Broken Prey

13

LUCAS WENT TO the Regions Hospital emergency room, where a doctor with warm soft fingers pushed his nose around, said the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and asked how Weather was doing in England.

"You know her?"

"I used to talk with her when I was doing my surgical rotation over at the university," the doc said. "She's got some amazing skills."

"I've seen her work," Lucas said.

The doc smiled at him and said, "I know. The famous tracheotomy. She used to tell us that if we really wanted to impress our boyfriends, we'd cut their throats."

She smiled; but Lucas thought of Angela Larson and Adam Rice, and grimaced. The doc, whose hands had been on his face, said, "Ooo-did that hurt?"

"No-so what's the diagnosis?"

She crossed her arms and looked at him with what might have been skepticism. "You got punched in the nose. It looks likes your poor nose has been through the routine before, I could feel some scar tissue on the bone…"

"Yeah, playing hockey… and one time… never mind."

"This time, it's only a crack, not a clean fracture. Best thing to do is to leave it. I'll put a plastic protective cup on it and give you a prescription for some pain medication. You may need it to get to sleep."

EVEN WITH THE PAIN MEDICATION, he couldn't sleep; but because of the pain medication, his brain got foggy and he couldn't think about the case, either. The protective cup drove him crazy, and at two a.m., he got up, pulled it off, and threw it away. He spent the rest of the night sitting in a leather club chair, semiupright, vacillating between slumber and stupor.

He did get a few hours: he last looked at the clock at five a.m. When Weather called at eight, he was asleep. The phone rang a second and a third time before he got to it; his back hurt from the unaccustomed position in the chair, and his face and neck hurt from Clanton's punch.

He picked up the phone: "How are you?" she asked.

WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, he went into the bathroom and looked at his face. He had a bruise the size of a saucer, a stupendous black eye; rather, a purple eye, with stripes of crimson and yellow-gray.

"Jesus H. Christ," he muttered.

He went back to his chair, closed his eyes. Another hour of unconsciousness, and the phone rang again. Sloan said, "I heard you got your nose busted."

Lucas groaned and looked at the clock. Time to go. "Yeah. My whole goddamned head hurts. I gotta sleep sitting up."

Sloan might have choked back a chickle. "They splint is? Your nose?"

"Naw. They pushed it around a little and gave me some pills."

"Got a shiner,huh?"

"You're a ray of sunshine," Lucas said. "How's the disease?"

"I'm dying. Every hole in my body's got junk running out of it."

"I'd rather have the busted nose."

"I'd have to think about it for a while…"

LUCAS FILLED HIM IN on the meth-lab bust. Sloan summed it up: "You got nothing but hit in the face."

"No. I got something," Lucas said seriously.

"Yeah?"

"This Clanton guy, the guy who knocked me on my ass. We were on the lawn after we busted him, and I was pushing him on Pope. He didn't know who I was talking about. I was looking at his face when he figured it out-and, man, he couldn't believe it. He called Pope a retard."

"Mr.Politically Correct."

"Hey- we've been fighting the same thing. We've got all these really smart professionals at St. John's talking about Pope in a professional way. They'd never call him a retard. What they know about Pope is too complicated. But Clanton made it simple: he knew a retard when he saw one. And he's right."

"Huh." Sloan knew what Lucas was saying. "You think we're chasing the wrong guy"

"We could be," Lucas said.

"What about the DNA?"

"Oh, Pope was there, all right," Lucas said "He did it, some of it. But he's not setting it up. Maybe he does the act; but somebody else does the directing. Somebody else has a car, somebody else has the money, somebody else does his shopping for him-Christ, the guy can barely feed himself. There's gotta be somebody else."

"We need to find this Mike West guy."

"We need to find everybody who might ever have talked to Charlie Pope," Lucas said. "We need to get back to St. John's, talk to people."

"Not me," Sloan said. "I'm out of it for a while. I can barely fuckin' walk. I walk across the house, I get so dizzy I wanna puke."

"Hey- I'm not saying you gotta do it yourself, but that's what's gotta be done. I've got to talk to Elle some more. She was right from the beginning-it's not Charlie Pope."

WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, Lucas went into the bathroom to look in the mirror again. His face hadn't changed: it was still the color of an eggplant. The pain had changed: though it was duller than it had been, it had spread all through his skull, and he felt as though his front teeth might come out.

He couldn't use the pain pills. They kicked his ass. Instead, he took two Aleves, got a drawing pad from the study, along with the all the paper and reports generated so far, and headed back to the chair.

He was trying to get comfortable when the phone rang again.

Sloan said, "Me again. You got me thinking."

"Okay…"

"You say there's gotta be another guy."

"Yup."

"Then where do the Big Three come in? We know they're involved. Somehow. Who did they influence, Charlie Pope or this other guy?"

Lucas thought about it for a moment. A puzzle. "I dunno. We come back to Mike West again."

"Or somebody like Mike West," Sloan said. "I can't believe that they made a robot out of Charlie Pope, and then he just went out and found some brains for himself. You know, a smart crazy guy to manage him."

"Maybe… maybe it was somebody one of the Big Three knew before he went inside. Did any of those guys have accomplices? Did they work with anyone?"

"I don't know. I can get Anderson to pull all those old records, if you think it's worth doing."

"It is. We don't want to miss anything."

"I'll call him. Like, in ten minutes. Right now, I gotta get back to my toilet."

LUCAS PUT HIS KNEES up and propped the drawing pad against it, stared at the blank page. Got on the phone again, called Shrake, the BCA muscle who'd gone after Mike West. Shrake picked up on the first ring.

"You get even a sniff of him?" Lucas asked.

"Not even a sniff."

"What's his history? Does he wander all over the country, or does he stay close?"

"He's got family here, and they say he's generally around somewhere," Shrake said. "They do know he goes out west from time to time. Washington, Oregon, California."

"Look, call Minneapolis and St. Paul, and all the burbs. Tell them we need to drag the streets-this is a big priority now. This is right there with finding Charlie Pope."

IN THE SKETCH BOOK he wrote,