Shadow Prey (23 page)

"Get it off get it off get it off get it off."

The negotiator knelt beside him and said, "You're okay, you're okay." A hand grasped the shotgun barrel, held it, and Lucas, his breath ragged, groaned, "Get it off, get it off," and there was a flat cutting sound and the muzzle was gone.

Again, everything was sharp, the blacktop beneath his knees, the smell of tar and city garbage, the sound of the radios, an ERU officer running, Lily saying "Jesus, Jesus," the team leader's knee next to his face, Billy Hood's gym shoe twisted in the dirt. Then Lucas' breakfast came up, and he knelt outside Billy Hood's apartment and vomited and vomited; and when he couldn't vomit anymore, dry heaves shook his shoulders and racked his stomach. Members of the ERU team were gathering around the body, and from somewhere he could hear a woman's wail over the shouting and the chatter. The team leader's hand was on the back of his neck, warm against his cold skin. He heard somebody crack the shotgun and a green-cased shotgun shell flipped out.

When the stomach spasms stopped, when he had controlled them, Lucas turned his head and saw Billy Hood's face. The front of it was caved in, as though somebody had hit him with a claw hammer.

"One shot in the ten ring," Lily said. She was standing above him, her face pale as winter, looking down at Hood. "Right on the bridge of his nose." And although her voice was brave, she sounded ineffably sad. Lucas got to his hands and knees, then to his feet, wobbling.

The team leader helped him strip the tape off his head, and turned to look at Lily. "You okay?" he asked.

"I'm okay," Lily said.

"How about you?" the negotiator asked Lucas.

"Fuck, no." Lucas took a couple wobbly steps and Lily slipped an arm around his waist. "It could take a couple of minutes. I was a dead man."

"Maybe he would have let you go," Lily said, looking back at Hood's body.

"Maybe, but I don't think so. Billy Hood was an angry man," Lucas said. "He was ready to die and he wasn't going alone."

He stopped and turned and, like Lily, looked back at the body. Hood's face wasn't peaceful in death. It was simply dead, and empty, like a beer can crushed on the side of a road. A red-hot anger washed through Lucas.

"God damn, we needed him. We needed the motherfucker to talk, the stupid shit. The stupid shit, why'd he do this?" He was shouting and the ERU team was looking at him.

Lily tightened her grip around his waist and gave him a gentle push toward the house across the street.

"Did I say Thank you'?" Lucas asked, looking down at Lily.

"Not yet."

"You could have blown my fuckin' brains out, Rothen-burg. And I've got all kinds of shit buried in my face."

"I'm too good a shot to have hit you. And the shit in your face is better than shotgun pellets behind your ear," she said.

"So, thanks. You saved my ass."

"I accept your abject gratitude, and while it's not enough..."

"I'll give you all the gratitude you can handle. You know that," he said. The hair on the top of her head brushed against his cheek.

"Fuckin' men," she muttered.

Chapter
12

Lucas sat on a stack of newspapers.

"Are you all right?" Daniel asked, squatting beside him. Lily realized that he was trying to be gentle but didn't know how.

"In a bit," Lucas said.

Larry Hart came in, saw them and stopped. "The whole area is surrounded by media," he said. "Channel Eight had a camera on a roof down the street. They had the whole thing on the air, live. Everybody'll be looking for you and Lily."

"Fuck that," said Lucas, his elbows on his legs, his head hung down to his knees. "Has anybody talked to Jennifer?"

"I gave her a call right after Lily took Hood out," Daniel said. "She was watching. She sounded pretty calm. She even tried to screw some details out of me, for their newscast."

"Sounds like Jennifer," Lucas said. He thought about the shotgun behind his ear and gripped his knees. "If you can get somebody to take the Porsche back to my place, maybe I could sneak out in a squad...."

"Sloan'll take it," Daniel said. Lucas nodded and dug the keys out of his pocket. "We've got more problems. I hate to bother you with them...."

"Jesus, what?"

"The St. Paul water patrol took a body off the Ford dam this morning. It got hung up on an abutment. It's an Indian. He was carrying an ID that said 'Richard Yellow Hand.' "

"Aw, fuck," said Lucas.

"We'd like you to take a look. We're not sure yet... well, we're pretty sure, but he was your snitch...."

"All right, all right, all right..."

"I'll go with you if you want," Lily offered.

"Uh, you better not," Daniel said, looking up at her. "We'll have some shooting reports to make out. You'll have to talk to our attorney, you not being a certified police officer in Minnesota...."

"What... ?"

"No, no, there won't be any problems," Daniel said hastily. "But there's some bureaucratic rigmarole to go through. Jesus, I wish I had a cigar."

"So I look at this body..." said Lucas.

"There's something else," Daniel said, almost reluctantly. "They did another one."

"Another one?" asked Lily. "Where?"

"Brookings, South Dakota. It's just coming in now. The fuckin' state attorney general. They were having some kind of harvest-festival thing and they had these polka dancers. This guy, the attorney general, always went to the polka dances because he knew he'd make the local TV. A gunman was waiting for him."

"Our friend with the braids?" asked Hart.

"No. And they got this guy. They shot him, anyway. He's in a trauma room right now. Some cowboy saw the shooting, pulled a rifle out of his pickup and nailed him."

"Okay. Well, fuck. Better go see Yellow Hand, first thing. If it is Yellow Hand. I can't worry about this SoDak thing, not yet." Lucas stood up and wandered in a circle, stopped by the door. Lily, Daniel and Hart watched him, worried, and he tried to smile. "You guys look like Dorothy, the Lion and the Tin Man. Cheer up."

"So what, that makes you the Wizard of Oz?" asked Lily, still worried.

"I feel more like the Wicked Witch when the house fell on her," Lucas said. He lifted a hand. "See you."

Yellow Hand's body was at the Ramsey County Medical Examiner's Office, lying faceup on a stainless-steel tray. Lucas hated floaters. They no longer looked human. They looked... melted.

"Yellow Hand?" asked a deputy medical examiner.

Lucas looked the melted thing in face. Yellow Hand's eyes were open and bloated and had no pupils; they resembled milk-jug plastic. His features were twisted, some enlarged, some not. But the thing was still recognizable. He turned away. "Yeah. Yellow Hand. He's got people out in Fort Thompson, that's in South Dakota. His mother, I think."

"We'll call..."

"Do you have a cause of death yet?" Lucas asked.

"We took a quick look. He's got a hole at the base of his skull. Like one of those Chinese executions, one bullet. That's not official yet: the wound might not have killed him, he might have drowned or something...."

"But he was shot?"

"Looks like it..."

Sloan arrived with the Porsche as Lucas was getting out of the squad car at his house.

"What a fuckin' car," Sloan said enthusiastically. "A hundred and fifty-five on the interstate, I couldn't believe it...." He checked Lucas' face. "Just joking," he said. "Jesus, you okay? You look like shit."

"It's been a bad day. And not even noon yet," Lucas said, trying to put some humor in his voice. It came out flat.

"Was it... ?"

"Yeah. It was Yellow Hand."

Sloan gave him the keys and said that Lily would be up to her neck in paperwork. A couple of local stations, and one from New York, were already asking why she had been carrying a pistol in Minneapolis. Daniel was handling it, Sloan said.

"Well, I gotta go, if I want a ride back in the squad," Sloan said.

"Yeah. Thanks for bringing the car."

"Take it easy...." Sloan seemed reluctant to leave him, but Lucas turned his back and walked to the house. As he unlocked the front door, he could hear the phone ringing. The answering machine kicked in before he could reach it. Jennifer Carey's voice said, "It's ten twenty-eight. We've been on the air about the Hood thing. Call me..."

Lucas picked up the phone. "Whoa. You still there?"

"Lucas? When did you get in?"

"Just this minute. Hang on a second, I've got to shut the front door."

When he got back to the phone, Jennifer pounced: "Damn you, Davenport, I've been going crazy. I talked to Daniel and he said he didn't know where you were, but that you were okay."

"I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine, I'm feeling a little fucked up. Where are you?"

"At the station. When I found out what was happening- thanks for not calling, by the way, we got our asses kicked by Eight, and since everybody knows that we go together, they're looking at me like I'm an alien toad...."

"Yeah, yeah. Where's the baby?" Lucas asked.

"I called Ellen, the college girl. She has her. She can stay as late as I need. She can stay over if she has to."

"Can you come over later?"

"You're okay?" she asked.

"Yeah. But I could use some heavy-duty succor."

"Things are going crazy here. You heard about Elmer Linstad, out in South Dakota?"

"Yeah. The attorney general."

"Dead as a mackerel. The guy they shot, this Liss guy-"

"Whoa, whoa, you're ahead of me now. Who is he?"

"He's an Indian guy named John Liss. He's from right here in the Cities. He's in the operating room, but the word is, he's going to make it. They're talking about putting me on a plane later this afternoon. I'll be running the crew out there..."

"Okay." Lucas tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

"... but I could sneak away around lunchtime."

"I'd like to see you," Lucas said. "I'm feeling kind of weird."

"If we sent a crew over there, could you talk... ?"

"No, I can't, Jen. Really. Tell them I'm not here. I'm going to turn off the phone. I've got to lie down."

"All right... Love you."

Lucas crawled into bed, but sleep wouldn't come. His brain was turning over, hot, he could feel the touch of muzzle behind his ear, the grotesquely bloated face of Yellow Hand floated up in front of his eyes....

He was lying flat on his back, sweating. He turned his head and looked at the clock. He'd been in bed for more than an hour; he must have been asleep, he must have been somewhere, it felt like five minutes....

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."