Shadow Prey

shaking his head. “I just ran over from the office.”
    “It’s Shadow Love, you know. Doing security work for the Crows.”
    “But why?” Daniel’s forehead wrinkled. “We’re not that close to them. And there’s no percentage in killing Lily, not for political reasons. I’m a politician and they’re politicians, and I can see what they’re doing. It makes sense, in a bizarre way. They were so careful to explain the others—Andretti, the judge in Oklahoma, the guy in South Dakota. This doesn’t fit. Neither did Larry. Or your snitch.”
    “We don’t know exactly what’s going on,” Lucas said, his voice on the edge of desperation. “If I could just find something . . . some little hangnail of information, just a fuckin’ scrap . . . anything.”
    They thought about it in silence for a moment, then Daniel, in a lower voice, said, “I called her husband.”
     
    Two hours later, long done with conversation, they were staring bleakly at the opposite wall of the corridor when the doors from the operating suite banged open. A redheaded surgeon came through, still wrapped in a blue surgical gown dappled with blood. She snapped the mask off her face and tossed it into a bin already half full of discarded masks and gowns, and began peeling off the gown. Daniel and Lucas pushed off the wall and stepped toward her.
    “I’m good,” she said. She tossed the used gown in the discard bin and wiggled her fingers in front of her face. “Seriously gifted.”
    “She’s okay?” Lucas asked.
    “You the family?” the surgeon asked, looking from one of them to the other.
    “The family’s not here,” Lucas said. “They’re on their way from New York. I’m her partner and this is the chief.”
    “I’ve seen you on TV,” she said to Daniel, then looked back at Lucas. “She’ll be okay unless something weird happens. We took the slug out—it looks like a light thirty-eight, if you’re interested. It entered through her breast, broke a rib, pulped up a piece of her lung and stuck in the muscle wall along the rib cage in back. Cracked the rib in back too. She’s gonna hurt like hell.”
    “But she’ll make it?” Daniel said.
    “Unless something weird happens,” the surgeon nodded. “We’ll keep her in intensive care overnight. If there aren’t any problems, we’ll have her sitting up and maybe walking around her bed in a couple of days. It’ll take longer before she’s feeling right, though. She’s messed up.”
    “Aw, Jesus, that’s good,” said Lucas, turning to Daniel. “That’s decent.”
    “Bad scars?” asked Daniel.
    “There’ll be some. With that kind of wound, we can’t fool around. We had to get in to see what was going on. We’ll have the entry wound from the slug, and then the surgical scars where I went in. In a couple or three years, the entry wound will be a white mark about the size and shape of a cashew on the lower curve of her breast. In five years, the surgical scars will be white lines maybe an eighth-inch across. She’s olive-complected, so they’ll show more than they would on a blonde, but she can live with them. They won’t be disfiguring.”
    “When can we see her?”
    The surgeon shook her head. “Not tonight. She won’t be doing anything but sleeping. Tomorrow, maybe, if it’s necessary.”
    “No sooner?”
    “She’s been shot, ” the surgeon said with asperity. “She doesn’t need to talk. She needs to heal.”
     
    David Rothenburg came in at two o’clock in the morning on a cattle-car flight out of Newark, the only one he could get. Lucas met him at the airport. Daniel wanted to send Sloan, or go himself, but Lucas insisted. Rothenburg was wearing a rumpled blue seersucker suit and a wine-colored bow tie with a white shirt; his hair was messed up and hewore half-moon reading glasses down on his nose. Lucas had talked to the airline about the shooting, and Rothenburg was the first person out of the tunnel into the gate area. He had a black nylon carry-on bag in his left hand.
    “David Rothenburg?” Lucas asked, stepping toward him.
    “Yes. Are you . . .” They moved in a circle around each other.
    “Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police.”
    “How is she?”
    “Hurt, but she’ll make it, if there aren’t any complications.”
    “My God, I thought she was dying,” Rothenburg said, sagging in relief. “They were so vague on the phone . . . .”
    “Nobody knew for a while. She’s had an operation. They didn’t