Winter Prey

Minneapolis?”
    “I’ve been thinking about it,” Lucas said. He swirled hiscognac in the glass, finished it. “I had a case last summer, in New York. Now this. I sometimes think I could make something out of it, just picking up work. But when I get real, I know it’ll never happen. There’s just not enough to do.”
    “Ah, well . . . nobody said life’d get easier.”
    “Yeah, but you always think it will,” Lucas said. “The next thing you know, you’re sixty-five and living in a rundown condo on Miami Beach, wondering how you’re going to pay for your next set of false teeth.”
    Weather burst out laughing and Lucas grinned in the dark, listening to her, delighted that he’d made her laugh. “The man is an incorrigible optimist,” she said.

    They talked about people they knew in common, both in Grant and in the Cities.
    “Gene Climpt doesn’t look like a tragedy, but he is,” she told him. “He married his high school sweetheart right after he got in the Highway Patrol—he was in the patrol before Shelly, way back, this was when I was in junior high school. Anyway, they had a baby girl, a toddler. One day Gene’s wife was running a bath for the baby, running just hot water and planning to cool it later, when the phone rang. She went to answer it, and the kid climbed on the toilet and leaned over the tub and fell in.”
    “My God.”
    “Yeah. She died from the scalding. Then, when Gene was at the funeral home, his wife shot herself. Killed herself. She couldn’t stand the baby dying. They buried them both together.”
    “Jesus. He never remarried?”
    She shook her head. “Nope. He’s fooled around with a few women over the years, but nobody’s ever got him. Quite a few tried.”
    Weather had worked nights at St. Paul-Ramsey General for seven years while she was doing her surgical residency at the University of Minnesota, and knew eight or ten St.Paul cops. Did she like them? “Cops are like everybody else, some of them are nice and some of them are assholes. They do have a tendency to hustle you,” she said.
    “A hospital’s a good place to hang around if you’re on patrol, and if the person you’ve brought in isn’t a kid or your partner,” Lucas said. “It’s warm, you’re safe, you can get free coffee. There are pretty women around. Most of the women you see, when you’re working, are either victims or perpetrators. Nothing like having a good-looking woman tell you to stick your speeding ticket in your ass to chill off your day.”
    “They’re right, cops should stick the tickets,” Weather declared.
    “Yeah?” He raised an eyebrow.
    “Yes. It always used to amaze me, seeing cops writing tickets. The Cities are coming apart; people are getting killed every night and you can’t walk downtown without a panhandler extorting money out of you. And half the time when you see a cop, he’s giving a ticket to some poor jerk who was going sixty-five in a fifty-five zone. The whole world is going by at sixty-five even while he’s writing the ticket. I don’t know why cops do it, it just makes everybody mad at them.”
    “Sixty-five is breaking the law,” Lucas said, tongue in cheek.
    “Oh, bullshit.”
    “All right, it’s bullshit.”
    “Don’t they have quotas for tickets?” she asked. “I mean, really?”
    “Well, yeah, but they don’t call it that. They have performance standards. They say an on-the-ball patrolman should write about X number of tickets in a month. So a patrol guy gets to the end of the month and counts his tickets and says, ‘Shit, I need ten more tickets.’ So he goes out to a speed trap and spends an hour getting his ten tickets.”
    “That’s a quota.”
    “Shhh. It’s a hell of a lot more lucrative for the city than busting some dumb-ass junkie burglar.”

    “ . . . wouldn’t tell me what the guy wanted, she was just too shy, and about fifteen minutes out of nursing school. It turned out he wanted his foreskin restored, He’d heard that sex felt better with a foreskin and he figured we could just take a stitch here and put a hem over there.”
    Weather had a cop’s sense of humor, Lucas decided, laughing, probably developed in the emergency room; someplace where the world got bad enough, often enough, that you learned to separate yourself from the bad news.
    “There’s just a thimbleful of cognac left and I get it,” Weather said, bouncing out of the chair.
    “You can have it,” Lucas said.
    When she came back,