of her eyes. When she left, her father said, 'I'll see you tomorrow?' and it really was a question.
'I'll be waiting for you,' she said.
She stopped at a supermarket on Grand, got enough food for a week, including some easy microwave one- dish stuff. As she was lying on her used couch, eating chicken-and-rice, it occurred to her that she was about six blocks from the first place she'd ever sampled crack.
Watching herself, she was amazed to find not even the slightest whisper of desire. Two weeks ago, a bottle of cheap wine was home. Now, she thought, she might be a teetotaler. Maybe. Maybe the stress of trying to get a job going would bring back all the bad stuff.
She doubted it: it seemed now, at this time and place, that all that had been scorched right out of her.
Later that evening, before she went to bed, she again felt the barrenness of the apartment. Not an emotional thing, but a simple, physical emptiness. She needed pottery, bird feathers, milkweed hulls, pinecones, a cup full of dried-up ballpoint pens and eraserless pencils, a file cabinet full of paper about one thing or another. She needed insurance, she needed a retirement program, she needed to open an account at Fidelity. She needed quarterly reports.
Standing in her new Target nightgown, she dumped her new pack on the floor, and looked at the few pieces that fell out. All that was left of her old life. She picked up her knife. Ought to throw it, she thought. This was not a good vibe…
But still, a girl should have a knife.
She opened the blade and noticed the brown crusty stuff… 'What?'
Blood? She held it next to a new Target lamp. Dried blood. She cut the guy up there in Duluth, the killer guy.
And she thought: DMA. Serious evidence against somebody, right there in her hand.
What to do? She was afraid of that cop, Davenport. He'd sounded so damn mean…
She closed the blade on the knife.
Tomorrow, an office.
The knife, she'd think about.
Chapter 20
The hours after a cop is killed are always a nightmare: telling the family, figuring out what went wrong, deciding if some living person is to blame-and Nadya was taking a hit on the last item.
She insisted that Reasons had initiated the relationship, telling her that his marriage was essentially over. Her argument was good enough, and detailed enough, that it made the Duluth cops angrier than ever. To have one of their own killed, and thus automatically qualified for sainthood-nobody liked to see a dead cop, but on the other hand, it never hurt the budgetary process if you lost the occasional flatfoot-and to have all of that tarnished by a Russian and maybe even a Commie…
Lucas took some of the heat off in a quick, illegal, and private meeting with the police chief, where everybody agreed that Lucas hadn't actually been stopped, shot at, or really handcuffed while he was pursuing the killer… that wouldn't have been good for the budget.
There was also a general agreement that it wouldn't be necessary to mention the sexual liaison to the press. Reasons had actually been guarding Nadya when he was murdered-he had given his life to save hers.
Lucas got back to Weather, late, waking her, telling her what had happened. Nadya had moved to a new room, and Weather said she would call her.
'I can tell you she ain't asleep,' Lucas said.
While all that was going on, so was the chase: Duluth cops went to every pizza place in town, trying to see who might have bought the pizza. They knew it was a fresh one-Nadya said she could smell it, even after the shooting.
'Must have been a hungry sonofabitch, hanging on to the pizza when you're chasing him all over the fuckin' hill,' Kelly said.
'Weird shit happens,' Lucas said.
Several pizza places had customers who might have fit the vague description they had of the killer: thin, blond, blackjacket or white shirt. None of those had any more details.
The women at the hotel's front desk had seen nothing but the back of the pizza-man's head.
In any case, nobody found anything: the killer was gone.
In the morning, Andreno, calling upstate from Virginia, asked, 'What the fuck happened down there?'
Lucas told him, and Andreno said, 'Maybe she needs a bodyguard. Somebody with a gun.'
'You want the job?'
'It's either that or go home. The Spivaks are in a bunker.'
'Come on down and let's talk,' Lucas said. 'I need some theoretical bullshit.'
'I'm on my way.'
Lucas tried to go back to sleep, failed, eventually got up, cleaned up, looked at the clock, and realized that Andreno could be there at any minute. He called and Andreno said, 'I'm just coming into town. If I don't get lost, I'll be there in ten minutes.'
Lucas called Nadya's room. She was up, dressed, and sounded like she had a cold.
'Breakfast,' he said. 'Ya gotta eat.'
'I need advice,' she said. 'And I need coffee.'
'I'll see you upstairs in two minutes,' Lucas said.
Lucas took the elevator. It stopped two floors up-she'd changed rooms-and Nadya got on, eyes and nose puffy, and said, 'Oh, God.'
'Yeah.' Lucas was tempted to give her a hug, but he wasn't a hugger, and she slumped in the corner, staring at the control buttons. At the top, they went into the restaurant, got a booth. The restaurant was already rotating, and they were overlooking the city but turning toward the harbor. They could see two long, low freighters standing offshore, heading into port, and another one, on the horizon, a dwindling lump.
The waitress came and they ordered coffee and Lucas asked for a waffle and bacon. The waitress left and Nadya said, 'Do you think the… news… of our relationship will be successfully suppressed?'
Lucas shrugged. 'I don't know. It doesn't help anybody if it gets out, but police departments are the biggest rumor mills in the world. Everybody in the department knows by now. The police reporter here, the guy we met down at that shack… he's no dummy. He'll probably hear about it.'
'But will he print it?'
'If he does, it could hurt him with his sources in the department-everybody would be pissed off at him. I don't think anyone would confirm it, officially, so he'd have to worry about printing rumors…'
Nadya took a napkin out of a napkin holder and folded it, precisely square, then folded it again. 'I have to decide whether to tell my superiors what happened. If I do, it would not be good for me. If I don't, and they find out, it would be worse. But if I don't, and they don't find out, and if we get the killer…'
As she was talking, Lucas noticed another woman approaching their table-not a waitress, but a woman in jeans and a nylon windbreaker. She was dark haired and stocky, and she was moving quickly, beelined toward them, and Lucas said, 'Uh…' but the woman ignored him and said to Nadya, 'Are you Nadezhda Kalin?' She pronounced the name with authority and a light went on in Lucas's brain and he started to get out of the booth just as the waitress appeared with two cups of hot coffee and blocked him, and Nadya looked at the woman and said, 'Yes?'
'I am Jerry Reasons's wife,' the woman said, and she launched herself into the booth on top of Nadya, her fingernails flashing, and Lucas said, 'Oh, shit,' and the waitress with the coffee went down ass-over-coffee-cup and Nadya screamed and slashed back.
Lucas was out of the booth and grabbed Reasons around the waist and tried to pull her off Nadya, but she was strong, angry, out of control, and when Lucas got her back a foot she turned in his arms and slashed at his
