Winter Prey

glanced up at Carr: “Sorry, Shelly.”
    “Well, I know what you mean,” Carr said lamely.
    “Horseshit reproduction,” Jones said, turning the paper in his hand. “This is like toilet paper.”
    “In more ways than one,” Carr said. “What about the story? Can you do something with it?”
    Jones was on his feet. “Oh, hell yes! The Russ Harper arrest is big. The AP’ll want that, and I can string it down to Milwaukee and St. Paul. Sure. People are so freaked out I’ve been talking to old man Donohue . . .”
    Climpt said to Lucas, “Donohue owns the paper.”
    “ . . . about putting out an extra. With Johnny Mueller and now this, I’ll talk to him tonight, see if we can get it out Sunday morning. I’ll need the arrest reports on Russ.”
    “Got them right here,” Carr said, passing him some Xeroxed copies of the arrest log.
    “Thanks. Whether or not Donohue goes with the extra, we’ll have it on the radio in half an hour. It’ll be all over town in an hour.”

    When Jones had gone, Carr leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and said, “Think we’ll shake something loose?”
    “Something,” Lucas said.

CHAPTER

16
    Weather Karkinnen threw her scrub suit into the laundry rack and stepped into the shower. Her nipples felt sore and she scratched at them, wondering, then realized: beard burn. Davenport hadn’t shaved for an entire day when she attacked him in the bathtub, and he had a beard like a porcupine.
    She laughed at herself: she hadn’t felt so alive in years. Lucas had been an energetic lover, but also, at times, strangely soft, as though he were afraid he might hurt her. The combination was irresistible. She thought about the tub again as she dried off with one of the rough hospital towels: that was the most contrived entrance she’d ever engineered. The bottle of wine, the robe slipping off . . .
    She laughed aloud, her laughter echoing off the tiles of the surgeons’ locker room.

    She left, hurrying: almost six-thirty. Lucas said he’d be done with Harper by six or seven. Maybe they could drive over to Hayward for dinner, or one of those places off Teal Lake or Lost Land Lake. Good restaurants over there.
    As she left the locker room, she stopped at the nurses’ station to get the final list for the morning. Civilians sometimes thought surgeons worked every week or two, after an exhaustive study of the patient. More often, they worked every day, and sometimes two or three times a day, with little interaction with the patient at all. Weather was building a reputation in the North Woods, and now had referrals from all the adjoining counties. Sometimes she thought it was a conspiracy by the referring docs to keep her busy, to pin her down.
    “ . . . Charlie Denning, fixing his toe,” she said. “He can hardly walk, so you’ll have to get a wheelchair out to his car. His wife is bringing him in.”
    As they went through it, she was aware that the charge nurse kept checking her, a small smile on her face. Everybody knew that Lucas was staying at her house in some capacity, and Weather suspected that a few of the nurses had, during the day, figured out the capacity. She didn’t care.
    “ . . . probably gonna have to clean her up, and I want the whole area shaved. I doubt that she did a very good job of it, she’s pretty old and I’m not sure how clearly I was getting through to her.”
    The charge nurse’s family had been friends of her family, though the nurse was ten years older. Still, they were friends, and when Weather finished with the work list, she started for the door, then turned and said, “Is it that obvious?”
    “Pretty obvious,” the nurse said. “The other girls say he’s a well-set-up man, the ones who have seen him.”
    Weather laughed. “My God—small towns, I love ’em.” She started away again. The nurse called, “Don’t wear him out, Doctor,” and as she went out the door, Weather was still laughing.

    Her escort was a surly, heavyset deputy named Arne Bruun. He’d been two years behind her in high school. He’d been president of the Young Republicans Club and allegedly had now drifted so far to the right that the Republicans wouldn’t have him. He stood up when she walked into the lobby,rolled a copy of Guns and Ammo, and stuck it in his coat pocket.
    “Ready to roll?” He was pleasant enough but had the strong jaw-muscle complex of a marginal paranoid.
    “Ready to roll,” she said.
    He went through the door