"Little too late for that," Marshall said. "This is better anyway. Takes care of a couple of problems: his and mine."
"Shoot him," Qatar screamed at Lucas. "Shoot him."
Marshall jerked him another step across the hill, dragging him by the loops of duct tape.
"Terry, goddamnit, stop it. Stop it." Lucas was walking up the hill toward them.
"You gonna shoot me and save this asshole?"
"No. But you gotta listen. We can still smooth this out: You turn him in, we tell everybody you freaked, you talk to a shrink for a couple of weeks…"
He was fifty feet away. Marshall had gotten Qatar to the dug-over area where the graves were.
"Oh, horseshit, Lucas, you know better'n that," Marshall drawled. He might have been smiling. "Minnesota's the same as Wisconsin: They'd hang me by my nuts. They'd make an example out of me. Cops can't do this shit."
Forty feet. Qatar's eyes were wide, his shoulders twisting away from Marshall. "Don't let him… You can't just shoot me," he shouted at Marshall. "I can't die today. I can't… I have classes today. I have responsibilities. The college is expecting me."
"I don't think so, pal."
Thirty feet. Lucas could see that Qatar's bare feet were bleeding, apparently from dragging over the rocks and roots of the hillside. Marshall lifted his pistol so that it pointed directly into the back of Qatar's head. "Stop right there," he said to Lucas.
"Terry, please, man, you're a good guy. And listen to this-one last thing." Lucas was begging for time. "There's not much chance, but what if he is innocent? What if we've screwed this up somehow?"
"That's right," Qatar said. "This is completely illegal. My lawyer-"
"Shut up." Marshall snapped the pistol barrel against the back of his head, and Qatar stopped, his mouth open in midsentence. Marshall said to Lucas, "There's a tape recorder on the front seat of the car. When I got him in the car, I pulled the duct tape off his mouth and told him what I was gonna do, but I told him that maybe I wouldn't if he'd tell me about the women. You listen to that tape, you'll get all the names, and pretty close to the dates, and the places he picked them up. He even says there are two more down in Missouri, some godforsaken place down there."
"You promised me," Qatar said. He tried to twist out of Marshall's grasp, but Marshall played him like a fish. "You promised."
"I lied," Marshall said.
"All right, I'll go to trial, I'll confess," Qatar said. "You got me. All right? All right? Just stop this, stop this now. You win. Okay ?"
"On the other hand, I could always shoot you, too," Marshall said to Lucas, but he was showing a grin again. "How'd they ever prove it was me?"
Lucas shrugged. "They would. Tire tracks, the slugs, nitrites when they picked you up. There's probably a parade on the way here now."
"Yeah, I know, I guess," Marshall admitted. The smile, if it was ever there, faded away and he took a deep breath and looked around the hillside, tipped his head back to look up through the oak branches. Again he cocked the gun up against Qatar's head. "Well, I guess there ain't gonna be any big ceremony in this."
Qatar looked at Lucas, his voice level but desperate. "Help me."
Lucas said, "Terry…"
"You want to say a couple of words, this is your last chance. You're gonna be in hell in ten seconds," Marshall said to Qatar.
Qatar turned his head away, trembling violently. And then he stopped. Maybe the finality of the situation had finally hit him, maybe he was embarrassed by his pleading, maybe this was simply the real Qatar-Lucas didn't know. But he reached down, carefully brushed some mud off his pajamas as well as he could with his cuffed hands, and then looked Marshall in the eyes.
"Your niece-she was a tasty little cunt," he said. "She took a long time to die."
"You cocksucker," Marshall screamed, and Lucas shouted, "Terry, goddamnit…"
The pistol shot was an earsplitting BANG, and Lucas flinched away from it. Qatar's face had a bloody hole in it where the hollow-point had exited; his legs went out, and he pitched down onto one of the refilled graves. He twitched once; he was dead. He didn't look like Edward Fox anymore, not even a bald one.
"Terry… Jesus Christ, Terry…" Lucas said. He was twenty feet away.
Marshall was talking, but talking to Qatar. "I didn't think you had the guts for that," he said. "You got to me. You did that."
He shook his head, looking down the slope at Qatar's crumbled body, but now talking to Lucas. "I had a little time to think on the way down here," Marshall said. "Time to think. I spent ten years of my life looking for the miserable shit. Ruined my life, what was left of it, after June was killed. Took Laura… I just wish Laura would have had a chance in life, you know? Where's Jesus when you need him?" He put the pistol under his own chin and turned his head to look Lucas in the eyes. "But you know what, Lucas?" He took a last look around and a deep breath. "Today's a nice day for this. You might want to look away for a second…"
"Terry!"Lucas screamed.
DEL ARRIVED TWENTY minutes later, pounding into the parking lot in his wife's Dodge. He jammed the transmission into park and jumped out of the car. Lucas was sitting cross-legged on the hood of the Porsche.
"Weather called," Del said. "I got here as soon as I could. Thought maybe I should call somebody, but I didn't… not yet." Lucas didn't respond, and Del looked up at the hill. The bodies were out of sight, untouched, except for the handful of dried oak leaves that Lucas had dropped over Marshall's half-open eyes. "Too late?"
Lucas sighed, rubbed his forehead with his fingers, eyes closed. "Just in time to say goodbye," he said.
30
LUCAS AND WEATHER were working on her boat, an aging S-2. The sky was a perfect blue, and the sun felt as if it wanted to burn down on the back of his neck but didn't yet have the horsepower.
"The thing is made of fiberglass-you wouldn't think you'd have to sit around and sandpaper and varnish," Lucas grumbled. "What the hell is fiberglass for, anyway? Why did they make the goddamn hatch cover out of wood when they had a fiberglass factory?"
"Shut up and paint," Weather said.
"Aren't you supposed to have, like, croissants and wine when you're working on a sailboat? And some friends come by and the guy has got a square chin and the chick is really good-looking and has loop earrings? And they're both wearing turtlenecks and you get this little vibration of possible group sex?"
"The more you talk, the sloppier you get. Just paint and shut up and let me scrub." She was down below, scrubbing what appeared to be chemically hardened chipmunk shit out from under the sink. Lucas was sitting in the cockpit, working on the slip-out hatch board. He secretly believed it was makework to keep him out of the way while she did the real cleanup.
Around them, in the marina, two dozen people were working on boats, and from where he sat on top of the boat, which was on top of the trailer, he could see a mile across Lake Minnetonka to one of the season's early regattas.
"Glad we're not out there racing," he said. "Those guys gotta be freezing their asses off."
"Best time of year," she said. She stepped into the companionway, stepped up, and looked toward the racers. "Nice and dry, too-couldn't be much wind over there."
"Love sailboat racing," Lucas said. "No wind, they still race."
"That's Lew Smith way out on the end-look at him, he must think something's coming."
Lucas leaned back and closed his eyes. It all smelled good: the day, the lake, the marina, even the varnish. If everything were like this all the time…
Well, he'd go nuts. But it was nice to be like this every once in a while. He opened his eyes and looked at Weather. She was still talking, but it was all about racing and who was being lifted above whom, and who was looking at a header, and he really couldn't care about any of it. What he did care about was Weather, and he smiled, watching her enthusiasm.
Sailing.
FOR TWO FRANTIC days after Qatar and Marshall died on the hillside, Lucas had shuttled between grand juries in Goodhue and Hennepin counties. The papers and television stations were wild for the story, and that might yet go on for a while. They all wanted to know why Lucas had gone down to the graveyard. Lucas could only say that it had been a hunch that came to him when he got the call from the 911 Center.