herself in the mirror. She was presentable, but just barely. She looked, she thought, like a woman just back from three weeks in the wilderness. Or maybe six weeks. Or ten. But when she left the skyway restroom, she was mostly clean, and barely resembled the woman who'd gone in.
On the way down the street, she took the dirty clothes out of her pack and dropped them in a trash basket. She carried the army coat, still unwilling to give it up.
Her first stop was at a drugstore. Under the careful eye of a sales clerk, she bought deodorant, razor blades and a razor, fingernail clippers, tweezers, a hairbrush and comb, a bottle of soap, and two tubes of lipstick. She was about to check out when she caught sight of herself in a mirror on a Camel's display; she went back into the store and bought a bottle of moisturizing lotion.
The next stop was the Westerway Motel, where she'd stayed three or four times when she had the money, before she hit bottom. The place was dank, the beds were crappy, but the price was right and the showers were just as good as the showers at the Radisson. Most important, they'd let her in.
At the Westerway, she stood in the shower for fifteen minutes. She would have taken a bath, but the tub was so grimy that it frightened her. Besides, somebody had stolen the drain plug. Who in the fuck, she wondered, jabbing at the furry hole with her big toe, would steal a drain plug? Never mind. When she was thoroughly clean, she began grooming herself. Nothing she could do about her hair, she thought: she looked like a witch.
Clean, dry, nails clipped, deodorized, and moisturized, she headed downtown. Stopped at a bank, where she changed three hundreds into twenties. Passed a test, too: a woman rubbed one of the hundreds with a test pen, and they were fine. If they'd been fake, Trey thought, she'd have had a heart attack.
She would catch a cab, she thought, and head up to a sporting-goods store across the highway from the Miller Hill Mall, and buy a real pack, the kind young women sometimes traveled with. An expensive one.
On the way down the street, she passed Hair Today, and saw the sign in the window that said, 'We Take Walk-Ins,' and she walked in.
By noon, she had a cut and a 'do that would take her anyplace in Minnesota; she still had that burned-out, feral face, but you couldn't see that from behind.
And by two o'clock, she had a new backpack full of new clothes from the Miller Hill Mall, two delicate pearl earrings, and a selection of expensive facial creams and moisturizers.
Back at the Westerway, she gathered up the few remaining pieces of her old identity, her old pack and the coat, and carried them out to a trash can. As she was about to dump them in, she saw Mary Wheaton rattling down the street with her cart.
The coat, she thought, was perfectly good…
'Mary…'
The older woman turned and looked and kept going. Trey caught up with her: 'Mary. You want my coat?'
Wheaton looked at her nearsightedly, then looked at the coat. 'Who're you?'
'I'm… just a person. You want the coat?'
Wheaton took the coat, shook it, looked at it, and said, 'You don't want it?'
'No more.'
Wheaton nodded, put the coat in the cart, and rattled away without a backward glance. She and Trey had talked a dozen times, and Wheaton knew her. This time she showed no sign of recognition.
Back at the Westerway, she looked in the mirror: she was changing, she thought. She tried to spot one thing that made the difference, but finally decided it wasn't one thing-it was a haircut that looked paid for, rather than done with manicure scissors or a knife; it was a face that looked cared for, instead of desert dry and flaking; it was an uprightness.
The next morning she left the Westerway, walked downtown, and caught a cab to the airport. She didn't have a reservation, so she had to sit in the terminal for six hours, until she got a seat on a Northwest flight to Minneapolis.
She took a cab from the airport to the University of Minnesota, where she bought a used Corolla for cash from a Lebanese graduate student who seemed nothing less than grateful for the money. Not a great car, with 85,000 miles, but it would do. As soon as she got the paper on it, she'd trade up: changing $50,000 into usable money wasn't all that easy, but she knew a few tricks from her doper days.
From Minneapolis, she moved on to Hudson, Wisconsin, on the Minnesota border twelve miles from St. Paul, where she knew a motel that would take cash, and wouldn't ask to see a credit card. Again, not a great place, but she was developing a base.
The next move: an apartment in the city, a bank account, and credit card applications. She saw the applications everywhere, and took them.
She was still in Hudson, waiting to be approved for an apartment in suburban St. Paul, when she sat down to eat French toast and link sausages in the Hudson Country Kitchen, and opened the paper to the story from Duluth.
Mary Wheaton was dead…
She sat and leaked tears for a while, read the rest of the story, looked at photographs of the cops standing outside her old hut in Duluth, then firmed up and finished her breakfast.
She'd go see about the apartment, and then she'd think.
Something had to be done.
Chapter 8
Lucas woke with a start.
There was a noise somewhere, in the room. The room was dimly lit, the light coming from cracks at the sides of the blackout curtain, so it must be after dawn. He glanced at the illuminated face of the bedside clock: eight in the morning. The sound wasn't threatening, there was no intruder in the room, but what…?
He groped until he found the bedside light, turned it on. The sound was coming from the telephone: not a ring, but a low, strangled jingle, as if somebody had punched the phone in the solar plexus and it hadn't gotten its voice back.
He picked it up. 'Yeah?' His voice sounded like a rusty coffin hinge in a horror movie.
'You told me to call,' Reasons said. 'I'm just leaving my house.'
He stifled the impulse to moan. 'Is there any air outside?'
'What?'
'Never mind. I'll be down in the lobby in twenty minutes. Did you call Nadya?'
'Yup. She sounds like she's been up for a while.'
'I have been too, I've been up for hours,' Lucas said. He yawned. He'd never been an early riser. 'I was doing my push-ups.'
'Twenty minutes,' Reasons said.
Lucas cleaned up, put on a fresh shirt and sport coat, got a bottle of Diet Coke from the machine down the hall, and found Nadya and Reasons standing opposite the elevator doors in the lobby.
'Breakfast?' Reasons asked, looking at the Coke.
'Of champions,' Lucas said. Then he had to explain to Nadya. 'See, there was this cereal, there still is this cereal…'
When he was finished explaining, she didn't see why it was funny.
'Well, it wasn't, very.'
'Give it up,' Reasons said.
Lucas asked Nadya, 'Did you hear anything about the computer?'
'No. The question is traveling through the bureaucracy.'
The Range is the remnant of both an ancient sea and an ancient mountain range, more or less an hour northwest of Duluth; it's the largest iron-ore lode in the U.S. The Range runs from northeast to southwest, and sitting atop it is a string of small iron-mining cities-Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Biwabik, Hibbing. The cities are cold, hardworking, blue-collar, economically depressed, and addicted to hockey.
The town of Virginia was straight up Highway 53 from Duluth, across gently rolling countryside covered with
