9

AT THE SURGEON’S INSISTENCE-backed up by a brook- no- argument Weather-Lucas stayed in the hospital overnight, all the next day and the next night, forced to sleep on his back, which he never did. By the end of it, he had a crippling ache at the juncture of his back and butt.

Before that, though, he’d been heavily fussed over. The morning after the shooting, at first light, the surgeon showed up. End of his shift. He looked at the wound and said, “I do good work.”

“Everybody keeps saying, ‘It wasn’t much,’” Lucas said. “It really wasn’t,” the surgeon agreed. He was a small, compact, swarthy man in good shape; looked like a handball player. “But man, it should have been. One inch to the left, it would have taken out your femoral artery. You’d have been forty- sixty getting to the hospital before you bled out. Two inches to the right, and we have massive genital involvement. You’d still be on the table, with the microsurgeons trying to sort out the pieces.”

“Ah, jeez."

"Yeah. Anyway, we’re gonna keep you here today at least, over-

night, and maybe tomorrow, depending,” the doc said. “There was some crap in the wound, material from your jeans. I got it pretty clean, but we want to watch it.”

“Is it gonna hurt?"

"On a scale of one to ten, about a five, to start, then going to a three, and then fading away,” the surgeon said. “But it’ll go away pretty quick. You’ll be good as new in a couple of weeks. Or three or four. Depending.”

Weather showed up. She’d gone home when Lucas had been given a sleeping aid the night before, mostly to comfort the kids, and hustled back in as the surgeon was leaving. They talked for two minutes, out of Lucas’s earshot, and he heard them laughing, and then Weather came in and said, “You stay in bed all day, and all night, pee in a bottle like a good boy, and maybe go home tomorrow.”

“What were you laughing about?” Lucas asked. “Ah, nothing."

"What?"

"Ah, it’s pretty funny."

"What’s funny?"

"Well, they didn’t know what they were going to have to do to you last night, so when they put you on the table, they scrubbed you up and… shaved. You got what we call a winky cut.”

“Aww…” Lucas pulled the robe apart and looked. A nether Mohawk, actually, both sides shaved, with a strip left up the middle. “Awww, man…”

They gave him Egg Beaters and a muffin for breakfast, which the breakfast lady said was heart- healthy, but seemed to Lucas to be nutrition deadly. There couldn’t have been more than fifty calories in it.

“Quit complaining,” Weather said. “There are little children starving in Texas.”

Anson showed up at eight o’clock, as Weather was gathering up her purse to leave. She stayed to listen. Lucas told the story again, in minute detail and gave Anson his car keys, and Anson said he’d have a cop drive the Porsche over to Lucas’s place. “He might want to take a dogleg through Milwaukee, first. He’s kind of a motorhead,” he said, and Lucas said, “He probably shouldn’t; I’m not in that good a mood.”

“You saw the shooter."

"Yeah, but I couldn’t positively identify him if I saw him again,” Lucas said. “I saw him twice, once when he stuck his head in the door, and once in the alley. He had a mustache and sunglasses, and the sunglasses should have tipped me off… In the alley, I only got to look at him for half a second before I started tap- dancing.”

And he remembered: “By the way, about two minutes after I got shot, in the ambulance, I called Alyssa Austin. She was at home.”

“So she’s not the fairy,” Anson said. “She could be, but then the woman in the alley wasn’t. And I have no idea who else she’d be, or the guy with the mustache, or why they’d want to shoot at me. I’ll tell you something else: I think the mustache might have been a Halloween mustache. I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking about when he looked at me in the bar, and there was something wrong with it.”

Anson had heard about the raid on Antsy Toms and wondered if the shooter might have been a Lithuanian crazy, getting some payback. But they couldn’t figure out how one of Antsy’s pals would know that Lucas would be at the A1.

“One of the Goths might have called the shooter when I came in-and it’s possible that they thought that I was you,” Lucas told Anson. “You were walking around talking to all those guys today… you might want to take it a little easy.”

“I’ll think about that,” Anson said.

“So what’d you get out of the alley?"

"No shells, so the guy was using a revolver. A.38. We’ve got three slugs, two of them pretty bad ricochets-he seemed to be shooting way low, we’ve got at least one hit right about where your feet would have been. The third one was higher and went into a nice soft wood two- by- four at the corner of the door. It’s in pretty good shape, so if we can find the pistol, we can match it up.”

“Excellent,” Lucas said. “And we got a half- assed witness,” Anson said. “A guy walking back home with a sandwich heard the shots, and he looked back down the street and saw two people running, one tall and one short, man and a woman. Just what you saw. He also saw their vehicle. He doesn’t know what kind, but it was a pickup.”

“That’s something,” Lucas said. “But not much.” When Anson was gone, Weather asked, “Antsy Toms? What was that?” But Lucas had drifted away from her, rerunning the shooting in his head. The shooter had been too far from him-too far for accurate shooting. Probably sixty or seventy feet. Lucas could see him jerking at the trigger with each shot, the gun barrel all over the place.

And in that mind’s-eye image, Lucas counted off the shots: he’d been shot at, he thought, six times, and hit once. He might have been hit in the head or the heart or he might not have been hit at all-the shooter was a fuckin’ amateur, and he’d been nervous and probably scared and maybe desperate.

What had Lucas done to make anybody desperate? “Antsy Toms,” Weather repeated. “Isn’t he the guy who beat up those officers?”HIS BOSS, Rose Marie Roux, came by for a look: “Jesus, Lucas, you’re supposed to be the brains of the operation. You’re not supposed to get shot in alleys. Not any more. Those days are over.”

“Hey, I didn’t go looking for it.” He got the flash again: the guy’s hand pumping out the bullets. How long? A second and a half?

“Then what were you doing in the alley?"

"Working. And this isn’t much-shit, I’ve been hurt worse than this doing home repair,” he said. The governor’s chief hatchet man called, and Carol, his secretary, called, crying, and then Del stopped by, and the governor himself called. Del wanted to look at the bullet hole, but was satisfied by looking at the bruising. “Nasty. But remember that time Gutmann got shot through both cheeks of his ass…?”

Alyssa Austin called, and wanted to come see him, but he told her he was too tired.

LUCAS SPENT MUCH of the day watching TV and reading the papers, saw pictures of himself on all the nightly newscasts-top story on two stations-and tried to think about the case, but found himself sleeping, instead. The photo kit of the fairy was featured as the possible Female Assassin, and a Goth, interviewed at the shooting site behind the A1, described her as gorgeous, and the TV guy inflated that to “mysterious raven-haired beauty.”

Weather came and went. Sometimes, her chair was empty, and he’d close his eyes for just a second, and when he opened them, she’d be there.

After a second restless night, the surgeon came in at the end of his shift, looked at the wound, pronounced it not bad, and told him that he could go home, but he’d still have to be signed off by the medicine guy, who’d given him a couple of prescriptions for pain pills. The wound itself was a harsh line of stitches, purple and black, and around it, a bruise the size of his hand, and growing.