Winter Prey

Weather.”
    “Does your mother live in town?”
    “No, no. Dad died ten years ago, and then she went, three or four years later,” Weather said, with just a color of sadness. “There was nothing particularly wrong with her. She just sorta died. I think she wanted to.”

    The maitre d’ was a chubby man with a neatly clipped black mustache and a Las Vegas manner. “Hello, Weather,” he said. His eyes shifted to Lucas’ throat and refused to lift any higher. “Two? No smoking?”
    “Yeah, two,” Lucas said.
    “A booth,” said Weather.
    When he left them with the menus, Weather leaned forward and muttered, “I forgot about Arlen. The maitre d’. He’d like to get me in bed. Not actually leave Mother and the Kids, you understand, just do a little Mm-hmm with the lady doctor, preferably in some place like Hurley, where we might not get caught.”
    “What are his chances?” Lucas asked.
    “Zero,” she said. “There’s something about the Alfred Hitchcock profile that turns me off.”
    The salad came with a French dressing redolent of catsup, sprinkled with a handful of croutons.
    “I remember the news stories when you left Minneapolis. Very strange, all those stories about a cop. A lot of people at the ER knew you, I guess. They were all pissed. It made an impression on me.”
    “I used to come in there quite a bit,” Lucas said. “I’d have these street guys working for me, and they’d get messed up and not have anybody to call. I’d go over and try to fix them up.”
    “Why’d you leave? Tired of the bullshit?”
    “No . . .” He found himself opening up, told her about the internal games played in the department.
    And the lure of money: “When you’re a cop, you’re always running into rich assholes who treat you like some kind of servant. Guys who oughta be in jail, but they’re driving around in Lexuses and Cadillacs and Mercedes,” he said, toying with his wine. “People tell you, yeah, but you’re doing a public service, blah blah blah, but after twenty years, you realize you wouldn’t mind having a little money yourself. Nice house, nice car.”
    “You had a Porsche. You were famous for it.”
    “That was different. A rich guy has a Porsche, he does it because he’s an asshole. A cop has a Porsche, it’s like a comment on the assholes,” he said. “Every cop in the department liked me driving a Porsche. It was like a fuck-you to the assholes.”
    “God, you have a rich ability to rationalize,” she said, laughing at him. “Anyway, what’re you doing now? Just consulting?”
    “No, no. Actually, I write games. That’s where I made my money. And I’ve started another little sideline that . . .”
    “Games?”
    “Yeah. I’ve done it for years, now I’m doing it full time.”
    “You mean like Monopoly?” she asked. She was interested.
    “Like Dungeons and Dragons, and sometimes war games. They used to be mostly on paper, now it’s mostly computers. I’m in a semipartnership with this college kid—he’s a graduate student in computer science. I write the games and he programs them.”
    “And you can make a living at this?”
    “Yeah. And now I’ve started writing simulation software for police crisis management, for training dispatch people. Most of that’s computers, dispatch is. And you get in a crisis situation, the dispatchers are virtually running things for a while. This software lets them simulate it, and scores them. It’s kind of taking off.”
    “If you’re not careful, you could get rich,” Weather said.
    “I kind of am,” Lucas said gloomily. “But goddamn, I’m bored. I don’t miss the bullshit part of the PD, but I miss the movement. ”

    And later, over walleye in beer batter:
    “You can’t hold together a heavy-duty relationship when you’re in medical school and working to pay for it,” Weather said. He enjoyed watching her work with her knife, taking the walleye apart. Like a surgeon. “Then a surgical residency kills you. You’ve got no time for anything. You sit there and think about men, but it’s impossible. You can fool around, but if you get serious about somebody, you can get torn apart between the work and the relationship. So you find it’s easiest, if you meet somebody you might love, to turn away. Turning away isn’t that hard if you do it right away, when you first meet.”
    “Sounds lonely,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, but you can tolerate it if you’re working all the time and you’re convinced