The lock-up attendant was sound asleep in a wooden chair that he had propped back up against the breeze-block walls of the holding cell area. He jerked forward as Luke and the lieutenant pulled open the fire door. He was young, no more than twenty-two, with a trick haircut and too much muscle. He looked steroidal and dim-witted, and Luke didn’t like him. He popped to his feet like a marionette when he saw Farrell behind Luke. A set of keys jangled from his webbing, and he was holding a Monadnock billy club in his hands. He saluted, blinking, and stared at Luke with the dull disinterest of a steer in a pen. Muscles in his jaw flexed and coiled as he chewed noisily on a wad of pink gum. His breath smelled of Juicy Fruit and cinnamon buns.
“Mike, this man’s here to see the prisoner.”
“Yes, ma’am. Are you carrying any weapons, sir?”
Luke unholstered his Taurus and handed it across to the turnkey. He put it into a locker and twisted the key. He looked at Luke for another second, trying to figure out if he should frisk him.
“He’s a Marshal, Mike. Just let him in. And wait outside.” Farrell turned and patted Luke’s shoulder. “I’ll be in my office. Come see me before you leave.”
Mike led him down a long hallway lined with beige-painted breeze-blocks. There were four green steel doors along the hall, each with tiny reinforced glass windows and a slot for food trays. Watching the back of Mike’s neck, Luke got a fleeting image of the man standing at one of those windows during the long empty watches of the night shift, staring at Aurora, waiting for her to do something interesting. He resisted the temptation to club him across the back of that bovine-looking neck. Mike reached cell B and put a large steel key into the slot, turned it twice, then opened the door quickly, stepping inside in front of Luke so that he was blocking Luke’s view.
“Hey, baby! Wakey-wakey!” said Mike. His body moved, and Luke heard the sound of his boot hitting a steel frame.
He heard Aurora’s bleat of fear.
Luke reached over, got a good grip on the back of Mike’s collar, braced himself as he felt Mike tensing, and jerked Mike off balance, throwing him backward against the wall across from the door. Mike bounced off it, his brutal young face bright pink, his dark eyes brimming with low-down mean.
Luke stepped into his advance and struck him square on the bridge of his nose with the meaty part of his fist, a short, sudden, upward blow. Blood spurted out of Mike’s nose and sprinkled down the front of his tan uniform. His eyes crossed, and there was blood in his teeth as he gasped in pain. He lifted his Monadnock, and Luke wrenched it out of his hand. He put the cross-arm up against Mike’s throat, kicked the man’s feet out into a spread, and pinned him to the wall.
“Mike, can you hear me?”
Mike struggled a bit, then focused on Luke’s face. The anger was fading, replaced by fear and humiliation. Luke waited until he had Mike’s full attention.
“Can you hear me?”
Mike tried to nod, found his range limited by a billy club.
“Yes.”
“I can and will make your life a waking nightmare, son. I am a federal officer. I can make one call and get you thrown under a train. You will not find work with Wal-Mart. You will not find work with Burger King. You will not ever, ever, put on a uniform again unless you’re standing under a hotel awning hoping for tips. If I ever hear of you treating a prisoner like that again, I promise you that you will become a hobby of mine, something for me to do whenever I have a lot of anger to work out. Am I getting through to you, son?”
“Yes,” said Mike.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You will leave this door unlocked?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine. Thank you. Now go clean yourself up. You look like shit.”
Luke threw the Monadnock down the hallway. It bounced and clattered, and Mike winced. Then Luke turned away and walked into the bright tiny cell.
Aurora Powys was sitting up on the edge of the steel cot, wrapped in a robin’s-egg-blue blanket, her pale Welsh cheeks streaked with mascara, her wild blond hair matted and damp. She had paper slippers on her bare feet. She was wearing a pair of prisoner’s overalls in Day-Glo orange. Her eyes were rimmed in red, bruised looking, but still the same bottomless blue, made even deeper by the tears in them.
“You love to make an entrance, don’t you?” she said.
Luke went over to her, crouched down at her knees, and pulled her into him. She smelled of soap and cotton. Her hair was damp. She hesitated, and then Luke felt her strong arms go around his neck, and she hugged him in tight. Her chest heaved once, twice, and then she shook herself and pushed him away. She used a corner of the blanket to rub at her face and wipe her eyes. Then she tried for a smile, and Luke felt his throat tightening and a burning in his own eyes. He drove all of that down.
Aurora covered her mouth.
“God, I must smell like a dead bat.”
He tried for Fernando Lamas.
“You look mah-velous, dahling.”
She smiled again, a little stronger.
“It is better to look good than to feel good.”
Her accent was always better than his. Luke touched her forehead. There was a large bruise near her temple, spreading out into her left eye in a pale purple and green stain. She winced but didn’t move. She nodded toward the open door.
“Thanks for dealing with that asshole. I’m never again going to be a bitch with a prisoner. He really enjoys his work. It took him ten minutes to frisk me when they brought me here. This thing”—she plucked at the orange overalls—“if you have to go to the bathroom, you have to undo them all the way down. All I have on is this thing. They took everything else. I was trying to pee … I don’t know … around—I don’t have a watch. What time is it now?”
“Five in the morning. Monday morning.”
“Where exactly am I, anyway?”
“You’re in a holding cell. New Jersey troopers picked you up near the Delaware line.”
“Christ … what a mess. Anyway, I’m sitting there on that thing—” She gestured toward the stainless-steel toilet-and-sink combination that was the only other piece of furniture in the nine-by-nine beige breeze-block cell. “Naked down to my ankles—I look up, and guess who’s got his fat fucking face pressed up against that window there? Know what he did, Luke? That asshole licked the glass! When I get out of here, I’m going to come back and kick his genitalia into strawberry jam.”
“Thatta girl.”
“Oh, you prick! Don’t girl me!”
Luke was grinning at her.
She pushed him back on his heels. “Sit down, will you.”
“Where?”
“I don’t care—on the toilet.”
Luke straddled it and settled down carefully. Aurora ran both her hands through her hair, trying to straighten out the tangles. She leaned back against the wall and let out a long ragged breath that ended in a brief sob.
“How much do you remember, Aurora?”
She plucked at the blue blanket angrily, shuddered a bit.
“I remember getting that call. I was okay, I mean, I hadn’t had anything. Doug and Payne decided to leave for Narragansett Saturday, so I had the whole house to myself. I was listening to Ry Cooder, a CD called Talking Timbuktu. The roof was like a waterfall, the sound of the rain? But it was … safe. The phone rang, I paid no attention. Then I heard this voice—very federal, you know? Like every word is fresh out of the box? I heard the name Rona. I reached it just as he was hanging up.”
“What did he say?”
“You’d think I was talking to the CIA. Flat dead voice, said it was a courtesy call, that federal agents had taken Paolo Rona out of the loop. Literally that’s what he said. I asked him what the hell that meant, he said that if I watched the news, I’d see the story. He said his call was ‘unofficial,’ just a ‘courtesy,’ that the case was ‘ongoing.’ ”
“Did he give you a name?”
“Oh yes. Dennis Swayze.”
“Not Reed Endicott?”
Aurora frowned at him. “No. Swayze. Said he was with Justice. Sounded like every one of Doug’s partners. So tightly wrapped that when they fart, you can’t hear it, but blocks away all the dogs are howling? Wished me a good afternoon. Then … I’m not sure. I started to have … to see it all again? So I thought, well, if you just have one.”
“One what?”
“A Valium. When I take Valium, I don’t feel like drinking. I thought it would be safer.”
“But you did drink?”
“Oh yes.… Once I had the Valium, everything just seemed … okay? Smooth? I mean, this was a good thing, right? So why not …”
“Celebrate?”
“Yeah.… Only once I had celebrated, I got this paranoid flash—what if he wasn’t dead? What if they got the ID wrong? What if one day I’m sitting in my house and I look up and there he is? So then I thought, well, you’ll know, so I called your pager, but the system was shut down for repairs.”
“You checked that?”
“Oh yeah. I called Motorola. It was a Sunday, and they were doing a hardware update at the switching station. Why?”
“Nothing. I’ll tell you later. Did you try Ops?”
“Yeah. I got a nice young kid, he told me you were either at Paddy Riley’s bar on M Street, or you were home.”
“So then you called me at home?”
“Yes. Got your answering machine. After that, it’s only three hundred miles from New York to D.C. Valium makes everything seem plausible. You oughta try it, Luke. Then I had a drink. Then I remembered what Swayze had said, so I turned on the TV. I flicked around with the remote. There was nothing. Then I got onto the radio, and there was this short piece about Treasury agents involved in a D.C. gun battle. A criminal had been killed. No names yet. That did it for me. I decided, to hell with it. Doug and Payne were gone. I needed to do something.”
“So you climbed into that Roadmaster and grew yourself a parade of law enforcement officers in the process? Did you know you ran a roadblock?”
“Did I?” She shook her hair, sighed. “I think I remember that.”
She looked over at Luke, reached out a hand. Luke held it.
“I think it’s fair to say I have a slight problem with alcohol, right?”
Luke laughed, then buried it. His face turned a little stony.
“Oh yeah. I’d say so. Why the hell didn’t you stay at AA?”
Aurora was quiet for a time. Luke watched her face and saw a kind of hybrid emotion, resignation mixed with anger, come over it.
“You know the trouble with going to AA? Pretty soon that’s all you are ever going to be. An ex-alcoholic. It … consumes … them all. A lot of them, they just trade cigarettes for the booze, or coffee. And it’s always the Twelve Steps, and your Higher Power. They make a cult out of guilt. I’m sorry for this and I’m ashamed about that, whine whine whine. After a while it starts to sound like bragging. Like, hey, you think you’re humble, hah? Lady, I’m the most humble guy on the eastern seaboard! I’m not drinking because I’m weak. And I don’t want to be humble! I’m drinking because I’m mad, because if I don’t drink, I’ll go out and find that fucking little … and now I can’t even do that.”
Her face reddened again, and she breathed deeply three or four times.
“Have you talked to Doug yet?” she asked.
“We spoke.”
“How is he? How’s Payne?”
“Payne’s fine. I heard him playing in the background. He said to tell you he loves you.”
Aurora teared up, brimmed over, and then pushed it all back down.
“And Doug? I guess I’ve embarrassed the Full Partner, haven’t I?”
“Not so’s you’d know it. He was real stand-up, I thought. All he wanted to know was if there was anything we could do. The service. He was a little bugged that I was coming, but he took it well.”
Aurora smiled at that. “Considering …”
“Yeah. Considering. He’s coming down with a lawyer in the morning. He had to get a sitter.”
“Julia Stern will do it. Payne’s got a crush on her.”
“Aurora, they’re all fine. Let’s worry about you, okay?”
“I guess I screwed the pooch, huh, Luke?”
“I think you had a sudden attack of craniorectal inversion, sweetheart. What was in your mind, anyway?”
“I wanted to see. Who’s Reed Endicott, anyway?”
Luke suppressed a tremor of anger.
“He’s one of the double A’s at Justice. Assistant U.S. Attorney. He’s got a Treasury thing going. You ever meet Bolton Canaday?”
“Older Irish guy? Big head of white hair? Kind of leaves a trail?”
“Yeah. That’s the guy.”
Now that they were closing in on the central issue, Luke’s indecision tormented him. “Canaday’s the agent in charge. He was there when it all went down.”
“What went down, Luke. Exactly what happened?”
Luke told her the story as it had been told to him by Endicott and Canaday, in Fiertag’s office. He told it straight, neither selling it nor undermining it. As Aurora listened, her face settled and took on an aspect of professional interest. Luke reached the end of the story and waited for her to ask him the one question he had been dreading ever since they got that call from Brewer at Doc Hollenbeck’s house.
“They showed you an ER report?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it him?”
“They seem to think so.”
She shook herself slightly.
“So you think he’s dead?”
There it was. Luke watched Aurora, and for some strange reason thought of Margot, of Margot’s accusations about moral lockjaw. So speak, then, Luke.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Good,” said Aurora. “Neither do I.”