school. It turned out he wanted his foreskin restored, He'd heard that sex felt better with a foreskin and he figured we could just take a stitch here and put a hem over there.'
Weather had a cop's sense of humor, Lucas decided, laughing, probably developed in the emergency room; someplace where the world got bad enough, often enough, that you learned to separate yourself from the bad news.
'There's just a thimbleful of cognac left and I get it,' Weather said, bouncing out of the chair.
'You can have it,' Lucas said.
When she came back, she sat next to him on the couch, instead of in the chair, and put a hand behind his head, on his opposite shoulder.
'You didn't drink hardly any of the wine. I drank two-thirds of the bottle, and now I'm finishing the cognac.'
'Fuck the cognac,' Lucas said. 'Wanna neck?'
'That's not very romantic,' she said severely.
'I know, but I'm nervous.'
'I still have a right to some romance,' she said. 'But yes, necking would be appropriate, I think.'
A while later she said, 'I'm not going to be coy about this; I go for the aging jock-cop image.'
'Aging?'
'You've got more gray than I do-that's aging,' she said.
'Mmmm.'
'But I'm not going to sleep with you yet,' she said. 'I'm gonna make you sweat for a while.'
'Whatever's right.'
After a while she asked, 'So how do you feel about kids?'
'We gotta talk,' he said.
The guest room was cool because of the northern exposure, and Lucas put on pajamas before he crawled into the bed. He lay awake for a few minutes, wondering if he should try her room, but he sensed that he should not. They'd ended the evening simply talking. When she left for her bedroom, she'd kissed him-he was sitting down-on the lips, and then the forehead, tousled his hair, and disappeared into the back of the house.
'See you in the morning,' she'd said.
He was surprised when, almost asleep, he heard her voice beside the bed: 'Lucas.' Her hand touched his shoulder and she whispered, 'There's someone outside.'
'What?' He was instantly awake. She'd left a hallway light on in case he had to get up in the night to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, and he could see her squatting beside the bed. She was carrying the.22. He pushed back the blankets and swung his feet to the floor. The.45 was sitting on the nightstand and he picked it up. 'How do you know?'
'I couldn't sleep right away.'
'Neither could I.'
'I've got a bath off my bedroom and I went for a glass of water. I saw a snowmobile headlight angling in toward the house from out on the lake. There's no trail that comes in like that. So I watched and the headlight went out-but I could see him in the moon, still coming. The neighbors have a roll-out dock and it's on their lawn. He stopped behind it, I think. They don't have a snowmobile. There's a windbreak down there, those pines. I didn't see him again.'
She was calm, reporting almost matter-of-factly.
'How long ago?'
'Two or three minutes. I kept watching, thinking I was crazy. Then I heard something on the siding, scratching-like.'
'Sounds like trouble,' Lucas said. He jacked a shell into the.45.
'What'll we do?' Weather asked.
'Call in. Get some guys down here, on the lake and on the road. We don't want to scare him off before we can get things rolling.'
'There's a phone in my bedroom-c'mon,' she said. She padded down the hall, Lucas following. 'What else?'
'He's got to find a place to get in, and that's gotta make some noise. I want you down by the kitchen, just listening. Stay behind the counter, on the floor. I'll be in the living room, by the couch. If you hear him, just sneak back and get me. Let's call.'
They were at her room and she picked up the phone. 'Uh-oh,' she said, looking at him. 'It's dead. That's never happened…'
'He took the wires out. Goddammit, he's here,' Lucas said. 'Get on the kitchen floor. I…'
'What?'
'I've got a handset in the truck.' He looked at the garage door; it'd take him ten seconds.
A loud knocking from the front room turned him around.
'What?' whispered Weather. 'That's the doors to the deck.'
'Stay back.' Lucas slipped down the hall, stopped at a corner, peeked around it, saw nothing. They'd left the curtains open so they could see the moon, but there was no visible movement on the deck outside the house, no face pressed against the glass. Nothing but a dark rectangle. The knocking started again, not as though someone were trying to force the door, but as if they were trying to wake up Weather.
'Hey…' A man's voice, muffled by the tri-pane glass.
'What?' Weather had stood up, and was walking through from the kitchen toward the living room.
'Get the fuck down,' Lucas whispered urgently, waving the pistol at her. 'Get down.'
She hesitated, still standing, and Lucas scuttled across the room, caught her wrist in his left hand, pulled her down and toward a wall.
'Somebody needs help,' she said.
'Bullshit: remember the phone,' Lucas said. They both edged forward toward a corner.
Another call, as if from a distance. 'Hey in there. Hey, we got a wreck, we got a wreck,' and there were three more knocks. Lucas let go of Weather's wrist and did a quick peek around the corner.
'It can't be him-that's somebody looking for me,' Weather said. She started past him, her white nightgown ghostly in the dim reflected light from the hall.
'Jesus,' said Lucas. He was sitting on the floor at the corner and reached up to catch her arm, but she stepped into the sightline from the deck, eight feet from the glass.
The window exploded, showering the room with glass, and a finger of fire poked through at Weather. Lucas had already pulled her back and she came off her feet, sprawling, okay, and Lucas yelled, 'Shotgun, shotgun…' and fired three quick shots through the door, pop-pop-pop and pulled back.
The shotgun roared again, sending more glass flying across the room, pellets ripping through the end of the leather couch, burying themselves in the far wall. Lucas did a quick peek, then another, fired a fourth shot.
Weather, on her hands and knees, lunged toward the kitchen, came up with the.22 rifle she'd left there, and started back.
'Fucker!' she screamed.
'Stay down, that's a twelve gauge,' Lucas shouted. Another shotgun blast, then another, a long five seconds apart, the muzzle flash from the first lighting up the front of the room. The flash from the second seemed fainter, the pellets ricocheting around the stone fireplace.
Five seconds passed without another shot. 'He's running,' Lucas said. 'I think he's running.'
He got to his feet and dashed into Weather's bedroom, looked out on the lawn. He could see the man there, a hundred feet away, twenty feet from the shelter of the treeline, fifteen feet. 'Goddammit.' He stepped back and fired two quick shots through the window glass, shattering it, then one more at the fleeing figure, a hopeless shot.
The man disappeared into the trees. Lucas fired a final shot at the last spot he'd seen him, and the magazine was empty.
'Get him? Get him?' Weather was there with the rifle. He snatched it from her and ran down the hall to the living room, out through the deck and into the snow. He floundered across the yard, through snow thigh deep, following the tracks, through the treeline… and saw the red taillight of a snowmobile scudding across the lake,
