“Asshole, asshole . . .”

He kicked at her and missed and she sprayed him again and he kicked again and she stumbled and was rolling and still had the Mace and he couldn’t find the gun and he kicked at her again. Lucky again, he connected with her Mace hand and the small can went flying. Blood was pouring from her forehead where it had been raked by the front sight on the pistol, streaming from the ragged cut down over her eyes and mouth, and it was on her teeth and she was screaming:

“Asshole, asshole.”

Before he could get back on the attack, she picked up a shiny stainless-steel pipe and swung it at him like a woman who’d spent time in the softball leagues. He fended her off and backed away, still looking for the gun, but it was gone and she was coming and the maddog made the kind of decision he was trained to make.

He ran.

He ran and she ran behind him and hit him once more on the back and he half-stumbled and turned and hit her along the jaw with the bottom of his fist, a weak, ineffective punch, and she bounced away and came back with the pipe, her mouth open, her teeth showing, showering him with saliva and blood as she screamed, and he made it through the door and jerked it shut behind him.

“ . . . asshole . . .”

Down the hall to the stairs, almost strangling in the mask. She didn’t pursue, but stood at the closed door screaming with the most piercing wail he’d ever heard. A door opened somewhere and he continued blindly down the stairs. At the bottom he stripped off the mask and thrust it in his pocket and stepped outside.

Amble, he thought. Stroll.

It was cold. Goddamn Minnesota. It was August and he was freezing. He could hear her screaming. Faintly at first, then louder. The bitch had opened the window. The cops were just across the way. The maddog hunched his shoulders and walked a little more quickly down to his car, slipped inside, and drove away. Halfway back to Minneapolis, still in the grip of mortal fear, shaking with the cold, he remembered that cars have heaters and turned it on.

He was in Minneapolis before he realized he was hurt. Goddamn pipe. Going to have big bruises, he thought, shoulders and back. Bitch. The gun shouldn’t be a problem, couldn’t be traced.

Christ it hurt.

CHAPTER

2

The counterman was barricaded behind a wall of skin magazines. Cigarettes, candy bars, and cellophane sacks of cheese balls, taco chips, pork rinds, and other carcinogens protected his flank. Next to the cash register, a rotating stand was hung with white buttons; each button carried a message designed to reflect each individual purchaser’s existential motif. Save the Whales—Harpoon a Fat Chick was a big seller. So was No More Mr. Nice Guy—Down on Your Knees, Bitch.

The counterman wasn’t looking at it. He was tired of looking at it. He was peering out the flyspecked front window and shaking his head.

Lucas Davenport ambled out of the depths of the store with a Daily Racing Form and laid two dollars and twelve cents on the counter.

“Fuckin’ kids,” the counterman said to nobody, craning his neck to see further up the street. He heard Lucas’ money hit the counter and turned. His basset-hound face tried for a grin and settled for a wrinkle. “How’s things?” he wheezed.

“What’s going on?” Lucas asked, looking past the counterman into the street.

“Couple of kids on skateboards.” The counterman had emphysema and his clogged lungs could manage only short sentences. “Riding behind a bus.” Whistle. “If they hit a manhole cover . . .” Suck wind. “They’re dead.”

Lucas looked again. There were no kids in the street.

“They’re gone,” the counterman said morosely. He picked up the Racing Form and read the first paragraph of the lead article. “You check the sale table?” Wheeze. “Some guy brought in some poems.” He pronounced it “pomes.”

“Yeah?” Lucas walked around to the side of the counter and checked the ranks of battered books on the table. Huddled between two hardback surveys of twentieth-century literature he found, to his delight, a slim clothbound volume of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Lucas never went hunting for poetry; never bought anything new. He waited to find it by chance, and surprisingly often did, orphan songs huddled in collections of texts on thermoelectrical engineering or biochemistry.

This Emily Dickinson cost one dollar when it was printed in 1958 by an obscure publishing house located on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Thirty years later it cost eighty cents in a University Avenue bookstore in St. Paul.

“So what about this pony?” Gurgle. “This Wabasha Warrior?” The counterman tapped the Racing Form. “Bred in Minnesota.”

“That’s what I think,” Lucas said.

“What?”

“Bred in Minnesota. They should whip its ass down to the Alpo factory. Of course, there is a silver lining . . .”

The counterman waited. He didn’t have the breath for repartee.

“If Warrior gets any kind of favorite-son action,” Lucas said, “it’ll push up the odds on the winner.”

“That’ll be . . .”

“Try Sun and Halfpence. No guarantee, but the numbers are right.” Lucas pushed the Emily Dickinson across the counter with the eighty-cent sticker price and five cents tax. “Let me get out of the store before you call your book, okay? I don’t want to get busted for conspiracy to tout.”

“Whatever you say.” Suck. “Lieutenant,” the counterman said. He tugged his forelock.

Lucas carried the Emily Dickinson back to Minneapolis and parked in the public garage across from City Hall. He walked around the wretchedly ugly old pile of liverish granite, across another street, past a reflecting pool, and into the Hennepin County Government Center. He took an escalator down to the cafeteria, bought a red apple from a vending machine, went back up and out the far side of the building to the lawn. He sat on the grass between the white birch trees in the warm August sunshine and ate the apple and read:

. . . but no man moved me till the tide

     Went past my simple shoe

     And past my apron and my belt

     And past my bodice too,

     And made as he would eat me up

     As wholly as a dew

     Upon a dandelion’s sleeve

     And then I started too.

Lucas smiled and crunched on the apple. When he looked up, a young dark-haired woman was crossing the plaza, pushing a double baby carriage. The twins were dressed in identical pink wrappings and swayed from side to side as their mother strutted them across the plaza. Mama had large breasts and a small waist and her black hair swung back and forth across her fair cheeks like a silken curtain. She wore a plum-colored skirt and silky beige blouse and she was so beautiful that Lucas smiled again, a wave of pleasure washing through him.

Then another one walked by, in the opposite direction, a blonde with a short punky haircut and a revealing knit dress, tawdry in an engaging way. Lucas watched her walk and sighed with the rhythm of it.

Lucas was dressed in a white tennis shirt, khaki slacks, over-the-calf blue socks, and slip-on deck shoes with long leather ties. He wore the tennis shirt outside his slacks so the gun wouldn’t show. He was slender and dark-complexioned, with straight black hair going gray at the temples and a long nose over a crooked smile. One of his central upper incisors had been chipped and he never had it capped. He might have been an Indian except for his blue eyes.