“There’s somebody here,” Barbara called from the kitchen, fear thick in her voice. “Somebody on the porch.”

The doorbell rang as Aaron hurried into the back bedroom, where he had been sleeping, and returned with an old blue .45. The bell rang again and then the front door pushed open. A dark figure, short hair, black eyes; Aaron, flattened against the hallway wall, at first thought it might be Shadow Love, but the man was too big . . . .

“Leo,” Aaron called in delight. A smile lit the old man’s face and he dropped the pistol to his side. “Sam, it’s Leo. Leo’s home.”

CHAPTER

23

“You’re sleeping with that New York cop. Lily.” Jennifer looked at him over the breakfast bar. Lucas was holding a glass of orange juice and looked down at it, as if hoping it held an answer. The newspaper sat next to his hand. The headline read: CROWS KILL COP.

He wasn’t a cop, Lucas thought. After a moment he glanced away from the table and then back at the newspaper and nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“Are you going to again?” Her face was pale, tired, her voice low and whispery.

“I can’t help it,” he said. He wouldn’t look at her. He turned the glass in his hand, swirling the juice.

“Is this . . . a long-term thing?” Jennifer asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Look at me,” she said.

“No.” He kept his eyes down.

“You can come back and see the baby, but call first. Once a week for now. I won’t continue our sexual relationship and I don’t want to see you. You can see the baby on Saturday nights, when I have a sitter. After Lily goes back to New York, we’ll talk. We’ll make some kind of arrangement so you can visit the baby on a regular basis.”

Now he looked up. “I love you,” he said.

Tears started in her eyes. “We’ve been through this before. You know what I feel like? I feel pathetic. I don’t like feeling pathetic. I won’t put up with it.”

“You’re not pathetic. When I look at you . . .”

“I don’t care what you see. Or anybody else. I’m pathetic in my own mind. So fuck you, Davenport.”

When Jennifer left, Lucas wandered around the house for a few moments, then drifted into the bedroom, undressed, and stood under a scalding shower. Daniel wanted every man on the street, but after Lucas had toweled off, he stood in front of an open closet, looking at the array of slacks and shirts, and then crawled back into bed and lapsed into unconsciousness. The Crows, Lily, Jennifer, the baby and game monsters from Drorg all crawled through his head. Every once in a while he felt the pull of the street scene outside Hood’s apartment: he’d see the bricks, the negotiating cop, a slice of Lily’s face, her .45 coming up. Each time he fought it down and stepped into a new dream fragment.

At one o’clock, Lily called. He didn’t answer the phone, but listened as her voice came in through his answering machine.

“This is Lily,” she said. “I was hoping we could get some lunch, but you haven’t called and I don’t know where you are and I’m starving so I’m going out now. If you get in, give me a call and we can go out to dinner. See you.”

He thought about picking up the phone, but didn’t, and went back to the bed. The phone rang again a half-hour later. This time it was Elle: “This is Elle, just calling to see how you are. You can call me at the residence.”

Lucas picked up the receiver. “Elle, I’m here,” he croaked.

“Hello. How are you?”

“A down day,” he said.

“Still the shotgun dream?”

“It’s still there. And sometimes during the day. The sensation of the steel.”

“It’s a classic flashback. We see it all the time with burn victims and shooting victims and people who’ve gone through other trauma. It’ll go away, believe me. Hold on.”

“I’m holding on, but it’s scary. Nothing’s ever gotten to me like this.”

“Are you going to play Thursday night?” Elle asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you come a half-hour early? We can talk.”

“I’ll try to make it.”

The bed was like a drug. He didn’t want it, but he fell back on the sheets and in a minute was gone again. At two o’clock, suddenly touched with fear, he sat up, sweating, staring at the clock.

What? Nothing. Then the cold ring of the shotgun muzzle rapped him behind the ear. Lucas clapped a hand over the spot and let his head fall forward on his chest.

“Stop,” he said to himself. He could feel the sweat literally pop out on his forehead. “Stop this shit.”

Lily called again at five o’clock and he let it go. At seven, the phone rang a fourth time. “This is Anderson,” a voice said to the answering machine. “I’ve got something . . . .”

Lucas picked up the phone. “I’m here,” he said. “What is it?”

“Okay. Lucas. God damn.” There was the sound of computer printouts rustling. Anderson was excited; Lucas could picture him going through his notes. Anderson looked, talked and sometimes acted like an aging hillbilly. A few months earlier he had incorporated his private computer business and was, Lucas suspected, on his way to becoming rich with customized police software. “I went into Larry’s genealogical files for the Minnesota Sioux—you know how he had them stored in the city database?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I looked up all the Crows. They were all too old—not many Crows in Minnesota. So I got a typist and had her put all the names from Larry’s file into my machine in a sort routine . . . .”

“What?”

“Never mind. She put them in my machine in a list. Then I went over to State Vital Records and found all the women named Love who had babies between 1945 and 1965. You said this Shadow Love dude looked like he was in his thirties . . . .”

“Yeah.”

“So I pulled all of those. There were a hell of a lot of them, more than four hundred. But I could eliminate all the girl babies. That got rid of all but a hundred and ninety-seven. Then I put the names of the fathers into my machine—”

“So you could run them against the genealogy—”

“Right. I got about halfway through and found a Rose E. Love. Mother of Baby Boy Love. No name for the kid, but that wasn’t uncommon. Get this. I don’t know how she did it, but she got them to list two names in the space for the father.”

“Interesting . . .”

“Aaron Sunders and Samuel Close.”

“Shit, Aaron and Sam, it’s gotta be . . .”

“Their race is listed as ‘other.’ This was back in the fifties, so it’s probably Indian. And they turn up on Larry’s genealogy. They are the grandsons of a guy named Richard Crow. Richard Crow had two daughters, and when they married, the Crow name ended. We got Sunders and Close—but I’d bet my left nut those are the real names for Aaron and Sam Crow.”

“God damn, Harmon, that’s fuckin’ terrific. Have you run—”

“They both had Minnesota driver’s licenses, but only way back, before the picture IDs. The last one for Sunders was in 1964. I called South Dakota, but they were shut down for the day. I asked for a special run and the duty guy told me to go shit in my hat. So then I rousted the feebs and they got on the line to the SoDak people. They got to the duty guy and now he’s shitting in his hat. Anyway, we got the special run. They’re checking the records now. I figure with everything that’s happened, that’s the most likely place . . . .”

“How about NCIC?”

“We’re running that now.”

“We ought to check prison records for Minnesota and the Dakotas and the federal system. Be sure you check the feds. The federal system gets the bad-asses off the reservations . . . .”

“Yeah, I’ve got that going. If the Crows were inside in the last ten or fifteen years, it’ll show at the NCIC. The feebs said they’ll check with the Bureau of Prisons to see about their records before that.”