Hidden Prey

“Maybe there’s a brownout or something, and there wasn’t enough power. I was afraid you’d decapitated yourself. That you were hurt.”
    This, instead of screaming, “THAT’S BECAUSE YOU DROVE INTO THE DRIVEWAY AT FIFTY MILES AN HOUR, YOU FUCKIN’ MORON.”
     
    W EATHER CRAWLED OVER the stick shift and out the passenger side. The phone stopped ringing and she turned her head toward the house, her eyes narrowing: “What’s wrong with Sam?” They could hear the kid crying through the open door to the kitchen.
    “The noise scared him. The whole house jumped when you hit the door,” Lucas said. “He’d been sleeping fine.”
    A neighbor, a chubby balding man in cargo shorts and a golf shirt, came wandering up the driveway. He carried a brown paper grocery bag with a head of lettuce poking out the top, and a querulous look. “Jeez, hit the garage door, huh?”
    “The door went up too slow,” Weather said. “The garage-door opener didn’t work right.”
    The neighbor nodded, and his eyes took on a duplicitous glaze:“Sometimes the drive chain slips. You gotta watch out for it,” he said. He’d been married for three decades. Then, to Lucas, “When I saw the door come down, I was afraid it’d landed on the Porsche.”
    “Oh, boy.” Lucas looked at the deep green 911 S4 crouched in the next space. “Never crossed my mind until now.”
    The neighbor said to Weather, “Thank God you’re okay,” his eyes involuntarily drifting back to the Porsche.
    “Thank God,” Lucas agreed.
     
    T HE COLLISION TOOK an hour to straighten out. One of Lucas’s older friends, a narrow man named Sloan, came over to help. The Honda, they agreed, was probably totaled: every piece of sheet metal on the car had at least one ugly gash, dent, or nasty scratch. The garage-door rail guides had punched holes in the roof and hood.
    The State Farm adjuster told them where to have the Prelude taken for an assessment. “Thank God it wasn’t the nine-eleven,” she said. The garage-door company, the original contractors, couldn’t send anyone out until Monday, but promised to fix the door before Monday evening. “Happens all the time,” the garage-door guy said. “Usually you’re backing up, but the door doesn’t get clear.”
    “Wasn’t me, it was my wife,” Lucas said.
    “Always is,” the garage-door guy said.
     
    T HE P ORSCHE WAS eased out into the driveway, clear of the wreckage. Lucas brought tools up from the basement, along with a jack. He and Sloan jacked the door up off the Honda, pushed the car out of the garage, and took the damaged door the rest of the way down.
    “I hope you didn’t blame Weather,” Sloan said.
    “I know the rules,” Lucas said.
    “It was just a car and a door,” Sloan said. “You got insurance up to your neck.”
    “She missed the Porsche by a foot,” Lucas said.
    Sloan winced: “Jesus.”
     
    W HEN THEY WERE done clearing the wreckage, they went inside for beer, and a subdued Weather, the baby on her shoulder, told Lucas, “There was a message on the phone. Rose Marie wants you to call back right away.”
    “Hmm.” Rose Marie Roux was the commissioner of Public Safety, and Lucas’s boss. The baby peered at him, and sucked at his thumb knuckle. He had Lucas’s blue eyes, and lived in a cloud of odor, equal parts milk-burp, leaky diaper, and Johnson’s baby powder. “Maybe it’s something.”
    Weather said, “Something about a dead Russian in Duluth.”
    “That happened a couple of weeks ago,” Lucas said. “The guy shot in the grain elevator?”
    “Better than in the heart,” Weather said. She considered herself a syntactical enforcer.
    “Probably a spy,” Sloan said, tipping his bottle toward Lucas. “You’re probably going into espionage.”
    Lucas called Rose Marie. Behind him, he heard Weather say, “I don’t know what happened. I hit the garage door opener, but it just didn’t open fast enough.”
    “The chain slips sometimes,” Sloan said. “Or maybe you had a temporary brownout.”
    “That’s what Gene said, from next door. The chain thing. I thought he was patronizing me.”
    “No way,” Sloan said. “That shit happens all the time. People call nine-one-one . . .”
    “Really?”
     
    R OSE M ARIE ANSWERED her private cell phone: “Lucas? You know that dead Russian in Duluth?”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said. “He’s a spy.”
    A moment of silence. Then, “How’d you know?”
     
    L UCAS D AVENPORT WAS a tall, tough, rangy man,