Lester was perched on a desk at the end of the room, talking to a cop with a notebook. He spotted Lucas and shook his head. Nothing happening.
Lucas stepped back to Marcy Sherrill's desk. She saw him coming, said something into the phone she was holding, and hung up. 'I'm really coming over?' She was a pretty woman in her early thirties; she liked to fight. She and Lucas had had a brief, intense affair, which everyone in the office had considered inevitable and overdue. After a couple of months, they'd called the thing off by mutual consent, to their mutual relief.
'Yeah, at least for a while,' Lucas said.
'Good. I'm trying to track down more people from the partyI bet we're missing forty peoplebut I'm not getting anywhere. I'm ready to bag it.'
'So you're up? Right now?'
'I could be, if you whispered in Frank's shell-like ear,' Marcy said.
'You remember Trick Bentoin?'
Sherrill didn't want to go after Bentoin, but if she could bring him into the state attorneys office, he could keep Del free all day.
'Soif I do this, I can work Alie'efor you?'
'We're all working Alie'e after this,' Lucas said. 'Maybe forever.'
Sherrill leaned back in her chair, locked her hands behind her head, and studied him.
'What?' he asked.
'You've got something going on, the way you look. You look sort of snazzy.'
'Meeting an old friend for lunch,' Lucas said. No point in denying it. During the affair, Sherrill had learned to read his mind.
'Nice-looking, I'd guess.' She smiled.
'I don't know. I really haven't talked to her in twenty years.'
'Whoa. So what happened? She just came back to town?'
'No, she's been living down south, on the Mississippi, somewhere down there.'
And shecould read his mind. She rocked forward, her face serious. 'Lucas, is she married?'
He shrugged. 'She's not entirely unmarried, as I understand it. Look, we're just having lunch.'
'Oh, God. Don't fuck her up, Lucas.'
He was offended, stiffened up. 'I won't. And you go get Bentoin, okay? Call me when you've got him.'
'Lucas' Even more serious now. 'Lucas, man, she's your age, she's married, she's in the danger zone. You could seriously mess her up. I can tell by the way you're acting.'
'Find Bentoin.' He turned and left. In the hall, under his breath, he said, 'Fuck you,' and looked at his watch. Plenty of time for an errand.
Carl Knox had taken a fine Sunday morning to look at a stolen Kubota 2900 tractor with a front loader and rear-mounted backhoe; an accessory mower was piled on the front of the trailer that held the tractor. While Carl looked, a freckle-faced, straw-haired, outraged thief was talking about the turf tires, practically unusedthe goddamn machine had only 145 hours on it, came straight off the best golf course in southern Minnesota. What was this two-thousand-dollar shit?
Carl couldn't hear him, because he was thinking about a Cree Indian guy named Louis Arnot up in Canada, who'd been calling around looking for just such a machine. Arnot would pay twelve thousand American if Carl could deliver the tractor to Kenora, Ontario, which he could, but his guys would have to change the numbers and he'd have to come up with some Kubota papers, and he hadn't done Kubota in a couple of years.
His daughter had come out to the shop with him. She'd been inside, fooling with the books, but now suddenly broke through the Service Department door and said, 'The cops are here.'
'Uh-oh,' he said. He waved her back inside, and then looked at the tractor. 'How hotis this thing?'
'Nobody even knows it's stolen yet,' Roy said nervously.
Davenport came around the corner of the building, fifty yards away. Knox said, quietly, 'Here he comes. Don't look. I know this guy, and he's not here about the tractor.'
'I'll take the two thousand,' Roy said, his Adam's apple bobbing. Knox stepped away from the trailer to greet Davenport.
'Nice-looking machine,' Lucas said as he strolled up. 'I use a B20 up north.'
'No offense, but that's practically a fucking lawn mower,' Knox said. Enough small talk. 'What's going on?'
Lucas was offended, but tried not to show it. Instead, he looked at the freckle-faced thief: 'Why don't you go get a Coke?'
'Sounds good,' Roy said. He hopped off the trailer and hotfooted it across the parking lot, toward the Service Department door. Through the glass panel of the door, Lucas could see the pale face of Knox's daughter peering out at them.
'Why's everybody so nervous?' he asked. 'What's everybody doing at work on a Sunday?'
'You work every day if you have a small business, and you're not sucking out of the state trough,' Knox said.
'That can't be it,' Lucas said. He looked at the Kubota. 'What, that hick steal this tractor?'
'Jesus, Davenport, he's a goddamn basement excavator who's going broke and has to sell his job. What do you want?'
'A list,' Lucas said. 'We chase all over town, going after the big dope wholesalers, the gangs, the people pushing shit on the street, and we pretty much know every one of them. The ones we don't know, the ones we can't get at, are the really smart ones who only move a kilo or so a week, to rich people. Nobody ever complains, nobody ever gets caught. Nobody's standing on a street corner. We need some of those names.'
'You know I don't mess with dope. Too dangerous.'
'But you do loan-sharking, Carl. And you got that layoff business with the sports-book guys. You know a lot of rich people who get their money in strange ways, and put a lot of it up their nose, and who don't buy their shit down in the ghetto.'
'You're gonna get my nuts cut off,' Knox said.
Lucas shrugged. 'So who's ever gonna know that you're talking to me? And it gives us just that much less incentive to figure out what you reallydo for a living. You know, the ugly details.'
'Is this part of the Alie'e Maison thing?'
'Yeah, part of it.'
'Nobody ought to be killing young girls,' Knox said. 'I saw the story in theStar-Tribune this morning, the interview with her parents.' He looked toward the service door, where his daughters face still floated in the rectangle of black glass in the service door. 'I can ask around,' he said. 'But like the last time, I might come up empty.'
'That helped, when you came up empty,' Lucas said. 'It eliminated some possibilities.'
'So I can ask,' Knox said. 'Now, you wanna take a hike before my kid breaks out in hives?'
Lucas left. Halfway back to the corner of the building, he turned and said, 'I'll anxiously await your call.'
Knox shook his head and watched until Lucas had turned the corner. The freckle-faced thief eased out of the building and asked, 'What'd he want?'
'Just bullshit,' Knox said. He turned to the thief. 'You said nobody knows the tractor is gone yet?'
'Won't nobody know until tomorrow, when the owner gets back from Vegas.'
'Can you get it back there?'
'Get it back? I just stole it,' Roy said.
'Yeah, but this guy is gonna look it up, just sure as shit. If it's on a list, he's gonna be back here, and he's gonna want to know where it went. I'd have to tell him I turned you down, and then he'd come looking for you.'
'You wouldn't tell him'
Knox shrugged. 'You're not a real big part of my business.'
'Well, goddamn, Carl'
'So you take it back,' Knox said. 'When does your guy go to Vegas again?'
'He goes every couple of months.'
'So steal it again, then. I'll give you three thousand,' Knox said.
'Three?'
