She pivoted to a shooting line past the falling woman and saw Shadow Love in the doorway, his gun arm out toward her. She was still turning past the woman, and then he was gone, his arm trailing behind, like a bat in a drag bunt. Lily was still following with the .45 when Shadow Love pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit her in the chest.

Lillian Rothenburg went down like a tenpin.

CHAPTER

25

Lucas was chatting with a gambler outside a riverfront bar when his handset beeped. He stepped off the curb, reached through the open window of the Porsche and thumbed the transmit switch.

“Yeah. Davenport.” The sun had set and a chill wind was blowing off the river. He stuck his free hand in his pants pocket and hunched his back against the cold.

“Lucas, Sloan says to meet him at Hennepin Medical Center just as fast as you can get there,” the dispatcher said.

“He says it’s heavy-duty. Front entrance.”

“Okay. Did he say what it’s about?”

After a second’s hesitation, the dispatcher said, “No. But he said lights and sirens and get your ass over there.”

“Five minutes,” Lucas said.

Lucas left the gambler standing on the sidewalk and pushed the Porsche across the bridge, south through the warehouse district to the medical center, wondering all the time. A break? Somebody nailed a Crow? There were three squad cars and a remote television truck at emergency receiving. Lucas wheeled around front, dumped the car in a no-parking space, flipped down the sunshade with the police ID and walked up the steps. Sloan stood waiting behind the glass doors, and Lucas saw a patrol captain and a woman sergeant standing in the lobby. They seemed to be staring at him. Sloan pushed the glass door open, and when Lucas stepped inside he linked his arm through Lucas’.

“Got your shit together?” Sloan asked. His face was white, drawn, deadly serious.

“What the fuck you talking about?” Lucas said, trying to pull away. Sloan hung on.

“Lily’s been shot,” Sloan said.

For just a second, the world stopped, like a freeze frame in a movie. A guy being wheeled across the lobby in a wheelchair: frozen. A woman behind an information desk: caught with her mouth half open, staring carplike at Lucas and Sloan. All stopped. Then the world jerked forward again and Lucas heard himself saying, “My fuckin’ Christ.” Then bleakly, “How bad?”

“She’s on the table,” Sloan said. “They don’t know what they got. She’s breathing.”

“What happened?” Lucas said.

“You okay?” asked Sloan.

“Ah, man . . .”

“A guy—Shadow Love—forced a maid to open her hotel room. Lily was taking a bath, but she got to her gun, and there was some kind of fight and he shot her. He got away.”

“Motherfucker,” Lucas said bitterly. “We were over looking at Clay’s hotel security, we never thought about hers.”

“The maid’s all shook up, but she’s looked at a picture and she thinks it was Shadow . . . .”

“I don’t give a fuck about that, what about Lily? What are the docs saying? Is she bad? Come on, man.”

Sloan turned away, shrugged, then turned back and gestured helplessly. “You know the fuckin’ docs, they ain’t gonna say shit because of the malpractice insurance. They don’t want to say she’s gonna make it, then have her croak. But one of the hotel guys was in combat in Vietnam. He says she was hit hard. He said if she’d of been in Vietnam, it would of depended on how fast they got her back to a hospital whether she made it . . . . He thinks the slug took a piece of lung, and he rolled her up on her side to keep her from drowning in blood . . . . The paramedics were there in two or three minutes, so . . . I don’t know, Lucas. I think she’ll make it, but I don’t know.”

Sloan led the way through the hospital to the surgical suite. Daniel was already there with a Homicide cop.

“You okay?” Daniel asked.

“What about Lily?”

“We haven’t heard anything yet,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “I just ran over from the office.”

“It’s Shadow Love, you know. Doing security work for the Crows.”

“But why?” Daniel’s forehead wrinkled. “We’re not that close to them. And there’s no percentage in killing Lily, not for political reasons. I’m a politician and they’re politicians, and I can see what they’re doing. It makes sense, in a bizarre way. They were so careful to explain the others—Andretti, the judge in Oklahoma, the guy in South Dakota. This doesn’t fit. Neither did Larry. Or your snitch.”

“We don’t know exactly what’s going on,” Lucas said, his voice on the edge of desperation. “If I could just find something . . . some little hangnail of information, just a fuckin’ scrap . . . anything.”

They thought about it in silence for a moment, then Daniel, in a lower voice, said, “I called her husband.”

Two hours later, long done with conversation, they were staring bleakly at the opposite wall of the corridor when the doors from the operating suite banged open. A redheaded surgeon came through, still wrapped in a blue surgical gown dappled with blood. She snapped the mask off her face and tossed it into a bin already half full of discarded masks and gowns, and began peeling off the gown. Daniel and Lucas pushed off the wall and stepped toward her.

“I’m good,” she said. She tossed the used gown in the discard bin and wiggled her fingers in front of her face. “Seriously gifted.”

“She’s okay?” Lucas asked.

“You the family?” the surgeon asked, looking from one of them to the other.

“The family’s not here,” Lucas said. “They’re on their way from New York. I’m her partner and this is the chief.”

“I’ve seen you on TV,” she said to Daniel, then looked back at Lucas. “She’ll be okay unless something weird happens. We took the slug out—it looks like a light thirty-eight, if you’re interested. It entered through her breast, broke a rib, pulped up a piece of her lung and stuck in the muscle wall along the rib cage in back. Cracked the rib in back too. She’s gonna hurt like hell.”

“But she’ll make it?” Daniel said.

“Unless something weird happens,” the surgeon nodded. “We’ll keep her in intensive care overnight. If there aren’t any problems, we’ll have her sitting up and maybe walking around her bed in a couple of days. It’ll take longer before she’s feeling right, though. She’s messed up.”

“Aw, Jesus, that’s good,” said Lucas, turning to Daniel. “That’s decent.”

“Bad scars?” asked Daniel.

“There’ll be some. With that kind of wound, we can’t fool around. We had to get in to see what was going on. We’ll have the entry wound from the slug, and then the surgical scars where I went in. In a couple or three years, the entry wound will be a white mark about the size and shape of a cashew on the lower curve of her breast. In five years, the surgical scars will be white lines maybe an eighth-inch across. She’s olive-complected, so they’ll show more than they would on a blonde, but she can live with them. They won’t be disfiguring.”

“When can we see her?”

The surgeon shook her head. “Not tonight. She won’t be doing anything but sleeping. Tomorrow, maybe, if it’s necessary.”

“No sooner?”

“She’s been shot,” the surgeon said with asperity. “She doesn’t need to talk. She needs to heal.”

David Rothenburg came in at two o’clock in the morning on a cattle-car flight out of Newark, the only one he could get. Lucas met him at the airport. Daniel wanted to send Sloan, or go himself, but Lucas insisted. Rothenburg was wearing a rumpled blue seersucker suit and a wine-colored bow tie with a white shirt; his hair was messed up and he wore half-moon reading glasses down on his nose. Lucas had talked to the airline about the shooting, and Rothenburg was the first person out of the tunnel into the gate area. He had a black nylon carry-on bag in his left hand.

“David Rothenburg?” Lucas asked, stepping toward him.

“Yes. Are you . . .” They moved in a circle around each other.

“Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police.”

“How is she?”

“Hurt, but she’ll make it, if there aren’t any complications.”

“My God, I thought she was dying,” Rothenburg said, sagging in relief. “They were so vague on the phone . . . .”

“Nobody knew for a while. She’s had an operation. They didn’t know until they got inside how bad it was.”

“But she’ll be okay?”

“That’s what they say. I’ve got a car . . . .”

Rothenburg was two inches taller than Lucas but slender as a rope. He looked strong, like an ironman runner, long muscles without bulk. They walked stride for stride across the terminal and out to the parking ramp to the Porsche.

“You’re the guy she bailed out of trouble. The hostage, when she shot that man,” Rothenburg said.

“Yeah. We did some work together.”

“Where were you tonight?” There was an edge to the question, and Lucas glanced at him.

“We split up. She went back to her hotel to read some stuff while I was out working my regular informant net. This guy we’re looking for, Shadow Love, tracked her there.”

“You know who did it?”

“Yes, we think so.”

“Jesus Christ, in New York the guy’d be in jail.”

Lucas looked directly across at Rothenburg and held the stare for a moment, then grunted, “Bullshit.”

“What?” Rothenburg’s anger was beginning to show.

“I said ‘bullshit.’ He fired one shot and got lost. He’s got a safe house somewhere and he knows what he’s doing. The New York cops wouldn’t do any better than we’re doing. Wouldn’t do as good. We’re better than they are.”

“I don’t see how you can say that, people are being shot down here.”

“We have about one killing a week in Minneapolis and we catch all the killers. You have between five and eleven a night in New York and your cops hardly catch any of them. So don’t give me any shit about New York. I’m too tired and too pissed to listen to it.”

“It’s my wife who’s shot . . .” Rothenburg barked.

“And she was working with me and I liked her a lot, and I feel guilty about it, so stay off my fuckin’ back,” Lucas snarled.

There was a moment of silence; then Rothenburg sighed and settled further into his seat. “Sorry,” he said after a moment. “I’m scared.”

“No sweat,” said Lucas. “I’ll tell you something, if it makes you feel better. As of tonight, Shadow Love is a dead motherfucker.”

Lucas left Rothenburg at the hospital and went back on the street. There were few places open; he found a bar in a yuppie shopping center, drank a scotch, then another, and left. The night was cold and he wondered where Shadow Love was. He had no way to find out, not without a break.

CHAPTER

26

Leo came in at three in the morning. “No sign of Clay, but his man’s at home.”

“Drake? You saw him?”

“Yeah. And he’s got a girl with him.”

“Blonde?” asked Sam.

“Yeah. Real small.”

“Far out . . . real young?”

“Probably eight or ten years old. Took Drake’s hand when they walked up to the door.”

“Clay’ll be coming,” Aaron said with certainty. “When you got his kind of twist, you don’t get away from it.” When he said ‘twist,’ he made a twisting motion with his fist.

Sam nodded. “Another night,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

“Did you hear about the cop?” asked Aaron.

Leo took off his jacket and tossed it at the couch. “The woman? Yeah. It’s Shadow.”

“God damn, the fool will ruin us,” Aaron said bitterly.

“One more night,” said Leo. “One or two.”

“Killing cops is bad medicine,” Aaron said. He looked at his cousin. “If it’s gonna happen with Clay, it’s gotta be soon. We might start thinking about taking him at the hotel or on the street.”

Sam shook his head. “The plan is right. Don’t fuck with the plan. Clay’s got a platoon of bodyguards with machine guns. They’d flat kill us on the street and Clay’d be a hero. If we can get him at Drake’s, he’ll be alone. And he won’t be no hero.”

“Tomorrow night,” said Leo. “I’d bet on it.”

Shadow Love hid in a condemned building six blocks out from the Loop. The building, once a small hotel, became a flophouse and finally was condemned for its lack of maintenance and the size of its rats. Norway rats: the fuckin’ Scandinavians ran everything in the state, Shadow Love thought.

There were a few other men living in the building, but Shadow Love never really saw them. Just shambling figures darting between rooms, or moving furtively up and down the stairs. When you took a room, you closed the door and blocked it with a four-by-four from a pile of lumber on the first floor. You braced one end of the timber against the door, one end against the opposite wall. It wasn’t foolproof, but it was pretty good.

The three-story structure had been built around a central atrium with a skylight at the top. When the men had to move their bowels—a rare event, most of them were winos—they simply hung over the atrium railing and let go. That kept the upper rooms reasonably tidy. Nobody stayed long on the bottom floors.

When Shadow Love moved in, he brought a heavy coat, a plastic air mattress, a cheap radio with earphones, and his gun. Groceries were slim: boxes of crackers, cookies, a can of Cheez Whiz, and a twelve-pack of Pepsi.

After the shooting, Shadow Love had run down the stairs, tried to stroll through the lobby, then hurried on to the Volvo. He drove it until he was sure he couldn’t have been followed, and dumped it. He stopped once at a convenience store to buy food and then settled into the hideout.

There was nothing on the radio for almost two hours. Then a report that Detective Lillian Rothenburg had been shot. Not killed but shot. More than he’d hoped for. Maybe he got her . . . .

Then, a half-hour later, word that she was on the operating table. And two hours after that, a prognosis: The doctors said she’d live.

Shadow Love cursed and pulled the coat around him. The nights were getting very cold. Despite the coat, he shivered.

The bitch was still alive.

CHAPTER

27

Lucas spent the next day working his net, staying in touch with the hospital by telephone. In the early afternoon, Lily woke up and spoke to David, who was sitting at her bedside, and later to Sloan. She could add little to what they knew.

Shadow Love, she said. She had never seen his face, but it felt right. He was middle-height, wiry. Dark. Ate sausage.

That said, she went back to sleep.

At nine, Lucas called a friend at the intensive care unit: he had been calling her hourly.

“He just left, said he was going to get some sleep,” the friend told Lucas.

“Is she awake?”

“She comes and goes . . . .”

“I’ll be right there,” he said.

Lily was wrapped in sheets and blankets, propped half upright on the bed. Her face was pale, the color of notebook paper. A breathing tube went to her nose. Two saline bags hung beside her bed, and a drip tube was patched into her arm below the elbow.

Lucas’ friend, a nurse, said, “She woke up a while ago, and I told her you were coming, so she knows. Don’t stay long, and be as quiet as you can.”

Lucas nodded and tiptoed to Lily’s bedside.

“Lily?”

After a moment, she turned her head, as if the sound of his voice had taken a few seconds to penetrate. Her eyes, when she opened them, were clear and calm.

“Water?” she croaked. There was a bottle of water on the bedstand with a plastic straw. He held it to her mouth and she sucked once. “Damn breathing tube dries out my throat.”

“You feel pretty bad?”

“Doesn’t . . . hurt much. I feel like I’m . . . really sick. Like I had a terrible flu.”

“You look okay,” Lucas lied. Except for her eyes, she looked terrible.

“Don’t bullshit me, Davenport,” she said with a small grin. “I know what I look like. Good for the diet, though.”

“Jesus, it freaked me out.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Thanks for the rose.”

“What?”

“The rose . . .” She turned her head away, then back and forth, as though trying to loosen up her neck muscle. “Very . . . romantic.”

Lucas had no idea what she was talking about, and then she said, “I got through the first fifteen minutes . . . with David. I hurt so bad I wasn’t thinking of you or anything, I was just happy to be here. And we were talking and when I thought of you, the first fifteen minutes were gone . . . and it was okay.”

“Jesus, Lily, I feel so bad.”

“Nothing you could do: but you be careful,” she said in her rusty voice. Her eyelids drooped. “Are you getting anywhere?”

Lucas shook his head. “We’ve got a screen of people around Clay—I still think it’s him. I just haven’t figured out how. We’re watching the dumbwaiter, but that’s not it.”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes closed and she took two deep breaths. “I’m so damn sleepy all the time . . . . Can’t think . . .”

And she was gone, sleeping, her face going slack. Lucas sat by her bed for five minutes, watching her face and the slow rise and fall of her chest. He was lucky, he thought, that he wasn’t walking beside her coffin across another cemetery, just as with Larry . . . .

Larry.

It came back in a flash, as real as the shotgun behind his ear. He’d been walking across the cemetery grass with Lily and Anderson, after leaving Rose Love’s well-tended grave. Anderson was talking about the cost of grave maintenance and the perpetual-care contract he and his wife had bought . . . .

And the question popped into his head: Who paid to take care of Rose Love’s grave? Neither Shadow Love nor the Crows had enough money to endow a perpetual-care fund, so they must pay it annually or semiannually. But if they were on the road all the time, where would the bill be sent? Lucas stood, looked down at Lily’s sleeping face, paced out of the ICU, past a patient who looked as though he were dying, and then back in, until he was standing by her bed again.

The Crows or Shadow Love, whoever paid for maintenance, might simply remember to write a check once or twice a year and mail it, without ever getting a bill. But that didn’t feel right; there must be a bill. Maybe they had a postal box; but if they had their mail sent to a box, and didn’t get back into town for a while, important messages might sit there for weeks. Lucas didn’t know what the Crows had done, but he knew what he would do in their circumstances. He’d have a mail drop. He’d have the cemetery bill and other important stuff sent to an old, trustworthy friend. Somebody he could rely on to send the mail on to him. He half ran from the ICU to the nurses’ station.

“I gotta have a phone,” Lucas snapped at his friend. She stepped back and pointed at a desk phone. He picked it up and called Homicide. Anderson was just getting ready to leave.

“Harmon? I’m heading out to Riverwood Cemetery in a hurry. You get on the line, find out where Riverwood does its paperwork and call me. I’ve got a handset. If the office is closed, run down somebody who can open it up, somebody who does the bills. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“What have you got?” Anderson asked.

“Probably nothing,” Lucas said. “But I’ve got just the smallest fuckin’ hangnail of an idea . . . .”

Clay and a security man stood in the parking garage and argued.

“It’s a fuckin’ terrible idea,” the security man said intently.

“No, it’s not. When you get a little higher in management, you’ll recognize that,” Lawrence Duberville Clay replied. An undertone in his voice hinted that it was unlikely the security man would ever rise higher in management.

“Look: one car. Just one. You wouldn’t even see it.”

“Absolutely not. You put a car on me and you better warn the people inside that I’ll fire their asses. And you with them. No. The only way for me to do this is to go out on my own. And I’ll probably be safer than if I was here. Nobody’ll expect me to be out on the street.”

“Jesus, boss . . .”

“Look, we’ve been through this before,” Clay said. “The fact is, when you’re surrounded by a screen of security, you don’t have any feel for anything. I need to get away, to be effective.”

They had a car for him, a nondescript rental that one of the agents had picked up at the airport. Clay took the wheel, slammed the door and looked out at the unhappy security man.

“Don’t worry, Dan. I’ll be back in a couple, three hours, no worse for the wear.”

Lucas had to wait ten minutes at the cemetery office, watching the moon ghost across the sky behind dead oak leaves. He shivered and paced impatiently, and finally a Buick rolled up and a woman got out.

“Are you Davenport?” she asked in a sour voice, jingling her keys.

“Yes.”

“I was at a dinner,” she said. She was a hard woman in her early thirties, with a beehive hairdo from the late fifties.

“Sorry.”

“We really should have some kind of papers,” she said frostily as she unlocked the door.

“No time,” Lucas said.

“It’s not right. I should call our chairman.”

“Look, I’m trying to be fuckin’ nice,” Lucas said, his voice rising as he spoke. “I’m trying as hard as I can to be a nice guy because you seem like an okay woman. But if you drag your feet on this, I’ll call downtown for a warrant. It’ll be here in five minutes and we’ll seize your whole goddamn billing system. If you get lucky, you’ll get it back sometime next year. You can explain that to your chairman.”

The woman stepped away from him and a spark of fear touched her eyes. “Please wait,” she said. She went into a back room, and soon Lucas could hear her typing on a computer keyboard.

It was all bullshit, Lucas told himself. Not a chance in a fucking million. A moment later a printer started, and then the woman came out of the back room.

“The bills have always been sent to the same place, every six months, forty-five dollars and sixty-five cents. Sometimes they’re slow-pay, but they always pay.”

“Who?” asked Lucas. “Where’d you send the bill?”

The woman handed Lucas a sheet of computer paper, with one short line pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “It’s right here,” she said. “A Miss Barbara Gow. That’s her address under her name. Does that help?”

Corky Drake had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, only to have it rudely snatched away in his teens. His father had for some years neglected to report his full income to the Internal Revenue Service. When the heathens had learned of Corky Senior’s oversight . . . well, the capital barely covered what was owed, much less the fines.

His father had removed himself from the scene with a garden hose that led from the tailpipe of a friend’s Mercedes into the sealed car. The friend had refused to forgive him, even in death, for what he had done to the upholstery.

Corky, who was seventeen, was already a person of refined taste. A life of poverty and struggle simply was not on the menu. He did the only thing he was qualified to do: he became a pimp.

Certain friends of his father’s had exceptional interests in women. Corky could satisfy those, for a price. Not only were the women very beautiful, they were very young. They were, in fact, girls. The youngest in his current stable was six. The oldest was eleven, although, Corky assured the wits among his clientele, she still had the body of an eight-year-old . . . .

Corky Drake met Lawrence Duberville Clay at a club in Washington. If they hadn’t become friends, they had at least become friendly. Clay appreciated the services offered by Drake.

“My little perversion,” Clay called it, with a charming grin.

“No. It’s not a perversion, it’s perfectly natural,” Drake said, swirling two ounces of Courvoisier in a crystal snifter. “You’re a connoisseur, is what you are. In many countries of the world . . .”

Drake would serve his clients in Washington or New York, if they required it, but his home base was in Minneapolis, and his resources were strongest there. Clay, in town on business, visited Corky’s home. After that, the visits became a regular part of his life . . . .

Drake was talking to the current queen of his stable when he heard the car in the driveway.

“Here he is now,” he said to the girl. “Remember, this could be the most important night of your life, so I want you to be good.”

Leo Clark sat in a clump of brush thirty yards from Drake’s elaborate Kenwood townhouse. He was worried about the cops. Barbara Gow’s car was parked up the street. It didn’t fit in the neighborhood. If they checked it and had it towed, he’d be fucked.

He sat in the leaves and waited, looking at his watch every few minutes and studying the face of the Old Man in the Moon. It was a clear night for the Cities, and you could see him staring back at you, but it was nothing like the nights on the prairie, when the Old Man was so close you could almost touch his face . . . .

At ten minutes after nine, a gray Dodge entered Corky’s circular driveway. Leo put up a pair of cheap binoculars and hoped there’d be more light when Corky opened the door. There was, and just enough: the elegant gray hair of Lawrence Duberville Clay was unmistakable. Leo waited until Clay was inside the house, then picked his way through the wood to Barbara’s car, quickly started it and headed back to her house. He stopped only once, at a pay phone.

The message was simple: “Clay’s at the house.”

Anderson was waiting in his office when Lucas hurried in.

“What you got?”

“A name,” Lucas said. “Let’s run it through the machine.”

They put Barbara Gow’s name into the computer and got back three quick hits.

“She’s Indian, and she’s a rad, or used to be,” Anderson said, scanning down the monitor. “Look at this. Organizing for the union, busted in a march . . . Christ, this was way back in the fifties, she was ahead of her time . . . . Civil rights and then antiwar stuff there in the sixties . . .”

“She’d of known the Crows,” Lucas said. “There weren’t that many activist Indians back in the fifties, not in Minneapolis . . . .”

Anderson was scanning through one of his notebooks; he found a page and held it up to the screen. “Look at this,” he said. He tapped an address in the notebook and touched an address on the screen. “She lived just a couple blocks from Rose E. Love, and at the same time.”

“All right, I’m going down there,” Lucas said. “Get onto Del and some of his narcs, tell them I might need surveillance help. I’ll look the place over now. It’s too much to hope that they’ll be there.”

“You want me to start some squads that way, just in case?”

“Yeah, you could start a couple, but keep them off the block unless I holler.”

Leo pulled into Barbara Gow’s driveway and Aaron lifted the garage door. Leo rolled the car inside but left the engine running. Sam stepped out of the house carrying a chopped-down shotgun. Leo had cut the gun down himself. What had been a conventional Winchester Super-X, a four-shot semiauto, wound up as an ugly illegal killing machine that looked as much like a war club as a shotgun. Sam opened the car door and slipped the shotgun under the passenger seat, and then helped Aaron load a six-foot chunk of railroad tie into the cargo space. They’d sharpened one end with an ax and screwed handles to the top. When it was in, Aaron slammed the tailgate and he and Sam got in.

“You want to leave the garage door up?” Leo asked.

“Yeah. If we gotta get off the street in a hurry when we come back, it’ll get us an extra minute.”

Lucas cruised by the side of the Gow house, moving as slowly as he could without being conspicuous. There were lights on in both front and back, probably the living room and the kitchen or a bedroom. The upper floor was dark. He turned the corner to pass in front of the house and saw that the garage door was up, the garage empty. As he passed, a shadow crossed the living room blind. Someone inside. Since the car was gone, that meant more than one person was living in the house . . . .

He picked up the handset and put in a call to Anderson.

“Get me the description of the woman who was seen with Shadow Love,” he said.

“Just a second,” Anderson said. “I’ve got the notebook right here. Can’t get Del, he’s on the street, but one of his guys has gone after him. There are a couple of squads waiting out on Chicago.”