twenty-five and forty-five, she thought. He had a smooth brown oval face and a soft manner that fit well with a doctor, but not so well as an accomplice to major crime. They never talked about crime, though he knew who she was, and called her 'Clara' rather than Cassie. He said that the costs of her care had been 'fully funded.'
He brought in a television with a DVD player, and for three days she watched TV and thought about things. On the fourth day, she made her first trip away from the bedpan, to the toilet, where she learned how hard it was for a woman to pee while sitting on one buttock and holding the other one carefully clear. Everything got squished together.
On the sixth day, she started a rehab program that featured five colors of rubber tubing that Geoffrey brought home from the hospital. She had to stretch against the rubber tubes, and could barely move the thinnest size. After a week, when she was feeling stronger and the thinnest tube wasn't stiff enough, he moved her to the next size, and again, he could barely move her leg…
As she waited to heal, and practiced walking, she watched TV and roamed the Internet and thought about things some more.
She thought about Paulo and the baby. The recovery process was quicker, easier than the recovery in Mexico, but the smells and the pain brought Paulo back, and the baby…
She thought about those bad years, the years she'd always tried to blank out, when her brother and her stepfather were abusing her. Abusing her and comparing notes on how well she'd done.
She'd run away, and she'd tried dancing nude, and she'd been raped by a fat man and she'd killed that man with a T-ball bat, and then she'd been picked up by John Ross, who'd taught her to kill for money, and she'd saved her money and had bought a bar and had been successful and had gone to college to try to understand herself…
She'd learned about herself in school. She might have avoided all this, if the killing hadn't been so easy and profitable. She never thought about the dead people, she only thought about the money. It had seemed like her right to kill, after all that had happened to her.
Then Davenport.
She'd feared the federal people, in a theoretical way, like you fear dying in a plane accident. Ross and his friends had heard rumors that there was a file on her, but that the file was almost empty.
Then Davenport had come along, and somehow had screwed everything. She'd lost her bar, lost a friend, almost lost her life. She'd been driven to Mexico and the disaster that followed. Nothing theoretical about Davenport.
She didn't cry about it. She might have, but she didn't.
She set her jaw, and she thought about Davenport.
She knew something about him. One solid fact.
She'd have to heal before she did anything. But she had time-five and a half weeks, to be exact. A Saturday in October.
Davenport was the devil, and had to be dealt with.
26
THE BRIDE WAS BLUSHING IN WHITE AND big as a house, and finally said she had to go off to the bathroom to get the goddamn leg strap right. Sloan, Lucas's oldest friend on the police force, leered at her and said, 'So you show a little leg. You're among friends.'
She said, 'Don't hold your breath, pervert-boy,' and went off into the back, shouting over her shoulder, 'And don't start without me.'
Lucas, waiting at the back of the church, pulled at the collar of his dress shirt, plucked at his tie. Del had been in the-What'd he call it? The nave? The main part of the church-drinking what Lucas hoped was a cream soda. Now he came up and asked, 'Nervous?'
'Of course I'm fuckin' nervous, what'd you think?' Lucas snapped. Then, quickly, 'Sorry. I'm not sure this is gonna work out. I thought about it all night. I was one inch from canceling the whole thing.' He looked at his watch and said, 'One minute. Where's that fuckin' Marcy?'
Sloan said, 'She just went down to the can,' and Lucas said to Del, 'I met this guy down in St. Louis who told me about this time he had to wear a tux and it kept dragging his Jockey shorts up the crack of his ass, and I swear to God, right now…'
Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police, went by and said, 'I think I'm more nervous than you are.'
Lucas grinned at her, a tight grin. 'If I was losing my job next week, I'd be nervous too. What if something happens and queers the deal with the state?'
'One big lawsuit, that's what would happen.'
Del prompted him, 'The guy's shorts kept dragging up his ass…'
Lucas tried to pick it up, and said, 'Yeah, and he said…'
Swanson, an old homicide dick, came by and said, 'This is the most fucked-up wedding I've ever been to, and my wife's family is a bunch of Polacks.'
'Thank God your wife isn't,' Sloan said.
'Where in the fuck is the bride?' Lucas snarled.
Tom Black, a semicloseted gay homicide detective, came out of the nave and said, 'Look at the women in there. They're having a great time. They're gonna be breaking out in fistfights.'
'If you couldn't get laid at this wedding, you couldn't get laid,' Del said. Then he glanced sideways at Rose Marie and said, 'No offense.'
'No problem,' the chief said, taking a drag on a fresh Marlboro. 'Cuts both ways.'
'Where's that fuckin' Sherrill?' Lucas barked. 'Christ… what?'
'Your earpiece is hanging down your neck,' Sloan said.
'Thing is covered with somebody else's ear wax,' Lucas said, looking at the earpiece. He plugged it in, and saw Marcy Sherrill coming.
'Where in the hell…?'
'Gun wasn't working out. I thought I'd hold it like this, like a little black clutch purse,' she said, holding her revolver in both hands.
'Like you're gonna need that,' Lucas said. Then he turned, and shouted into the nave. 'All right, people, we're gonna do this. Everybody sit tight, unless you're part of the porch group.'
Then, to the people gathered around him: 'Everybody ready, porch people? Porch people? Let's do it. Reverend, lead the way.'
Del put down the bottle of what Lucas hoped was cream soda, adjusted his choir robe, picked up a cigar box, which everybody agreed looked a lot like a Bible-the prayer books had been locked up by some mistake-and led the way through the church's double doors. Marcy, all in bridal white, her revolver clutched like a purse, put her arm through Lucas's arm, pulled it tight, and said, 'I always dreamed of this day,' and Lucas said, 'Enjoy it while it lasts. Man, you look like fuckin' Moby Dick.'
'You look a little like Shamu the killer whale, yourself,' she said. 'I think it's the black and white that does it.'
THE TROUBLE IN St. Louis seemed almost like a dream. Treena Ross had been indicted for her husband's murder, and the local cops had chased down every story of an injured woman that they could find. Three days after Ross went down, Lucas returned to the Twin Cities, and the whole episode drifted off into the past, another complicated memory, mostly bad.
Weather had been happy to get him back. The wedding planning had been completed, the invitations ordered, and the house had taken a big step toward completion. Getting through daily life pushed aside any speculation about Clara Rinker, though Lucas was careful not to pattern himself.
Clara, he thought, would come, sooner or later. He'd half expected her to call, as she had after their last collision, but she hadn't. The silence intensified his apprehension.
RINKER SAT BEHIND the wheel of the red Jeep Cherokee and looked across the valley at the front of the church, a half-mile away. A beautiful view, she thought, in the brilliant sunlight, with the pale blue skies: the white,
