"Yes, I am all right. If Jerry hadn't been here, I would have been…" She tipped her head toward the doorway. And she didn't look all right; she looked scared to death; as they talked, she started to shake, and Kelly put his arm around her, squeezing her. "There is nothing between me and death, but luck and sex and coincidence."
"You believe in coincidence."
"Yes," she said, sadly.
"So what happened?"
"A man came to the door. He said he had a pizza, but I ordered no pizza. But Jerry was standing in the bedroom door and… he was leaving, we had been in bed already… and he went to the door and opened it and I came behind him to say I ordered no pizza, and the man there, bang. But not so loud a bang. I saw Jerry start to fall and I ran back to the bed and got his pistol and the man came to the door and I shoot at him three times, and he shoots at me two or three times and hits the lamp…"
"You didn't hit him?"
"No. I know the pistol well enough to fire it, but I am not intimate with it, and everything was so fast that he came to the door and I shoot, shoot, shoot, with no thinking. Then he ran, and I ran to the door, and then you came."
"Ah, brother…"
Kelly: "What the fuck is going on?"
"We don't know," Lucas said. To Nadya. "How good a look did you get? Could you identify him?"
She shook her head. "I see almost nothing. Nothing! I see the hat, I see the shoot, I run to get the gun and I shoot and shoot and then he was gone."
"Goddamnit."
"But," she said, holding up a finger. She turned and pointed at a blaze orange glove on the floor. "This is his glove. This belongs not to us, and I saw it when he was at the door… saw the orange. He must have lost it."
"We're gonna bag it, check it for DNA," Kelly said, as Lucas stepped over to look at it. It was a cheap, fuzzy, synthetic-cloth glove like the ones deer hunters used.
"You saw the guy," Kelly said to Lucas.
The phone rang and Nadya said, "I will get that," and edged around Reasons's body.
"Yes. White guy, white hat, one of those paper pizza hats, blond, I think, wearing a white shirt when I saw him first," Lucas said. "The girls down in the lobby said he was pulling on a black jacket when he went by them… He was carrying a pizza box. The whole fuckin' time, he was carrying a pizza box."
"All right. We'll check the pizza places, see if somebody picked up a pizza."
"Probably a dummy to cover the gun."
"Yeah, I think."
Nadya started shouting into the phone, in Russian, then she turned toward Kelly and Lucas and pointed at the phone and Lucas said, "Shit, it's somebody. You got a cell phone?"
Kelly handed him a cell phone and he called Harmon and when Harmon came up, as cool as ever, Lucas said, "We've got a phone call coming into room seven forty-five at the Radisson exactly now, and we need it traced… Shit."
Nadya was shaking her head, and hung up.
To Harmon, Lucas said, "You gotta trace that call. We got a big problem here…" He explained quickly and Harmon said, "This is a whole new thing. I'll check out guys, but I'm pretty sure that nobody that we're watching is in Duluth."
"Hang on," Lucas said.
To Nadya, "What was that all about?"
"I must call the embassy," she said. "This was a Russian, a man. He said that I should leave, or I will be killed, like Nikitin. He said this action is none of the concern of, of, my people. He called us the siloviki. This, I do not think, was an American. This siloviki, used this way, meaning members of the KGB, this is a new usage."
"So you're saying…"
"Maybe this is not the local Americans. Maybe… I don't know. This siloviki, this is a word Oleshev would have used."
"This is Harmon," he said, handing her the phone. "Tell him about it." She took the phone and stepped away.
Lucas said to Kelly, "We're gonna need the feds in a major way. This thing is out of control."
"You're saying Reasons was killed by a Russian. A Russian Russian. By mistake."
Lucas said, "I don't know anymore. For a pro, like you know, an international spy hit man, the guy kinda fucked up."
"I don't see that. There was no reason to think that Jerry would be here," Nadya said, the phone at her side. "Besides that, he was good enough."
"Yeah…" The orange glove caught his eye. "But would an international assassin wear a goddamn used blaze orange hunter's glove? Where would he even get one at this time of year?"
They thought about that for a minute, then Lucas: "Climbing down from the international intrigue for a minute… Has somebody gone to tell Mrs. Reasons?"
Nadya, hand to mouth: "Oh, my God." Lucas could hear Harmon's voice: "Hello? Hello?"
Chapter 19
Trey put her new apartment together in two long days. The apartment was off Cretin Avenue, in St. Paul, not far from St. Thomas University, in a well-kept gray-stucco building; two bedrooms, one of which she could use for an office. The rent was twelve hundred dollars a month, which was a lot, but the place felt right.
She bought used furniture for it-good used furniture, most of it from low-end antique shops-and a new bed from Sears. She squandered another two thousand dollars at four different Target stores, buying bathroom and kitchen equipment and a small but nice-looking stereo and twenty CDs, and a television. She went to a used-book store and picked up thirty paperbacks, the best books she remembered from high school and college; To Kill a Mockingbird, like that.
When she was done, the place looked almost like a home. All it needed was some living-in, some accumulation of detritus. Where do you buy a clamshell full of pennies and nickels? She would get it, she thought.
The day after that, at six in the evening, when she'd gotten her guts up, she drove down Summit Avenue to the brown-brick four-square house where she'd spent her teen years. There were lights on, and she drove on past, then two more times around the block. This was necessary, she thought. But what if they kicked her out without giving her a chance?
She'd dressed up a little bit; a nice skirt and blouse, a navy blue jacket. Her face still looked a little wild-the kind of weathering she'd had, you didn't get rid of in two weeks. Stilclass="underline" she was about a million percent different from the Trey of two weeks past.
She finally parked, walked through a pattern of falling leaves up the sidewalk to the screened porch, through the outer door, crossed the porch-there was an oaken porch swing, but it looked as though it hadn't been used in years. She swallowed, and rang the doorbell; rang it quickly, so she wouldn't have a chance to run.
When she heard the footsteps, she knew her father was coming. That was better: her mother was more skeptical, less given to romantic hope. She had her back to the door as he came up, and she turned just as he opened it.
"Hi, Dad," she said. "I need to talk with you."
"Annabelle…" He was a tall man, much balder than she remembered, older, and a little heavier. He seemed shocked.
"I don't need any money," she said. "I'm looking more for… information, I guess."
"Annabelle," he said again. He turned, still holding on to the doorknob. "Lucy-Annabelle is here."
After a moment, she heard her mother coming, and her father looked her over again and said, "Well, you better come in."
Her mother came out of the dining room and into the parlor. Her mother had always colored her hair, and still did-expensive coloring, the kind where they give you the touch of gray that looks almost natural. Her hair looked great, but her face no longer did: she had gotten much older, quickly. She said, "Annabelle. I… you look a lot better than last time."
"I've given up all that other stuff," she said. "I finally burned out. I've been working-and as I told Dad, I don't need money. I just need a little information. A little push in the right direction."
"Well, come in," her father said. "What exactly are we talking about?"
They moved into the parlor, and Annabelle perched on an easy chair while her parents faced her from a couch. "I need… a place to start. You know I got in trouble with the county attorneys office, but I was never brought up on any charges, I was never arrested for anything. Never had any sanctions from the bar. I've been working around, saving my money… I've got an apartment here and I'd like to find a job. Clerking, doing pro bono. Anything like that. I don't need much money."