Part 9 (1/2)

”I watched Harrison and MacRinney do a free flap on a kid with Bell's palsy,” she said, popping the top on the can.

”Interesting?” She put her purse on the kitchen counter and turned her face up to him: her face was a little lopsided, as though she'd had a ring career before turning to medicine. He loved the face; he could remember reacting the first time he'd talked with her, in a horror of a burned-out murder scene in northern Wisconsin: she wasn't very pretty, he'd thought, but she was very attractive. And a little while later, she'd cut his throat with a jackknife. . . .

Now she nodded. ”Couldn't see some of the critical stuff-mostly clearing away a lot of fat, which is pretty picky. They had a double operating microscope, so I could watch Harrison work part of the time. He put five square knots around the edge of an artery that wasn't a heck of a lot bigger than a broom straw.”

”Could you do that?”

”Maybe,” she said, her voice serious. He'd learned about surgeons and their compet.i.tive instincts. He knew how to push her b.u.t.tons. ”Eventually, but . . . You're pus.h.i.+ng my b.u.t.tons.”

”Maybe.”

She stopped, stood back and looked at him, picking something up from his voice. ”Did something happen?”

He shrugged. ”I had a fairly interesting case for about fifteen minutes this afternoon. It's gone now, but . . . I don't know.”

”Interesting?” She worried.

”Yeah, there's a woman from the BCA who thinks we've got a serial killer around. She's a little crazy, but she might be right.”

Now she was worried. She stepped back toward him. ”I don't want you to get hurt again, messing with some maniac.”

”It's over, I think. We're off the case.”

”Off?”

Lucas explained, including the strange call from Connell. Weather listened intently, finis.h.i.+ng the Sprite. ”You think she's up to something,” she said when he finished.

”It sounded like it. I hope she doesn't get burned. C'mon. Let's run.”

”Can we go down to Grand and get ice cream afterwards?”

”We'll have to do four miles.”

”G.o.d, you're hard.”

AFTER DARK, AFTER the run and the ice cream, Weather began reviewing notes for the next morning's operation. Lucas was amazed by how often she operated. His knowledge of surgery came from television, where every operation was a crisis, undertaken only with great study and some peril. With Weather, it was routine. She operated almost every day, and some days, two or three times. ”You've got to do it a lot, if you're going to do it at all,” she said. She'd be in bed by ten and up by five-thirty.

Lucas did business for a while, then prowled the house, finally went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt for a small off-duty gun, clipped it under his waistband and pulled his golf s.h.i.+rt over it. ”I'm going out for a while,” he said.

Weather looked up from the bed. ”I thought the case was over.”

”Ehh. I'm looking for a guy.”

”So take it easy,” she said. She had a yellow pencil clenched between her teeth, and spoke around it; she looked cute, but he picked up the tiny spark of fear in her eyes.

He grinned and said, ”No sweat. I'll tell you straight out when there might be a problem.”

”Sure.”

Lucas's house was on the east bank of the Mississippi, in a quiet neighborhood of tall dying elms and a few oaks, with the new maples and ginkgoes and ash trees replacing the disappearing elms. At night, the streets were alive with middle-cla.s.s joggers working off the office flab, and couples strolling hand in hand along the dimly lit walkways. When Lucas stopped in the street to s.h.i.+ft gears, he heard a woman laugh somewhere not too far away; he almost went back inside to Weather.

Instead, he headed to the Marshall-Lake Bridge, crossed the Mississippi, and a mile farther on was deep into the Lake Street strip. He cruised the c.o.c.ktail lounges, p.o.r.no stores, junk shops, rental-furniture places, check-cas.h.i.+ng joints, and low-end fast-food franchises that ran through a brutally ugly landscape of cheap lighted signs. Children wandered around at all times of day and night, mixing with the suburban c.o.ke-seekers, dealers, drunks, raggedy-hip insurance salesmen, and a few lost souls from St. Paul, desperately seeking the shortcut home. A pair of cops pulled up alongside the Porsche at a stoplight and looked him over, thinking Dope dealer. He rolled down his window and the driver grinned and said something, and the pa.s.senger-side cop rolled down his window and said, ”Davenport?”

”Yeah.”

”Great car, man.”

The driver called across his partner, ”Hey, dude, you got a little rock? I could use a taste, mon.”

FRANKLIN AVENUE WAS as rugged as Lake Street, but darker. Lucas pulled a slip of paper from his pocket, turned on a reading light, checked the address he had for Junky Doog, and went looking for it. Half the buildings were missing their numbers. When he found the right place, there was a light in the window and a half-dozen people sitting on the porch outside.

Lucas parked, climbed out, and the talk on the porch stopped. He walked halfway up the broken front sidewalk and stopped. ”There a guy named Junky Doog who lives here?”

A heavyset Indian woman heaved herself out of a lawn chair. ”Not now. All my family live here now.”

”Do you know him?”

”No, I don't, Mr. Police.” She was polite. ”We've been here almost four months and never heard the name.”

Lucas nodded. ”Okay.” He believed her.

Lucas started crawling bars, talking to bartenders and customers. He'd lost time on the street, and the players had changed. Here and there, somebody picked him out, said his name, held up a hand: the faces and names came back, but the information was spa.r.s.e.

He started back home, saw the Blue Bull on a side street, and decided to make a last stop.

A half-dozen cars were parked at odd att.i.tudes around the bar's tiny parking lot, as though they'd been abandoned to avoid a bombing run. The Blue Bull's windows were tinted, so that patrons could see who was coming in from the lot without being seen themselves. Lucas left the Porsche at a fire hydrant on the street, sniffed the night air-creosote and tar-and went inside.

The Blue Bull could sell cheap drinks, the owner said, because he avoided high overhead. He avoided it by never fixing anything. The pool table had grooves that would roll a ball though a thirty-degree arc into a corner pocket. The overhead fans hadn't moved since the sixties. The jukebox had broken halfway through a Guy Lom bardo record, and hadn't moved since.

Nor did the decor change: red-flocked wh.o.r.ehouse wallpaper with a patina of beer and tobacco smoke. The obese bartender, however, was new. Lucas dropped on a stool and the bartender wiped his way over. ”Yeah?”

”Carl Stupella still work here?” Lucas asked.

The bartender coughed before answering, turning his head away, not bothering to cover his mouth. Spit flew down the bar. ”Carl's dead,” he said, recovering.

”Dead?”

”Yeah. Choked on a bratwurst at a Twins game.”

”You gotta be kidding me.”

The bartender shrugged, started a smile, thought better of it, and shrugged again. Coughed. ”His time was up,” he said piously, running his rag in a circle. ”You a friend of his?”

”Jesus Christ, no. I'm looking for another guy. Carl knew him.”

”Carl was an a.s.shole,” the bartender said philosophically. He leaned one elbow on the bar. ”You a cop?”

”Yup.”

The bartender looked around. There were seven other people in the bar, five sitting alone, looking at nothing at all, the other two with their heads hunched together so they could whisper. ”Who're you looking for?”