"What are they doing?" she asked.
"What?" He looked in the same direction she was. The people who had been looking at the petroglyphs were lined up along the fence, facing them, repeatedly slapping their hands together.
Lucas stared for a moment, perplexed, then caught it and threw back his head and laughed.
"What?" asked Lily, still puzzled, looking at the line of people across the fence. "What are they doing?"
"They're applauding," Lucas laughed.
"Oh, no," Lily said, her face flaming as they accelerated away. She looked back and after a moment added, "They certainly got their money's worth…"
CHAPTER 20
In the car, Barbara looked him over.
"Why am I doing this? Driving you?"
"I'm looking for a guy," Shadow Love said. "I want you to talk to him on the telephone."
"You're not going to do anything, are you?"
"No. Just want to talk," Shadow Love said. He turned away and watched the street roll by. It took an hour of cruising and a half-dozen stops, with Barbara growing increasingly anxious, but Shadow Love finally spotted Larry Hart as he went into the Nub Inn.
"Let's find a phone," Shadow Love said. "You know what to say."
"What're you going to do?" Barbara asked.
"I want to talk to him. See what he's getting. If there's any possibility that we'll be seen, I'll call it off. You can wait out of sight down the road. If anything goes wrong and they grab me, I just won't show up and you can drive away."
"All right. Be careful, Shadow."
Shadow Love glanced at her. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. She knows what's coming. The pistol he'd used to kill Yellow Hand pressed into his side. His fingers touched the cold stone knife in his pocket.
Hart took the bait. Barbara called him at the Nub Inn, explained that she'd seen him go inside, and said that she had some information. But she was scared, she said. Scared of the assassins, scared of the cops. She was an old client of his, she said, and knew him by sight. She said she'd meet him by the green dumpster outside the sheet-rock warehouse by the river.
"You've got to come alone, Larry, please. The cops scare me, they'll beat me up. I trust you, Larry, but the cops scare me."
"Okay. I'll see you in ten minutes," Hart said. "And don't be scared. There's nothing to be scared of."
She looked through the glass of the phone booth toward her car. Shadow Love was slumped in the passenger seat, and she could just see the top of his head. "Okay," she said.
It took Hart fifteen minutes to get out of the inn, into his car and down to the warehouse. "There he is," Shadow Love said as Hart pulled over to the curb near the warehouse. They watched as he got out of the car, locked it, looked around and began walking cautiously toward the dumpster at the corner of the building.
"Drive around the block, like I told you. I'll look for cops," Shadow Love said.
Nothing moving on the street, nobody sitting in parked cars. Shadow Love took a breath. "Okay," he said. "Up behind the warehouse. And then you go on down where I showed you, and wait."
When they finished circling the block, they were on the back side of the warehouse. Shadow Love got out of the car. "Take care," Barbara said. "And be quick."
As she drove away, Shadow Love walked across a vacant lot littered with construction debris to the warehouse. He slipped carefully around the corner and was then directly behind the dumpster. Through a narrow space between the warehouse wall and the dumpster, he saw, for just a second, the dark sleeve of a man's coat on the other side. Hart was wearing a black jacket. Shadow Love touched the pistol under his shirt and stepped around the dumpster.
"Larry," he said. Hart jumped and spun around.
"Jesus," he said, his face stricken. "Shadow."
"It's been a long time," Shadow Love said. "I think I saw you a time or two out on Lake Street, after you graduated."
"Yeah, long time," Hart said. He tried to smile. "Are you still living around here?"
Shadow Love ignored the question. "I heard in the bars that you've been looking for me," he said, stepping closer. Hart was bigger than he was, but Shadow Love knew that Hart would be no contest in a fight. Hart knew it too.
"Yeah, yeah. The cops have. They want to talk to you about your fathers."
"My fathers? The Crows?"
"Yeah. Some people think they might, you know…" Hart bobbed his head uncomfortably.
"… have a connection with these killings?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I don't know about that," Shadow Love said. He was standing on the sides of his feet, the fingers of both his hands in his jeans pockets. "Are you a cop now, Larry?"
"No, no, I still work for the Welfare."
"You're sure talking like a cop, out on the street," Shadow Love said, pressing.
"Well, I know," Hart said. "I don't like it either. I got my clients, but the cops won't leave me alone, you know? They don't have anybody else who knows the people."
"Mmmm." Shadow Love looked down at the toes of his cowboy boots, then up at the sky. It had been slate-gray for a day and a half, but now there was a big blue hole in the clouds right over the river. "Come on, Larry. I want to talk some more. Let's go on down where we can see the river. Nice day."
"It's cold," Hart said. He shivered but walked along. Shadow Love stayed just a few inches behind him, his fingers still in his pockets.
"That's a big old hole, there," Shadow Love said, looking at the sky.
"They call it a sucker hole, pilots do," Hart said, looking up at it. "I took a couple of flying lessons once. That's what they called those things. Sucker holes."
"What do you think, that the Crows are behind all this?" Shadow Love asked.
Hart had to half turn to talk to him, and he lost his footing for a moment and stumbled. Shadow Love caught his elbow and helped him regain his balance. "Thanks," Hart said.
"The Crows?" Shadow Love prompted. They continued ' walking. j "Well, old man Andretti shipped a lot of money out here -that's the money the cops have been spreading around town-and those were the names that came up," Hart said. "The Crows.";
"How about me?"
"Well, the cops know you're their son. They thought maybe you'd know…"
"… where they are? Well, yeah. I do," Shadow Love said.
"You do?"
"Mmm." They got off the blacktopped street and walked along the grassy top of the hill that ran down to the Mississippi. Shadow Love stopped and looked down the river. The black spot floated out in front of his eyes, a funnel of darkness in the day. Fuckin' Hart, probing to find his fathers. "Love the river," he said.
"It's a hell of a river," Hart agreed. A harbor tow was pushing a single empty barge downstream toward the Ford lock and dam. The light from the sucker hole poured down on it, and from the height of the hillside, the boat and barge looked like kids' toys, every detail standing out in high relief.
"Look up there," Shadow Love said. "There's an eagle."
Hart looked up and saw the bird, but he thought maybe it was a hawk. He didn't say so but stood looking at it, aware of Shadow Love beside and slightly behind him. Shadow Love slipped his hand in his pocket and felt the knife. He'd ';• never used it before, never thought of it as a real weapon.
"Breathe it in, Larry, the cold air. God, it feels good on your skin. Breathe it in. See the eagle circling? Look at the hillside over there, Larry. Look at the trees, you can pick them all out… Breathe it in, Larry…"
Hart stood with his back to Shadow Love, his eyes half closed, taking great gulping breaths of the cold air, feeling the tingle on his skin, on the back of his neck. He turned his head up again and said, "You know, I talked…"