A cold wind was already blowing through Lucas' chest. He knew what he was going to do – he even knew how he was going to do it, to the smallest detail – but the idea chilled him. He felt like a wealthy man about to shoplift something expensive. And fooling with Carmel Loan was not like messing with a doper or a player or a stick-up guy. If he screwed up, he could go to jail.
After a few minutes, he roused himself from the chair and walked down the hall to the Homicide office. Sloan was just leaving: 'The goddamned air conditioning is giving me goose bumps.' 'What are you doing tonight?' Lucas asked. 'Maybe taking the old lady out for a movie.' 'If you take her to Penelope's, on Lake
Minnetonka, I'll pay for the meal and sign off on the overtime.'
'Ya got me,' Sloan said quickly. 'For one thing, if I said no, the old lady'd murder me.' Sloan had a daughter in college and tuition to pay, and luxury was hard to come by. 'What do I have to do?'
When Sloan had gone, Lucas called Jim Bone, president of Polaris bank: 'Jim, are you gonna be home between eight and nine tonight?'
'Yeah; you need something?'
'I need to talk. Ten minutes, maybe. I've been running around like a mad dog, and I can't spring any time, during the day, and besides, you're busy…'
'Come on over. Kerin would love to see you.'
'How's she doing?' Bone's wife was pregnant.
'Just starting to show…'
'You guys didn't waste any time.'
'Yeah, well, we're old people.'
Myron Bunnson told everybody that his mother was a stone freak hippie and that his real given name was Bullet Blue, and that his father had been an Oakland
Hell's Angel, before the Angels got old. None of that was true. His parents were really named Myron (Senior) and Adele Bunnson, and they ran a dairy farm near
Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Bullet was working one of the three valet slots at Penelope's. He saw the red
Jag swing into the lot and said to the other two, 'This is it. This is mine.'
'Three-way split, man,' said his friend, Richard Schmid, who was trying to convince his friends to call him Crank. The third valet nodded: 'Three ways.'
'No problem,' Bullet Blue said. 'I'm just workin' the chick.'
'Right.' Crank recognized the Jag. Bullet's chances of nailing this particular chick, especially dressed as he was, like an organ-grinder monkey, were slim and none, and slim was outa town. Still, Bullet Blue wanted the car, and they all had their favorites…
Blue took the Jag and ten bucks from Carmel, who flashed a smile at him. 'Thank you, ma'am,' Blue said, giving her his best look. The look apparently missed over her bare shoulder, and she was into the restaurant with her friend, a guy who Blue thought looked way too straight. Whatever. He hopped into the Jag, and rolled it into the valet parking area on the side of the restaurant. Lucas was leaning against a Chevy van, talking to the man who sat in the driver's seat.
'You got the money?' he asked Lucas. 'Keys?'
Bullet dropped the keys into Lucas' hand. Lucas passed them through the window to the man in the driver's seat, who took them and clambered into the back.
Lucas handed Bullet Blue a small fold of currency. 'I'll talk to McKinley.'
'If we could just get her off this one time…' Bullet slipped the bills into his pants pocket. The three-way split only involved the ten bucks from Carmel.
'I didn't say I could do that,' Lucas said bluntly. From the van, they could hear the grinding buzz of the key- cutter. 'The best we could do is maybe drop the charge to something less heavy. But she's gonna do some time.'
'She's already done time,' Blue protested. He was talking about his sister, who came off the farm two years after Bullet, and started calling herself Baby Blue.
'She's been sittin' in jail for a month, waiting for the trial. Can't we get her time served?'
'Not with this one,' Lucas said. 'If she hadn't had the gun…'
'It wasn't her gun; it was Eddie's,' Bullet said heatedly.
'But she had it. I'll see if McKinley and the guys'll go for two or three months. As it is, she's looking at a year, and maybe more.'
'Anything you can do, man.'
'And you stay the fuck outa trouble, dickweed,' Lucas said. 'Go back home if you gotta.'
'Right. Spend my life pulling cow tits.'
'Then get your ass back in Dunwoody – how much time you got to go there?' Lucas asked.
'One semester.'
'One semester. You get out, you start making some good money, and you make it wherever you go.'
'Yeah, yeah,' Bullet said.
You don't want to hear my Dunwoody speech?'
'I just ain't made to fix cars, no more'n I'm made to pull cow tits; I'm made to rock n' roll.'
'You're made to…'
The man in the van spoke over Lucas shoulder: 'All done.' He handed Carmel's key ring to Lucas, and Lucas handed it to Blue.
'Dunwoody,' Lucas said.
'Rock n' roll,' said Blue, as he walked away.
Lucas, wearing his dark blue lawyer suit and carrying a black-leather briefcase, said, 'Jim Bone,' to the doorman at the desk, who looked at a list and said,
'And your name, sir?' 'Lucas Davenport.'
'Go right on up, Mr. Davenport,' the doorman said, making a tick next to Lucas' name.
Lucas had made a medium-sized fortune when he sold his simulations company;
Bone's bank managed it. '… really risky,' Bone said. 'The economy could drop like a rock and who's going to pay a hundred dollars a round after that?'
Lucas nodded: 'Yeah, but I wouldn't have to make a hundred dollars a round – I could break even at sixty.'
'You don't know anything about running a golf course,' Bone said.
'Of course not; I wouldn't even try to. I don't even like golf. That's why they're talking about professional management.'
'It's not completely crazy,' Bone admitted finally.
'The whole point,' Lucas said, 'is that I could give my daughter that big chunk right now, take a mortgage on the rest, put all the excess into course maintenance, building value. By the time she's twenty-five or thirty, she owns the whole limited-partnership share, ninety-nine percent, while I own the general-partner's share, one percent, and we sell it and she's fixed. She picks up four or five million, minimum, and who knows? Maybe five or ten.'
'The concept's okay, but to tell you the truth, you might do better in the long run just to pay the government's bite…'
When they were done, Lucas said good-bye to Kerin, who seemed much softer than when he'd first met her; slower, happier, pleased with herself. Bone, at the door, said, 'I'll have the guys work it up for you. We'll have something in a week.' 'Thanks,
Jim.'
There were five doors on Bone's floor. Three apartments in addition to Bone's, and the fire-stair door. No security camera. Lucas let the elevator doors close behind him, and pushed twenty-seven. As the elevator started up, he took a nylon sock out of his pants pocket, spread it apart, and slipped it over the top of his head, like a watch cap. If there were somebody in the hallway, he could slip it back off – maybe without it being seen.
But the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor was dead quiet. Still in the elevator, blocking the door with his foot, he pulled the nylon down over his face, turned up his coat collar, so it looked almost clerical, and did a quick peek out in the hall. No video cameras. He walked quickly down to Carmel's apartment, slipped the first key in. The
