what's going on.'
Lucas tried to be calm: 'The guy who shot Reasons just ran around that corner-'
'There are more people down the block; just try to be calm and put your hands down…'
Lucas put his hands down, and said, 'If you don't get a car down there in five seconds, he's gone,' and the cops said, 'That's all taken care of, sir,' but he didn't exactly say sir as if he meant it, and the driver-cop cuffed him, the other cop took the.45 out of his belt.
Lucas was talking fast. 'If we go back to the Radisson, I've got my ID in my room, and I talked to a guy named Larry Kelly in your detective bureau when we found the old lady's stuff down by the tracks… and the Russian investigator can ID me… Listen, you gotta find out…' He stopped, took a breath: too late. 'Ah, fuck, never mind.'
'Never mind, what?' asked the cop who cuffed him. Lucas could tell he'd started to believe.
'Never mind trying to put more guys on the killer. He's gone. He's gone. Didn't even get a look at his fuckin' car…' He looked down the street, pulled around, hoping against hope that a car might zip through one of the intersections he could see. None did.
Now they believed him a little more; didn't uncuff him, but he said, 'Look, let's go over to the hotel. Reasons looked pretty bad. And be careful of the.45. The safety's on, but it's still cocked and there's a round in the chamber.'
He let them put him in the backseat of the squad car, and then said, 'Put out a call and tell them to nail any speeders they see. I don't know what kind of car, but we're looking for a thin blond guy in a black jacket or a white shirt. He was wearing a white shirt when I saw him, but he pulled a black jacket over it.'
The driver put out the call immediately; then the other guy said, 'What about Reasons?'
Lucas thought about Reasons shaking and trembling on the floor of Nadya's room. Brain death. He'd seen it before, when a guy's brain was starving of oxygen. 'I think Jerry… Jerry was hit pretty hard,' Lucas said. 'I called nine one one before I ran after the guy, but he was hit hard.'
'You think…'
'Yeah, I think.'
'Jesus Christ,' the cop said, his eyes big. 'Jesus Christ. I was just talking to him this afternoon.'
The uniform cops brought Lucas through the police lines around the hotel, everybody looking at him hard-they thought he might be a suspect-and they went up in the elevator and Nadya, in the hallway, her blouse soaked with black blood, saw them coming and said, 'Lucas, why are you…' and then Larry Kelly, the cop who'd been leading the Wheaton murder, and who had been talking to her, turned, saw his arms pinned behind him and asked, 'What's going on with you?' looking querulously behind him at the uniform cops.
'How about Jerry?' Lucas asked.
Kelly shook his head. 'Didn't even bother to transport him. He's still here.'
Lucas stepped forward and looked in the room: Reasons was as Lucas had left him, sprawled faceup on the carpet.
'So what about you?' Kelly said, pressing.
'Found him in the street waving a gun, so we picked him up,' one of the cops said, and then, to Lucas, 'Sorry,' and he stepped behind Lucas and popped off the cuffs.
'Did you see the man?' Nadya asked.
'I chased him about a fuckin' mile,' Lucas said, rubbing his wrists. 'Then we sort of got tangled up…'
'What?' Kelly demanded of the uniforms, incredulity riding his voice. 'You had two guys running and you busted this one?'
'Ah, there was no way for them to know,' Lucas said. 'They couldn't see the other guy and there I was running around in the dark, no ID. Nothing but a gun. They did okay.'
'Maybe not,' one of the uniformed said. He handed Lucas his.45. 'I sorta let off a couple of rounds.'
'Yeah.' Lucas remembered. He looked down at his left shirtsleeve, put his little finger through the nine- millimeter hole.
'Ah, fuck me,' the cop said, turning away.
'We can talk about it,' Lucas said. 'Just everybody keep their mouths shut for a while, and… we can talk about it.'
'Go,' Kelly said to the uniforms. 'But don't go too far.'
'What about Jerry?' one of them asked.
'Jerry's dead,' Kelly said.
'Jesus, I just talked to him this afternoon.'
'Most of us did,' Kelly said. 'Go.'
'Are you all right?' Lucas asked Nadya.
'Yes, I am all right. If Jerry hadn't been here, I would have been…' She tipped her head toward the doorway. And she didn't look all right; she looked scared to death; as they talked, she started to shake, and Kelly put his arm around her, squeezing her. 'There is nothing between me and death, but luck and sex and coincidence.'
'You believe in coincidence.'
'Yes,' she said, sadly.
'So what happened?'
'A man came to the door. He said he had a pizza, but I ordered no pizza. But Jerry was standing in the bedroom door and… he was leaving, we had been in bed already… and he went to the door and opened it and I came behind him to say I ordered no pizza, and the man there, bang. But not so loud a bang. I saw Jerry start to fall and I ran back to the bed and got his pistol and the man came to the door and I shoot at him three times, and he shoots at me two or three times and hits the lamp…'
'You didn't hit him?'
'No. I know the pistol well enough to fire it, but I am not intimate with it, and everything was so fast that he came to the door and I shoot, shoot, shoot, with no thinking. Then he ran, and I ran to the door, and then you came.'
'Ah, brother…'
Kelly: 'What the fuck is going on?'
'We don't know,' Lucas said. To Nadya. 'How good a look did you get? Could you identify him?'
She shook her head. 'I see almost nothing. Nothing! I see the hat, I see the shoot, I run to get the gun and I shoot and shoot and then he was gone.'
'Goddamnit.'
'But,' she said, holding up a finger. She turned and pointed at a blaze orange glove on the floor. 'This is his glove. This belongs not to us, and I saw it when he was at the door… saw the orange. He must have lost it.'
'We're gonna bag it, check it for DNA,' Kelly said, as Lucas stepped over to look at it. It was a cheap, fuzzy, synthetic-cloth glove like the ones deer hunters used.
'You saw the guy,' Kelly said to Lucas.
The phone rang and Nadya said, 'I will get that,' and edged around Reasons's body.
'Yes. White guy, white hat, one of those paper pizza hats, blond, I think, wearing a white shirt when I saw him first,' Lucas said. 'The girls down in the lobby said he was pulling on a black jacket when he went by them… He was carrying a pizza box. The whole fuckin' time, he was carrying a pizza box.'
'All right. We'll check the pizza places, see if somebody picked up a pizza.'
'Probably a dummy to cover the gun.'
'Yeah, I think.'
Nadya started shouting into the phone, in Russian, then she turned toward Kelly and Lucas and pointed at the phone and Lucas said, 'Shit, it's somebody. You got a cell phone?'
Kelly handed him a cell phone and he called Harmon and when Harmon came up, as cool as ever, Lucas said, 'We've got a phone call coming into room seven forty-five at the Radisson exactly now, and we need it traced… Shit.'
Nadya was shaking her head, and hung up.
To Harmon, Lucas said, 'You gotta trace that call. We got a big problem here…' He explained quickly and Harmon said, 'This is a whole new thing. I'll check out guys, but I'm pretty sure that nobody that we're watching is in Duluth.'
