Chosen Prey

you said it was like driving an RV.”
    “You misremember,” Lucas said. He waved at a waitress and pointed at his empty martini glass. She nodded, and he turned back to Weather. “I said it was like driving an RV across North Dakota at seven miles an hour. Except less interesting.”
    Weather had a glass of white wine, and she twirled it between her fingers. She was a surgeon and had the muscled hands of a surgeon. “What about this woman who was strangled? Why don’t you help with that?”
    “It’s being handled,” Lucas said. “Besides, I—”
    “It’s been a while,” Weather said, interrupting. “When did they find her? Last weekend?”
    “Last Sunday,” Lucas said. “Takes time.”
    “A week, and what’ve they got? Anything? And she’d already been dead for eighteen months when they found her.”
    “I dunno. I don’t know what they got. You know I knew her folks?”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “They came to see me when she disappeared, asked for help. I called around, talked to some people. Half of them thought she’d split for the Coast, the other half figured she was dead. Nobody had any idea who did it. All they knew was that she was gone, and it didn’t look like she’d planned to go . . . . Other than that, we had zip. Nothing.”
    “So why not get in it? It’s the kind of case you enjoy. You get to figure something out. It’s not some jerk sitting in the kitchen with a can of Schlitz in his lap, waiting for the cops to bust him.”
    “I don’t want to fuck with somebody trying to do a job,” Lucas said. He scrubbed furiously at an old scar that ran down his forehead and across an eyebrow onto a cheek. He was a large man, heavy-shouldered, dark-complected—almost Indian-dark—but with sky-blue eyes. He moved uneasily in his chair, as though it might break under his weight. “Besides, knowing her folks makes it tougher. Knocks me off center. Makes me feel bad.”
    “Oh, bullshit,” Weather said. “You’re moping around looking for sympathy. Maybe you oughta call what’s-her-name. She’d probably give you some sympathy.”
    Lucas deliberately misunderstood the reference to “what’s-her-name.” “Or a pot. If she didn’t give me sympathy, she could give me a pot.”
    Weather’s voice went dangerously quiet. “I didn’t mean that one.”
    Of course she hadn’t, but Lucas could play the game too. “Oh,” he said, and tried his charming smile. But his charming smile hardly ever came off: His eyes could be charming, but his smile just made him look hard.
    Romantic relationships were like gears in an old pocket watch, Lucas thought, looking across the table at Weather. They were always turning, some of the gears small and fast, others bigger and slower. The biggest of his life, his relationship with Weather, was lazily clicking around to something serious.
    They’d once been headed for marriage, but that had come undone when Weather had been taken as a hostage by a crazy biker because of a case Lucas had worked on. There’d been an ambush, and the biker had been killed. Weather had . . . gone away; had left her wedding dress hanging in Lucas’s bedroom closet. They’d been apart for a couple of years, and now they were seeing each other again. They’d been in bed for two months, but nothing had been said. No final commitments yet, no ultimatums or we-gotta-talk’s. But if something went wrong again, that would be the end. There could be no renegotiation now, not if there were another breakdown . . . .
    Lucas liked women. Most of them, with a reasonable number of exceptions, liked him back. Enough had liked him well enough to keep a couple of gears spinning at a time. The summer before, he’d had a quick, enjoyable fling with a potter. About the same time, an old college girlfriend had been going through the breakup of her long-term marriage, and he’d started talking to her again. That hadn’t ended. There’d been no dating, no sex, nothing but talk: But Catrin was the gear wheel that most concerned Weather.
    Lucas kept telling her that there was no need to worry. He and Catrin were friends, going way back. Old friends. “Old friends worry me more than new potters,” Weather had said. “Besides, the potter’s a child. You couldn’t date a child for long.”
    The potter was eight years younger than Weather, whose baby alarm was now booming like Big Ben.
    The waitress came with the martini—three olives—and Lucas turned back to the river.