“I am,” Lucas said. “There’ll be a clusterfuck tomorrow. Get some sleep while you can.”
“See you at the office,” she said.
As she walked away to her truck, Lucas got a card from the cop they’d been talking to and told him that he’d give it to the U.S. Marshal for the district of Minnesota.
“You think I got a chance?” the cop asked.
“You got a chance,” Lucas said.
• • •
Lucas had alreadytalked to his wife, Weather, twice, filling her in on his day. Back in his car, he called her again. “What have we got to eat?”
“We’ve already eaten here. Hit a drive-through on your way back. I’ll be streamingThe Perfect Couple.Sam’s down the basement and wants some privacy for his study session with Ellen. Your daughter is in the middle of an end-of-days sulk because I wouldn’t let her go to the mall, so…”
“Did Sam take a book down the basement with him?”
“I didn’t notice one. He did take two Cokes,” Weather said. “I’m washing enough nocturnal emissions out of his Jockey shorts that I doubt he’d have anything to spare for Ellen.”
“God, women can be so vulgar,” Lucas said.
“I’m sure your mother did the same for you. Go get a sandwich.”
“As a much-needed alert…I did have enough to spare. Keep an eye out. We don’t need Sam knocking up any teenagers.”
“I’ll wait until somebody moans.”
• • •
Lucas stopped ata pizza place that might once have been a gas station, which was confirmed by the menu—he ordered a twelve-inch El Camino—and after a wait, got halfway through the pizza when the burner rang in his jacket pocket.
He found it, answered, and Sherwood said, “I apologize for the interruption in whatever you’re doing…”
“I’m eating a pizza. What happened?”
“Our Russians hit an emergency room in the town of Bison, if you know where that is?”
“Know it like the back of my hand,” Lucas said. He didn’t, but he’d once had an informant who lived there, and he’d visited a few times. “Kill anyone?”
“No, but they kidnapped a doctor and took drugs, blood, and surgical equipment with them, and disappeared, to where, we don’t know. If you have time…I’m calling from a rental car, I’m on the way there myself.”
“I can be there in forty-five minutes or maybe an hour…”
“I wouldn’t bother you, but you’re local and the FBI people I’ve been talking to…they’re not local.”
“See you in a bit.”
Lucas got a box for the remaining pizza along with a dozen napkins and called Weather to tell her what had happened. He ate the congealing slices of pizza at stoplights along the way, a napkin tucked behind his necktie.
The land around the lakes west of Minneapolis was low, marshy, with cattail swamps in the roadside ditches, narrow highways, half-seen barely lit small-town water towers floating like flying saucers in the night sky. He crossed the Crow River at a town which was called, for some reason, Rockford; shouldn’t it be called Crowford? But then, maybe the riverbed was rocky? He’d been through the town a half-dozen times, and never stopped to solve the mystery, because he really wasn’t that interested in it.
He was even less interested in thinking about the shooting earlier in the day, the blood spatter on White, Martha’s brains on the kitchen cupboards. He thought about it anyway and experienced no revelations. He made it to the hospital in forty-five minutes.
Two black SUV cop cars, a highway patrol car, two plain vanilla sedans with micro-flashers that looked like FBI transportation, and two civilian compact SUVs were in the parking lot. A uniformed cop checked Lucas through, and he parked and walked up to the glassed-in entry cubicle.
• • •
Sherwood was standinginside the emergency room, talking to a couple of suits, without any apparent urgency; Lucas assumed they were feds. Sherwood saw Lucas coming and crooked a finger at him. “FBI is covering the kidnapping, but so far, we don’t have anywhere to go. We thought maybe the doc had her phone with her and we could find her that way, but she didn’t: her phone’s laying on the floor in the back along with a pager.”
