Lucas sat up and winced as the headache hit him. He went out to the kitchen, got a bottle of lime-flavored mineral water from the refrigerator and walked unsteadily back to his workroom. The answering machine was blinking at him: eight messages. He punched the replay button. Six calls were from TV stations and the two papers. One was from Daniel, the last from Lily. He called her back.
"I'm up to my ass in paperwork," she said.
"I heard."
"And I've got a deposition tomorrow morning…"
"Lunch, maybe?"
"I'll call you."
"I'll be on the street. I'll have a handset…"
Daniel had called to see how he was. "We've got the feebs by the nuts," he said. "We've got one team working the people in Hood's apartment house and his roommates; Sloan and Anderson are digging for stuff on this guy in South Dakota. You heard he was from here?"
"Yeah. Jen told me."
"Okay. Listen, I've got to go. You take it easy. We got it covered."
When he got off the phone with Daniel, Lucas poured the mineral water into a tumbler and followed with three fingers of Tanqueray gin. The combination made a bad gin and tonic. He sat in the kitchen and drank it down. Fuckin'
Yellow Hand. Hood and the shotgun. He reached back and rubbed the spot where the shotgun had been, then walked unsteadily back to the bathroom and got in the shower. The liquor was working on him and the hot water beat on his face, but the images of Hood and Yellow Hand would not go away.
He was out of the shower, toweling off, when the doorbell rang. He wrapped the towel around his waist, padded through the kitchen and peeked out a window at his porch.
Jennifer.
"Hi," she said, taking him in. "You still okay?"
"Kind of drunk," he said.
A worry line appeared between her eyebrows, and she leaned forward and kissed him. "Gin," she said. "I never would have believed it."
"I'm fucked up," he said, trying on a grin.
"Follow me," she said, tugging at his towel. "We'll try to unfuck you."
The afternoon sun dropped below the eaves and lit up the curtain in Lucas' bedroom. Jennifer pushed him off and swung her legs over the side of the bed, and looked back and said, "That was… frantic."
"I'm not sure I'm still alive," Lucas said. "Christ, I could use a cigarette."
"Were you scared?"
"Almost paralyzed. I wanted to plead, but… it just… I don't know, it wouldn't have done any good… I just wanted to get it off me…"
"This policewoman from New York…"
"Lily…"
"Yeah. There was a press conference, a short one, with Daniel and her and Larry Hart. She looked tough," Jennifer said, watching his face. "She looked like your type."
"I could give a shit about that," Lucas grunted. "The best thing about her is that she used to shoot in combat competition. She had that forty-five in Billy Hood's face in maybe a tenth of a second. Boom. Adios, motherfucker."
"She looked pretty nice," Jennifer said.
"Jesus, yeah. She looks pretty nice. She's a little chubby, but nice-looking."
"She looked a little chubby," Jennifer agreed. Jennifer worked out every morning at a hard-core muscle gym.
"She eats everything in sight," Lucas said. "Jesus, I wish I still smoked."
"So you're all right…"
"Nothing like this has ever happened," he said, bewildered. "I've come close before, shit, with the Maddog I almost got my ass killed. But this got to me… I don't know."
She rubbed his still damp hair and he asked, "Did you go on the date? To the symphony?"
"Yeah."
"How was it?"
"It was okay," she said. "I'll go with him again if he asks, but I won't be sleeping with him."
"Ah. Decent of you to tell me."
"He's just too fuckin' nice," Jennifer said. "No edges. Everything I said, he agreed with."
"He's probably hung like a Tennessee stud horse."
Jennifer's forehead wrinkled. "Men worry about the god-damnedest things," she said.
"I wasn't worried."
"Sure. That's why you mentioned it," she said. "Anyway, even if I did plan to sleep with him, I'd put it off for a while. I keep looking at the baby, and I keep thinking I want to do it again. With the same daddy."
Lucas turned on his side and kissed her on the forehead.
"I'd like to help, whenever you want to. Soon?"
"I think so. In a couple, three months. This time, I'll tell you when I go off the Pill."
He kissed her again and his hand crept over her breast, circling and pressing her nipple with the palm of his hand.
"I'd like a boy," she said.
"Whatever," said Lucas. "Another daughter would be fine with me."
"Maybe we could move it up. Next month, maybe."
"I'll be on the job," he said.
She laughed, shook her head and looked at her watch.
"Think you could stand some more succor? I've got barely enough time."
"Christ, I don't know, I'm getting old…" They made love again, more sedately, and later, when Jennifer was getting dressed, Lucas said, hoarsely, "I didn't want the world to go away. I would never have known, but I kept thinking… I don't even know if I was thinking it, but I was feeling it… I wanted more. More life. Jesus, I was afraid I'd just wink out, like a soap bubble…"
After Jennifer left for the airport, Lucas tried again to nap. Failing, he turned on the television and caught the cable news from Sioux Falls. John Liss was out of surgery; he'd live, but he'd never walk again. The cowboy's shot had taken out a piece of spinal cord just above the hips. They ran the tape of the shooting again, then another time, in slow motion, and then cut to a picture of Lawrence Duber-ville Clay. It was a well-known shot, the director in shirtsleeves on the Chicago waterfront, working a cocaine bust. He had a huge Desert Eagle automatic pistol packed under his arm in an elaborate shoulder holster.
"In a related development, FBI director Lawrence Du-berville Clay has announced that he will go personally to Brookings to take charge of the investigation, and said he expects to set up a temporary national FBI headquarters in Minneapolis until the conspirators are captured," the an-chorwoman said. "Clay said the move should be accomplished in the next two or three days. This is the third time that the FBI director has involved himself with a specific investigation. His action is seen as an administration effort to emphasize the importance given to its war on crime…"
Lucas poked the remote control and Clay's face went away. Three o'clock. He stood, thought a moment, then went back in the kitchen for the rest of the Tanqueray.
CHAPTER 13
Shadow Love saw Billy Hood's death on a television set in the corner of a Lake Street grill. The camera was a full block from the scene, but up high, and it was all as clear as a running play on Monday Night Football.
Billy and the hunter cop. The woman with the purse. Billy moving. Why did he do that? Why did he take his finger off the trigger? The woman's hand coming up with the pistol. The shot, Billy going down like a rag doll, and Davenport kneeling on the pavement, vomiting…
Shadow Love watched it once, watched it again, watched it a third time as the station endlessly ran the tape loop. "The following news broadcast contains scenes of violence and death and may not be appropriate for children. If there are any children in the viewing area…"
And then a running press conference at the shooting scene. Larry Hart: "… have developed evidence that these people are not just killing whites, but have killed one of our own, a Dakota man from Fort Thompson, Yellow Hand…"
Larry Hart on the TV. Sweating. Pleading. Twisting his hands like Judas Iscariot.
The black spot popped up, twitching, growing, blurrin;1, his vision. Shadow Love tried to blink it away, but the anger was stirring through his chest.
Judas. Sweating, pleading…
Hart's face vanished in an electronic instant, to be replaced by that of a woman newscaster. "We've just gotten word that there has been another assassination attempt in Brookings, South Dakota, apparently related to the killings done by the Indian extremist group responsible for the assassinations of the New York commissioner of welfare and a federal judge in Oklahoma. The target of the South Dakota attempt was Elmer Linstad, the state's attorney general…"