Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 95 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“Hang on a second,” Lucas said. A power outlet with a steel cover was set into the garage wall, just at light-switch height. Lucas lifted the cover, looked inside. Nothing. A post lantern with a yellow bug light sat at the corner of a back deck. He waded through thigh-deep snow to get to it, looked into the four-sided lantern, then lifted one of the glass elements, fished around, and came up with a key.

“Fuckin’ rural-ass hayshakers,” he said, grinning at Climpt.

The key worked on the door into the garage. The door between the garage and the house was unlocked. Lucas led the way in, found the inside of the Schoeneckers’ house almost as cold as the outside. They walked through quickly, checking each room.

“Gone,” Lucas said from the master bedroom. The closets and dressers were half-empty. A stack of wire hangers lay on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom. “Packed up.”

“And not coming back in a hurry, either,” Climpt said from down the hall. “Look at this.”

Climpt was in the bathroom, staring into the toilet. Lucas looked. The bowl was empty, but stained purple with antifreeze. “They winterized.”

“Yup. They’ll be gone a while.”

“So let’s go through it,” Lucas said.

They began with the parents’ bedroom and found nothing at all. The second bedroom was shared by the Schoeneckers’ daughters. Again, they came up empty. They worked through the bathroom, the living room, the dining room, took apart the kitchen, spent half an hour in the basement.

“Not a goddamned thing,” Climpt growled, scratching his head. They were back in the living room. “I never seen a house so empty of anything.”

“Not a single videotape,” Lucas said. He walked back down the hall to the master bedroom, checked the television there. A tape player was built into the base. In the living room, a bigger television was hooked into a separate tape player. “They’ve got two videotape players and no tapes.”

“Could rent ’em,” Climpt said.

“Even then . . .”

“Did those boxes in the basement . . . just a minute,” Climpt said suddenly, and disappeared down the basement steps.

Lucas wandered through the still, cold house, then went to the garage, opened the door, and looked in. Climpt came back up the stairs, carrying two boxes, and Lucas said, “They’ve got two cars. The garage is tracked on both sides.”

“Yeah, I believe they do.”

“How often do families go on vacations and take two cars when there are only four of them?” Lucas asked.

“Look at this,” Climpt said. He held the boxes out to Lucas. One was the carton for a video camera. The other was a carton for a Polaroid Spectra camera. “A video camera and no videotapes. And last night Henry Lacey said that Polaroid was taken with a Spectra camera.”

“Jesus.” Lucas ran his hand through his hair. “Okay. Tell you what. You go through that file cabinet with the bills, get all the credit card numbers you can find. Especially gas card numbers, but get all of them. I’m going back to the girls’ room. I can’t believe teenagers wouldn’t leave something.”

He began going through the room inch by inch, pulling the drawers from all the dressers, looking under them, checking bottles and boxes, paging through piles of homework papers dating back to elementary school. He felt inside shoes, lifted the mattress.

Climpt came in and said, “I got all the numbers they had, I think. They had Sunoco and Amoco gas cards. They also bought quite a bit of gas from Russ Harper, which is pretty strange when you consider his station is fifteen miles from here.”

“Keep those slips,” Lucas said as he dropped the mattress back in place. “And check and see if there’s any garbage outside.”

“All right.”

A half-dozen books sat upright on top of the bureau, pressed together by malachite bookends shaped like chess knights. Lucas looked at the books, turned them, held them page-down and flipped through them. An aluminum-foil gum wrapper fell from the Holy Bible. Lucas picked it up, unfolded it, found a phone number and the name Betty written in orange ink.

He put the book back, walked into the living room as Climpt came in from outside. “No garbage. They cleaned the place out, is what they did.”

“Okay.” Lucas picked up the phone, dialed the number on the gum wrapper.

The call was answered on the first ring. “This is the Ojibway Action Line. Can I help you?” The voice was female and professionally cheerful.

“What’s the Ojibway Action Line?” Lucas asked.

“Who is this?” The voice lost a touch of its good cheer.

“A county sheriff’s deputy,” Lucas said.

“You’re a deputy and don’t know what the Ojibway Action Line is?”

“I’m new.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lucas Davenport. Gene Climpt is here if you want to talk to him.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay, I heard about you. Besides, it’s not a secret—we’re the crisis line for county human services. We’re right in the front of the phone book.”

“All right. Can I speak to Betty?”

There was a moment of silence, then the woman said, “There’s not really a Betty here, Mr. Davenport. That’s a code name for our sexual abuse counselor.”

CHAPTER

12

Lucas parked in Weather’s driveway, climbed out of the truck, and trudged to the porch, carrying a bottle of wine. He was reaching for the bell when Weather pulled the door open.

“Fuck dinner,” Lucas said, stepping inside. “Let’s catch a plane to Australia. Lay on the beach for a couple of weeks.”

“I’d be embarrassed. I’m so winter-white I’m transparent,” Weather said. She took the bottle. “Come in.”

She’d taken some trouble, he thought. A handmade rag rug stretched across the entry; that hadn’t been there the night before. A fire crackled in the Volkswagen-sized fireplace. And there was a hint of Chanel in the air. “Pretty impressive, huh? With the fire and everything?”

“I like it,” he said simply. He didn’t smile. He’d been told that his smile sometimes frightened people.

She seemed both embarrassed and pleased. “Leave your coat in the closet and your boots by the door. I just started cooking. Steak and shrimp. We’ll both need heart bypasses if we eat it all.”

Lucas kicked off his boots and wandered through the living room in his stocking feet. He hadn’t seen it in the dark, the night before, and in the morning he’d rushed out, thinking about Bergen . . . .

“How’d the operation go?” he called to her in the kitchen.

“Fine. I had to pin some leg bones back together. Nasty, but not too complicated. This woman went up on her roof to push the snow off, and she fell off instead. Right onto the driveway. She hobbled around for almost four days before she came in, the damn fool. She wouldn’t believe the bone was broken until we showed her the X rays.”

“Huh.” Silver picture frames stood on a couch table, with hand-colored photos of a man and woman, still young. Sailboats figured in half the photographs. Her parents. A small ebony grand piano sat in an alcove, top propped up, sheet music for Erroll Garner’s “Dreamy” on the music stand.

He went back into the kitchen. Weather was wearing a dress, the first he’d seen her in, simple, soft-shouldered; she had a long, slender neck with a scattering of freckles along her spine. She said, smiling, “I’m going to make stuff so good it’ll hurt your mouth.”

“Let me help,” he said.

She had him haul a grill from the basement to the back deck, which she’d partially shoveled off. He stacked it with charcoal and started it. At the same time she put a pot of water on the stove. A bag of oversized, already-shelled shrimp went into a colander, which she set aside. Herbs and a carton of buttermilk became salad dressing; a lump of cheese joined a pile of mushrooms, celery, walnuts, watercress, and apples on the cutting board. She began slicing.

“I won’t ask if you like mushrooms; you’ve got no choice,” she said. “Oh—get the wine going. It’s supposed to breathe for a while.”

The outside temperature had been rising through the afternoon, and was now approaching zero. A breeze had sprung up and felt almost damp compared to the astringent dryness of the air at twenty below. Lucas put his boots back on and tended the charcoal; the cold felt good on his skin, taken only a few seconds at a time.

The salad was tart and just right. The shrimp were killers. He ate a dozen of them, finally tearing himself away from the table long enough to put the steaks on.

“I haven’t eaten like this since . . . I don’t know when. You must like cooking,” Lucas said as he stood inside the glass doors, looking out at the grill.

“I don’t, really. I took a class at the high school called Five Good Things,” she confessed. “That’s what they taught me. How to make five good things. This is one of them.”

“That’s a class I need,” Lucas said, slipping back outside with a plate. The steaks were perfect, she said. Red inside, a little char on the outside.

“No Mueller kid?” she asked.

He shook his head, and the feel of the evening suddenly warped. “I can’t think about it right now,” he said.

“Fine,” she said hastily, picking up his mood. “It’s a terrible business anyway.”

“Let me tell you a couple of things,” he said. “But it can’t go any further.”

“It won’t.”

He outlined what had happened. The priest and the time problem, the homosexual question and Harper, the Schoeneckers’ search.

She listened solemnly and finally said, “I don’t know Phil Bergen very well, but he never struck me as gay. The few times I’ve talked to him, he seemed almost shy. He was reacting to me.”

“Well, we don’t know for sure,” Lucas said. “But it would explain a lot.”

“So what’s happening with the Schoeneckers?”

“Carr’s meeting with the sexual therapist right now to see if they can match any calls with the Schoeneckers’ kids—the kids never actually came in, but they get a lot of anonymous calls that never develop into anything. The calls are taped, so there might be something. And we’re checking credit cards, trying to find out where they are. They just took off, supposedly to Florida.”

“If all this is true, the town’ll be a mess,” Weather said.

“The town’ll handle it. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before,” Lucas said. “The big question is, how out-of-control is the killer? What is he doing?”

“Hey, you’ll give me nightmares,” she said. “Eat, eat.”

Lucas gave up halfway through his steak and staggered off to an overstuffed couch in front of the fireplace. Weather put an ounce of cognac in each of two glasses, pulled open the drapes that covered the sliding glass doors to the deck, and dropped into an E-Z Boy that sat at right angles to the couch. They both put their feet on the scarred coffee table that ran the length of the couch.

“Blimp,” Lucas said.

“Moi?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“No, me. Christ, if somebody dropped a dictionary on my gut, I’d blow up. Look at that.” Lucas pointed out the doors, where a crescent moon was just edging up over the trees across the lake.

“I feel like . . .” she started, looking out at the moon.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m starting out on an adventure.”

“I wish I was,” Lucas said. “All I do is lay around.”

“Well, writing games . . . You said the money was pretty good.”

“Yeah, like you came up here to make a lot of money.”

“Not quite the same thing,” she said.

“Maybe not,” Lucas said. “But I’d like to do something useful. That’s what I’m finding out. When I was a cop, I was doing something. Now I’m just making money.”

“For now you’re a cop again,” she said.

“For a couple of weeks.”

“How about going back to Minneapolis?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Lucas said. He swirled his cognac in the glass, finished it. “I had a case last summer, in New York. Now this. I sometimes think I could make something out of it, just picking up work. But when I get real, I know it’ll never happen. There’s just not enough to do.”

“Ah, well . . . nobody said life’d get easier.”

“Yeah, but you always think it will,” Lucas said. “The next thing you know, you’re sixty-five and living in a rundown condo on Miami Beach, wondering how you’re going to pay for your next set of false teeth.”

Weather burst out laughing and Lucas grinned in the dark, listening to her, delighted that he’d made her laugh. “The man is an incorrigible optimist,” she said.

They talked about people they knew in common, both in Grant and in the Cities.

“Gene Climpt doesn’t look like a tragedy, but he is,” she told him. “He married his high school sweetheart right after he got in the Highway Patrol—he was in the patrol before Shelly, way back, this was when I was in junior high school. Anyway, they had a baby girl, a toddler. One day Gene’s wife was running a bath for the baby, running just hot water and planning to cool it later, when the phone rang. She went to answer it, and the kid climbed on the toilet and leaned over the tub and fell in.”

“My God.”

“Yeah. She died from the scalding. Then, when Gene was at the funeral home, his wife shot herself. Killed herself. She couldn’t stand the baby dying. They buried them both together.”

“Jesus. He never remarried?”

She shook her head. “Nope. He’s fooled around with a few women over the years, but nobody’s ever got him. Quite a few tried.”

Weather had worked nights at St. Paul-Ramsey General for seven years while she was doing her surgical residency at the University of Minnesota, and knew eight or ten St. Paul cops. Did she like them? “Cops are like everybody else, some of them are nice and some of them are assholes. They do have a tendency to hustle you,” she said.

“A hospital’s a good place to hang around if you’re on patrol, and if the person you’ve brought in isn’t a kid or your partner,” Lucas said. “It’s warm, you’re safe, you can get free coffee. There are pretty women around. Most of the women you see, when you’re working, are either victims or perpetrators. Nothing like having a good-looking woman tell you to stick your speeding ticket in your ass to chill off your day.”

“They’re right, cops should stick the tickets,” Weather declared.

“Yeah?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. It always used to amaze me, seeing cops writing tickets. The Cities are coming apart; people are getting killed every night and you can’t walk downtown without a panhandler extorting money out of you. And half the time when you see a cop, he’s giving a ticket to some poor jerk who was going sixty-five in a fifty-five zone. The whole world is going by at sixty-five even while he’s writing the ticket. I don’t know why cops do it, it just makes everybody mad at them.”

“Sixty-five is breaking the law,” Lucas said, tongue in cheek.

“Oh, bullshit.”

“All right, it’s bullshit.”

“Don’t they have quotas for tickets?” she asked. “I mean, really?”

“Well, yeah, but they don’t call it that. They have performance standards. They say an on-the-ball patrolman should write about X number of tickets in a month. So a patrol guy gets to the end of the month and counts his tickets and says, ‘Shit, I need ten more tickets.’ So he goes out to a speed trap and spends an hour getting his ten tickets.”

“That’s a quota.”

“Shhh. It’s a hell of a lot more lucrative for the city than busting some dumb-ass junkie burglar.”

“ . . . wouldn’t tell me what the guy wanted, she was just too shy, and about fifteen minutes out of nursing school. It turned out he wanted his foreskin restored, He’d heard that sex felt better with a foreskin and he figured we could just take a stitch here and put a hem over there.”

Weather had a cop’s sense of humor, Lucas decided, laughing, probably developed in the emergency room; someplace where the world got bad enough, often enough, that you learned to separate yourself from the bad news.

“There’s just a thimbleful of cognac left and I get it,” Weather said, bouncing out of the chair.

“You can have it,” Lucas said.

When she came back, she sat next to him on the couch, instead of in the chair, and put a hand behind his head, on his opposite shoulder.

“You didn’t drink hardly any of the wine. I drank two-thirds of the bottle, and now I’m finishing the cognac.”

“Fuck the cognac,” Lucas said. “Wanna neck?”

“That’s not very romantic,” she said severely.

“I know, but I’m nervous.”

“I still have a right to some romance,” she said. “But yes, necking would be appropriate, I think.”

A while later she said, “I’m not going to be coy about this; I go for the aging jock-cop image.”

“Aging?”

“You’ve got more gray than I do—that’s aging,” she said.

“Mmmm.”

“But I’m not going to sleep with you yet,” she said. “I’m gonna make you sweat for a while.”

“Whatever’s right.”

After a while she asked, “So how do you feel about kids?”

“We gotta talk,” he said.

The guest room was cool because of the northern exposure, and Lucas put on pajamas before he crawled into the bed. He lay awake for a few minutes, wondering if he should try her room, but he sensed that he should not. They’d ended the evening simply talking. When she left for her bedroom, she’d kissed him—he was sitting down—on the lips, and then the forehead, tousled his hair, and disappeared into the back of the house.

“See you in the morning,” she’d said.

He was surprised when, almost asleep, he heard her voice beside the bed: “Lucas.” Her hand touched his shoulder and she whispered, “There’s someone outside.”

“What?” He was instantly awake. She’d left a hallway light on in case he had to get up in the night to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, and he could see her squatting beside the bed. She was carrying the .22. He pushed back the blankets and swung his feet to the floor. The .45 was sitting on the nightstand and he picked it up. “How do you know?”

“I couldn’t sleep right away.”

“Neither could I.”

“I’ve got a bath off my bedroom and I went for a glass of water. I saw a snowmobile headlight angling in toward the house from out on the lake. There’s no trail that comes in like that. So I watched and the headlight went out—but I could see him in the moon, still coming. The neighbors have a roll-out dock and it’s on their lawn. He stopped behind it, I think. They don’t have a snowmobile. There’s a windbreak down there, those pines. I didn’t see him again.”

She was calm, reporting almost matter-of-factly.

“How long ago?”

“Two or three minutes. I kept watching, thinking I was crazy. Then I heard something on the siding, scratching-like.”

“Sounds like trouble,” Lucas said. He jacked a shell into the .45.

“What’ll we do?” Weather asked.

“Call in. Get some guys down here, on the lake and on the road. We don’t want to scare him off before we can get things rolling.”

“There’s a phone in my bedroom—c’mon,” she said. She padded down the hall, Lucas following. “What else?”

“He’s got to find a place to get in, and that’s gotta make some noise. I want you down by the kitchen, just listening. Stay behind the counter, on the floor. I’ll be in the living room, by the couch. If you hear him, just sneak back and get me. Let’s call.”

They were at her room and she picked up the phone. “Uh-oh,” she said, looking at him. “It’s dead. That’s never happened . . .”

“He took the wires out. Goddammit, he’s here,” Lucas said. “Get on the kitchen floor. I . . .”

“What?”

“I’ve got a handset in the truck.” He looked at the garage door; it’d take him ten seconds.

A loud knocking from the front room turned him around.

“What?” whispered Weather. “That’s the doors to the deck.”

“Stay back.” Lucas slipped down the hall, stopped at a corner, peeked around it, saw nothing. They’d left the curtains open so they could see the moon, but there was no visible movement on the deck outside the house, no face pressed against the glass. Nothing but a dark rectangle. The knocking started again, not as though someone were trying to force the door, but as if they were trying to wake up Weather.

“Hey . . .” A man’s voice, muffled by the tri-pane glass.

“What?” Weather had stood up, and was walking through from the kitchen toward the living room.

“Get the fuck down,” Lucas whispered urgently, waving the pistol at her. “Get down.”

She hesitated, still standing, and Lucas scuttled across the room, caught her wrist in his left hand, pulled her down and toward a wall.

“Somebody needs help,” she said.

“Bullshit: remember the phone,” Lucas said. They both edged forward toward a corner.

Another call, as if from a distance. “Hey in there. Hey, we got a wreck, we got a wreck,” and there were three more knocks. Lucas let go of Weather’s wrist and did a quick peek around the corner.

“It can’t be him—that’s somebody looking for me,” Weather said. She started past him, her white nightgown ghostly in the dim reflected light from the hall.

“Jesus,” said Lucas. He was sitting on the floor at the corner and reached up to catch her arm, but she stepped into the sightline from the deck, eight feet from the glass.

The window exploded, showering the room with glass, and a finger of fire poked through at Weather. Lucas had already pulled her back and she came off her feet, sprawling, okay, and Lucas yelled, “Shotgun, shotgun . . .” and fired three quick shots through the door, pop-pop-pop and pulled back.

The shotgun roared again, sending more glass flying across the room, pellets ripping through the end of the leather couch, burying themselves in the far wall. Lucas did a quick peek, then another, fired a fourth shot.

Weather, on her hands and knees, lunged toward the kitchen, came up with the .22 rifle she’d left there, and started back.

“Fucker!” she screamed.

“Stay down, that’s a twelve gauge,” Lucas shouted. Another shotgun blast, then another, a long five seconds apart, the muzzle flash from the first lighting up the front of the room. The flash from the second seemed fainter, the pellets ricocheting around the stone fireplace.

Five seconds passed without another shot. “He’s running,” Lucas said. “I think he’s running.”

He got to his feet and dashed into Weather’s bedroom, looked out on the lawn. He could see the man there, a hundred feet away, twenty feet from the shelter of the treeline, fifteen feet. “Goddammit.” He stepped back and fired two quick shots through the window glass, shattering it, then one more at the fleeing figure, a hopeless shot.

The man disappeared into the trees. Lucas fired a final shot at the last spot he’d seen him, and the magazine was empty.

“Get him? Get him?” Weather was there with the rifle. He snatched it from her and ran down the hall to the living room, out through the deck and into the snow. He floundered across the yard, through snow thigh deep, following the tracks, through the treeline . . . and saw the red taillight of a snowmobile scudding across the lake, three or four hundred yards away. The rifle was useless at that range.

He was freezing. The cold caught at him, twisted him. He turned and began to run back toward the house, but the cold battered at him and he slowed, plodding in his bare feet, his pajamas hanging from him.

“Jesus, Lucas, Lucas . . .” Weather caught him under the arms, hauled him into the house. He was shaking uncontrollably.

“Handset in my truck. Get it,” he grunted.

“You get in the goddamn shower—just get in it.”

She turned and ran toward the garage, flipping on lights as she went. Lucas peeled off his sodden pajama top, so tired he could barely move, staggered back toward the bathroom. The temperature inside the house was plunging as the night air roared through the shattered windows, but the bathroom was still warm.

He got in the shower, turned on the hot water, let it run down his back, plastering his pajama pants to his legs. He was holding on to the shower head when Weather came back with the handset.

“Dispatch.”

“This is Davenport down at Weather Karkinnen’s place. We were just hit by a guy with a shotgun. Nobody hurt, but the house is a mess. The guy is headed west across Lincoln Lake on a snowmobile. He’s about two minutes gone, maybe three.”

“Weather, that’s the damnedest, stupidist thing . . .” Carr started, but Weather shook her head and looked at the blown-out window. “I won’t leave,” she said. “Not when it’s like this. I’ll figure out something.”

Lucas was wrapped in a snowmobile suit. Carr shook his head and said, “All right, I’ll get somebody from Hardware Hank out here.”

The gunman had come in on snowshoes, as the LaCourt killer had. By the time an alert had been issued, he could have been any one of dozens of snowmobilers still out on the trails within two or three miles of Weather’s house. The two on-duty deputies were told to stop sleds and take names. Nobody thought much would come of it.

“When I got the call about the shooting, I phoned Phil Bergen,” Carr told Lucas.

“Yeah?”

“Nobody home,” Carr said.

There was a moment of silence, then Lucas asked, “Does he have a shotgun?”

“I don’t know. Anybody can get a gun, though.”

“Why don’t you have somebody check on the sled, see if it’s at his house? See if he’s out on it.”

“That’s being done,” Carr said.

The Madison crime scene techs were taking pictures of the snowmobile tread tracks, the snowshoe tracks, and were digging shotgun shells out of the snow. Lucas, still shaking with cold, walked through the living room with Weather. A double-ought pellet had hit the frame on one of the photographs of her parents, but the photo was all right.

“Why did he do it that way, why . . . ?”

“I have to think about that,” Lucas said.

“About . . . ?”

“He wanted you by those windows. If he’d gone to a door, you might not have let him in. And he’d need a hell of a gun to shoot through those oak doors and be sure about getting you. So the question is, did he know about the doors?”

“I think the glass was just the way he wanted to do it,” Weather said after a minute. “He could get access up from the lake, nobody’d see him.”

“That’s possible, too. If you hadn’t seen him, if we didn’t know about the phones, you might’ve walked right up to the glass.”

“I almost did anyway,” she said.

Carr came back. “We can’t find Phil, but his sled’s in the garage. His car is gone.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Lucas said.

“I don’t either—but I’ve got dispatch calling Park Falls at Hayward. They’re checking the bars for his car.”

The man from Hardware Hank brought three sheets of plywood and a Skil saw, broke the glass fragments out of the glass doors and the window in Weather’s bedroom, fitted the openings with plywood, and set them in place with nails. “That’ll hold you for tonight,” he said as he left. “I’ll check back tomorrow on something permanent.”

By three o’clock that morning the crime scene techs were packing up and the phone company had come and gone. Bergen had still not been found.

“I’m going home,” Carr said. “I’ll leave somebody.”

“No, we’re okay,” Weather said. “Lucas has his .45 and I have the rifle . . . and I seriously doubt that’d he’d be back again.”

“All right,” Carr said. He flushed slightly. Lucas realized that he assumed that he and Weather were in bed together. “Stay on the handset.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. Then, glancing at Weather, said to Carr, “C’mere and talk a minute. Privately.”

“What?” Weather asked, hands on her hips.

“Law enforcement talk,” Lucas said.

Carr followed him into the guest bedroom. Lucas picked up his shoulder holster, took the pistol out. He’d reloaded after he got out of the shower, and now he punched out the chambered round and reseated it in the magazine.

“If we don’t find Bergen tonight, he could get lynched tomorrow,” he said.

“I know that,” Carr said. “I’m praying he’s drunk somewhere. First time for that.”

“But the main thing I want to say is, we need to get Weather out of town. She’s gonna fight it, but I’ve contaminated her. I can’t quite think why, but I guess I have.”

“So work on her,” Carr said.

Lucas gestured to his bag on the floor, the rumpled bedclothes. “We’re not quite as friendly as you think, Shelly.”

Carr flushed again, then said, “I’ll talk to her tomorrow, we’ll work something out. I’ll have a guy with her all day.”

“Good.”

When the last man left, Weather pushed the door shut, looked at Lucas.

“What was that little bull session about?” she asked suspiciously.

“I asked some routine questions and let Shelly get a good look at my clothes and my watch and the rumpled-up bed in the guest room,” Lucas said. He shivered.

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Huh. I appreciate that. I guess. Are you still cold?”

“Yeah. Freezing. But I’m okay.”

“That was the stupidest goddamn thing I ever saw, you tearing through the snow like that in your bare feet. I honest to God thought you were in trouble when I got you back in here, I thought you were gonna have a heart attack.”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” he said.

She walked back into the living room, looked at the damaged walls, and said, “I’m really cranked, Davenport. Pissed and cranked. I’m gonna have to reschedule the hysterectomy I had going this morning . . . maybe I can push it back into the afternoon. Jesus, I’m wound up.”

“You’ve got about two quarts of adrenaline working their way through your body. You’ll fall apart in an hour or so.”

“You think so?” She was interested. “Hey, look at the holes in the walls—my God.”

She called the hospital’s night charge nurse, explained the problem, rescheduled the operation, unloaded then reloaded her .22, asked Davenport to demonstrate his .45, went repeatedly back to the buckshot holes, poking at them with an index finger, going outside to see if they’d gone through. She found three holes in her leather couch, and was outraged all over again. Lucas let her go. He went into the kitchen, made a bowl of chicken noodle soup, ate it all, went back into the living room, and fell on the couch.

“What about the shots you fired? Could you have hit somebody across the lake?” she demanded. She had the magazine out of his .45 and was pointing it at her own image in the mirror over the fireplace.

“No. Some people call a .45 slug a flying ashtray. It’s fat, heavy, and slow. It’ll knock the shit out of you close up, but it’s not a long-range item. Fired from here, on the level, it wouldn’t make it halfway across.”

“Any chance you hit him?” she asked.

“No . . . I just didn’t want him swarming through the door with the shotgun. I might of got him, but he would have got us, too.”

“God, it was loud,” she said. “The shots almost broke my eardrums.”