Phantom Prey

seventy feet. Lucas could see him jerking at the trigger with each shot, the gun barrel all over the place.
    And in that mind’s-eye image, Lucas counted off the shots: he’d been shot at, he thought, six times, and hit once. He might have been hit in the head or the heart or he might not have been hit at all—the shooter was a fuckin’ amateur, and he’d been nervous and probably scared and maybe desperate.
    What had Lucas done to make anybody desperate?
    "Antsy Toms,” Weather repeated. “Isn’t he the guy who beat up those officers?”
    His boss, Rose Marie Roux, came by for a look: “Jesus, Lucas, you’re supposed to be the brains of the operation. You’re not supposed to get shot in alleys. Not any more. Those days are over.”
    “Hey, I didn’t go looking for it.” He got the flash again: the guy’s hand pumping out the bullets. How long? A second and a half?
    “Then what were you doing in the alley?”
    “Working. And this isn’t much—shit, I’ve been hurt worse than this doing home repair,” he said.
    The governor’s chief hatchet man called, and Carol, his secretary, called, crying, and then Del stopped by, and the governor himself called.
    Del wanted to look at the bullet hole, but was satisfied by looking at the bruising. “Nasty. But remember that time Gutmann got shot through both cheeks of his ass . . . ?”
    Alyssa Austin called, and wanted to come see him, but he told her he was too tired.
    Lucas spent much of the day watching TV and reading the papers, saw pictures of himself on all the nightly newscasts—top story on two stations—and tried to think about the case, but found himself sleeping, instead. The photo kit of the fairy was featured as the possible Female Assassin, and a Goth, interviewed at the shooting site behind the A1, described her as gorgeous, and the TV guy inflated that to “mysterious raven-haired beauty.”
    Weather came and went. Sometimes, her chair was empty, and he’d close his eyes for just a second, and when he opened them, she’d be there.
    After a second restless night, the surgeon came in at the end of his shift, looked at the wound, pronounced it not bad, and told him that he could go home, but he’d still have to be signed off by the medicine guy, who’d given him a couple of prescriptions for pain pills. The wound itself was a harsh line of stitches, purple and black, and around it, a bruise the size of his hand, and growing.
    He had Egg Beaters again, and read stories about himself in the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune. Ruffe, the crime reporter, had taken care of him, but the editorial page had done a snide, “Davenport, Again” story, which recalled that Lucas had once beaten up a pimp and had had to leave the Minneapolis police force for a while. The paper did not mention that the pimp had church-keyed one of Lucas’s street sources.
    Weather showed up and said, “They redid that story about me doing the tracheotomy.”
    “Yeah, I saw.” The story about him getting shot in the throat by a little girl, his life saved with a pocketknife . . . Hardly ever thought about that anymore, but when he touched his throat, he could still feel the scar that Weather had left behind. She asked him once if he’d married her because of it, and he’d grinned and said, “No, but if you hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have married you.”
    “What?”
    “Think about it.”
    He finally got out at 11 A.M., wheeled to Weather’s car in a wheelchair, given a crutch for the last four feet. In the car, as he settled down, she said, “If you were a little smarter, I’d worry about post-traumatic shock.” Her eyes caught his when she said it.
    “That’s no way to talk to a patient,” he said.
    The fact was, he hurt more this second morning than he had the first morning-after. His leg now felt as though he’d been hit with a baseball bat, rather than a pointer. He was grateful for the pain-killers.
    He stayed home for the day, and made the housekeeper lie for him: when the phone rang, and it was media, she told them he was at work. He first lay in bed and then on the couch in the living room, and read a book called The Seasons of Tulul, by Egon Lass, about living with Bedouins, and a cop novel, Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill.
    He couldn’t get comfortable with the leg, and the housekeeper bothered him with food, as though she were feeding a favored canary. The pain in the leg seemed to be diminishing when he made two trips to