I’d been working on the street until 1 A.M. and hadn’t even tried to get a few hours of sleep. The fact that I was going to stay up all night had worried both Radich and Lundquist. But they must have read in my face how badly I’d wanted to come along, because in the end they had let me go. At the moment I didn’t feel sleepy at all. I felt like I had washed down several dozen wasps with too much black coffee.
As I was checking my weapon by the side of the car, Shiloh came over to me.
“I guess I should thank Radich for thinking of me again,” I said.
“No, this was my idea,” he said mildly. “Look, I came over to tell you something-”
“He explained everything,” I interrupted. “I’m going to stay behind Nelson and just cover him; you and Hadley are going in the front and he and I will take the back.”
“That’s not it,” Shiloh said. “This is something I learned from a psychologist. If you ever get scared, not that people like us ever do,” and he paused to let me know that was a joke, “you can put your hands on a doorway-car door, anything-and imagine that you’re leaving your fear there.”
I put my weapon in its holster.
“It’s something you can do and not be obvious about when there’re people around,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said shortly.
He wasn’t deceived by the surface politeness of my response.
“I didn’t mean I think you’re scared.”
“I know.”
He looked away, toward the house. “Just do it like we talked about it. This one isn’t going to give us any problems.”
Radich had said much the same thing earlier; now Shiloh had said it. I guess something had to go wrong under that much karmic prodding.
Two of them were sleeping on a couch in the first-floor living room. Shiloh and Hadley went directly upstairs, hearing the muffled sound of running feet above. Nelson got the tall man from the bar up against the wall-seeing him standing, I could now gauge him at an impressive six-foot-six or -seven-and started handcuffing him. The couch’s other occupant, a skinny blond woman in her early twenties, made a bolt for the nearest exit, a window.
Even before Nelson jerked his forehead in the woman’s direction, I went after her. The woman was pretty quick; she had jerked the sash window up and gotten her head and shoulders out by the time I reached her. When I did, she hung on to the windowsill so hard that its edge sliced her palm. She shrieked.
“Look what you did, bitch!” she yelled, seeing her own blood, spreading her hand so I could see it.
“Please put your hands behind your back,” I instructed her.
“Get your hands off me! Look what you fucking did! Get your hands off me, you fucking bitch!”
“Trace,” Nelson’s suspect said, tiredly. He knew a lost cause when he saw one. Trace-or Tracy, more likely-didn’t seem to hear him. She wasn’t listening to anyone. She kept yelling at me while I tried to read her the Miranda rights. It was making me nervous. If she couldn’t hear herself being Mirandized, I wondered, did she have a possible loophole in court?
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hadley and Shiloh coming back downstairs with a third suspect. I had successfully gotten Tracy handcuffed but wished she’d shut up. I was starting to feel self-conscious about being the only one who couldn’t keep my suspect under control.
Just then something very strange happened. The staircase had a traditional open railing, supported by carved wooden posts. A bronze blur, like part of the wood framework come to life, dropped from between two of the posts, landing almost directly in front of Nelson. Nelson made a remarkably controlled jump but didn’t go anywhere, his pale blue eyes showing white at the edges.
I didn’t even have to look down to know what it was. The percussive sound of a rattlesnake’s warning was familiar from my childhood out West.
For a split second everybody was frozen, even the snake coiled to strike.
I stepped forward, caught the snake behind its triangular head, and broke its neck.
Its rattle, persisting after death, filled the house. Hadley and Nelson were looking at me like I’d just split the atom. Tracy had stopped in mid-scream to stare at me with her mouth open. Only Shiloh seemed unsurprised, though he was looking at me with a glimmer of some unreadable thought in his eyes.
“Maybe we should move everyone outside,” he suggested.
We did, but someone had to go back in and make sure the house was safe. Nelson and Hadley showed no interest whatsoever. Their eyes went to me.
“You’re the dragon slayer,” Hadley said, only half joking.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m game.”
“I’ll go with you,” Shiloh said.
There were no more loose snakes. Upstairs, we found the terrarium.
At one end, a heat lamp shone down on a broad basking rock. At the other end was a cool retreat box. Two adult snakes seemed to sleep on the sand, coiled against each other.
“God save me from drug dealers and their goddamn affectations,” Shiloh said wearily.
“Are we going to have to call Animal Control?” I was sitting on my heels, looking into a little half-size refrigerator, which held not only dead mice but little bottles of antivenin.
“The pound, are you kidding? They won’t touch this,” Shiloh said. “I think we’re going to have to get Fish and Wildlife out here, or someone from the zoo, which means one of us is going to have to stay here.”
“I could do that,” I told him.
“No, Nelson and I need to get everything into evidence. Go on back, process the suspects in, write up your paperwork. Hadley will enjoy riding back with you. I think he’s in love.”
It was a joke, but I saw him realize what he’d said. He’d accidentally evoked what we were both trying hard to forget. We’d been walking on a thin layer of ice, and he’d broken through with an innocent remark. We both felt the cold water it splashed on our newfound rapport.
Shiloh was right about one thing, though. Hadley called me. We dated for six companionable weeks, something we kept a secret from other officers.
One night I was on patrol alone. Crossing the Hennepin Bridge, I’d seen a cardboard box sitting on the pedestrian walkway, by itself, no one around. That struck me as mildly strange and I wanted to see what was in it.
I approached the cardboard box with caution that turned out to be unnecessary. The box was open at the top. Two kittens slept inside on pages of newspaper.
Someone had felt a spasm of compassion at the last minute and couldn’t throw them over the railing into the river. Now they and their box would go to the squad room until Animal Control was open in the morning.
I was in no hurry to go back to my car, looking out over the Mississippi and the riverbank instead. There was still no traffic on the bridge, no cars moving below in my line of sight. It was like being on an empty movie set. Downtown, windows in the high-rise buildings glowed with light, and in the distance I could hear the rushing sound of the 35W, like blood heard through a stethoscope. Those were the only signs of life. It wasn’t normal, even for two-thirty on a weekday morning. But it wasn’t disturbing. It was mystic.
Motion below caught my eye, a lone figure in the distance.
It was a runner, making long strides like a cross-country athlete close to the finish, down the middle of an empty street whose wet black surface gleamed in the night.
Just by watching I knew several things about him: that he’d been at this pace for a little while and was capable of keeping it up for a good time. That he was feeling the energy of running down the center of a street that was almost never empty. That he was the kind of runner I wished I could be, the kind who could let his mind go and just run, without keeping track of distance and thinking about when he could stop.
When he drew nearer I realized I knew him. It was Shiloh.
He passed right under me, and as he did there was engine noise behind me all of a sudden, two cars going eastbound, and the moment of stillness was over.