Stolen Prey

walked through, checked it all out, and pronounced herself satisfied. “If I didn’t have this cast … I hate this cast.”
    “Better than the alternative,” Lucas said.
    She thought about that for three seconds, then said, “But he didn’t hit me in the head. He hit me in the arm, and I hate this cast.”
    “I got this little … aphorism … from the DEA,” Lucas said.
    W EATHER WAS watching Letty like a hawk, and the third day after they’d gotten back in the house, she said to Lucas, “I hope there’s nothing wrong with her.”
    “Like what?” Lucas asked.
    “She’s not showing any signs of the psychological trauma that she should be. I’ve been reading everything I can find on it. The shock—”
    “She’s okay,” Lucas said.
    “But—”
    “I know exactly what you’re saying,” Lucas said. “You’re worried that she might be a psychopath, or a sociopath, or one of those path things. She’s not. Or at least, that’s not all she is.”
    “You know I love her,” Weather said.
    “Of course you do, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re worried about,” Lucas said. “But stop worrying.”
    “I’m not sure I can. I want her to be … happy. I want her to be well.”
    “A lot of people think surgeons must have a little psychological thing, you know?” Lucas said. “They take perfectly good people and slice them to pieces so they can have a shorter nose. You’d have to be a little crazy to do that, or to get it done, for that matter. We’re all a little crazy, sweetheart.”
    Weather got puffed up. “Comparing what I do—”
    “I know, there’s no direct comparison.”
    They had a little five-minute exchange about the psychological stability of surgeons, punctuated with examples of crazy surgeons that Weather had talked about in the past, and she finally said, “Look, whatever—I’m not talking about all of that. I’m talking about our daughter.”
    “I know you are,” Lucas said. “And like I said, we’re all a little crazy, but basically, and overall, Letty’s okay.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because she’s just like me,” Lucas said. “And I’m okay, mostly.”
    L UCAS AND L ETTY stopped at a coffee shop, and Letty got a grande latte and Lucas got a no-fat hot chocolate, and Letty asked, “Is Mom okay?”
    “She’s holding up. She’ll be working again tomorrow,” Lucas said.
    “Okay, that’s good,” she said.
    “How are
you
holding up?” Lucas asked.
    “I…” she said, then stopped. “I don’t know.” Her voice was distracted, Lucas thought, like she was taking effort just to talk. Usually she was chatty. She didn’t sound depressed, though. Just distracted.
    “Do you feel bad about it?”
    “I don’t,” she said. “I shot that one guy before, but I didn’t kill him. But this … nope. Nothing. Just … I had to do it, and I did it, and it was done. I’m not worried about it, I don’t feel bad. Is that normal?”
    “It depends,” Lucas said. “Sometimes, if—”
    “How many people have you killed?” Letty asked abruptly.
    Lucas considered. They’d never talked about it. Not directly. It was known, but it was a topic they’d always avoided. He did a quick tally in his head.
    “Ten,” he said. “That I know of.”
    “That you
know
of?”
    “There are a few more people dead, that I was responsible for, directly or indirectly,” Lucas said. “I’d get in a situationwhere pretty much it’s going to end with a death. That sort of thing.”
    “Is
that
normal?”
    “No. Not for most cops. But I was always pushed into the rough stuff. All of my professional life,” he said. “And sometimes, you’ll get something—a hostage situation, say—and you’ll find out that there’s no way to do it without someone dying. When that happens, if it’s your only option … I just don’t have time to feel too bad about it.”
    “Do you regret any of them?”
    “Some of them,” Lucas said. “Sometimes they were just … crazy. You get into a situation like that, and what can you do? Like, you remember Alyssa? She was simply insane. Killing people. When we figured that out, we wound up in a confrontation. What happened was her call. She called it, and the whole situation went a certain way. I had no way to … to
disarm
her or anything. Either she died, or I did. I regret it because she was insane—she was ill. She might have been treatable…. I don’t know. It would have been nice to find