“No,” I said. “I don’t have family there anymore. And the years I spent there seem like so long ago. It’s like…” I tried to find the right words. “… everything in New Mexico seems like something that happened to somebody else. Almost like a past life. It’s weird, but-”
What am I doing? I thought, stopping short. “Sorry,” I said. “I was rambling. I just meant,” I was quick to explain, “those years weren’t that eventful. Nothing really happened to me in New Mexico.” I could feel heat rising under my skin.
But once again Mike Shiloh chose to overlook my consternation. “I know the feeling,” he said, and smiled. “Nothing much ever happened to me in Utah.”
His words were light and casual, but he was looking at me seriously. No, that wasn’t it. He was looking at me in an assessing way and yet a kind way, also, a look that made me feel-
“Come here, come here,” Shiloh said quickly, startling me out of my thoughts. He gestured me forward. “I need to look over your shoulder and not get seen, okay?”
At his direction I slid onto his lap; for the next moment we were a couple making out across the street from the bar. His hands laced on my lower back, his face buried against my neck and shoulder.
“That’s good,” he told me.
I was distracted from the intimacy of it by worrying about what I was doing. I tried to move just a little, to look natural, without getting in his way.
“Be casual about it,” he said quietly into my neck, “but turn around and look at the guy in the dark jacket, walking in from the parking lot.”
I turned slightly, tucking my chin down against my shoulder. “I see him.” The man disappeared through the bar’s windowless double doors as I spoke.
“He’s someone I know from Madison,” Shiloh said. “And when I say I know him, I mean I busted him once. So I can’t go in there.”
“But I can?”
“Right,” Shiloh said. “You’ll go in and sit where you can see him. Check out who he’s sitting with. Get a thorough description. But not yet. We’ll give him a couple of minutes to get settled.”
“All right,” I said, pleased at the prospect of being in action.
“But you can get off my lap now,” he said.
I pulled away hastily. If it hadn’t been so dark, I would have worried about reddening.
The bar, when I was inside, was nearly as dark inside as the street outside. The man I’d followed in was close enough to the bar that I could sit there and surveil him, but the two men he was with had their backs to me.
After one sip, I left the draft beer I’d ordered on the bar and went to the cigarette machine. I rooted in my purse, acting frustrated.
I crossed to the table where the three men sat. “Excuse me? Could any of you give me four quarters for a dollar?”
“Sorry, babe,” Madison said coolly.
“No, I got it,” said one of his companions. He was, I saw, a very tall man. His exact height was hard to gauge, but his legs stretched a long, long way under the table.
“Thanks,” I said, laying a weathered single on the little round table and taking the quarters from his hand.
I went back to the cigarette machine, bought a pack of Old Golds, and headed toward the ladies’ room. But instead of going into the bathroom, I went out the side door, which was hidden from view of the bar.
I stood at the driver’s-side window of the Vega and Shiloh rolled it down.
“Two blond guys,” I said. “One’s really, really tall and has long hair, clean-shaven otherwise, blue eyes. The other guy is average height, I think. Looks a lot like his friend, except the hair’s a little paler and cut short. He’s got a tattoo on his left forearm.”
“A barbed-wire pattern?”
“Yeah,” I said, pleased. “Both guys are clean-shaven. The tall guy was wearing-”
“Good,” Shiloh said, waving me off. “I don’t need to know what they were wearing.”
“Now what?”
Shiloh jerked his head toward the passenger side of the car. “Now we go back to Minneapolis.”
“Really?” I was disappointed. It didn’t seem like a whole night’s work.
“Really,” he said. “You did good.”
Genevieve and I worked out together about a week later. In the locker room, she wanted to know how I had liked my first stakeout.
“How’d you hear about that?” I asked her.
“I ran into Radich again. You know how it goes: You don’t see someone for months, then you see them twice in a week.”
“It was okay. Dull,” I said. I hadn’t thought it was, but that had been Shiloh’s assessment, and I wanted to sound sufficiently jaded.
“Oh. I thought you might want to work in Narcotics, since you’re getting your foot in the door,” she said.
“I wouldn’t call one stakeout a ‘foot in the door.’ ”
“What about the raid?”
“What raid?”
Genevieve studied my face. “They’re going to raid the lab. Radich said he was going to talk to your sergeant about borrowing you again to go along. I guess he hasn’t yet.”
“Lundquist didn’t mention it to me.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything-”
“In case Lundquist says no? Don’t worry, I can deal with that.”
“Radich probably hasn’t asked him yet, is all. Lundquist won’t say no. They’ll have enough people anyway; this is just something nice for you, so you can learn. Because you helped them out.”
“What help? I sat on Shiloh’s lap and pretended to be his girlfriend.”
“Did it bother you they asked you to do that? Nelson couldn’t have done it.”
“I was okay with it.”
“Shiloh was okay?”
“Yeah, he was fine. What were you going to say about him and Kilander the other night?” I asked.
“Kilander?”
“About their, what, ‘history of unfriendliness’?”
“Oh, that. Nothing serious,” she said. “I don’t remember all the details, but when Shiloh had just got here from Madison, he went in on some kind of raid on a club in north Minneapolis. The whole case was kind of shaky. It ended up being Kilander’s to prosecute. And I guess he needed Shiloh to…” I could see her mentally reviewing her list of mild, noninflammatory words. “… to be cooperative in his testimony. Don’t ask me what about, I don’t remember.
“Shiloh didn’t like the whole case, thought it was flimsy. He wasn’t about to color his story in any way.” Genevieve yanked open her combination lock. “Kilander would have had a very unhelpful witness on the stand. Instead he decided not to call Shiloh at all. And lost the case.”
“What did the MPD guys think?” A cop’s opinion was more important than a prosecutor’s, at least to me.
“Well, obviously the story got around-that’s how I heard it. And someone sent away for some ACLU membership stuff and had it sent to the station in Shiloh’s name, like that’s supposed to be really embarrassing. I doubt it was Kilander. Not his style.” Genevieve laced up her boots. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s always good to know the department gossip,” I said lightly.
When I got to the squad room, there was a message waiting from my sergeant, Lundquist. See Lt. Radich.
If it’s hard to surveil a farmhouse, it’s also hard to sneak up on one, for the same reasons. In fact, Radich had explained, we weren’t going to be subtle. Instead, this would be a dawn raid. We’d come through the door on a no-knock warrant and catch everyone sleepy and unprepared.
It was five twenty-five in the morning, and I was riding out toward Anoka in the same green Vega that Shiloh and I had used before. This time I was sitting next to Nelson.
We rode mostly in silence. I felt more comfortable with Nelson than with Shiloh. He was the kind of cop I was used to, with a buzz cut and a blunt way of speaking. He related to me like another cop would. He hadn’t seen me naked forty-five minutes after we’d met in an airport bar.