"Jesus, that makes me feel good…" He looked down at himself.
"Maybe you oughta run dip it in Lysol…" she said.
"Don't have any Lysol-I got some Oven-Off," he said, and laughed. She grinned and patted his leg. "So what were you going to do? Your guns?"
He looked at her for a minute and then nodded. "Yeah. I've got a gun safe down in the basement. It was like they were glowing down there, the guns. Glowing with some kind of gravity, or magnetism, or something. I could feel them wherever I was, pulling me down there. It didn't make any difference if I was on the other side of Minneapolis, I could feel them. I carry a gun, but I never thought about using it. It was the guns in the safe, pulling me down."
"You ever go down? Just to look, or handle them? Stick one in your ear?"
"Nope. I would of felt stupid," Lucas said.
She threw back her head and laughed, but not a happy laugh; an acknowledgment. "I think a lot of suicides are avoided because you'd feel stupid. Or because of the way you'd look afterwards. Like hanging…" She gripped herself around the throat and squeezed, crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out.
"Jesus," he said, laughing again.
She turned serious. "Did you think about it because everything was too painful, or what?"
"No. I just couldn't handle what was going on in my head, this, this storm. I couldn't sleep: I'd have these crazy fucking episodes where nine million thoughts would go pounding through my head, and I couldn't stop them. Crazy shit. You know, like the names of people in my senior class, or all the guys on the hockey squad, and all kinds of bizarre shit, and you get crazy because you forget a couple of them."
"That's pretty common," Cassie said, nodding.
"But basically, I thought about the guns because it didn't seem to make any difference whether I lived or died. It was like, Heads I live, tails I die-and if you keep flipping, it'll come up tails, sooner or later."
Cassie nodded. "There was a guy I knew in New York, he used to play Russian roulette with a revolver. About once a year he'd spin that thing, that…"
"Cylinder."
"Yeah. Then he'd put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. Right around Christmastime. Said it kept him straight for a whole 'nother year."
"What happened to him?" Lucas asked.
"I don't know. He wasn't that good a friend. He was still alive the last time I was in New York. I could never figure out if he was lucky or unlucky."
"Huh."
She stretched out again, her hands behind her head, and they lay beside each other in comfortable silence for a minute. "Did you have the voice in the back of your head, watching you go through all this shit?" she asked finally.
"Yeah. The watcher. It was like having my own critic back there. My own journalist."
She giggled. "I never thought of it that way, but that's it. Like, the major part of me was hacking away with a bread knife-"
"Ah, fuck, a bread knife?"
"Yeah, the kind with the serrated blade?"
"Ah, Jesus…"
"Good brand, too, Solingen…"
"God, Cassie…"
"Anyway, the big part was hacking away, and this little voice was back there reporting on it, like CNN or something. Kind of skeptical, too."
"Jesus." He reached out and stroked her, from navel to breasts, and back down across her groin to the inside of her knee.
"Pretty gross, huh? Anyway, I'm glad you're getting better."
"I'm not really sure I am…"
"Oh, you are." She patted the bed. "You're here. When you're really depressed, your sex life jumps in a car and leaves for Chicago. I was in this group, as part of the therapy, and every one of the men said so. It wasn't that they couldn't-they just couldn't stand the thought of the complications. Sex is the first thing to go. When it comes back, you're definitely getting better."
The phone rang at eleven o'clock. Lucas woke clear-eyed, rested, already rolling toward the edge of the bed before he was aware of the weight on the other side. He'd slept, and dreamed, and had almost forgotten…
Cassie was lying facedown again, bare as the day she was born, the sheet covering her hips. Her hair had parted on either side of her head, and the light slanting through the venetian blinds played across the sensuous turn of her vertebrae, starting at the nape of her neck, trailing down almost to her just hidden tailbone. He reached down, still aware of the phone, now ringing the fourth time, or fifth, and gently slid the sheet even farther down, onto her legs…
She reached down with one hand and pulled it back up. "Go answer the phone," she grumped, not moving her head.
He grinned and headed for the kitchen, and picked the phone up on the sixth ring. Dispatch. "I've got a call holding from Michael Bekker," the woman said. "Put it through?"
"Yes."
There was a click, a pause, and then Bekker said, "Hello?"
"Yeah, this is Davenport."
"Yes, Lucas. Will you be free tonight, late?" Bekker's voice was low, friendly, carefully modulated. "I've got classes, then a dinner, but I've found something in my wife's papers that I thought was interesting. I'd like to show it to you…"
"Can you tell me on the phone?"
"Mmm, why don't you come over? Somebody'll have to anyway, and I'd prefer it be you. That other policeman… he's a bit thick."
Swanson. Not thick at all, although any number of Stillwater inmates had made the mistake of thinking so… "All right. What time?"
"Tennish?"
"I'll see you then."
Lucas hung up and padded back to the bedroom. The bed was empty, and water was running in the bathroom. Cassie was bent over the sink, using his toothbrush. He winced, then reached out and touched her bottom.
"Hi," she said through a mouthful of bubbles, looking into the mirror over the sink. "Done in a minute. Breath like a dinosaur. And I gotta pee."
"I'll run down to the other bathroom," he said. He went down the hall, looked back to make sure she wasn't following, opened a drawer, took out a new toothbrush, peeled the package, removed the brush and hastily stuffed the packaging back in the drawer. He was smiling when he looked at himself in the mirror.
Back in the bedroom, he found the sheets and blankets in a pile on the floor, while she lounged in the middle of the bed.
"Hop in," she said, patting the mattress beside her. "We're right on time for a nooner and we're not even up yet. Ain't it great?"
After Cassie left, in a cab, he spent the rest of the day fooling around, unable to focus much on the case, making call-backs, driving around town, checking the net. He walked past Bekker's house again, and spoke to a neighbor who was raking the winter gunk from his lawn. Stephanie had once had a cocker spaniel, the neighbor said, and when Bekker had had to walk it in the winter, he'd take it up to the corner and then "kick the shit out of it. I saw him out the window, he did it several times." The neighbor's wife, who had been splitting iris bulbs, turned and said, "Be fair, tell him about the shoes."
"Shoes?"
"Well, yeah, the dog had bad kidneys, I guess, and he used to sneak up to Bekker's closet and pee in his shoes."
Lucas and the neighbor started laughing at the same time.
In the evening, an hour before Cassie went on at the Lost River, she and Lucas walked down the block for a cup of coffee. They sat across from each other in a diner booth, and Cassie said, "Ultimately, you're not flaky enough for me. But it'd be nice if we could keep it together for a couple of months."