Easy Prey

Pasties in an hour.”
     
 
ROSE MARIE HAD gone home, but a night nurse at the hospital let Lucas look in on Marcy. She was half propped up in a bed, a breathing tube in her nose, more tubes in her arms, wires scrambled around the top of the bed, running to monitors. She smelled of disinfectant and something else: corruption, or cut flesh. Lucas knew the odor, but had never been able to put a name to it.
    He sat down on a chair next to the bed, watched her breathe for five minutes, then said, “We got a couple of things going, couple of leads. You’re gonna make it. We talked to the docs. But you gotta keep sleeping for now.” Maybe she could understand it, somewhere down in her brain. He backed out of the room, turned, and nearly ran over a woman who’d been standing by the door.
    “Lucas,” she said, and showed a tiny smile.
    “Weather.” His heart thumped. That hardly ever happened anymore; now, three times in three days, with Catrin, with Jael Corbeau. “I was just . . . Marcy . . . you know.”
    “I heard. I was coming down to take a look,” Weather said. She was a small woman, with wide athletic shoulders and a slightly crooked nose that might have been just a shade too large. Her eyes were dark blue, her short hair just touched with white. She’d be thirty-eight, Lucas thought. And, God, she looked good. “I talked to Hirschfeld—he did the surgery—and he said she’s got a good chance. She was pretty torn up when she first came in, and he was worried, but they got it together.”
    “She was hit hard.”
    “Another nutcase, Lucas. They keep coming.” She was a surgeon. She saw the victims, especially the children.
    “Four times a year, about,” Lucas said. “Crime’s down. Burglary’s down, rape’s down, robbery’s down, even murder’s down, except for nutcases.”
    “Everybody’s getting too old for crime,” she said.
    “Everybody’s got a job,” Lucas said. “Jobs cure everything. And crack’s going away. . . .”
    She looked up at him—she was a small woman, with shoulders that were slightly too broad, like an acrobat’s—and asked, “What’re we talking about?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Want a cup of coffee?”
    “I’ve gotta go. I’m running down south, I’ve got a door to kick down,” Lucas said.
    Now she did smile. “Lucas. So see you around, huh?”
    He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then: “Really?”
    “If you’ve got the time . . . sometime.”
    “Anytime,” he said. “Anytime but now. I just gotta, I just gotta . . . go.” He backed away from her as he’d backed out of the room, backed up almost to the outer door, then turned and pushed through.
    Behind him, Weather’s smile softened; she’d heard him talking to Marcy. In that few seconds, she thought, something had changed. Maybe . . .
     
 
LUCAS DROVE SOUTH through town, replaying the talk with Weather. Played it once, played it again. What she looked like, what she sounded like. She’d once owned a dress that she planned to wear for her wedding to Lucas; that hadn’t happened. The relationship had dissolved in blood, in the very hospital where they’d talked, where Marcy had gone under the knife; another nutcase who’d died for his efforts. Weather Karkinnen. She’d wanted kids, two or three. . . .
     
 
PASTIES WAS AN all-night greasy spoon off Lyndale Avenue. When it first opened, it sold indigestible meat pies, but now it was all fried bacon, fried sausage, and fried hamburger, with home fries or french fries and catsup, and suspicious-looking pecan pie. Lettuce was not in demand; the coffee was mediocre. On the other hand, it was open all night, had racks of free papers inside the front door, and nobody cared if a customer spent an hour drinking a cup of coffee.
    Del was deep in conversation with the counterman when Lucas showed up. He broke off the conversation and they took a booth, and the counterman followed him over with a plastic carafe of coffee and two cups. The counterman was tubercularly thin, with round John Lennon glasses and shaggy hair; he was rolling an unlit, unfiltered cigarette between his dry lips. “Anyway, that’s what happened,” he told Del. He shook his head. “Shoulda known better. He said he only wanted to stay a couple of days.”
    “I’ll tell you what—those accordion guys are sneakier than they look,” Del said. “Some of that music is pretty damn romantic. The Blue Skirt Waltz ? You know that one? And you know women like to