In fact, he had the money in his pocket from his mother's house; and Saks and Neiman Marcus were right around the corner. On the way to the mall, he stopped and looked in the window of a jewelry store, where they were featuring small men's rings set with star sapphires. He'd never considered a ring, but they had a certain look.

"In here," he said. "Just on a lark."

He paid two thousand dollars for a gold ring that perfectly fit his right pinkie. "My mother's favorite color was blue," he told her. He teared up again, wiped them away, and they mushed on to Saks.

The men's store was on the first level. He led her down to the first level-and there they found the most marvelous thigh-length leather jacket, smooth-finished with kangaroo-hide details, on sale, $1,120.

He looked at it and said, "Oh my God, forty-long." Her eyes were on him, and he said, reverently, "It's exactly my size."

"Oh my God," she said.

21

WEATHER SAID IT was no big deal, just friends getting together for a beer and a little seafood, but she got to Lucas's place early and spent three hours dusting and vacuuming, and made it smell like nobody lived there but forest elves and evergreens. She was also wearing the engagement ring.

"Sort of stinky right now," she said, "but when you cook up the wild rice and mushrooms the spices'll make this place smell like…" She couldn't think of anything. "Good," she said. "You don't have enough beer, by the way, and when you're at the store, get a couple bottles of pinot noir-everybody drinks that, right? Something nice and buttery."

"Buttery," he said.

"Yes. Ask the clerk. Maybe three bottles. You better get some paper towels, and some regular napkins-you're all out of those."

"Never had any," he said.

"What'd you use?"

"Toilet paper," he said.

She put her fists on her hips. "I'm not exactly, precisely, in the right mood for humor, with the house being the wreck that it is. You wanna go to the store?"

SLOAN HAD TRADED his usual brown suit and wing tips for khakis and a brown sweater with oxblood loafers. Del did his best to look neat, in jeans that had been ironed, brothel-creeper boots, and a blue fleece pullover. Their wives looked like cops' wives: carefully dressed in sweaters and slacks, a little too chunky, with skeptical eyes.

Lucas had set up the charcoal grill in the back, heaped it with charcoal and a half-pint of starter fluid, stood back, and touched it off; he and Del and Sloan all smiled at the foom the fluid made when it ignited, and the resulting fireball. When the charcoal was going, he put the iron pot on top and poured in enough water to cover the lobsters.

"Teach the little fuckers to come back to life as lobsters," Lucas said.

"The only problem is, he's too chicken to put them in. I've got to do that," Weather said.

"Damn things bite," Lucas said. "Did we get some crackers?"

"Those little round ones?" Del asked hopefully.

THEY TALKED ABOUT cases, but not the gravedigger case. They talked about medicine, but not Randy. Weather talked about a skull reconstruction that she was working toward, and how image-manipulation technology allowed her to image a skull three-dimensionally, work out the reconstruction to the millimeter, and fit all the bones together at the end. "Of course, it doesn't always work out that way, and there's some fudging, but it's light-years past five years ago…"

Del's wife had a story about another plastic surgeon who got into an instrument-throwing fit. "He's usually a nice guy-must be something going on."

Weather knew him and pitched in. "He was talking about quitting surgery and going into investment banking-he got really deep in investments. I think it was pretty risky. He told me if I wanted to kick in a quarter-mil, he could make it a mil in a year. I told him I couldn't afford it, but what I really think was, the risk must have been terrific. Maybe he took a hit."

They batted it all around for a while, and finally Cheryl, Del's wife, watching her husband crack a lobster claw and dip it in butter, asked, "I wonder if lobster has as much cholesterol as shrimp?"

"Both are sorta like bugs," Lucas said. He got up and said, "More beer?"

Cheryl looked at the other two women. "Is Del the only one with high cholesterol?"

"Ah, shut up," Del said.

"No, really."

"Sloan's is so low that it's like a race with his blood pressure, to see which one can hit bottom first. I'm sorta borderline," Sloan's wife said.

"I'm okay. Lucas has to think about it, but he's basically okay, if he'd just cut out the doughnuts," Weather said.

"Del's ought to be better with this Lapovorin stuff." Cheryl poked her husband with her elbow. "That doesn't mean you can eat everything in sight. Go back on those terrible pig rinds."

"Shut up. You gonna eat those claws?"

She pushed her plate toward him. "Mr. Sophisticated has been worrying about what that guy told you in the bar," she said to Lucas.

Lucas had to think a minute: the Cobra. "Oh, yeah. Lapovorin makes you come backwards."

"What?"Sloan was interested.

"Ah, Jesus," Del said.

"This guy told us that this woman who got killed by the gravedigger, that the only thing that she said about him-she was laughing about it-was that he was taking Lapovorin and was afraid that he was gonna be screwed up sexually."

"Like he isn't," Weather said.

"Yeah, but this is some kind of real physical thing," Lucas said. "Some kind of ejaculation thing happens, and…"

He hesitated to say it, but Del didn't. "You come backwards. Nothing comes out."

They were all mildly amused, and Weather said, "Del, that's nonsense. I know a little about Lapovorin, and there are no side effects like that at all. You've got to have your liver function checked every once in a while, a blood test-"

"Really?" he said, brightening. "I got the blood test."

"You mean the guy was talking through his ass?" Lucas asked. "I was planning to pimp Del with this for the next ten years."

"Not Lapovorin. What he was talking about is a situation that you see in a certain percentage of men who use that baldness drug," Weather said.

"What?" Del asked.

"You know. It's on television all the time," Weather said. "It's got enough weird hormones in it that they recommend that women never handle it. Not even get dust on them."

THE THREE COPS did the dishes while the women talked in the living room. They filled Sloan in on the gravedigger case, and talked a bit about Terry Marshall.

"Tough guy," Del said. "You get that way, I think, when you're one of those country guys. Around here it's all lawyers and shit, but out in the country, a lot of times it's just you, and you got to fix it."

"Know what you mean," Lucas said. "But he's got this soul-brother thing going with Anderson."

"Anderson."

They spent the rest of the evening gossiping about friends and acquaintances. Cheryl Capslock asked Weather if they'd made any decision about children, and when they were going to get married, if they were. "We haven't figured out a wedding date," Weather said. "We're still working on that. We're working on a kid at the same time."

"Good luck," Sloan said. "Let's see, Lucas, you'll be about, mmm, ninety-four when the kid graduates from high school…"

WITH ALL THE talk, nothing tripped with Lucas until the next morning. Weather had already gone, and he was in the shower.

Weather, he thought, might have been slightly irritated with Sloan's crack about Lucas's age, especially since Weather wasn't that much younger. The thought of aging, and the thought of the whole group getting gray, and that they were worrying about cholesterol and reverse ejaculation…

He was grinning into the shower head, thinking about the coming-backwards discussion, when it struck him.