“We can run down to Mankato early, check on the bat, then over to Rochester. We gotta find this woman he’s looking at. That’s the thing: if he’s telling us the truth, we might not have a lot of time.”
“I hope to hell he doesn’t have anybody. I couldn’t deal with another woman like Larson.”
“Just. . hold on, man,” Lucas said. “You’re going through a tough spot.”
“It’s all been tough,” Sloan said. “Now, it’s breaking me up.”
The man with the throaty whisper felt better after talking with Ignace; more complete. Talking about what he was doing actually helped him to think through it, to appreciate it. Though. . what a weird fuckin’ name the guy had. Ruffe Ignace. Who’d name their kid something like that? Why not something decent, like Bob, or Roy? With a name like Ruffe, you were bound to grow up queer.
And it was nice to talk about Millie, even if just a little.
One thing Millie found out early was that sex in the shower sounded good in books but was less fun in real life. First of all, you were standing up, and you had to concentrate on not falling down. The way you did that was, you hung on the water faucet handles, and then just about the time you got a rhythm going, you pushed too hard on the cold handle and Mihovil got a shot of icy water down his back and his dick retracted like a snail in a shell. That wasn’t good.
Then there was the drowning issue. Oral sex always seemed like a possibility in a shower, but that meant you had to rely on nose breathing to keep you alive, and with water pouring down on you, that wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
They tried it in Mihovil’s bathtub, but in a modern bathtub, there just wasn’t enough room, and Mihovil cracked his head so hard on the water faucet that he actually bled from the cut.
In either the shower or the tub, soap was a problem in a number of ways. .
They tried it standing up in the bedroom, but that was almost as awkward as the shower-something usually went wrong at exactly the wrong time. The pumping action would produce rude noises, or Mihovil would fall out and they’d lose the rhythm, and once he ejaculated on the shag carpet in Millie’s bedroom, which had been amess. .
There were issues.
There were issues, but they also made a lot of progress. She found that she could actually learn to have an orgasm. She could link a little fantasy with a little reality, she could get Mihovil to behave in certain ways to increase the sense of fantasy, get the physical part to match the mental stuff, and Pop! It worked almost every time, after she learned how to do it.
Like this. They were doing it doggie style, had just gotten started, and Mihovil asked, “How often do you masturbate?”
She was embarrassed by the question. That seemed a little private, and if she said something like “Every night,” it might even seem to reflect on Mihovil’s own sexual efficacy (in her case) so she temporized and said, “Well, I guess, you know. .”
“No, tell me,” he said. “You must (uh) do it all the time when you have no boyfriend.”
“I do it (grunt) sometimes,” she said. “I think it’s (um) natural. . I guess.”
“Yes. It’s natural. I do it all the time. Sometimes (ah) when I’m watching football. Okay?”
“Okay.” But she was a little doubtful. Where was this going?
He cleared up that question right away: “Now. When we do it this way, it would work much better if you would just reach up and rub yourself a little, because I can hardly reach in there with my hands, and I know my cock doesn’t rub you the right way. . so just reach up there. .”
So she did.
The best thing, they discovered, with research, was to start in the shower, and then get toweled off, and then race into the playroom and do all the stuff in the bed that you imagined doing in the shower, but you let the bed hold you up. Since you were squeaky clean, there really were no limitations. The icky factor essentially vanished. And you didn’t drown. And they only fell out of bed twice, which was actually, when you thought about it, pretty neat.
Falling out of bed, it felt so good. .
11
The morning was brilliant, a bluebird sky with a breath of breeze from the south, and a lick of humid gulf air that meant there’d be thunderstorms in the afternoon.
Lucas woke at six, cleaned up, and went to the phones. Nordwall said he was moving people into the bean field even as they spoke; the Rochester chief of police said his guys had come up empty the night before. “You sure he was here?” the Rochester cop asked.
“Unless Ma Bell is lying to us,” Lucas said. “You got a place for us to get together?”
“Yup. We’re getting quite a few calls, too. The sheriff did some kind of District Six hot-line thing. You know where the government center is, downtown, right on the river? We’re gonna use the boardroom.”
“I know it. See you at ten. Get some coffee and doughnuts-the state will spring for it.”
“Jeez-no wonder the legislature is back in session.”
Sloan showed up a few minutes after seven o’clock, dragging. He looked better than he had the night before, but only because he was standing in daylight. Lucas told him about Grant’s visit the night before and their talk about the possibility of a second man. “A second man?” Sloan wondered.
“Or a woman.”
“Could be a woman, I guess. Another nut. They had a problem at St. John’s with male and female patients getting together. .”
“We had a report on that: they keep the sexual predators away from the mixed-gender units,” Lucas said. “Charlie wouldn’t have met a woman there.”
“But what if he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a woman. .”
They talked about inmates at St. John’s, about the phone call from Charlie Pope, and about Mike West, the missing schizophrenic, as they finished the coffee. Lucas had decided during the night that he wanted to talk to Pope’s mother, who lived in the town of Austin, south of Rochester.
“You’re better at talking to old ladies than I am,” Lucas said. “I thought as long as we were down there. .”
“Yeah, sure.”
When they finished the coffee, Lucas stood at the kitchen sink and rinsed the cups and said, “You don’t look so good.”
“Ah, I took about four orange Nyquils. I oughta be okay,” Sloan said. He didn’t look okay: his eyes were rimmed in red, and he occasionally gurgled. He’d brought a box of Kleenex with him.
“Your call,” Lucas said.
“How about ‘beast of burden’?” Sloan asked, on the way out of town.
“That’s one too many Stones songs,” Lucas said. “Besides, what’s-her-name covered it, and I never liked the cover.”
“How about Def Leppard, ‘Rock of Ages’?”
“On the possible list, but down a way.”
“You know what you oughta do? You oughta make a worst song list from the rock era. That’s something nobody’s seen before.”
Lucas considered the possibilities for a second, then said, “Wouldn’t work. You’d play ‘American Pie,’ followed by ‘Vincent,’ and then any normal human being would throw the iPod out the window.”
They took the truck, because the Porsche’s paint job didn’t like gravel, heading south again, down the four-lane to Mankato, through town, out to the Rice farm. They’d just gone through town when Weather called from London.
“You sound like you’re up,” she said.
“I just went through Mankato. I’ve been up since dawn.”
“Something broke!”
Lucas told her about it, and about Sloan figuring out a murder, and the press conference. She told him about revising the burns on the face of a little girl who was messing around with the white gas in her brother’s camp-stove set.
“At least we’re both staying busy,” Lucas said.
“What about the music list?”