Winter Prey (14 page)

“Pretty noble,” Lucas said. The line came out sounding
skeptical instead of wry. Before she could say anything, he put up a hand. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

She shrugged. “I owed you one.” She looked at his hand. He was holding it at his side, waist height, clenching the towel in his fist. “What happened to your hand?”

“Broke a nail.”

“You oughta use a good acrylic hardener,” she said. And then quickly, “Sorry again. Let me see it.”

“Aw . . .”

“Come on.”

He unwrapped the towel and she held his finger in her hand, turned it in the weak light. “Nasty. Let me, uh . . . come more under the light.” She opened her bag.

“Listen, why don’t I . . . Is this gonna hurt?”

“Don’t be a baby,” she said. She used a pair of surgical scissors on the nail, trimming it away. No pain. She dabbed on a drop of an ointment and wrapped it with a Band-Aid. “I’ll send you a bill.”

“Send it to the sheriff, I got it on the job,” he said. Then: “Thanks.”

They stopped at the door, looked out at the snow. “Where’re you going?” Lucas asked.

She glanced at her wristwatch. No rings. “Get something to eat.”

“Could I buy you dinner?” he asked.

“All right,” she said simply. She didn’t look at him. She just pushed through the door and said
all right.

“Where?” following her onto the porch.

“Well, we have six choices,” she said.

“Is that a guess?”

“No.” A grin flickered across her face and she counted the restaurants off on her fingertips. Lucas noticed that her fingers were long and slender, like a pianist’s were supposed to be. Or a surgeon’s. “There’s Al’s Pizza, there’s a Hardee’s, the Fisherman Inn, the Uncle Steve’s American Style, Granddaddy’s Cafe, and the Mill.”

“What’s the classiest joint?”

“Mmm.” She tilted her head, thought about it, and said,
“Do you prefer stuffed ducks or stuffed fish? On the wall, I mean, not the menu.”

“That’s a hard one. Fish, I guess.”

“Then we’ll go to the Inn,” she said.

“Do you play piano?”

“What?” She stopped and looked up at him. “Have you been asking about me?”

“Huh?” He was puzzled.

“How did you know I play?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was just thinking your hands . . . they look like a pianist’s.”

“Oh.” She looked at her hands. “Most of the pianists I’ve known have heavy hands.”

“Like a surgeon’s hands, then,” he said.

“Most surgeons’ hands are ordinary.”

“Okay, okay.” He started to laugh.

“Ordinary. They are.”

“Why are you grumping at me?” Lucas asked.

She shrugged. “We’re just getting over being awkward. It’s always hard on a first date.”

“What?” he asked, following down the sidewalk. He had the sense that something had just flown past him.

The restaurant had been built from two double-wide trailers set at right angles to each other, both covered with vinyl siding disguised as weathered wood. A neon Coors sign hung in the window. Lucas pulled into the parking lot and killed his light, trailed a few seconds later by Weather in her Jeep.

“Elegant,” he said.

She pivoted her feet out of the Jeep, pulled off her pac boots. “I want to change shoes . . . elegant, what? The restaurant?”

“I think the vinyl siding combined with the sparkle of the Coors sign gives it a certain European ambiance. Swiss, I’d say, or possibly Old Amsterdam.”

“Wait’ll you find out that each table has its own red votive candle, personally lit by the maitre d’, and a basket
of cellophane-wrapped crackers and breadsticks,” Weather said.

“Hey, it’s a gourmet joint,” Lucas said. “I expected nothing less. And a choice of wines, I bet.”

“Yup.”

And they both said, simultaneously, “Red or white,” and laughed. Weather added, “If you ask for rosé, they say fine, and you see the bartender running into the back with a bottle of white and bottle of red.”

“Where’d you get your name?” Lucas asked.

“My father was a sailboat freak. Homemade fourteen-foot dinghys and scows. He used to build them in the garage in the summer,” she said. She pulled on the second loafer, tossed the pac boot onto the floor on the passenger side, stood up and slammed the car door with authority. And left it unlocked. “Anyway, Mom says he was always talking about the weather—‘If the weather holds, if the weather turns.’ Like that. So when I was born, they called me Weather.”

“Does your mother live in town?”

“No, no. Dad died ten years ago, and then she went, three or four years later,” Weather said, with just a color of sadness. “There was nothing particularly wrong with her. She just sorta died. I think she wanted to.”

The maitre d’ was a chubby man with a neatly clipped black mustache and a Las Vegas manner. “Hello, Weather,” he said. His eyes shifted to Lucas’ throat and refused to lift any higher. “Two? No smoking?”

“Yeah, two,” Lucas said.

“A booth,” said Weather.

When he left them with the menus, Weather leaned forward and muttered, “I forgot about Arlen. The maitre d’. He’d like to get me in bed. Not actually leave Mother and the Kids, you understand, just do a little Mm-hmm with the lady doctor, preferably in some place like Hurley, where we might not get caught.”

“What are his chances?” Lucas asked.

“Zero,” she said. “There’s something about the Alfred Hitchcock profile that turns me off.”

The salad came with a French dressing redolent of catsup, sprinkled with a handful of croutons.

“I remember the news stories when you left Minneapolis. Very strange, all those stories about a cop. A lot of people at the ER knew you, I guess. They were all pissed. It made an impression on me.”

“I used to come in there quite a bit,” Lucas said. “I’d have these street guys working for me, and they’d get messed up and not have anybody to call. I’d go over and try to fix them up.”

“Why’d you leave? Tired of the bullshit?”

“No . . .” He found himself opening up, told her about the internal games played in the department.

And the lure of money: “When you’re a cop, you’re always running into rich assholes who treat you like some kind of servant. Guys who oughta be in jail, but they’re driving around in Lexuses and Cadillacs and Mercedes,” he said, toying with his wine. “People tell you, yeah, but you’re doing a public service, blah blah blah, but after twenty years, you realize you wouldn’t mind having a little money yourself. Nice house, nice car.”

“You had a Porsche. You were famous for it.”

“That was different. A rich guy has a Porsche, he does it because he’s an asshole. A cop has a Porsche, it’s like a comment on the assholes,” he said. “Every cop in the department liked me driving a Porsche. It was like a fuck-you to the assholes.”

“God, you have a rich ability to rationalize,” she said, laughing at him. “Anyway, what’re you doing now? Just consulting?”

“No, no. Actually, I write games. That’s where I made my money. And I’ve started another little sideline that . . .”

“Games?”

“Yeah. I’ve done it for years, now I’m doing it full time.”

“You mean like Monopoly?” she asked. She was interested.

“Like Dungeons and Dragons, and sometimes war games. They used to be mostly on paper, now it’s mostly computers. I’m in a semipartnership with this college kid—he’s a graduate student in computer science. I write the games and he programs them.”

“And you can make a living at this?”

“Yeah. And now I’ve started writing simulation software for police crisis management, for training dispatch people. Most of that’s computers, dispatch is. And you get in a crisis situation, the dispatchers are virtually running things for a while. This software lets them simulate it, and scores them. It’s kind of taking off.”

“If you’re not careful, you could get rich,” Weather said.

“I kind of am,” Lucas said gloomily. “But goddamn, I’m bored. I don’t miss the bullshit part of the PD, but I miss the
movement.
”

And later, over walleye in beer batter:

“You can’t hold together a heavy-duty relationship when you’re in medical school and working to pay for it,” Weather said. He enjoyed watching her work with her knife, taking the walleye apart.
Like a surgeon.
“Then a surgical residency kills you. You’ve got no time for anything. You sit there and think about men, but it’s impossible. You can fool around, but if you get serious about somebody, you can get torn apart between the work and the relationship. So you find it’s easiest, if you meet somebody you might love, to turn away. Turning away isn’t that hard if you do it right away, when you first meet.”

“Sounds lonely,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, but you can tolerate it if you’re working all the time and you’re convinced that you’re right. You keep thinking, if I can just clear away this last thing, if I can just make it through next Wednesday or next month or through the winter, then I can get my life going. But time passes. Sneaks past. And all of a sudden your life is rushing up on you.”

“Ah . . . the old biological clock,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. And it’s not just ticking for women. Men get it just as bad.”

“I know.”

She rolled on: “How many men do you know who decided that life was passing them by, and they jumped out of their jobs or their marriages and tried to . . . escape, or something?”

“A few. More felt trapped but hung on,” said Lucas.

“And got sadder and sadder.”

“You’re talking about me, I think,” she said.

“I’m talking about everybody,” Lucas said. “I’m talking about me.”

After a carafe of wine: “Do you worry about the people you’ve killed?” She wasn’t joking. No smile this time.

“They were hairballs, every one of them.”

“I asked that wrong,” she said. “What I meant to ask was, has killing people screwed up your head?”

He considered the question for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t brood about them, if that’s what you mean. I had a problem with depression a couple of years ago. The chief at the time . . .”

“Quentin Daniel,” she said.

“Yeah. You know him?”

“I met him a couple of times. You were saying . . .”

“He thought I needed a shrink. But I decided I didn’t need a shrink, I needed a philosopher. Someone who knows how the world works.”