CHAPTER

19

Lucas sat alone in the worst row of seats on the plane, in tourist class behind the bulkhead, no good place to put his feet except in the aisle. The stewardess was watching him before they crossed Niagara Falls.

“Are you all right?” she asked finally, touching his shoulder. He’d dropped the seat all the way back, tense, his eyes closed, like a patient waiting for a root canal.

“Are the wheels off the ground?” he grated.

“Uh-oh,” she said, fighting a smile. “How about a scotch? Double scotch?”

“Doesn’t work,” Lucas said. “Unless you’ve got about nine phenobarbitals to put in it.”

“Sorry,” she said. Her face was professionally straight, but she was amused. “It’s only two more hours . . . .”

“Wonderful . . .”

He could see it so clearly in his mind’s eye: ripped chunks of aluminum skin and pieces of engine nacelle scattered around a Canadian cornfield, heads and arms and fingers like bits of trash, fires guttering just out of sight, putting out gouts of oily black smoke; women in stretch pants wandering through the wreckage, picking up money. A Raggedy Ann doll, cut in half, smiling senselessly; all images from movies, he thought. He’d never actually seen a plane crash, but you had to be a complete idiot not to be able to imagine it.

He sat and sweated, sat and sweated, until the stewardess came back and said, “Almost there.”

“How long?” he croaked.

“Less than an hour . . .”

“Sweet bleedin’ Jesus . . .” He’d been praying that it was only a minute or two; he’d been sure of it.

The plane came in over the grid of orange sodium-vapor lights and blue mercury lights, banking, Lucas holding on to the seat. The window was filled with the streaming cars, the black holes of the lakes stretching down from just west of the Minneapolis Loop. He looked at the floor. Jumped when the wheels came down. Made the mistake of glancing across the empty seat next to him and out the window, and saw the ground coming and closed his eyes again, braced for the impact.

The landing was routine. The bored pilot said the usual good-byes, the voice of a Tennessee hay-shaker, which he undoubtedly was, not qualified to fly a ’52 Chevy much less a jetliner . . . .

Lucas stunk with fear, he thought as he bolted from the plane, carrying his overnight bag. My God, that ride was the worst. He’d read that La Guardia was overcrowded, that in a plane you could get cut in half in an instant, right on the ground. And he’d have to do it again in a day or two.

He caught a cab, gave directions, collapsed in the backseat. The driver took his time, loafing along the river, north past the Ford plant. Lucas’ house had a light in the window. The timer.

“Nice to get home, huh?” the cabdriver asked, making a notation in a trip log.

“You don’t know how good,” Lucas said. He thrust a ten at the driver and hopped out. A couple strolled by on the river walk, across the street.

“Hey, Lucas,” the man called.

“Hey, Rick, Stephanie.” Neighbors: he could see her blond hair, his chrome-rimmed glasses

“You left your backyard sprinkler on. We turned it off and put the hose behind the garage.”

“Thanks . . .”

He picked up the mail inside the door, sorted out the ads and catalogs and dumped them in a wastebasket, showered to get the fear-stink off his body and fell into bed. In thirty seconds, he was gone.

“Lucas?” Quentin Daniel stuck his head out of his office. He had dark circles under his eyes and he’d lost weight. He’d been the Minneapolis chief of police for two terms, but that wasn’t what was eating him. Innocent people had died because of Quentin Daniel: Daniel was a criminal, but nobody knew except Daniel and Lucas. Lucas had resolved it in his mind, had forgiven him. Daniel never could . . . . “C’mon in. What happened to your face?”

“Got mugged, more or less . . . I need some help,” Lucas said briefly, settling into the visitor’s chair. “You know I’m working in New York.”

“Yeah, they called me. I told them you were Mr. Wunnerful.”

“I need to find the guys who were in the jail cells next to Bekker—or anybody he talked to while he was in there.”

“Sounds like you’re scraping the bottom of the bucket,” Daniel said, playing with a humidor on his desk.

“That’s why I’m here,” Lucas said. “The cocksucker’s dug in, and we can’t get him out.”

“All right.” Daniel picked up his phone, punched a number. “Is Sloan there? Get him down to my office, will you? Thanks.”

There was a moment of awkward silence, then Lucas said, “You look like shit.”

“I feel like shit,” Daniel said. He turned the humidor around, squared it with the edge of the desk.

“Your wife . . . ?”

“Gone. Thought it’d be a lift, seeing her go, but it wasn’t. I’d get up every morning and look down at her and wish she was gone, and now I get up and look at the bed and there’s a hole in it.”

“Want her back?”

“No. But I want something, and I can’t have it. I’ll tell you one thing, between you and me and the wall—I’m getting out of here. Two months and I hit a crick in the retirement scale. Maybe go up north, get a place on a lake. I’ve got the bucks.”

There was a knock on the door, and Daniel’s secretary stuck her head in and said, “Sloan . . .”

Lucas stood up. “I do wish you luck,” he said. “I’m serious.”

“Thanks, but I’m cursed,” Daniel said.

Sloan was lounging in the outer office, a cotton sport coat over a tennis shirt, chinos, walking shoes. He saw Lucas and a grin spread across his thin face.

“Are you back?” he asked, sticking out his hand.

Lucas, laughing: “Just for the day. I gotta find some assholes and I need somebody with a badge.”

“You’re working in the Big Apple . . . .”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you about it, but we gotta go talk to the sheriff.”

Three names, a deputy sheriff said. He’d looked at the records, checked with the other guards. They all agreed.

Bekker had been next to Clyde Payton, who was now at Stillwater, doing twenty-four months on a drugstore burglary, third offense. A doper.

“Motherfucker’s gonna come out and kill people,” the deputy said. “He thought Bekker was like some rock idol, or something. You could see Payton thinking: Killing people. Far out.”

Tommy Krey, car theft, had been on the other side. He was still out on bail; Krey’s attorney was dragging his feet on the trial. “The car owner’s gonna move to California, I hear. Tommy’s lawyer’s looking for a plea,” the deputy said.

Burrell Thomas had been across the aisle, and pled to simple assault, paid a fine. He was gone.

“I know Tommy, but I don’t know the other two,” Lucas said. Out of touch.

“Payton’s from St. Paul, Rice Street. Basically a doper, sells real estate when he’s straight,” Sloan said. “I don’t know Thomas either.”

“Burrell’s a head case,” the deputy said. “They call him Rayon. Y’all know Becky Ann, the cardplayer with the huge hooters, see her down on Lake sometimes?”

“Sure.” Lucas nodded.

“She was going with this super-tall black dude . . . .”

“Manny,” said Sloan, and Lucas added, “Manfred Johnson.”

“Yeah, that’s him—he’s a friend of Burrell’s. Like from high school and maybe even when they were kids . . .”

• • •

“How’s New York?” Sloan asked. They were in Sloan’s unmarked car, poking into the south side of Minneapolis.

“Hot. Like Alabama.”

“Mmm. I never been there. I mean New York. I understand it’s a dump.”

“It’s different,” Lucas said, watching the beat-up houses slide by. Kids on bikes, rolling through the summer. They’d called Krey’s attorney, a guy who worked out of a neighborhood storefront. He could have Krey there in a half-hour, he said.

“How different? I mean, like, Fort Apache?”