Phantom prey

time Gutmann got shot through both cheeks of his ass…?”

Alyssa Austin called, and wanted to come see him, but he told her he was too tired.

Lucas spent much of the day watching TV and reading the papers, saw pictures of himself on all the nightly newscasts-top story on two stations-and tried to think about the case, but found himself sleeping, instead. The photo kit of the fairy was featured as the possible Female Assassin, and a Goth, interviewed at the shooting site behind the A1, described her as gorgeous, and the TV guy inflated that to “mysterious raven-haired beauty.”

Weather came and went. Sometimes, her chair was empty, and he’d close his eyes for just a second, and when he opened them, she’d be there.

After a second restless night, the surgeon came in at the end of his shift, looked at the wound, pronounced it not bad, and told him that he could go home, but he’d still have to be signed off by the medicine guy, who’d given him a couple of prescriptions for pain pills. The wound itself was a harsh line of stitches, purple and black, and around it, a bruise the size of his hand, and growing.

He had Egg Beaters again, and read stories about himself in the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune. Ruffe, the crime reporter, had taken care of him, but the editorial page had done a snide, “Davenport, Again” story, which recalled that Lucas had once beaten up a pimp and had had to leave the Minneapolis police force for a while. The paper did not mention that the pimp had church- keyed one of Lucas’s street sources.

Weather showed up and said, “They redid that story about me doing the tracheotomy.”

“Yeah, I saw.” The story about him getting shot in the throat by a little girl, his life saved with a pocketknife… Hardly ever thought about that anymore, but when he touched his throat, he could still feel the scar that Weather had left behind. She asked him once if he’d married her because of it, and he’d grinned and said, “No, but if you hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have married you.”

“What?'

'Think about it.”

He finally got out at 11 A.M., wheeled to Weather’s car in a wheelchair, given a crutch for the last four feet. In the car, as he settled down, she said, “If you were a little smarter, I’d worry about post- traumatic shock.” Her eyes caught his when she said it.

“That’s no way to talk to a patient,” he said. The fact was, he hurt more this second morning than he had the first morning- after. His leg now felt as though he’d been hit with a baseball bat, rather than a pointer. He was grateful for the painkillers.

He stayed home for the day, and made the housekeeper lie for him: when the phone rang, and it was media, she told them he was at work. He first lay in bed and then on the couch in the living room, and read a book called The Seasons of Tulul, by Egon Lass, about living with Bedouins, and a cop novel, Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill.

He couldn’t get comfortable with the leg, and the housekeeper bothered him with food, as though she were feeding a favored canary. The pain in the leg seemed to be diminishing when he made two trips to the bathroom, but flared up again late in the day.

They all ate dinner together, and Letty talked about bullet wounds she’d seen, which were numerous, considering her age, and compared his current wound to a hangnail.

He snapped at her: “It might be a hangnail, but it hurts like hell,” and she suddenly got teary, and pushed away from the table and stalked out of the room and when he called, “Hey,” she called back, “I was just trying to cheer you up.”

Weather said, “Ah, jeez,” and Sam exhaled and looked suddenly sad.

“Better tomorrow,” Lucas said. Another restless night, but this time, thinking about Letty and Sam. The third morning after the shooting, the pain was still there, but more of an ache, like a bruise, than a cutting pain; like the pain you get forty- five seconds after being hit by a fastball. Weather redressed the wound and pronounced him improved. The wound had sealed, with no obvious inflammation showing, and she said that it was superficial and shouldn’t be dangerous.

“Good. I’m going downtown.'

'Take the truck,” she said. “You won’t want to use a clutch.” Letty made a point of kissing him on the forehead before she left, which really did make him feel better, if elderly. Sam ran into a wall and creased an eyebrow and thought not much of it. Sam ran into things a lot and called the subsequent wounds “bimps.”

Before he left, he read the Star Tribune’s second- day story about the shooting, which was a rewrite of the first day’s, leaving out the history, and adding only that the police had learned nothing more.

The Star- Tribune had asked the governor for a comment, and he’d said, “Sometimes, in these matters, we have to take risks, and sometimes we get hurt. I’m told Lucas is already on his feet, and I expect he’ll get right back out there and nail this guy.” The governor sounded as though he’d been behind Lucas’s left shoulder, with a gun in his hand.

He got the crutch and went out to the truck.

Lucas limped into the office and Carol asked, “Oh my God, what are you doing here?”

“Working.'

'That crutch looks like a waste of time.” He looked at it. “Yeah.” He called Austin: “I’ve got to see you, the earlier the better. Where are you?'

'In my car, I’m almost at the Wanderwood location, it’s up by North Oaks. I’ll be here for a couple of hours, if you could stop by there?”

“Sure. Half an hour, probably.” When he left, Carol was coming back up the hallway carrying an old- fashioned wooden cane. She gave it to him and said, “Try this.'

'Ah, for Christ’s sakes, I’m not elderly.'

'Try it.” He tried it, and it helped. “What a pain in the ass,” he said. “If it’ll make you happy…” He strolled down to the elevator, twirling it like a baton, but after he got downstairs, used it to walk out to the car. It took a few pounds off the leg, and that helped. A lot.

Fuckin’ women.

Wanderwood was a well-kept, yellow-painted concrete-block building that shared a parking lot with a Caribou Coffee shop. He left the cane in the truck, thinking that he could suppress the urge to limp, took two steps, and went back for the cane. Inside, a receptionist looked him over and said, “You’re not here about the mirrors.”

“No. I’m here to see Alyssa Austin. She’s expecting me.'

'Hang on one second,” the receptionist said, and disappeared down a tiled hallway. Lucas looked around: there was just the faintest tang of sweat about the place, but it might have come from a spray bottle. Otherwise, it smelled like Chanel, or some other kind of French perfume.

Expensive-looking easy chairs were arranged around a tree- trunk coffee table, very ecological- looking, in the waiting area. The table held an apricot-colored orchid in a plain terra- cotta pot, and a stack of appropriate magazines: In Style, Vanity Fair, Fitness, Marie Claire, Allure, Vogue. Nothing with a car on the cover, or even a suggestion that a car existed.

He paged through Fitness for a moment, then the receptionist reappeared and said, “Come on back.”

She took him past a small open workout area, where a half- dozen women rode bikes or ran on treadmills, to a private workout room where Austin was working with a trainer, doing Pilates. She was flat on her stomach doing foot- and- hand lifts with light weights in her hands, sweating like a dog, but when she finished, she did a kind of snap push- up that bounced her to her feet. The trainer nodded and said, “Not too bad, but you have to start finishing the routine.”

“How many times have I missed?” The trainer, a woman a bit taller than Austin but just as fit, bones showing in her face, said, “Week before last, you only got halfway through.”