"Nine o'clock. We'll get them by nine," Daniel said.
Lucas hung up and dialed the StarTribune library. He gave his friend a summary of what had happened and arranged to meet her near the paper's offices.
"It's kind of exciting," she whispered as she leaned over his car. He handed her the manila envelope. "It's like being a mole, in John le Carre."
He left her in a glow and headed home.
Lucas lived in St. Paul. From his front-room window, he could see a line of trees along the Mississippi River gorge and the lights of Minneapolis on the other side. He lived alone, in a house he once thought might be too big. Over ten years, he'd spread out. The double garage took an aging Ford four-wheel-drive that he used for backcountry trips and boat-towing. The basement filled up with weights and workout pads, a heavy bag and a speed bag, shooting gear and a gun safe, tools and a workbench.
Upstairs, the den was equipped with a deep leather chair for dreaming and watching basketball on television. One bedroom was for sleeping, another for guests. He'd converted a third bedroom into a workroom, with an oak drawing table and a bookcase full of references.
Lucas invented games. War games, fantasy games, role-playing games. Games paid for the house and the Porsche and a cabin on a lake in northern Wisconsin. For three months, he had been immersed in a game he called Drorg. "Drorg" was an invented word, inspired by cyborg, which itself was a contraction of the words cybernetics organism. Cyborgs were humans with artificial parts. A drorg, in Lucas' game, was a drug organism, a human altered and enhanced by designer drugs. To see in the dark, to navigate by sonar with enhanced hearing, to have the strength of a gorilla, the reflexes of a cat. The brain of a genius.
Not all at once, of course. That's where the game came in. And the drugs had penalties. Some lingered: Call for su-perstrength and it hung on when you needed superintelli-gence. Call for superintelligence and the drug pushed you to madness and suicide if you couldn't acquire the antidote. Take the pan-effects drug and it flat killed you, period; but not before you achieved superabilities and eventually intolerable pleasure.
It all took work. There was the basic plot to write-Drorg was essentially a quest, like most role-playing games. There were also scoring systems to build, opponents to create, boards to design. The publisher was excited about it and was pressing. He wanted to do a computer version of it.
So five or six nights a week, for three months, Lucas had been in the workroom, sitting in a pool of light, plotting his patterns. He listened to classic rock, drank an occasional beer, but mostly laid out a story of information bureaucracies, corporate warfare, 'luded-out underclasses and drorg warriors. Where the story came from, he didn't know; but every night the words were there.
When he got home, Lucas put the car in the garage, went inside and popped a frozen chicken dinner into the microwave. In the five minutes before it was ready, he checked the house, got the paper off the front porch and washed his hands. He'd eaten all the french fries and three of the four chicken nibbles-he wasn't exactly sure what part they were, but they did have bones-when Lily Rothenburg's face popped into his mind.
She came out of nowhere: he hadn't been thinking about her, but suddenly she was there, like a photograph dropped on a table. A big woman, he thought. A little too heavy, and not his style; he liked the athletes, the small muscular gymnasts, the long sleek runners.
Not his style at all.
Lily.
CHAPTER 6
Leo Clark was a drunk by the time he was fifteen. At forty, he had been twenty-two years on the street, begging nickels and dimes from the rich burghers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. A lifetime lost.
Then one bitterly cold night in St. Paul, he and another drunk, a white man, were turned out of the mission after an argument with a clerk. They stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of rye whiskey. After some argument, they walked down to the railroad tracks. An old tunnel had been boarded up, but the boards were loose. They pried them back and crawled inside.
Late that night, Leo went out, found sticks of creosote-covered scrap lumber along the tracks, dragged it back to the tunnel and started a fire. The two men finished the whiskey in the stinking smoke. Their cheeks, hands and stomachs felt like fire, but their legs and feet were blocks of ice.
The white man had an idea. Up along the bluffs on the Mississippi, he said, were storm sewers that led into the tunnel system under the city. If they could crawl back there, they could lie up on steam pipes. The tunnels would be as warm as the mission and it wouldn't cost them a dime. They could get a Coleman lantern, a few books…
When Leo Clark woke the next morning, the white man was dead. He was lying facedown on the cold ground and had taken a few convulsive bites of the earth as he died: his mouth was half full of oily dirt. Leo Clark could see one of his eyes. It was open, and as flat and silvery and empty as the dime that the steam tunnels wouldn't cost him.
"He died in a fuckin' cave, man; they let him die in a fuckin' hole in the ground," Leo told the cops. The cops didn't give a shit. Nobody else did either: the body went unclaimed, and was eventually dumped in a pauper's grave. Dental X rays were filed with the medical examiner in the improbable case that somebody, someday, showed up looking for the dead man.
After the white man died in the cave, Leo Clark stopped drinking. It didn't happen all at once, but a year later he was sober. He drifted west, back to the res. Became a spiritual man, but with a twist of hate for people who would let men die in holes in the ground. He was forty-six years old, with a face and hands like oak, when he met the Crows.
Leo Clark hid in a corner of a dimly lit parking ramp, between the bumper of a Nissan Maxima and the outer wall of the ramp. He was thirty feet from the locked steel door that led into the apartment building.
A few minutes earlier, he had looped a piece of twelve-pound-test monofilament fishing line around the doorknob. He led the line to the bottom of the door, fastened it with a piece of Magic mending tape and trailed it on to the Maxima. In the low light, the line was invisible. He was waiting for somebody to walk through the door-going in, he hoped, but out would be okay, as long as it wasn't to the Maxima. That would be embarrassing.
Leo Clark lay bathed in the odors of exhaust and oil and thought about his mission. When he had killed Ray Cuervo, the overwhelming emotion had been fear-fear of failure, fear of the cops. He'd known Ray personally, had suffered from his greed, and anger and hate had been there too. But this judge? The judge had been bribed by an oil company in a lawsuit involving the illegal disposal of toxic wastes at the Lost Trees reservation. Leo Clark knew that, but he didn't feel it. All he felt was the space in his chest. A… sadness? Was that what it was?
He had thought his years on the street had burned all of that away: that he'd lost all but the most elemental survival emotions. Fear. Hate. Anger. He wasn't sure whether this discovery, this renewal of feeling, this sadness, was a gift or a curse. He would have to think about that: Leo Clark was a careful man.
As for the judge, it would make no difference. He had been weighed and he would die.
Leo Clark had been waiting for twenty minutes when a car pulled into an empty space halfway down the garage. A woman. He could hear her high heels rapping on the concrete. She had her keys in her hand. She opened the door into the building, stepped inside. The door began to swing shut and Leo pulled in the line, popping off the Magic mending tape, putting tension on the line, easing the door shut… but not quite enough to latch. He kept up the tension, waiting, waiting, giving the woman time for the elevator, hoping that nobody else came out…
After three minutes, he slid from beneath the car. Keeping the line tight, he walked to the door and eased it open. Nobody in the elevator lobby. He stepped inside, walked past the elevator to the fire stairs, and went up.