Shadow Prey

and I’ll go back with him again. I’ll tell him if we squeeze anything out of Liss, we can probably send him back to work at Welfare . . . .”
     
    They took overnight bags to Brookings. If they didn’t get the information the first night, there wouldn’t be much point in staying a second.
    “Your friend . . . Jennifer. She’s in Brookings, right?”
    “Yeah. They sent out a crew. She’s producing.” They were crossing the Minnesota River at Shakopee. A flock of Canada geese were standing on the riverbank, watching the water go by. Lucas said, “Geese.”
    “Mmm. Will you stay with her?”
    “What?”
    “Jennifer. Will you stay with her?”
    Lucas downshifted as they came into town and rolled upto a stoplight. He glanced at her, then turned right on the red light. “No. I’d rather that she not know I was there. She has a way of reading my mind. If she sees me, she’ll know something is up.”
    “Do you know where she’s staying?”
    “Sure. It’s out by the interstate that comes up from Sioux Falls. The Brookings cops told me that Louise Liss is staying in a place downtown. I thought we’d check in there.”
     
    They were going through the town of Sleepy Eye on Highway 14 when they passed a man on bicycle, dressed in cycling clothes: a green-striped polo shirt, black cycling shorts, white helmet. It was cool, but his bare legs were exposed and pumped like machine pistons. Lucas estimated that he was breaking the speed limit through the downtown.
    “He looks like David,” Lily said. “My husband.”
    “David’s a cyclist?”
    “Yeah. He was pretty serious about it, once.” She turned her head to watch the cyclist as they went by. “He’d go out every Saturday with a group of people and they’d ride centuries. Sometimes two. A century’s a hundred miles.”
    “Jesus. He must be in great shape.”
    “Yeah.” She was watching the storefronts in the tiny town. “Bicycles bore the shit out of me, to tell you the truth. They always break down, then you’ve got to fix them. Or they’re not broken, then you’ve got to fiddle with them to get them tuned up exactly right. The tires go flat all the time.”
    “That’s why I bought a Porsche,” Lucas said.
    “A Porsche’s probably cheaper too,” Lily said. “Those goddamned racing bikes cost a fortune. And you can’t have just one.”
    A few minutes later, back in the countryside, they passed a herd of black-and-white dairy cows.
    “Neat cows,” she said. “What kind are they?”
    “Beats the hell out me,” Lucas said.
    “What?” she said in amusement. “You’re from Minnesota. You ought to know about cows.”
    “That’s the cheeseheads over in Wisconsin who knowabout cows. I’m a city kid,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’re Holsteins.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “ ’Cause that’s the only cow name I know. Wait a minute. There’s also Guernseys and Jerseys. But I don’t think they’re the spotted ones.”
    “Brown Swiss,” Lily said.
    “What?”
    “That’s a kind of cow.”
    “I thought that was a kind of cheese,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t think so . . . . There’s another bunch.” She watched a herd of cows ambling down the pasture toward the barn, walking in ones and twos, like tourists coming back to a bus, shadows trailing behind them. “David knows the names of everything. You drive up toward the mountains and you say, ‘What’s that tree?’ And he says, ‘That’s a white oak,’ or, ‘That’s a Douglas fir.’ I used to think he was bullshitting me, so I started checking. He was always right.”
    “I don’t think I could stand it,” Lucas said.
    “He’s really smart,” she said. “He might be the smartest man I ever knew well.”
    “Sounds like fuckin’ Mahatma Gandhi.”
    “What?”
    “You once told me he was the gentlest man you ever knew. Now you say he’s the smartest.”
    “He’s really quite the guy.”
    “Yeah, I doubt Gandhi rode a racing bike, so he’s one up . . .”
    “I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore.”
    “All right.”
    But a few minutes later she said, “Sometimes, I don’t know . . .”
    “What?”
    “He’s so centered. David is. Peaceful. Sometimes . . .”
    “It bores the shit out of you,” Lucas suggested.
    “No, no . . . I just feel like I’m so taken care of, I can’t hardly stand the weight of it. He’s such a good guy. And I hang out at the refrigerator and eat too much and I walk