The 37th Hour (21 page)

“What help? I sat on Shiloh’s lap and pretended to be his girlfriend.”

“Did it bother you they asked you to do that? Nelson couldn’t have done it.”

“I was okay with it.”

“Shiloh was okay?”

“Yeah, he was fine. What were you going to say about him and Kilander the other night?” I asked.

“Kilander?”

“About their, what, ‘history of unfriendliness’?”

“Oh, that. Nothing serious,” she said. “I don’t remember all the details, but when Shiloh had just got here from Madison, he went in on some kind of raid on a club in north Minneapolis. The whole case was kind of shaky. It ended up being Kilander’s to prosecute. And I guess he needed Shiloh to . . .” I could see her mentally reviewing her list of mild, noninflammatory words. “. . . to be
cooperative
in his testimony. Don’t ask me what about, I don’t remember.

“Shiloh didn’t like the whole case, thought it was flimsy. He wasn’t about to color his story in any way.” Genevieve yanked open her combination lock. “Kilander would have had a very unhelpful witness on the stand. Instead he decided not to call Shiloh at all. And lost the case.”

“What did the MPD guys think?” A cop’s opinion was more important than a prosecutor’s, at least to me.

“Well, obviously the story got around—that’s how I heard it. And someone sent away for some ACLU membership stuff and had it sent to the station in Shiloh’s name, like that’s supposed to be really embarrassing. I doubt it was Kilander. Not his style.” Genevieve laced up her boots. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s always good to know the department gossip,” I said lightly.

When I got to the squad room, there was a message waiting from my sergeant, Lundquist.
See Lt. Radich.

If it’s hard to surveil a farmhouse, it’s also hard to sneak up on one, for the same reasons. In fact, Radich had explained, we weren’t going to be subtle. Instead, this would be a dawn raid. We’d come through the door on a no-knock warrant and catch everyone sleepy and unprepared.

It was five twenty-five in the morning, and I was riding out toward Anoka in the same green Vega that Shiloh and I had used before. This time I was sitting next to Nelson.

We rode mostly in silence. I felt more comfortable with Nelson than with Shiloh. He was the kind of cop I was used to, with a buzz cut and a blunt way of speaking. He related to me like another cop would. He hadn’t seen me naked forty-five minutes after we’d met in an airport bar.

I’d been working on the street until 1
A.M.
and hadn’t even tried to get a few hours of sleep. The fact that I was going to stay up all night had worried both Radich and Lundquist. But they must have read in my face how badly I’d wanted to come along, because in the end they had let me go. At the moment I didn’t feel sleepy at all. I felt like I had washed down several dozen wasps with too much black coffee.

As I was checking my weapon by the side of the car, Shiloh came over to me.

“I guess I should thank Radich for thinking of me again,” I said.

“No, this was my idea,” he said mildly. “Look, I came over to tell you something—”

“He explained everything,” I interrupted. “I’m going to stay behind Nelson and just cover him; you and Hadley are going in the front and he and I will take the back.”

“That’s not it,” Shiloh said. “This is something I learned from a psychologist. If you ever get scared, not that people like us ever do,” and he paused to let me know that was a joke, “you can put your hands on a doorway—car door, anything—and imagine that you’re leaving your fear there.”

I put my weapon in its holster.

“It’s something you can do and not be obvious about when there’re people around,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said shortly.

He wasn’t deceived by the surface politeness of my response.

“I didn’t mean I think you’re scared.”

“I know.”

He looked away, toward the house. “Just do it like we talked about it. This one isn’t going to give us any problems.”

Radich had said much the same thing earlier; now Shiloh had said it. I guess something had to go wrong under that much karmic prodding.

Two of them were sleeping on a couch in the first-floor living room. Shiloh and Hadley went directly upstairs, hearing the muffled sound of running feet above. Nelson got the tall man from the bar up against the wall—seeing him standing, I could now gauge him at an impressive six-foot-six or -seven—and started handcuffing him. The couch’s other occupant, a skinny blond woman in her early twenties, made a bolt for the nearest exit, a window.

Even before Nelson jerked his forehead in the woman’s direction, I went after her. The woman was pretty quick; she had jerked the sash window up and gotten her head and shoulders out by the time I reached her. When I did, she hung on to the windowsill so hard that its edge sliced her palm. She shrieked.

“Look what you did, bitch!” she yelled, seeing her own blood, spreading her hand so I could see it.

“Please put your hands behind your back,” I instructed her.

“Get your hands off me! Look what you fucking did! Get your hands off me, you fucking bitch!”

“Trace,” Nelson’s suspect said, tiredly. He knew a lost cause when he saw one. Trace—or Tracy, more likely—didn’t seem to hear him. She wasn’t listening to anyone. She kept yelling at me while I tried to read her the Miranda rights. It was making me nervous. If she couldn’t hear herself being Mirandized, I wondered, did she have a possible loophole in court?

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hadley and Shiloh coming back downstairs with a third suspect. I had successfully gotten Tracy handcuffed but wished she’d shut up. I was starting to feel self-conscious about being the only one who couldn’t keep my suspect under control.

Just then something very strange happened. The staircase had a traditional open railing, supported by carved wooden posts. A bronze blur, like part of the wood framework come to life, dropped from between two of the posts, landing almost directly in front of Nelson. Nelson made a remarkably controlled jump but didn’t go anywhere, his pale blue eyes showing white at the edges.

I didn’t even have to look down to know what it was. The percussive sound of a rattlesnake’s warning was familiar from my childhood out West.

For a split second everybody was frozen, even the snake coiled to strike.

I stepped forward, caught the snake behind its triangular head, and broke its neck.

Its rattle, persisting after death, filled the house. Hadley and Nelson were looking at me like I’d just split the atom. Tracy had stopped in mid-scream to stare at me with her mouth open. Only Shiloh seemed unsurprised, though he was looking at me with a glimmer of some unreadable thought in his eyes.

“Maybe we should move everyone outside,” he suggested.

We did, but someone had to go back in and make sure the house was safe. Nelson and Hadley showed no interest whatsoever. Their eyes went to me.

“You’re the dragon slayer,” Hadley said, only half joking.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m game.”

“I’ll go with you,” Shiloh said.

There were no more loose snakes. Upstairs, we found the terrarium.

At one end, a heat lamp shone down on a broad basking rock. At the other end was a cool retreat box. Two adult snakes seemed to sleep on the sand, coiled against each other.

“God save me from drug dealers and their goddamn affectations,” Shiloh said wearily.

“Are we going to have to call Animal Control?” I was sitting on my heels, looking into a little half-size refrigerator, which held not only dead mice but little bottles of antivenin.

“The pound, are you kidding? They won’t touch this,” Shiloh said. “I think we’re going to have to get Fish and Wildlife out here, or someone from the zoo, which means one of us is going to have to stay here.”

“I could do that,” I told him.

“No, Nelson and I need to get everything into evidence. Go on back, process the suspects in, write up your paperwork. Hadley will enjoy riding back with you. I think he’s in love.”

It was a joke, but I saw him realize what he’d said. He’d accidentally evoked what we were both trying hard to forget. We’d been walking on a thin layer of ice, and he’d broken through with an innocent remark. We both felt the cold water it splashed on our newfound rapport.

Shiloh was right about one thing, though. Hadley called me. We dated for six companionable weeks, something we kept a secret from other officers.

One night I was on patrol alone. Crossing the Hennepin Bridge, I’d seen a cardboard box sitting on the pedestrian walkway, by itself, no one around. That struck me as mildly strange and I wanted to see what was in it.

I approached the cardboard box with caution that turned out to be unnecessary. The box was open at the top. Two kittens slept inside on pages of newspaper.

Someone had felt a spasm of compassion at the last minute and couldn’t throw them over the railing into the river. Now they and their box would go to the squad room until Animal Control was open in the morning.

I was in no hurry to go back to my car, looking out over the Mississippi and the riverbank instead. There was still no traffic on the bridge, no cars moving below in my line of sight. It was like being on an empty movie set. Downtown, windows in the high-rise buildings glowed with light, and in the distance I could hear the rushing sound of the 35W, like blood heard through a stethoscope. Those were the only signs of life. It wasn’t normal, even for two-thirty on a weekday morning. But it wasn’t disturbing. It was mystic.

Motion below caught my eye, a lone figure in the distance.

It was a runner, making long strides like a cross-country athlete close to the finish, down the middle of an empty street whose wet black surface gleamed in the night.

Just by watching I knew several things about him: that he’d been at this pace for a little while and was capable of keeping it up for a good time. That he was feeling the energy of running down the center of a street that was almost never empty. That he was the kind of runner I wished I could be, the kind who could let his mind go and just run, without keeping track of distance and thinking about when he could stop.

When he drew nearer I realized I knew him. It was Shiloh.

He passed right under me, and as he did there was engine noise behind me all of a sudden, two cars going eastbound, and the moment of stillness was over.

A few days later I met Hadley for lunch and we discussed our relationship. We agreed that it wasn’t ultimately going to work out. I don’t know who actually used the phrase
the long run,
but I suspect it was me.

I did not call Mike Shiloh or contrive to cross his path downtown.

Neither was I asked to help the narcotics task force again, although Radich stopped by to thank me for my help. The rattlesnake incident had made me briefly famous in the department, but now that had mercifully died down. I was an unassuming patrol officer again, working my midwatch and dogwatch shifts, which were uneventful.

An early warm spell settled over the Cities. Genevieve took a week off during Kamareia’s spring break, and without a workout partner for the weight room, I took to running in the afternoons along the river. I told myself that I wasn’t avoiding the pickup basketball games in which the Narcotics guys sometimes played; I was simply cross-training, and besides, the warm weather was too pleasant to waste by exercising indoors.

I always walked my last quarter mile to cool down. That’s what I was doing one evening a little after five, walking and enjoying the scent of a pizza restaurant nearby, when I turned onto my own street and saw a pair of long legs on my front steps. The rest of my visitor was out of sight, sitting on the top step within the entry alcove, but the scuffed boots were vaguely familiar, as was, I suddenly realized, the green Catalina parked on the street.

I was glad to have recognized who it was in advance; it allowed me to not look surprised when I came face-to-face with Mike Shiloh for the first time in two months.

It had been about that long since our cluster of encounters, and seeing him gave me that little shock, the one of both recognition and of realization that your memory hasn’t painted someone quite true. I registered everything anew: the slightly Eurasian features, the longish, curling hair, which clearly hadn’t been cut in the interim, and most of all, the direct, unapologetic gaze. Given his place on the highest of the steps, he was almost on a level with me, even seated.

“I figured if you were working midwatch you’d be there by now,” he said by way of greeting. “Have you eaten?”

“Did you think of calling first?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is Hadley here right now?”

He kept a completely straight face, but I sensed amusement. He was pleased at having guessed something Hadley and I had worked hard to keep off the grapevine.

“I am no longer seeing Detective Hadley socially,” I said, using the most formal phrasing I could think of, and the coolest tone.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Shiloh said. “Last Friday evening I saw Detective Hadley in the Lynlake district with a young woman. She was dressed like she might be ‘seeing him socially.’ ”

“Good for him.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Are you hungry?” He tilted his head slightly, interrogatively. “I was thinking of a Korean place in St. Paul, but that’s negotiable,” he said. “It all depends on what you want.”

I realized that for a while now I’d been trying to decide who this man was, and if I liked him, and still I couldn’t come to a conclusion.

“Before I go anywhere,” I said stiffly, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Why drink in an airport bar?”

If nothing else, I’d surprised him; I saw that in his face. He rubbed the back of his neck a minute, then looked up at me and said, “Airports have their own police. I wanted to go somewhere that I wouldn’t run into any cops I knew.”

I heard the truth in his words. Truth, and none of the easy cynicism that would have allowed me to send this man away and stop thinking about him once and for all.