Her father said, "You're really off the dope."
She nodded: "I'm absolutely clean. No dope, no alcohol. All I want is a little quiet. I want to work."
They both stared at her for a long time, and then her mother said, "It's very hard to trust you, after what you've put us through."
"I know that," Annabelle said. "I'm not asking you for money, and I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to tell me where I can go and get an office and start working. I'll go there, rent the office, or apply for the job, but I want to shortcut it. I don't want to be running around for six weeks. I want to get going."
They looked at her again, long, measuring stares, then her father said to her mother, "We need to talk somewhere." To Annabelle: "You wait here, we're going in the kitchen."
They were gone for ten minutes, and might have been arguing, Annabelle thought. She sat perched on the chair, looked at all the stuff-the detritus-that the Ramfords had accumulated in forty years of mar-riage. Knickknacks, paintings, pottery, photographs. Seashells full of nickels and pennies, and the odd pair of fingernail clippers.
Ten minutes, and they came back out of the kitchen. Her father sat down, her mother moved behind the couch.
"You know our suite in the Foster Building," her father said. He cleared his throat. "At the end of the fourth floor annex, that's one up from where I am, there's an empty office. One big room. We could put a desk in there, some office equipment, and a couple of chairs. You'd have access to our library and Lexis. You would not be an employee of the firm, but… we'd give you all our pro bono. Nobody wants to do it, and it's all over the place, and I'll pay you out of my pocket. But: you screw up just once, and I'll lock the office and I'll tell the security people to keep you out of the building."
She thought about it: not exactly what she wanted. Better in some ways, but the idea of her father looking over her shoulder every minute…
But then, she could handle her father, now, she thought. Because way deep down in her heart, she no longer really gave a shit what he thought. She needed the break, and as soon as she'd worked it, as soon as she was on her feet, she could move out.
"I'll take it," she said. "You won't be sorry. All I want to do is work."
Not everything was sweetness and light. They were still wary of her, still waiting for the monster to jump out of her eyes. When she left, her father said, "I'll see you tomorrow?" and it really was a question.
"I'll be waiting for you," she said.
She stopped at a supermarket on Grand, got enough food for a week, including some easy microwave one-dish stuff. As she was lying on her used couch, eating chicken-and-rice, it occurred to her that she was about six blocks from the first place she'd ever sampled crack.
Watching herself, she was amazed to find not even the slightest whisper of desire. Two weeks ago, a bottle of cheap wine was home. Now, she thought, she might be a teetotaler. Maybe. Maybe the stress of trying to get a job going would bring back all the bad stuff.
She doubted it: it seemed now, at this time and place, that all that had been scorched right out of her.
Later that evening, before she went to bed, she again felt the barrenness of the apartment. Not an emotional thing, but a simple, physical emptiness. She needed pottery, bird feathers, milkweed hulls, pinecones, a cup full of dried-up ballpoint pens and eraserless pencils, a file cabinet full of paper about one thing or another. She needed insurance, she needed a retirement program, she needed to open an account at Fidelity. She needed quarterly reports.
Standing in her new Target nightgown, she dumped her new pack on the floor, and looked at the few pieces that fell out. All that was left of her old life. She picked up her knife. Ought to throw it, she thought. This was not a good vibe…
But still, a girl should have a knife.
She opened the blade and noticed the brown crusty stuff… "What?"
Blood? She held it next to a new Target lamp. Dried blood. She cut the guy up there in Duluth, the killer guy.
And she thought: DMA. Serious evidence against somebody, right there in her hand.
What to do? She was afraid of that cop, Davenport. He'd sounded so damn mean…
She closed the blade on the knife.
Tomorrow, an office.
The knife, she'd think about.
Chapter 20
The hours after a cop is killed are always a nightmare: telling the family, figuring out what went wrong, deciding if some living person is to blame-and Nadya was taking a hit on the last item.
She insisted that Reasons had initiated the relationship, telling her that his marriage was essentially over. Her argument was good enough, and detailed enough, that it made the Duluth cops angrier than ever. To have one of their own killed, and thus automatically qualified for sainthood-nobody liked to see a dead cop, but on the other hand, it never hurt the budgetary process if you lost the occasional flatfoot-and to have all of that tarnished by a Russian and maybe even a Commie…
Lucas took some of the heat off in a quick, illegal, and private meeting with the police chief, where everybody agreed that Lucas hadn't actually been stopped, shot at, or really handcuffed while he was pursuing the killer… that wouldn't have been good for the budget.
There was also a general agreement that it wouldn't be necessary to mention the sexual liaison to the press. Reasons had actually been guarding Nadya when he was murdered-he had given his life to save hers.
Lucas got back to Weather, late, waking her, telling her what had happened. Nadya had moved to a new room, and Weather said she would call her.
"I can tell you she ain't asleep," Lucas said.
While all that was going on, so was the chase: Duluth cops went to every pizza place in town, trying to see who might have bought the pizza. They knew it was a fresh one-Nadya said she could smell it, even after the shooting.
"Must have been a hungry sonofabitch, hanging on to the pizza when you're chasing him all over the fuckin' hill," Kelly said.
"Weird shit happens," Lucas said.
Several pizza places had customers who might have fit the vague description they had of the killer: thin, blond, blackjacket or white shirt. None of those had any more details.
The women at the hotel's front desk had seen nothing but the back of the pizza-man's head.
In any case, nobody found anything: the killer was gone.
In the morning, Andreno, calling upstate from Virginia, asked, "What the fuck happened down there?"
Lucas told him, and Andreno said, "Maybe she needs a bodyguard. Somebody with a gun."
"You want the job?"
"It's either that or go home. The Spivaks are in a bunker."
"Come on down and let's talk," Lucas said. "I need some theoretical bullshit."
"I'm on my way."
Lucas tried to go back to sleep, failed, eventually got up, cleaned up, looked at the clock, and realized that Andreno could be there at any minute. He called and Andreno said, "I'm just coming into town. If I don't get lost, I'll be there in ten minutes."
Lucas called Nadya's room. She was up, dressed, and sounded like she had a cold.
"Breakfast," he said. "Ya gotta eat."
"I need advice," she said. "And I need coffee."
"I'll see you upstairs in two minutes," Lucas said.
Lucas took the elevator. It stopped two floors up-she'd changed rooms-and Nadya got on, eyes and nose puffy, and said, "Oh, God."
"Yeah." Lucas was tempted to give her a hug, but he wasn't a hugger, and she slumped in the corner, staring at the control buttons. At the top, they went into the restaurant, got a booth. The restaurant was already rotating, and they were overlooking the city but turning toward the harbor. They could see two long, low freighters standing offshore, heading into port, and another one, on the horizon, a dwindling lump.