On Sunday, he had to get on an airplane. Everything was coming into focus.
Lucas had been shot the previous spring. With September half gone, he was still feeling after-effects; which, he supposed, was better than the alternative. He was working hard to get back in shape, running, lifting, punching a heavy bag. Everybody said how good he looked.
When he checked himself in the mirror, though, in his own eyes he looked gray, and too thin. Not wiry, but something over toward emaciated. His cheekbones had been blunt, and were now knife-edged; the crow’s feet at his eyes were like cuts; his watch was too loose at his wrist. He’d lost chunks of the hockey defenseman muscle he’d carried since college and getting it back, at his age, two years past fifty, was tough.
He wanted the weight. The morning scale said he was at 192, and for a cop who enjoyed the occasional fight, two hundred pounds was a good starting point.
Now something was happening in Washington, DC. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good, and at the moment he wasn’t in top form. Or maybe, his wife suggested, his body was fine, but his brain was still screwed up.
—
LUCAS HAD BEENbarbequing steaks in his backyard the night before for a couple of cop friends and their wives, when Elmer Henderson had called. Henderson was a U.S. senator from Minnesota, a former governor, a onetime vice-presidential candidate (he lost), and one of the richest men in the state.
Henderson had a ten-thousand-square-foot cabin on his own private six-hundred-acre lake, staff of six, up in the Northwoods, when he needed something simpler and more primitive than his life in the Twin Cities and Washington, DC. He had a dozen plaid shirts and numerous pairs of carefully ironed and faded jeans for the cabin life, along with several pairs of buffalo-hide loafers. Lucas had once spent a weekend at the cabin and he’d peeked in Henderson’s main closet—because he was a cop, andtherefore somewhat curious, or snoopy, take your pick. Henderson’s Jockey shorts, Lucas believed, after a surreptitious inspection, were both ironedandstarched.
Henderson also had a smaller, more discreet cabin in Wisconsin, which he called “The Hideout,” where he and the other Big Cigars from the Twin Cities cut their political deals. Lucas had been there, as well... cutting a deal.
—
LUCAS WAS RICH HIMSELF, but not rich like the people who’d inherited wealth. He didn’t assume its presence, because he’d made his money during a time when he wasn’t working as a cop. He’d been run out of the Minneapolis Police Department after he’d beaten a pimp who’d church-keyed one of his sources. The beating had neither cured the pimp of his inclinations, nor the woman of her facial scars, but had made a point that had resonated on Minneapolis streets, at least for a while.
While he was in college, and later, working as a cop, he’d had a sideline as a developer of role-playing games. None of them got as big asDungeons & Dragons, but they’d sold well enough to buy him a used Porsche 911.
Then computers came along and the in-person role-playing games began to die. That occurred as he was being pushed out of the Minneapolis Police Department. With the new 9-1-1 systems then coming online, it occurred to him that American police departments could use role-playing games for their 9-1-1 systems, giving their personnel practice in responding to emergencies before they had to handle the real thing.
He wrote the simulations, found a college computer freakwho could do the programming, and the resulting Davenport Simulations, which he’d sold at exactly the right time, had made him wealthy.
But not rich like Henderson.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t say, but perhaps should have, “Theveryrich are different than you and me.” And as Ernest Hemingway didn’t say, but probably would have liked to have said, “Yes, they have more money.”
If the exchange had actually occurred, Lucas thought, Fitzgerald would have had the better of it. In his experience, many of the very rich never really touched the sides or the bottom of the world, of life, but were cocooned from it, even when they wound up dead with needles in their arms.
Henderson was a prime example of the privileges of inherited wealth. Still, he and Lucas were friends on some level, and Henderson had twice been in a position to give Lucas something that he wanted but couldn’t get on his own: the authority to hunt.
After Lucas lost his job with Minneapolis, and after he made his money, he’d gotten, with Henderson’s support, a political appointment as an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and a new badge. When the time ran out on that appointment, Henderson and another U.S. senator, Porter Smalls, had ushered him into a job as a deputy U.S. Marshal.
And they’d seen to it that he had the freedom to hunt, as long as he performed the occasional political task.
—
“I’LL SEND A PLANE,” Henderson told Lucas, because of course he would. Sending a plane didn’t mean much more to him thangiving a cop cab fare. “In fact, I already sent it, if nobody’s screwed up, or my wife didn’t sneak off to Manhattan. You need to be here tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Lucas said.
“I’ll talk to the bishop and tell him you’re excused,” Henderson said.
“Ah, Jesus, you know I got shot, I’m still in recovery mode...”
“I know all about that,” Henderson said. “You weren’t hurt so bad you didn’t run off to Nevada and kill somebody.”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Lucas grumbled.
“Okay—you managed the killing. Well done, in my opinion. The world has enough cannibals,” Henderson said. “Anyway, you’re all healed up. My office, tomorrow, one o’clock. That should allow you to sleep in until eight tomorrow morning. Or seven. Whatever.”
“Eight? Listen, Elmer, I never...” But Henderson was gone. Here was the rich man’s assumption: make a call and the guy shows up on time, with a necktie and polished shoes.
—
