Stolen Prey

UCAS CALLED F LOWERS : “Anything yet?”
    “Won’t be today. But Richie says they’re doing drugs, one way or another. So probably tomorrow afternoon. Next day at the latest. Your two guys, the guys who robbed you, are probably named Duane Bird and Bernice Waters. Both have a long trail, but all minor stuff, not counting these robberies. Bernice stole sixteen thousand dollars from the Full Bible Church of Darby five years ago, and spent some time out at the women’s prison…. That’s about as big as they’ve gotten.”
    “All right. Keep talking to me,” Lucas said.
    Lucas went home, and Weather, who always got home earlier, said, “Cast is coming off.”
    “Which is good,” Lucas said. “Which is about time.”
    “For such a big lug, you’re such a baby,” she said. “You got anything else tomorrow?”
    He told her about the press conference, and about Virgil’s investigation, and she said, “So you’re going to have to get up early.”
    “Eight o’clock.”
    “Maybe we ought to go to bed early. We could get this week’s sex out of the way.”
    “I’ll have to look at my calendar again, and maybe have an extra glass of milk,” he said, “but it’s a possibility.”
    He barely thought about Martínez, except to wonder where she might be. Still in the Cities? In Missouri or Oklahoma? Back in Mexico already?
    Whatever. He no longer much cared—she was Shaffer’s Easter egg.
    L UCAS’S EYES popped open at six o’clock, when he felt Weather stirring around. She said, quietly, “The alarm is set for eight.”
    “See you tonight,” he said. He tried to go back to sleep, dozed for a while, but at seven he got up; there was too much going on for sleep. He cleaned up, dressed for the press conference in a blue suit and a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, saw the Martínez photo again on the morning news, and a promo for the ten-o’clock news conference. Letty was kicking around in the kitchen getting some cereal when he got downstairs, and he chatted with her about Channel Three and asked her about a kid named Tom who’d been hanging around the driveway, and was told that he was just a friend.
    Further efforts to elicit information were fruitless, but he decided that Tom would bear watching.
    He was out of the house at eight-thirty, at Hennepin Medical Center at nine, where he checked with Weather’s secretary and was told that she was already doing a scar revision. He went down to the clinic, stated his business, and was told to take a seat.
    He was reading a home furnishings magazine when his name was called. He took a seat in an examination room, and five minutes later a small fussy middle-aged man showed up, said he was a doctor, and showed Lucas what he, the doctor, called “a specialized kind of saw.” The saw looked a little like a Dremel tool with a sanding disk. “It will cut the cast with a vibration. It will not cut your arm,” the doctor said.
    “Sounds good to me,” Lucas said.
    The doctor peered at the tool, as though he was unsure exactly how to turn it on, then said, “I don’t usually do this—a nurse practitioner usually does it, but she’s not here right now.”
    “Just glad to get it off,” Lucas said.
    The doctor began cutting, and it went quickly enough, but an inch down the foot-long cast, Lucas felt a cutting pain, and flinched. The doctor said, “Just hold on, you may feel a few twitches, but it won’t cut.”
    He started again, and another inch or two along the way, there was another slicing pain, and Lucas flinched away again.
    “Don’t do that,” the doc said impatiently. He took the head of the tool and pressed it against his palm, where it buzzed away. No cut.
    “You think it’s cutting, but it’s not,” he said. “Let’s not break the cutting head.”
    Another inch, and Lucas said, “Ahhhh…” but didn’t flinch;another inch, and he did flinch, and the doctor said, “Hold on, hold on.” To Lucas, it didn’t seem like his imagination…. One more searing pain, and the cast popped loose.
    The doctor carefully pulled it off and said, “See, no cuts.”
    Lucas could still feel something like cuts, and looked closely at his arm. There were five inch-long white lines on the fresh pink skin.
    “What’re these things?” he asked. “They hurt like hell.”
    D EL SAID , “Burns?”
    Lucas: “Yeah. I’ve got five burns, each one an inch long, gonna be scars, right up my arm. What he didn’t know was, the saw doesn’t cut