• • •
“You don’t have a gun, do you, bitch?” Shadow Love screamed. The cry was as hard and sharp as a sliver of glass and Lily gasped involuntarily. He heard the gasp and froze. She was close by. He could feel it. Very close. Where? He swung an arm out to the right, then his gun hand to the left. And he touched her, raked the back of her calf with his gun hand as she went through the door, into the outer room, and he pivoted and fired the pistol once through the door . . . .
No, she thought. He must have heard . . .
She took a fast step through the door, high, over him, in case his legs were still in the doorway, and was pushing off with her back leg when his hand struck her calf. Shit. She dodged sideways; there was a flash and a deafening crack, and she twisted sideways toward the television set, crawling . . . .
“Noooo . . .” The scream clutched at Lily as she hit a body in the dark. Soft . . . woman . . . She had just registered the thought as the other woman, sobbing frantically, clubbed at her and she went down, twisting, back on her hands and knees, crawling toward the television, reaching out, sweeping the carpet for the purse . . . .
The muzzle blast blinded him for a second, but now he knew for sure: She had no gun and was heading for the door. The maid’s scream froze him, then Shadow Love struggled to his feet, groping for the wall and a light switch. He found the wall and ran his hand toward the switch, watching the doorway in case the cop tried for the door.
And then, in the instant before he would turn on the light . . .
He heard the slide.
There was no other sound like it. A .45, at full cock.
And then Lily, her voice like a gravedigger’s: “I’m out here, motherfucker. Go ahead—turn on the light.”
Shadow Love, poised in the doorway, felt the voice coming from his left. One chance: he took it. With the gun in his hand he launched himself straight through the dark toward the other door, where he could hear the maid sobbing. Two steps, three, and then he hit her. She was standing and she screamed, and he held her for an instant as he found the door, gripped the knob and then thrust the woman toward the place Lily’s voice had come from. He felt the maid go, stumbling, and he wrenched open the door. As he went through, he fired once, toward the two women, and then ran toward the stairs, waiting for the bite from the .45 . . . .
Light from the hallway flooded the room, and Lily saw movement toward her and realized it was too small to be Shadow Love: maid.
She pivoted to a shooting line past the falling woman and saw Shadow Love in the doorway, his gun arm out toward her. She was still turning past the woman, and then he was gone, his arm trailing behind, like a bat in a drag bunt. Lily was still following with the .45 when Shadow Love pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit her in the chest.
Lillian Rothenburg went down like a tenpin.
CHAPTER
25
Lucas was chatting with a gambler outside a riverfront bar when his handset beeped. He stepped off the curb, reached through the open window of the Porsche and thumbed the transmit switch.
“Yeah. Davenport.” The sun had set and a chill wind was blowing off the river. He stuck his free hand in his pants pocket and hunched his back against the cold.
“Lucas, Sloan says to meet him at Hennepin Medical Center just as fast as you can get there,” the dispatcher said.
“He says it’s heavy-duty. Front entrance.”
“Okay. Did he say what it’s about?”
After a second’s hesitation, the dispatcher said, “No. But he said lights and sirens and get your ass over there.”
“Five minutes,” Lucas said.
Lucas left the gambler standing on the sidewalk and pushed the Porsche across the bridge, south through the warehouse district to the medical center, wondering all the time. A break? Somebody nailed a Crow? There were three squad cars and a remote television truck at emergency receiving. Lucas wheeled around front, dumped the car in a no-parking space, flipped down the sunshade with the police ID and walked up the steps. Sloan stood waiting behind the glass doors, and Lucas saw a patrol captain and a woman sergeant standing in the lobby. They seemed to be staring at him. Sloan pushed the glass door open, and when Lucas stepped inside he linked his arm through Lucas’.
“Got your shit together?” Sloan asked. His face was white, drawn, deadly serious.
“What the fuck you talking about?” Lucas said, trying to pull away. Sloan hung on.
“Lily’s been shot,” Sloan said.
For just a second, the world stopped, like a freeze frame in a movie. A guy being wheeled across the lobby in a wheelchair: frozen. A woman behind an information desk: caught with her mouth half open, staring carplike at Lucas and Sloan. All stopped. Then the world jerked forward again and Lucas heard himself saying, “My fuckin’ Christ.” Then bleakly, “How bad?”
“She’s on the table,” Sloan said. “They don’t know what they got. She’s breathing.”
“What happened?” Lucas said.
“You okay?” asked Sloan.
“Ah, man . . .”
“A guy—Shadow Love—forced a maid to open her hotel room. Lily was taking a bath, but she got to her gun, and there was some kind of fight and he shot her. He got away.”
“Motherfucker,” Lucas said bitterly. “We were over looking at Clay’s hotel security, we never thought about hers.”
“The maid’s all shook up, but she’s looked at a picture and she thinks it was Shadow . . . .”
“I don’t give a fuck about that, what about Lily? What are the docs saying? Is she bad? Come on, man.”
Sloan turned away, shrugged, then turned back and gestured helplessly. “You know the fuckin’ docs, they ain’t gonna say shit because of the malpractice insurance. They don’t want to say she’s gonna make it, then have her croak. But one of the hotel guys was in combat in Vietnam. He says she was hit hard. He said if she’d of been in Vietnam, it would of depended on how fast they got her back to a hospital whether she made it . . . . He thinks the slug took a piece of lung, and he rolled her up on her side to keep her from drowning in blood . . . . The paramedics were there in two or three minutes, so . . . I don’t know, Lucas. I think she’ll make it, but I don’t know.”
Sloan led the way through the hospital to the surgical suite. Daniel was already there with a Homicide cop.
“You okay?” Daniel asked.
“What about Lily?”
“We haven’t heard anything yet,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “I just ran over from the office.”
“It’s Shadow Love, you know. Doing security work for the Crows.”
“But why?” Daniel’s forehead wrinkled. “We’re not that close to them. And there’s no percentage in killing Lily, not for political reasons. I’m a politician and they’re politicians, and I can see what they’re doing. It makes sense, in a bizarre way. They were so careful to explain the others—Andretti, the judge in Oklahoma, the guy in South Dakota. This doesn’t fit. Neither did Larry. Or your snitch.”
“We don’t know exactly what’s going on,” Lucas said, his voice on the edge of desperation. “If I could just find something . . . some little hangnail of information, just a fuckin’ scrap . . . anything.”
They thought about it in silence for a moment, then Daniel, in a lower voice, said, “I called her husband.”
Two hours later, long done with conversation, they were staring bleakly at the opposite wall of the corridor when the doors from the operating suite banged open. A redheaded surgeon came through, still wrapped in a blue surgical gown dappled with blood. She snapped the mask off her face and tossed it into a bin already half full of discarded masks and gowns, and began peeling off the gown. Daniel and Lucas pushed off the wall and stepped toward her.
“I’m good,” she said. She tossed the used gown in the discard bin and wiggled her fingers in front of her face. “Seriously gifted.”
“She’s okay?” Lucas asked.
“You the family?
” the surgeon asked, looking from one of them to the other.
“The family’s not here,” Lucas said. “They’re on their way from New York. I’m her partner and this is the chief.”
“I’ve seen you on TV,” she said to Daniel, then looked back at Lucas. “She’ll be okay unless something weird happens. We took the slug out—it looks like a light thirty-eight, if you’re interested. It entered through her breast, broke a rib, pulped up a piece of her lung and stuck in the muscle wall along the rib cage in back. Cracked the rib in back too. She’s gonna hurt like hell.”
“But she’ll make it?” Daniel said.
“Unless something weird happens,” the surgeon nodded. “We’ll keep her in intensive care overnight. If there aren’t any problems, we’ll have her sitting up and maybe walking around her bed in a couple of days. It’ll take longer before she’s feeling right, though. She’s messed up.”
“Aw, Jesus, that’s good,” said Lucas, turning to Daniel. “That’s decent.”
“Bad scars?” asked Daniel.
“There’ll be some. With that kind of wound, we can’t fool around. We had to get in to see what was going on. We’ll have the entry wound from the slug, and then the surgical scars where I went in. In a couple or three years, the entry wound will be a white mark about the size and shape of a cashew on the lower curve of her breast. In five years, the surgical scars will be white lines maybe an eighth-inch across. She’s olive-complected, so they’ll show more than they would on a blonde, but she can live with them. They won’t be disfiguring.”
“When can we see her?”
The surgeon shook her head. “Not tonight. She won’t be doing anything but sleeping. Tomorrow, maybe, if it’s necessary.”
“No sooner?”
“She’s been shot,” the surgeon said with asperity. “She doesn’t need to talk. She needs to heal.”
David Rothenburg came in at two o’clock in the morning on a cattle-car flight out of Newark, the only one he could get. Lucas met him at the airport. Daniel wanted to send Sloan, or go himself, but Lucas insisted. Rothenburg was wearing a rumpled blue seersucker suit and a wine-colored bow tie with a white shirt; his hair was messed up and he wore half-moon reading glasses down on his nose. Lucas had talked to the airline about the shooting, and Rothenburg was the first person out of the tunnel into the gate area. He had a black nylon carry-on bag in his left hand.
“David Rothenburg?” Lucas asked, stepping toward him.
“Yes. Are you . . .” They moved in a circle around each other.
“Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police.”
“How is she?”
“Hurt, but she’ll make it, if there aren’t any complications.”
“My God, I thought she was dying,” Rothenburg said, sagging in relief. “They were so vague on the phone . . . .”
“Nobody knew for a while. She’s had an operation. They didn’t know until they got inside how bad it was.”
“But she’ll be okay?”
“That’s what they say. I’ve got a car . . . .”
Rothenburg was two inches taller than Lucas but slender as a rope. He looked strong, like an ironman runner, long muscles without bulk. They walked stride for stride across the terminal and out to the parking ramp to the Porsche.
“You’re the guy she bailed out of trouble. The hostage, when she shot that man,” Rothenburg said.
“Yeah. We did some work together.”
“Where were you tonight?” There was an edge to the question, and Lucas glanced at him.
“We split up. She went back to her hotel to read some stuff while I was out working my regular informant net. This guy we’re looking for, Shadow Love, tracked her there.”
“You know who did it?”
“Yes, we think so.”
“Jesus Christ, in New York the guy’d be in jail.”
Lucas looked directly across at Rothenburg and held the stare for a moment, then grunted, “Bullshit.”
“What?” Rothenburg’s anger was beginning to show.
“I said ‘bullshit.’ He fired one shot and got lost. He’s got a safe house somewhere and he knows what he’s doing. The New York cops wouldn’t do any better than we’re doing. Wouldn’t do as good. We’re better than they are.”
“I don’t see how you can say that, people are being shot down here.”
“We have about one killing a week in Minneapolis and we catch all the killers. You have between five and eleven a night in New York and your cops hardly catch any of them. So don’t give me any shit about New York. I’m too tired and too pissed to listen to it.”
“It’s my wife who’s shot . . .” Rothenburg barked.
“And she was working with me and I liked her a lot, and I feel guilty about it, so stay off my fuckin’ back,” Lucas snarled.
There was a moment of silence; then Rothenburg sighed and settled further into his seat. “Sorry,” he said after a moment. “I’m scared.”
“No sweat,” said Lucas. “I’ll tell you something, if it makes you feel better. As of tonight, Shadow Love is a dead motherfucker.”
Lucas left Rothenburg at the hospital and went back on the street. There were few places open; he found a bar in a yuppie shopping center, drank a scotch, then another, and left. The night was cold and he wondered where Shadow Love was. He had no way to find out, not without a break.
CHAPTER
26
Leo came in at three in the morning. “No sign of Clay, but his man’s at home.”
“Drake? You saw him?”
“Yeah. And he’s got a girl with him.”
“Blonde?” asked Sam.
“Yeah. Real small.”
“Far out . . . real young?”
“Probably eight or ten years old. Took Drake’s hand when they walked up to the door.”
“Clay’ll be coming,” Aaron said with certainty. “When you got his kind of twist, you don’t get away from it.” When he said ‘twist,’ he made a twisting motion with his fist.
Sam nodded. “Another night,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”
“Did you hear about the cop?” asked Aaron.
Leo took off his jacket and tossed it at the couch. “The woman? Yeah. It’s Shadow.”
“God damn, the fool will ruin us,” Aaron said bitterly.
“One more night,” said Leo. “One or two.”
“Killing cops is bad medicine,” Aaron said. He looked at his cousin. “If it’s gonna happen with Clay, it’s gotta be soon. We might start thinking about taking him at the hotel or on the street.”
Sam shook his head. “The plan is right. Don’t fuck with the plan. Clay’s got a platoon of bodyguards with machine guns. They’d flat kill us on the street and Clay’d be a hero. If we can get him at Drake’s, he’ll be alone. And he won’t be no hero.”
“Tomorrow night,” said Leo. “I’d bet on it.”
Shadow Love hid in a condemned building six blocks out from the Loop. The building, once a small hotel, became a flophouse and finally was condemned for its lack of maintenance and the size of its rats. Norway rats: the fuckin’ Scandinavians ran everything in the state, Shadow Love thought.
There were a few other men living in the building, but Shadow Love never really saw them. Just shambling figures darting between rooms, or moving furtively up and down the stairs. When you took a room, you closed the door and blocked it with a four-by-four from a pile of lumber on the first floor. You braced one end of the timber against the door, one end against the opposite wall. It wasn’t foolproof, but it was pretty good.
The three-story structure had been built around a central atrium with a skylight at the top. When the men had to move their bowels—a rare event, most of them were winos—they simply hung over the atrium railing and let go. That kept the upper rooms reasonably tidy. Nobody stayed long on the bottom floors.
When Shadow Love moved in, he brought a heavy coat, a plastic air mattress, a cheap radio with earphones, and his gun. Groceries were
slim: boxes of crackers, cookies, a can of Cheez Whiz, and a twelve-pack of Pepsi.
After the shooting, Shadow Love had run down the stairs, tried to stroll through the lobby, then hurried on to the Volvo. He drove it until he was sure he couldn’t have been followed, and dumped it. He stopped once at a convenience store to buy food and then settled into the hideout.
There was nothing on the radio for almost two hours. Then a report that Detective Lillian Rothenburg had been shot. Not killed but shot. More than he’d hoped for. Maybe he got her . . . .
Then, a half-hour later, word that she was on the operating table. And two hours after that, a prognosis: The doctors said she’d live.
Shadow Love cursed and pulled the coat around him. The nights were getting very cold. Despite the coat, he shivered.
The bitch was still alive.
CHAPTER
27
Lucas spent the next day working his net, staying in touch with the hospital by telephone. In the early afternoon, Lily woke up and spoke to David, who was sitting at her bedside, and later to Sloan. She could add little to what they knew.
Shadow Love, she said. She had never seen his face, but it felt right. He was middle-height, wiry. Dark. Ate sausage.
That said, she went back to sleep.
At nine, Lucas called a friend at the intensive care unit: he had been calling her hourly.
“He just left, said he was going to get some sleep,” the friend told Lucas.
“Is she awake?”
“She comes and goes . . . .”
“I’ll be right there,” he said.
Lily was wrapped in sheets and blankets, propped half upright on the bed. Her face was pale, the color of notebook paper. A breathing tube went to her nose. Two saline bags hung beside her bed, and a drip tube was patched into her arm below the elbow.