Several years ago, my father’s last girlfriend-whose name I learned and forgot in the span of a week-called to tell me my father was dead. She (Sandy? Was that it?) barely tracked me down in time for me to make the service. I’d had just enough time to call my sergeant and explain, and then buy a black dress and a pair of heels at Carson Pirie Scott before catching a flight west on a bargain regional carrier.
After spending most of his adult life in New Mexico, my father had tired of the cold winters and isolation of the high country and moved to Nevada, where his money would stretch even further than it had in the Southwest. In the desert sun of Nevada, his life savings bought him a condominium and some good times with a new girlfriend. The girlfriend (Shelly?) was a full ten years younger than him. That didn’t surprise me. My father had always been a very handsome man, and he had remained that way until the heart attack claimed him. Or so people in Nevada told me.
Sandy or Shelly had arranged for him to be buried in Nevada. There was no reason to take the body back to New Mexico. My mother wasn’t there; she was buried in Minnesota with her people. My brother, killed while serving in the army, had merited burial in a military cemetery with honors.
So my father was buried in a modern memorial garden on the outskirts of town, one of those where flowers too uniformly bright to be real decorate acres of sameness, and the grave markers, also alike, lie flush in the ground, hidden by green grass until you are nearly on top of them. As the nonsectarian chaplain said his few words under the canopy that shaded the coffin and mourners, I let my mind wander until one of my high heels pierced the overwatered turf and began to sink in, bringing me back to reality with a jolt.
One paper plate of food, forty-five minutes of small talk with my father’s friends and neighbors, and one long rental car drive later, and I was on my way back to Minneapolis again.
There wasn’t a spare seat in the coach section of the flight back. My fellow travelers seemed mostly to be retirees who’d been on gambling vacations, taking a break from Minnesota in January in the warmth of the West. As soon as we were in the air, the pilot got on the overhead and cautioned us, smooth-voiced, that the flights ahead of us were experiencing some “chop” from storms over the plains. The other pilots weren’t kidding. Fifteen minutes after his initial announcement, the pilot got back on the mike and told the two flight attendants to take their seats.
The plane bounced like a sled being pulled too fast over old snowpack that had turned to hard, uneven ice. The whole airframe made crunching, shuddering noises, bouncing hard enough to shake the wattle of the blue-haired old woman sleeping next to me.
I’m not afraid of flying, but that night I had a very odd feeling, one I’ve never had since. I felt completely adrift and out of control. I was surrounded by human beings, but they were strangers. I felt lost, as if up in this black stratum between clouds and stars not even God could know where I was. I looked hard out the window, hoping for city lights, anything that could give me a point of reference. There was none.
I hadn’t bought a real drink while I had the chance, and now I wanted one. For me it was always a physical craving that had two locations: I felt it under my tongue, and deep in my chest. I chewed the last cubes of ice from my Coke and felt a pang of regret when they ran out.
Had my mother lived, I was sure, we would have been close. She died when I was nine. My brother Buddy had been a bully, full of a sense of entitlement to whatever he wanted. Physical strength was the only thing he’d respected; at five years younger, I’d never had enough. My father, a long-distance truck driver, had slept in the main room of our trailer when he’d been at home, just so Buddy and I could have separate rooms. He never knew it, but he really needn’t have bothered.
It had been a great relief to me when Buddy, at 18, had joined the army and left home. My father saw it differently. He spent long stretches on the road, and felt that no 13-year-old girl could be ready to spend those days and nights alone, without the supervision of at least an older brother. He’d put me on a Greyhound for Minnesota, where my mother’s aunt still lived.
It was in Minnesota that I discovered basketball, or rather the coach discovered me, because at 14 I was head and shoulders above most of the girls in my class. I nearly lived at the gym after that, both in regularly scheduled team workouts and afterward, working to perfect free throws, striving for an absurd three-quarter-court shot. Just as a song can get stuck in your head, I sometimes heard a repeating loop of gym noise as I tried to fall asleep at night: the kinetic slamming of the ball against the hardwood floor, the shudder of the backboard, the squeaks of athletic shoes.
Everyone needs a place, and that was mine. Our team won a state championship in my senior year. There was a photo in our high-school yearbook from that night, one reprinted from one of the newspapers. It was taken just after the final buzzer, when in the midst of the celebration my co-captain, Garnet Pike, had literally picked me up in her arms, both of us laughing. Garnet was a little taller than me, and we’d all been hitting the gym hard that year. Even so, a second after the picture was snapped, we both fell, and I hit the court so hard the coach was afraid I might have fractured my tailbone. At the time I hadn’t felt a thing. Immortality ran in my veins that night; we were all untouchable.
UNLV came calling, and I went to play for them, but it was never the same. College didn’t suit me, and while I saw some action in games, it wasn’t much, not nearly enough to make me feel needed. I’d said nothing-to do otherwise would have looked like whining-but what ate at me was the feeling that I was at UNLV under false pretenses, that I wasn’t earning my place. Certainly my grades didn’t justify my presence on campus.
In the media guide for that season, I look unhappy, and you can see the ridiculous sheen I put in my hair as if to underscore the distance I felt from my clean-cut, ponytailed, or cornrowed teammates. The next year I let registration slide by without signing up for any classes, then wrote a letter to the coach, packed up, and went to find a series of dead-end jobs, my last, restless detour on the road to being a cop.
Buddy had died in a helicopter accident over Tennessee, the one that took the lives of thirteen servicemen. My father hadn’t believed me when I’d said I wasn’t leaving my police academy training to come home for the funeral. In his world, Buddy had been a noble hero; in his world, I’d loved and admired my brother as much as he did. He had continued to expect me until the very day of the service.
The night of Buddy’s funeral, I’d gotten home to find an eight-minute message on my answering machine. Outrage was my father’s main theme, some disappointment, some melancholy, but always returning to anger.
He had raised me single-handedly after my mother died, he said. He had never been drunk in front of me. And later, he’d never begrudged the checks he’d sent east for my support, while I’d never written him and rarely called. Finally, he’d segued into a paean to Buddy, the fallen hero, and that was when the tape ran out and cut him off.
It was too bad that the conversation was one-sided, because it was the last substantive one we’d ever had. I thought of picking up the phone and calling him. But I knew that he wouldn’t and couldn’t hear what I had to tell him about Buddy, the noble warrior. So in the end I hadn’t responded, and a long twilight had fallen on our relationship. Ultimately, if his girlfriend hadn’t gotten my address off an old Christmas card, I wouldn’t even have known about his death, nor been on a crowded bargain-carrier flight back from his funeral.
Landing at MSP, I felt relief at being on solid ground again, weariness from adrenaline letdown, and a desire for Seagram’s that had suddenly doubled. I had to take a cab home anyway, so there was no reason not to stop at the airport bar.
I was almost the only person in there. A bartender sliced up lemon wedges, her face faraway. A tall, lanky man with auburn hair nearly to his shoulders and two days’ growth of beard was drinking at the bar.
Instead of sitting at the bar as well, I’d taken a table against the wall, giving that man his privacy. Despite that, we kept looking at each other. Accidentally, it seemed. The TV turned a blank green face down at the bar, and there was no one else around, and it seemed like we didn’t really know where to put our eyes except on each other. Maybe we sensed in each other an equality of misery.
The man leaned forward and spoke to the bartender. She mixed up another whiskey and water like mine, more vodka for him. He paid and carried both drinks over to my table.
He was kind of good-looking; maybe a little too lean. I would have described his face as Eurasian, or maybe Siberian. His eyes had just a bit of slant to them, like the eyes of a lynx.
“I don’t want to intrude, but that dress looks like a funeral to me,” he’d said.
We introduced ourselves without last names. I was Sarah, just back from a family funeral; he was Mike, recently out of a “very brief, very wrong” affair. We didn’t expand on those circumstances. We didn’t talk about what we did for a living. Within twenty minutes he’d asked me how I was getting home.
He drove me to my place, a cheap studio in Seven Corners. Inside, I left my sober black funeral dress and stockings on the floor with his weather-beaten clothes and work boots.
These were my careless days, and I hadn’t been a stranger to the one-night stand. I always awoke just enough to hear the men get up to leave, but never opened my eyes, always feeling a sneaking, sorry sense of gratitude that they wouldn’t be there in the morning.
This one seemed to dematerialize from my bed; I never heard a thing. I would have felt my usual relief, but for one memory.
At the airport, we’d walked in silence to the short-term parking and he’d led me to his car, an old green Catalina.
“This is nice,” I’d said. “It’s got character.”
He didn’t say anything, and I turned around to look. He’d stopped and leaned up against a concrete pillar. His eyes were closed, his face lifted into the wind that came off the airfield, frigid January air scented with aviation fuel.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Nope,” he’d said, his eyes still closed. “Just sobering up, so I don’t cash in our chips on the 494.”
I’d crossed to where he was, looking out at a Northwest plane climbing an invisible ramp of air into the night sky. And then I’d said something I didn’t even remember thinking first.
“I’ve outlived my whole family,” I said.
“God, I wish I had,” he said, and I was just drunk enough that it made me laugh, a surprised, giddy sound. He opened his eyes to look at me, and then he pulled me into his arms and held me, hard, his beard scratching my cheek.
It should have been all wrong in the etiquette of a one-night stand, way too intimate for the rules of hooking up without intimacy. But it didn’t bother me. It didn’t even surprise me. It eased a tight feeling in my chest that even Seagram’s hadn’t touched.
Genevieve and I worked out together, as was our custom, later that week. On this occasion our trip to the weight room was interrupted. We were walking near the basketball courts when a voice rang out.
“Hey, Brown!”
Genevieve stopped and turned, and I followed her example.
The man who’d yelled stood on the free-throw line, flanked by three other men, all younger than him. “Why don’t you introduce us to your friend!” he called.
“Those are all narcotics guys for the city-county task force,” Genevieve said, “except the really tall guy. That’s Kilander, a county prosecutor.”
She raised her voice. “You mean my very tall friend?” she yelled back. Then, to me again, “You want to meet them? They’re probably recruiting for some kind of team.”
Clearly, I saw, she was friendly with their ringleader, Radich, who up close resolved into a Mediterranean-looking man of Gen’s age with a rough-edged face and tired-looking dark eyes. Kilander was about six-five, with blond hair and blue eyes, polished and sincere-looking like an ex-farm boy turned news anchor. The other two were a lithe mid-height black man of my age, Hadley, and an ex-military-looking Scandinavian with a painfully short buzz cut and flat blue eyes, Nelson.
“This is Sarah Pribek. She’s a patrolwoman,” Genevieve said. “And more important, a state champion point guard in her high school days.”
The men exchanged smiles.
“So,” Genevieve continued, “why don’t you consider me her agent in negotiations for whatever crappy interagency team you’re putting together?”
“Putting together?” Radich said innocently. “We need some-one right now, to sub in. Nelson’s leaving. And you can play, too, naturally, Detective Brown.”
“Naturally my ass,” Gen said.
“Wait,” I interjected. “One guy’s leaving and two of us sub in?”
“I count as half a person or something,” Genevieve explained.
“No,” Radich said. “We were already playing three-on-two. Where the hell is Shiloh?”
“I’m here,” a new voice said.
Watching Genevieve joust with Radich, I didn’t even see him approach, returning from somewhere on the sidelines. I turned to look at the newcomer, and my throat worked involuntarily.
There wasn’t even a ripple of surprise in those lynx eyes, but I knew he recognized me. He was clean-shaven this day. I wanted to take my eyes away from his face and couldn’t.
Radich carried on with introductions. “Mike Shiloh, Narcotics, this is Genevieve Brown from the Investigations Division-”
“I know Genevieve.”
“-and Sarah Pribek, Patrol.”
“Hey,” he said.
“They’re going to play with us for a little while. Kilander got first pick last time, so you call it this time. Brown or Pribek.”
Genevieve looked at me and rolled her eyes at the foregone conclusion.
Shiloh’s gaze passed over both of us, then he looked at Genevieve and jerked his head in the direction of his teammate, Hadley. “Come here, Brown,” he said.
“Mike!” Hadley sounded disgusted. Radich flashed a mildly surprised look at Genevieve, who lifted both shoulders in a search-me fashion.
In all the confusion, I hoped nobody saw the shock of the insult register on my face. Kilander, the prosecutor, was the only unperturbed one; he flashed me a smile as though we had a great and sexy secret.
So that was how it stacked up. Genevieve darted gamely among us, with slow-footed Radich guarding her. Hadley did a pretty good job of covering Kilander, his speed counterbalancing Kilander’s height and skill. But really the game was all Shiloh and me.
He was very good, I had to admit, pressing me on my weak low-post moves, not letting me get out where I could sink my three-pointers. I managed, though, to keep his scoring down. Our teams were tied for much of the game. Shiloh crowded me, but was careful not to foul me. Finally my temper snapped and I body-slammed him.
Shiloh marked this victory by not commenting on my loss of control as he stood and accepted the ball from Hadley. Genevieve, though, as we all moved aside to let Shiloh take his free throws, hissed gleefully in my ear: “You just cost your team the game.” She was teasing, but I was annoyed with myself.
“Maybe he’ll miss.”
“He doesn’t miss,” Genevieve whispered back.
Shiloh accepted the ball from Radich, bounced it in the judicious, time-killing way of basketball players everywhere, shot, and whanged it off the rim.
I laughed in relief that my teammates took for triumph. Shiloh ignored me. It didn’t matter in the end. His team ended up winning the game by a narrow margin.
As Genevieve was saying goodbye to Radich, Shiloh turned to me from about six feet away, stopping in the middle of following Hadley off the court. Sweat made his faded green Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt stick to his ribs, reminding me of the flanks of a cooling racehorse.
“Kilander was a forward at Princeton,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Maybe you should work on your passing game.”
Out of earshot, on our way to the locker room, Genevieve was less diplomatic. “What the hell was that?” she demanded.
“What?”
“I’ve never seen two people so competitive in my life. Do you know Shiloh from somewhere?”
“Why is it my fault?” I complained evasively.
“You fouled him,” she said.
“It serves him right for not picking me for his team. What the hell was that, by the way?”
Genevieve turned thoughtful. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know him that well. I’m not sure that anybody does. He’s not real well liked around the department.”
“Why not?”
Genevieve shrugged. “He does things like what he just did with you. He probably didn’t even realize that he was snubbing you.” She bent over to lace up her boots, one foot propped on a bench. “He’s competent, from what Radich says, but not real good with people. Radich is his lieutenant, you know.”
I turned that over in my mind.
“He and Kilander have a little history. An unfriendly one.” Then, just as the conversation was getting really interesting, Genevieve changed the subject. “Are you on midwatch tonight?”
“Nope,” I said. “Got the whole day off. Why?”
“I told you that you should come over for dinner sometime; tonight’s as good a night as any. My daughter’s fixing it. She’s already a better cook than I am.”
I reflected that I would have to get Genevieve to talk about Kilander and Shiloh some other time, but in the following days the opportunity never came up. The next thing I heard about him was that I was being taken off the street for a night to work with Det. Mike Shiloh on some kind of stakeout.
Wear street clothes. That was about the extent of my instructions when I went to meet Shiloh at the motor pool. He was dressed only marginally better than the night I’d first met him, and just nodded for me to accompany him as he signed out an unmarked car, a dark-green Vega.
“Where are we going?” I asked when we were on the road.
“Outside the city,” Shiloh said. “Meth country.”
A minute after I decided we were going to drive in silence, he went on. “This is actually going to be pretty dull,” he said. “In a small town, it’s harder to blend in. Hard to park for a while without attracting too much attention. With a female partner you can pass for a couple out parking after a date.”
“And you thought of me.”
“No,” Shiloh said flatly. “Radich did.”
I wondered if he couldn’t forgive me for seeing him weak and needing someone. I wondered if it had crossed his mind that I could be pissed that he, too, saw me weak and needing someone. Maybe we were going to carefully avoid mentioning having slept together for the rest of the time we knew each other. Damned if I was going to bring it up.
“Well, I’ll have to thank Radich,” I said.
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “This is a no-brainer. Like I said, dull.”
“What did you do to your arm?”
“What?” Shiloh followed my gaze to the crook of his elbow, to the round Band-Aid there. “I gave blood. I’m O negative, a universal donor. They call me a couple of times a year, asking me to come in and donate.” He pulled off the Band-Aid, revealing unmarked skin.
That was the end of the conversation until we got to our destination, parking across the street from a dispirited-looking working-class bar.
Shiloh switched off the ignition.
“Why here?” I asked.
“Both the guys hang out here, the ones we think are running a lab out of a house down the road from here. This place is like their de facto office.” He paused. “Which is good, because it’s very hard to surveil a farmhouse without being noticed. There’s no pretext for us to be parked out there.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Something to prove they’re not just two underemployed guys who spend too much time at the bar. I’m hoping if I spend some time out here watching, they’ll have guests. Someone we’re familiar with, someone with priors. A lot of these guys, they have long rap sheets. They get out of prison and go right back to cooking.” Shiloh turned slightly to face me, his posture, if not his face, telegraphing interest. He was, I realized, getting into character. It was Date Night. “I need to see them associating with people like that. It’s not enough for a warrant, but it’ll contribute.” He laid a hand gently on my shoulder and I disciplined myself not to let the touch show on my face.
“Genevieve tells me you’re from Utah,” I said, just to make conversation.
“Genevieve told you right,” he said.
“You’re Mormon, then?”
“No, not at all.” Shiloh looked almost amused.
“Why is that funny?” I asked him.
“My father was the minister of a small nondenominational church. He didn’t even consider Mormons to be Christian.”
“He was fundamentalist?”
Shiloh lifted a shoulder negligently. “People like to hang labels. But to my father there were just two kinds of people in the world: sheep and goats.”
“Those are the choices?” Neither sounded very flattering to me. I hadn’t heard the gospel story of the final judgment.
“Sorry,” he said wryly, and if I’d known him better, I might have laughed.
“So how’d you get from Utah to the Twin Cities?” I asked, changing the subject.
“It wasn’t particularly a destination,” he said.
For a little while, he told me about his training and his first patrol work in Montana, then about coming east to work in Narcotics, his nomadic years of buy-and-bust operations and more complicated undercover work. His eyes flicked away from me frequently, out at the street. I didn’t try to help him surveil; I wouldn’t have known who I was looking for. He occasionally ran a finger along my neck and collarbone in a possessive, affectionate way. Staying in character.
Then he tired of talking about himself. “Where are you from?” he asked me.
“Up north,” I said. “The Iron Range.”
It was my standard answer for people I’d just met. I don’t know why, but I rarely mentioned New Mexico to people unless I thought we were going to get to know each other well. Mike Shiloh didn’t belong in that category, I thought.
But his very next words required me to break my own rule. “So you’re a native Minnesotan?” he said.
“Okay, no,” I said. “I lived in New Mexico until I was thirteen.”
“And then what?”
“And then I came here.” It wasn’t that I was trying to kill the conversation; I knew we had to do something to pass the time. But my feeling was that your childhood is like the weather: you can talk about it all you want, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
“Why?” Shiloh asked me. He wasn’t prying. Asking questions is just a cop’s instinct. They do it even with people who aren’t criminals or suspects, the way Border collies will try to herd little kids when no farm animals are around.
“I had a great-aunt who lived here. My father sent me to live with her. He drove a truck, so he was away from home a lot, on the road.” I paused. “My mother died when I was nine. Cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It was a long time ago,” I said. “Anyway, my father worried about me when he was on the road. He arranged with my aunt-great-aunt, I mean-for me to live here. He thought I needed a maternal influence in my teenage years, too, I guess. It wasn’t like I was incorrigible or did something wrong.”
Goddammit. I didn’t know where that last part had come from. Maybe in some way I’d been afraid that this was the conclusion to be drawn from my story.
But Mike Shiloh either didn’t notice my embarrassment or didn’t want to draw attention to it. “Do you ever go back there, to New Mexico?” he said.
“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.
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.
A few days later I met Hadley for lunch and we discussed our relationship. We agreed that it wasn’t ultimately going to work out. I don’t know who actually used the phrase the long run, but I suspect it was me.
I did not call Mike Shiloh or contrive to cross his path downtown.
Neither was I asked to help the narcotics task force again, although Radich stopped by to thank me for my help. The rattlesnake incident had made me briefly famous in the department, but now that had mercifully died down. I was an unassuming patrol officer again, working my midwatch and dogwatch shifts, which were uneventful.
An early warm spell settled over the Cities. Genevieve took a week off during Kamareia’s spring break, and without a workout partner for the weight room, I took to running in the afternoons along the river. I told myself that I wasn’t avoiding the pickup basketball games in which the Narcotics guys sometimes played; I was simply cross-training, and besides, the warm weather was too pleasant to waste by exercising indoors.
I always walked my last quarter mile to cool down. That’s what I was doing one evening a little after five, walking and enjoying the scent of a pizza restaurant nearby, when I turned onto my own street and saw a pair of long legs on my front steps. The rest of my visitor was out of sight, sitting on the top step within the entry alcove, but the scuffed boots were vaguely familiar, as was, I suddenly realized, the green Catalina parked on the street.
I was glad to have recognized who it was in advance; it allowed me to not look surprised when I came face-to-face with Mike Shiloh for the first time in two months.
It had been about that long since our cluster of encounters, and seeing him gave me that little shock, the one of both recognition and of realization that your memory hasn’t painted someone quite true. I registered everything anew: the slightly Eurasian features, the longish, curling hair, which clearly hadn’t been cut in the interim, and most of all, the direct, unapologetic gaze. Given his place on the highest of the steps, he was almost on a level with me, even seated.
“I figured if you were working midwatch you’d be there by now,” he said by way of greeting. “Have you eaten?”
“Did you think of calling first?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is Hadley here right now?”
He kept a completely straight face, but I sensed amusement. He was pleased at having guessed something Hadley and I had worked hard to keep off the grapevine.
“I am no longer seeing Detective Hadley socially,” I said, using the most formal phrasing I could think of, and the coolest tone.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Shiloh said. “Last Friday evening I saw Detective Hadley in the Lynlake district with a young woman. She was dressed like she might be ‘seeing him socially.’ ”
“Good for him.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Are you hungry?” He tilted his head slightly, interrogatively. “I was thinking of a Korean place in St. Paul, but that’s negotiable,” he said. “It all depends on what you want.”
I realized that for a while now I’d been trying to decide who this man was, and if I liked him, and still I couldn’t come to a conclusion.
“Before I go anywhere,” I said stiffly, “I want to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Why drink in an airport bar?”
If nothing else, I’d surprised him; I saw that in his face. He rubbed the back of his neck a minute, then looked up at me and said, “Airports have their own police. I wanted to go somewhere that I wouldn’t run into any cops I knew.”
I heard the truth in his words. Truth, and none of the easy cynicism that would have allowed me to send this man away and stop thinking about him once and for all.
“Come in for a minute,” I said. “I need to change.”