As they stood side-by-side, Lucas loomed over her, a substantial opposite, with expensively cut dark hair threaded with gray and crystalline blue eyes. He was tall, wide across the shoulders. A hairline scar tracked across his left eye from his forehead to his cheek, a relic of a fishing trip. Another puckered scar sat on his throat, where a teenaged girl had shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 that he hadn’t seen coming. He had a nonstandard Walther 40 S&W on his left hip, in a cross-draw holster, for easier access under a suit coat.
Lucas had a tendency toward depression, exacerbated by the gloom of winter, and by the sporadic violence of the job. White shared the depressive gene, and they sometimes compared notes. When Lucas was younger, he hadn’t worried about it. Now, in his later fifties, he had a tendency to think he’d been shot too often and to brood about the near-death experiences. About what he’d miss, if he were dead; about not seeing his younger children grow into adults.
White had thoughts that ran down in the same trench.
Still, they both were hunters, trackers. They liked the intensity of the work, if not always the consequences, because the intensity went some way toward offsetting the blues.
• • •
“I don’t knowwhy they put us out here,” White said, looking around like a curious cat, her nose twitching in the wind. Although she was wearing a down parka, ski gloves, and a cashmere watch cap over her streaky brown hair, she shivered. They were standing at the top of the driveway, in a grove of paper birches, the kind the Ojibwe once turned into canoes.
The ground, hard as pig iron, was covered with half an inch of crunchy snow. There’d been almost no snow over the winter months, but they’d gotten all the usual cold weather. The temperature, according to Lucas’s weather app, was six degrees and falling, and a persistent breeze whipped the steam away from their mouths. “I’m not a babysitter,” she added.
“This guy is no baby,” Lucas said. He coughed once, covering his mouth with a gloved fist. He wasn’t sick; the bitter cold set him off. He could feel his lips cracking, and he’d left his ChapStick sitting on his dresser. “He was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency. He’s probably killed more people than the Marshals Service.”
“Yeah, but why us in particular?” White asked. “Why not Remy, or that asshole Clark? They’d jump at it, hanging out with headquarters guys.”
“Because I’m the smartest guy in the office, and you’re a close second? They thought the job might take some brains.”
“You’re almost smart enough to get that almost right,” White said, shivering again. She’d been a National Merit Scholar in high school and Lucas hadn’t been; but then, he’d been a hockey jock, and what could you expect from somebody who’d been hit in the head with a puck, and more than once? “But really?”
“Because Witness Protection doesn’t babysit, either,” Lucas said. “They plug a guy into a hideout and that’s it. This guy…The Russians would like to get at him. They need somebody with guns close by, or think they do. That’s not usually Witness Protection.”
• • •
“All right,” Whitesaid. She’d done time with fugitive task forces and considered her Glock to be a species of musical instrument. Lucas had a reputation as a shooter, which he didn’t entirely appreciate, because it suggested he was too fast on the trigger. He felt he was barely fast enough, and he had the scars to prove it.
At the moment, White was in the Minnesota winter stance, shoulders squeezed tight, elbows to rib cage, fingers pulled out of the fingers of her gloves, hands clenched in fists. “Why aren’t you cold? You’re standing there in your plutonium suit and tie…and that coat. What’s that coat made of? Pubic hair from virgins? What?”
“Wool, from goats, but highly refined, college-educated, Italian goats,” Lucas said. He was a hopeless fashion plate. He leaned toward White: “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m also wearing long underwear. Smartwool. Of course, if I have to pee, I’m in trouble.”
“Well, that’s it: youaresmarter than me. I’m wearing cotton bikini briefs.” White looked at her watch: “They’re late. Jerks left us standing out here freezing our balls off.”
“Not mine. They’re like two chestnuts roasting on an open fire.”
White: “Hey: you don’t have to top me every time, okay?”
• • •
Lucas’s cell phonebuzzed. He dug it out of the pocket of his coat, looked at the screen: “Now they’re going to tell us why they’re late.”
He answered, listened for a moment, and when the person on the other side stopped talking, he said, “Okay. We’ll take a look around here,” and rang off.
White: “What?”
Lucas said, “They’re still half an hour out. They had to find a suitcase. Knowing the Marshals Service, they probably flew last-class on Trans-New Jersey Airways.”
“If we had a key…” White looked wistfully up at the locked and alarmed house, furnace steam puffing from a rooftop chimney. The place had what were once called “grounds.” Nothing rural about it, a four-acre fenced lot heavy with white-trunked birches and brooding blue conifers and maples, a few red leaves still attached to the maples. A line of bare-naked bridal wreath bushes were strung along the driveway, while leafless lilacs waited in the dooryard for spring.
“Wecouldsit in the truck, but I’d like to take a look around,” Lucas said. “You know, in case we ever had to come back out here.”
“Not a bad idea. We can at least see through the woods right now,” White said. “Gotta be pretty dense in the summer.”
“Let me change my shoes…”
Lucas popped the back of his truck and took out a pair of Sorel Caribous, pulled them on, tucked in the bottom of his suit pants, and carefully placed his John Lobbs on the truck’s floor.
Together, they marched around the lot, past a frozen picnic table that sat next to a frozen firepit made with frozen stones with frozen logs next to it, through the maples and pines and birches and around the withered shrubs. They found a hard-frozen coiled hose that somebody had forgotten under a dwarf mugo pine, two wickets from a croquet set that somebody had forgotten to pull, and, at the back of the yard, a shovel with a rusted blade and a broken handle. Having crisscrossed the yard, they went out a gate at the back.
