The 37th Hour (20 page)

He was very good, I had to admit, pressing me on my weak low-post moves, not letting me get out where I could sink my three-pointers. I managed, though, to keep his scoring down. Our teams were tied for much of the game. Shiloh crowded me, but was careful not to foul me. Finally my temper snapped and I body-slammed him.

Shiloh marked this victory by not commenting on my loss of control as he stood and accepted the ball from Hadley. Genevieve, though, as we all moved aside to let Shiloh take his free throws, hissed gleefully in my ear: “You just cost your team the game.” She was teasing, but I was annoyed with myself.

“Maybe he’ll miss.”

“He doesn’t miss,” Genevieve whispered back.

Shiloh accepted the ball from Radich, bounced it in the judicious, time-killing way of basketball players everywhere, shot, and whanged it off the rim.

I laughed in relief that my teammates took for triumph. Shiloh ignored me. It didn’t matter in the end. His team ended up winning the game by a narrow margin.

As Genevieve was saying goodbye to Radich, Shiloh turned to me from about six feet away, stopping in the middle of following Hadley off the court. Sweat made his faded green Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt stick to his ribs, reminding me of the flanks of a cooling racehorse.

“Kilander was a forward at Princeton,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Maybe you should work on your passing game.”

Out of earshot, on our way to the locker room, Genevieve was less diplomatic. “What the hell was that?” she demanded.

“What?”

“I’ve never
seen
two people so competitive in my life. Do you know Shiloh from somewhere?”

“Why is it my fault?” I complained evasively.

“You fouled him,” she said.

“It serves him right for not picking me for his team. What the hell was that, by the way?”

Genevieve turned thoughtful. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know him that well. I’m not sure that anybody does. He’s not real well liked around the department.”

“Why not?”

Genevieve shrugged. “He does things like what he just did with you. He probably didn’t even realize that he was snubbing you.” She bent over to lace up her boots, one foot propped on a bench. “He’s competent, from what Radich says, but not real good with people. Radich is his lieutenant, you know.”

I turned that over in my mind.

“He and Kilander have a little history. An unfriendly one.” Then, just as the conversation was getting really interesting, Genevieve changed the subject. “Are you on midwatch tonight?”

“Nope,” I said. “Got the whole day off. Why?”

“I told you that you should come over for dinner sometime; tonight’s as good a night as any. My daughter’s fixing it. She’s already a better cook than I am.”

I reflected that I would have to get Genevieve to talk about Kilander and Shiloh some other time, but in the following days the opportunity never came up. The next thing I heard about him was that I was being taken off the street for a night to work with Det. Mike Shiloh on some kind of stakeout.

Wear street clothes. That was about the extent of my instructions when I went to meet Shiloh at the motor pool. He was dressed only marginally better than the night I’d first met him, and just nodded for me to accompany him as he signed out an unmarked car, a dark-green Vega.

“Where are we going?” I asked when we were on the road.

“Outside the city,” Shiloh said. “Meth country.”

A minute after I decided we were going to drive in silence, he went on. “This is actually going to be pretty dull,” he said. “In a small town, it’s harder to blend in. Hard to park for a while without attracting too much attention. With a female partner you can pass for a couple out parking after a date.”

“And you thought of me.”

“No,” Shiloh said flatly. “Radich did.”

I wondered if he couldn’t forgive me for seeing him weak and needing someone. I wondered if it had crossed his mind that I could be pissed that he, too, saw me weak and needing someone. Maybe we were going to carefully avoid mentioning having slept together for the rest of the time we knew each other. Damned if I was going to bring it up.

“Well, I’ll have to thank Radich,” I said.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “This is a no-brainer. Like I said, dull.”

“What did you do to your arm?”

“What?” Shiloh followed my gaze to the crook of his elbow, to the round Band-Aid there. “I gave blood. I’m O negative, a universal donor. They call me a couple of times a year, asking me to come in and donate.” He pulled off the Band-Aid, revealing unmarked skin.

That was the end of the conversation until we got to our destination, parking across the street from a dispirited-looking working-class bar.

Shiloh switched off the ignition.

“Why here?” I asked.

“Both the guys hang out here, the ones we think are running a lab out of a house down the road from here. This place is like their de facto office.” He paused. “Which is good, because it’s very hard to surveil a farmhouse without being noticed. There’s no pretext for us to be parked out there.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Something to prove they’re not just two underemployed guys who spend too much time at the bar. I’m hoping if I spend some time out here watching, they’ll have guests. Someone we’re familiar with, someone with priors. A lot of these guys, they have long rap sheets. They get out of prison and go right back to cooking.” Shiloh turned slightly to face me, his posture, if not his face, telegraphing interest. He was, I realized, getting into character. It was Date Night. “I need to see them associating with people like that. It’s not enough for a warrant, but it’ll contribute.” He laid a hand gently on my shoulder and I disciplined myself not to let the touch show on my face.

“Genevieve tells me you’re from Utah,” I said, just to make conversation.

“Genevieve told you right,” he said.

“You’re Mormon, then?”

“No, not at all.” Shiloh looked almost amused.

“Why is that funny?” I asked him.

“My father was the minister of a small nondenominational church. He didn’t even consider Mormons to be Christian.”

“He was fundamentalist?”

Shiloh lifted a shoulder negligently. “People like to hang labels. But to my father there were just two kinds of people in the world: sheep and goats.”

“Those are the choices?” Neither sounded very flattering to me. I hadn’t heard the gospel story of the final judgment.

“Sorry,” he said wryly, and if I’d known him better, I might have laughed.

“So how’d you get from Utah to the Twin Cities?” I asked, changing the subject.

“It wasn’t particularly a destination,” he said.

For a little while, he told me about his training and his first patrol work in Montana, then about coming east to work in Narcotics, his nomadic years of buy-and-bust operations and more complicated undercover work. His eyes flicked away from me frequently, out at the street. I didn’t try to help him surveil; I wouldn’t have known who I was looking for. He occasionally ran a finger along my neck and collarbone in a possessive, affectionate way. Staying in character.

Then he tired of talking about himself. “Where are you from?” he asked me.

“Up north,” I said. “The Iron Range.”

It was my standard answer for people I’d just met. I don’t know why, but I rarely mentioned New Mexico to people unless I thought we were going to get to know each other well. Mike Shiloh didn’t belong in that category, I thought.

But his very next words required me to break my own rule. “So you’re a native Minnesotan?” he said.

“Okay, no,” I said. “I lived in New Mexico until I was thirteen.”

“And then what?”

“And then I came here.” It wasn’t that I was trying to kill the conversation; I knew we had to do something to pass the time. But my feeling was that your childhood is like the weather: you can talk about it all you want, but there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Why?” Shiloh asked me. He wasn’t prying. Asking questions is just a cop’s instinct. They do it even with people who aren’t criminals or suspects, the way Border collies will try to herd little kids when no farm animals are around.

“I had a great-aunt who lived here. My father sent me to live with her. He drove a truck, so he was away from home a lot, on the road.” I paused. “My mother died when I was nine. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “Anyway, my father worried about me when he was on the road. He arranged with my aunt—great-aunt, I mean—for me to live here. He thought I needed a maternal influence in my teenage years, too, I guess. It wasn’t like I was incorrigible or did something wrong.”

Goddammit.
I didn’t know where that last part had come from. Maybe in some way I’d been afraid that this was the conclusion to be drawn from my story.

But Mike Shiloh either didn’t notice my embarrassment or didn’t want to draw attention to it. “Do you ever go back there, to New Mexico?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t have family there anymore. And the years I spent there seem like so long ago. It’s like . . .” I tried to find the right words. “. . . everything in New Mexico seems like something that happened to somebody else. Almost like a past life. It’s weird, but—”

What am I doing?
I thought, stopping short. “Sorry,” I said. “I was rambling. I just meant,” I was quick to explain, “those years weren’t that eventful. Nothing really happened to me in New Mexico.” I could feel heat rising under my skin.

But once again Mike Shiloh chose to overlook my consternation. “I know the feeling,” he said, and smiled. “Nothing much ever happened to me in Utah.”

His words were light and casual, but he was looking at me seriously. No, that wasn’t it. He was looking at me in an assessing way and yet a kind way, also, a look that made me feel—

“Come here, come here,” Shiloh said quickly, startling me out of my thoughts. He gestured me forward. “I need to look over your shoulder and not get seen, okay?”

At his direction I slid onto his lap; for the next moment we were a couple making out across the street from the bar. His hands laced on my lower back, his face buried against my neck and shoulder.

“That’s good,” he told me.

I was distracted from the intimacy of it by worrying about what I was doing. I tried to move just a little, to look natural, without getting in his way.

“Be casual about it,” he said quietly into my neck, “but turn around and look at the guy in the dark jacket, walking in from the parking lot.”

I turned slightly, tucking my chin down against my shoulder. “I see him.” The man disappeared through the bar’s windowless double doors as I spoke.

“He’s someone I know from Madison,” Shiloh said. “And when I say I know him, I mean I busted him once. So I can’t go in there.”

“But I can?”

“Right,” Shiloh said. “You’ll go in and sit where you can see him. Check out who he’s sitting with. Get a thorough description. But not yet. We’ll give him a couple of minutes to get settled.”

“All right,” I said, pleased at the prospect of being in action.

“But you can get off my lap now,” he said.

I pulled away hastily. If it hadn’t been so dark, I would have worried about reddening.

The bar, when I was inside, was nearly as dark inside as the street outside. The man I’d followed in was close enough to the bar that I could sit there and surveil him, but the two men he was with had their backs to me.

After one sip, I left the draft beer I’d ordered on the bar and went to the cigarette machine. I rooted in my purse, acting frustrated.

I crossed to the table where the three men sat. “Excuse me? Could any of you give me four quarters for a dollar?”

“Sorry, babe,” Madison said coolly.

“No, I got it,” said one of his companions. He was, I saw, a very tall man. His exact height was hard to gauge, but his legs stretched a long, long way under the table.

“Thanks,” I said, laying a weathered single on the little round table and taking the quarters from his hand.

I went back to the cigarette machine, bought a pack of Old Golds, and headed toward the ladies’ room. But instead of going into the bathroom, I went out the side door, which was hidden from view of the bar.

I stood at the driver’s-side window of the Vega and Shiloh rolled it down.

“Two blond guys,” I said. “One’s really, really tall and has long hair, clean-shaven otherwise, blue eyes. The other guy is average height, I think. Looks a lot like his friend, except the hair’s a little paler and cut short. He’s got a tattoo on his left forearm.”

“A barbed-wire pattern?”

“Yeah,” I said, pleased. “Both guys are clean-shaven. The tall guy was wearing—”

“Good,” Shiloh said, waving me off. “I don’t need to know what they were wearing.”

“Now what?”

Shiloh jerked his head toward the passenger side of the car. “Now we go back to Minneapolis.”

“Really?” I was disappointed. It didn’t seem like a whole night’s work.

“Really,” he said. “You did good.”

Genevieve and I worked out together about a week later. In the locker room, she wanted to know how I had liked my first stakeout.

“How’d you hear about that?” I asked her.

“I ran into Radich again. You know how it goes: You don’t see someone for months, then you see them twice in a week.”

“It was okay. Dull,” I said. I hadn’t thought it was, but that had been Shiloh’s assessment, and I wanted to sound sufficiently jaded.

“Oh. I thought you might want to work in Narcotics, since you’re getting your foot in the door,” she said.

“I wouldn’t call one stakeout a ‘foot in the door.’ ”

“What about the raid?”

“What raid?”

Genevieve studied my face. “They’re going to raid the lab. Radich said he was going to talk to your sergeant about borrowing you again to go along. I guess he hasn’t yet.”

“Lundquist didn’t mention it to me.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything—”

“In case Lundquist says no? Don’t worry, I can deal with that.”

“Radich probably hasn’t asked him yet, is all. Lundquist won’t say no. They’ll have enough people anyway; this is just something nice for you, so you can learn. Because you helped them out.”