Lucas felt as though he were strangling: "You get home. Get home. Goddamnit, Letty…"
"I'm going," she said meekly.
Too meekly, Lucas thought, but she'd hung up, and he wouldn't call her back in the presence of the St. Paul cop.
"That was her?" Briar asked brightly.
"Yeah. She's at the Capitol," Lucas said.
"Glad she's okay," Briar said.
The cop shook his head, but didn't press. He had enough problems, without picking at one that seemed to have solved itself. You could ruin a perfectly good evening, he believed, with one extra ill-placed question. He stepped away, got on his radio, and said, "We need another ambulance and we're gonna need a rape kit at Regions, better alert them…"
Down below, the paramedics were thrashing through the trees. The first cop, with Lucas, began talking to Briar about what had happened that evening, and Briar couldn't get through it-couldn't think of what to say, other than that they were partying and that Randy had been crazy in his wheelchair, and she told him about how Ranch had made the crank pipe. The cop asked, "Mind if we look inside?"
Briar said, "No, go ahead."
Lucas, who'd been looking down into the hollow, smiled to himself: there were a bunch of ill-considered words, he thought, though the cop could probably go in anyway. Now, there was no problem at all-he'd been invited.
"I heard that," he said to the cop, turning toward them, and the cop nodded to him. Lucas was looking right at Briar's back, and in the thin flickering lights from the house, saw what looked like stripes across her dress; but he recognized blood when he saw it.
"Hey…"
The cop picked up the tone and looked toward him. "Check her back," Lucas said. "She's bleeding." Briar started to weep, and sidled away from them. "He didn't mean nothing by it," she said. "He didn't mean nothing."
The paramedics brought Whitcomb up out of the trees, strapped to the board, and hauled him to the ambulance and raced away toward the hospital. He moved not at all, though he appeared to be semiconscious.
The second cop watched them go, then turned to Lucas and said, "He's fucked. His neck is not right."
Lucas was about to comment when Ranch, who'd been standing, silently, a few feet away, fell over, unconscious. Because his hands were cuffed, he landed directly on his face. Lucas and the cop both flinched and glanced around, listening for a gunshot, then the cop crouched over Ranch and said, "He's breathing."
"Better call another meat wagon," Lucas said. He looked toward the house, where the first cop had taken Briar. He could hear Briar weeping again. "These people are messed up."
Lucas left the St. Paul cops to straighten it all out, called Shrake and was told that nothing was happening at the apartment; and that the armored car companies were being monitored. "They might be gone."
"Maybe," Lucas said. "But they lingered. Why did they linger?"
"What about the SWAT?"
Lucas looked at his watch: "Leave them for a while. I'm coming back, but I've got to talk to Letty first. Something weird is going on."
When he got back to the house, he was determined to stay calm. He did, somewhat to his own surprise, because Letty was apparently as confused about events as he was.
"You arrested her at a motel? What for? How did you know her?" Letty asked. "Did you arrest Randy?"
"I didn't even know she was involved with Randy," Lucas said. "How do you know Randy?"
"I only saw Randy once, when I was in a McDonald's with John and Jeff, the day they picked me up at the Capitol, when you gave me the twenty. I don't know what Randy wanted-I just thought Juliet would make a story."
"But you knew I'd been involved with Randy?"
"Yeah, later. I figured he might be coming after me to get back at you, but he was such a dummy, I decided that he really wasn't much of a threat."
"You were wrong about that," Lucas said. "He was a threat. People like that are always a threat, because they're nuts. But then ' you kept going back, didn't you?"
"Only to Juliet," Letty said. "I didn't mess with Randy. Did Jennifer tell you about the perverted mailman? That whole thing?"
"What perverted mailman?" Lucas asked. He looked at Weather, who was draped over a couch, looking at both of them with great skepticism. "Do you know about a mailman?"
"First I've heard about a perverted mailman," Weather said.
"But what about the motel?" Letty asked. "You arrested a possible assassin who Juliet was supposed to ' you know?"
"Let's go back to the mailman," Lucas said.
When they worked through it all, none of it seemed to make too much sense. Lucas finally said, "All right, this is all done, okay? Randy's hurt, and it's pretty bad-he's broken his neck, maybe. But you're all done with Randy and Juliet and I want a no-shit promise from you. I'm not pressuring you, I'm asking you: on our relationship, I'm asking you."
Letty stuck out a fist for a bump: "If I ever have one more thing to do with either of them, no matter how small, I'll tell you first," she said. She meant it this time: the Randy problem was gone.
They bumped fists and were done with it.
"Now," Lucas said, "if we could only find that fuckin' Cohn."
"You gotta watch your language a little more," Weather said to Lucas.
"Maybe they're holding up the Republican Party," Letty said.
"You can't hold up a party," Lucas said. "You gotta hold up a thing. There's gotta be one place, there's gotta be some money moving, we're watching all the armored car warehouses, they're all scrambling their routes ' I can't get it."
"Sleep on it," Weather said.
By the time they were all done, it was after midnight.
Weather and Letty went to bed, and Lucas checked again with Shrake, who said that nothing had changed. "I'm going to bag out on my couch for a while," Lucas said. "Maybe you and Jenkins should trade off. We need somebody there to keep an eye on the place until we're sure they're gone; but there's no point in both of you being there."
"What time will you be back?"
Lucas looked at his watch: "I'll set my alarm for three, see you about three-thirty. If you want to send Jenkins home, tell him to come back around seven to relieve me."
"Sounds like a deal," Shrake said. "What about the SWAT?"
"When were they due to quit?"
"Anytime."
"Ah… tell them to hang on until three o'clock. It's all overtime, anyway. But if it ain't happened by three, it probably won't-nobody working after that."
"See you at three-thirty," Shrake said.
Lucas got a pillow and an alarm clock from the bedroom- Weather was cutting in the morning, as she was most mornings, and he didn't want to disturb her in the middle of the night-kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the couch.
As he dozed off, he wondered what he had heard that night, pinging in the back of his head, that worried him so much.
Chapter 23
They'd been stuck in the van so long that they were all a little groggy. Toward the end of the wait, Cohn looked at his watch every three minutes and finally said, "Fuck it: let's do it."
Cruz: "Twenty minutes yet. It's all right to be late, but it's not all right to be early."
"I'm going nuts in here," Cohn said.
"Then let's go for a walk," Cruz said. "There's nobody around right now, we can get out of here, down the stairs, take a hike around the block. And we'll feel better."
Lane said, "I could use a walk. I'm tired and I'm scared."
They piled out of the van, walked down the stairs. A nurse was just crossing the street from the hospital and she nodded at them and went into the parking structure. Lane said, "This way," and they followed him down the street, away from the lights of downtown. Around the corner, it was even darker, but they weren't worried, since they were the ones who were supposed to be lurking in the dark '