Broken Prey

started down her face.
    The nurse said, “Maybe I better take off for a while . . .”
     
    LUCAS WENT HOME that day. His eye was blacker than it had ever been, but his nose was more or less straight. His arm was immobilized from shoulder to wrist. Two quarter-inch metal rods went straight through his skin from an outer brace: they would be there for a few days, and then another minor operation would take them out.
    An orthopedic surgeon was checking out the brace when Weather came back from the bathroom. The doc recognized her and they chatted for a few seconds, and then Weather, with a certain tone in her voice, said to Lucas, “You see these rods going into your arm?”
    Lucas looked down and said, “Yeah?”
    “That’s what orthopods call ‘sutures.’ ”
     
    THE MORNING AFTER THAT , he and Weather were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, reading Ignace’s story. Now that Lucas was ambulatory and she could see that his life wasn’t in danger, she was talking about getting back to the kids.
    “Go ahead,” Lucas kept saying, “I’m really okay.”
    His arm felt like a truck was sitting on it, and his face felt like somebody had driven a nail through his eye. He smiled and suppressed a wince.
    “I feel like I’d be ditching you,” she said.
    “No, no . . . I’m gonna be busier than hell.”
    She started giving him more trouble about lying to her—although the night before, she’d settled most of his sexual problems, and any that he might have developed over the coming six or eight weeks.
    Then the phone rang, and he snatched it up to get away from her eyes. Beloit, the doc from St. John’s, said, “I’ve got to talk with you. Privately. Secretly. May I come up?”
     
    BELOIT CAME UP , and she and Weather sniffed each other’s credentials for a few minutes, then Weather went away and Beloit perched on a chair in the den and said, “I think I know why Sam withdrew money from the bank the day he disappeared.”
    “I’d be interested,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to hear it from me. I don’t want to testify. I’d lose my job and so would other people. But I need to get it off my chest . . .”
    “So, we’ll call you a confidential source,” Lucas said. “If there’s no way to prove it, we’ll just pretend nobody said anything.”
    She looked at him for a minute, then away, and finally her eyes came back: “We sort of had a social group in the hospital. The longhairs. We occasionally smoked a little dope.”
    Ah. So that was it. He knew then what she was going to say but let her say it.
    “Leo had the connection,” she said. “He knew the guy who brought it in from Canada. When the guy was coming by, he’d call Leo, but Leo didn’t have much money. So Sam would front the money, and he and Leo would go pick up a can of the stuff—it usually came in one of those big tobacco cans. Sam would parcel it around to the people in our group. We’d pay him our share, and he’d put the money back. He wasn’t making money on the deal, he was just . . . facilitating.”
    “So Leo could have told him the guy was coming through . . .”
    “And it was time. We’d been low, or out, for a while,” she said. “People had started asking when the guy from Canada was coming.”
    “Okay. Would you happen to know the Canadian guy’s name?”
    “Um, Manny,” Beloit said, with a tentative smile. “They used to call him Manny Sunshine.”
    Lucas smiled. “It’s always Somebody Sunshine.”
    “You can get this out, without my name?” she asked.
    “I’ll have our dope guys look into Manny. If we can find him, we’ll have a talk. We don’t really want to bust a bunch of potheads. But it would be nice if we could explain the money withdrawal.”
    “Please, please, keep my name out of it.”
    “I will.” He liked her, even if she was a doper. He remembered seeing her kneeling over the woman in the cage, saving a life, as the shooting was going on around her.
    “Do you think we’ll ever find Sam?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We shouldn’t have found Charlie Pope, but we did. So . . . I don’t know.”
     
    THREE DAYS AFTER Lucas’s truth appeared in the Star-Tribune , DHS officials, seeing how the wind was blowing, decided to preempt any chance of higher-level hangings by doing a few of their own. Cale and four other administrators were put on administrative leave from the