"Ah, Jesus."

"There's one of the paramedics."

A paramedic had come out of the building, a black man with a shaved head. He wore a small gold earring and had a cigarette dangling from his lip. Lucas walked over and said, "I'm… with the FBI guys. I understand you brought Malone in?"

"Yeah. There was nothing we could do. We couldn't help her."

"Where was she hit?"

"In the spine, right between the shoulder blades. The doc could maybe tell you better. I'm not a doctor."

"Tell me what you think," Lucas said.

The paramedic took a long drag on the cigarette, blew smoke, then said, "It looked to me like a small-caliber bullet, a. 22 probably. Very small entry wound, almost like the end of a pencil. We turned her over to see if she was pumping blood out of her chest, but there were hardly any exit wounds, a couple of little cuts, like. Like shrapnel, or something. I think the bullet clipped through her spine and just exploded, like one of those… you know, those guys who shoot prairie dogs."

"A varmint bullet."

"Yeah. Varmint bullet. Like it hit her and exploded everything, just pulped her heart and lungs."

They stood silently for a minute or so, and then the guy said, "I'm sorry."

Lucas rubbed his nose. "Goddamnit."

"She a nice lady?"

"Ohhh… yeah, in a lot of ways," Lucas said, not ready for that kind of question. The paramedic looked at him oddly, and Lucas realized that he had been asking a pro-forma question and had expected a pro-forma answer. Lucas nodded his head and said, "Yeah, she was, really. A nice lady."

LUCAS WENT INSIDE and found Mallard slumped in a chair, while an uncertain doctor stood a couple of feet away, looking down at him, then at Lucas. "Are you a friend?"

"Yeah."

"We might want to keep this gentleman around for a little while-he's got a shock problem."

"All right. I'll have somebody sit with him."

Lucas sat down and looked at Mallard, who had suddenly shriveled. He wasn't saying anything, wasn't looking at anything except the tiled floor. Lucas patted him on the shoulder and said, "Just sit for a while."

Mallard nodded dumbly, and Lucas got up, found the red-haired agent, and told him to stick with Mallard.

The red-haired guy nodded and said, "I jerked the AIC out of bed. He's on his way to the scene, so that's covered."

"All right. I'm going back to the hotel."

"Wait for the call?"

"If it comes."

The agent shook his head. "Gotta get the bitch now. Before it was a sport. Now it's a war."

Lucas took a step toward the emergency room door, then turned back. "When you take Mallard out of here, use some other door. She set up this last shooting-it just occurred to me that she could be setting up outside here." He nodded toward the doors. "She knows we'll all be here."

The agent looked at the doors and then said, "I'll get some guys to make a quiet sweep."

"Do it."

LUCAS WENT BACK to the hotel to wait; took off his shirt, got into some jeans, tried not to think about Malone. Couldn't help thinking about her: wanted to get her back, but couldn't. Finally used the hotel phone to call Weather, and told her.

"Oh, my God, Lucas. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I mean, I'm fucked up, but I'm not hurt. When I left, they were talking about getting somebody to do the formal identification and sign-off, and I just cleared out of there. I couldn't stand to go look at her. Jesus, we walked out of here a couple of hours ago. We went down the elevator together, and she was sure we had Rinker in a box."

"Maybe you ought to come home."

"Can't now. I'm going to get her."

"Unless she gets you."

"She's not mad enough at me. She wouldn't have gone after Malone if Malone hadn't been the one talking about her brother, in the paper."

"You don't know that for sure. She might've gone over the edge."

"I gotta give it some more time. But I'm feeling really… bummed."

"But not medically bummed."

He knew what she meant. A little problem with clinical depression. "Not like that."

"Then I'd say you're pretty healthy. You should be bummed when a friend is killed. Just wait until Rinker calls. Track her down. Get her."

"I'm going to," he said. "Sooner or later."

RINKER CALLED a half hour later. The cell phone rang, and he let it ring once more, then picked it up.

"Yes."

"I'm all done with the FBI," Rinker said. Her whiskey voice sounded blue, depressed.

"Too late for you, Clara," Lucas said. "They'll never quit now. The guy that gets you is gonna be a hero, and his career will be made for life. People are going to make you into their hobby."

"Well, good luck to them," Rinker said. "This never would have happened if they hadn't killed my brother."

"Nobody wanted your brother to die. Malone took a lot of shit after it happened. There was gonna be an inquiry."

"Yeah, right, a cop inquiry. Were they planning to raise him up, like Lazarus?"

"No, but…"

"So what you're saying is that a memo would get written."

"Nobody wanted him to die. Nobody deliberately pulled a trigger on him."

"Might as well have. I told you myself, he wasn't right." Lucas couldn't think of anything to say, and after a moment of silence, Rinker continued. "I'm thinking about getting out. You think they would chase me to Chile?"

"I think they'd chase you to fuckin' Mongolia. And I'll tell you what, if I were you… when they catch me, I wouldn't give up. I'd put a gun in my mouth. They'll pen you up for ten years in a concrete box the size of a phone booth, and then they'll stick a needle in your arm and kill you. Better to go quick."

"I don't suppose you're thinking of going home."

"No. I'll be here as long as you are."

"My problem with you is, you're lucky." Again, a moment of silence. Then: "This fiancйe of yours, is she pretty good-looking?"

"Pretty good," Lucas said. "We're gonna do the whole thing, except not a Catholic wedding because she'll be a little heavy by then, and besides, she doesn't care for the Church. But we got a wild-hair Episcopalian place, which is almost like Catholic, and we're gonna tie the knot up with a priest and flower girls and the whole thing."

"That was gonna be me, a few months ago."

"If you'd just stuck with killing the Mafia assholes, you would have pissed off the FBI, but you still could have pulled a disappearing act and found a guy somewhere and still had the kid. Not now. That's all gone."

"I don't want to talk to you anymore," Rinker said. "You're being a jerk."

"A good friend of mine was killed," Lucas said. "I'm gonna get you for it. Me and my good luck."

"Yeah, don't press it," Rinker said. She laughed, abruptly, a little crazily, and said, "I'm gone. I guess you're tracking this call. Tell your friends that the next sound they hear is the telephone hitting the highway."

He heard it hit. And, in a bizarre tribute to Finnish technology, the phone neither broke nor turned off, and Lucas could hear trucks rushing by.

Wherever it was; wherever she was.

THEY DIDN 'T GET HER. They came close, one of the chopper pilots said. Their tracking gear put them on her; they were only a half-mile out when she tossed the phone out the window. But that was five thousand cars, rolling along the highway, getting off and on. A lot of What ifs and If I'd justs. A highway patrol cop was vectored into the area within five minutes of the first phone ring, but had no idea what he should be looking for. Another cop spotted the phone under a guardrail, picked it up, said, "Hello?" and then turned it off.

THE NEXT MORNING, Lucas and the FBI Special Studies Group, minus Mallard, listened to the tape of the phone conversation twenty times, picking it apart word by word. When she said she was gone, did she mean gone as in Gone to Paraguay? Or did she just mean that she was gone from the conversation? Why did she throw the phone out the window? She could have used it again. Was she cutting them off? Was she done talking to anyone? Had she just been pissed off? What?