Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(6)

And they’d seen to it that he had the freedom to hunt, as long as he performed the occasional political task.



* * *



—

“I’LL SEND A PLANE,” Henderson told Lucas, because of course he would. Sending a plane didn’t mean much more to him than giving a cop cab fare. “In fact, I already sent it, if nobody’s screwed up, or my wife didn’t sneak off to Manhattan. You need to be here tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Lucas said.

“I’ll talk to the bishop and tell him you’re excused,” Henderson said.

“Ah, Jesus, you know I got shot, I’m still in recovery mode . . .”

“I know all about that,” Henderson said. “You weren’t hurt so bad you didn’t run off to Nevada and kill somebody.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Lucas grumbled.

“Okay—you managed the killing. Well done, in my opinion. The world has enough cannibals,” Henderson said. “Anyway, you’re all healed up. My office, tomorrow, one o’clock. That should allow you to sleep in until eight tomorrow morning. Or seven. Whatever.”

“Eight? Listen, Elmer, I never . . .” But Henderson was gone. Here was the rich man’s assumption: make a call and the guy shows up on time, with a necktie and polished shoes.



* * *



—

WHEN THEIR GUESTS HAD DEPARTED, and the kids were soundly asleep, and the dishes washed, Lucas and Weather had had one of the snarly disagreements common to long-lasting marriages, and they had gone to bed a little angry with each other. The trouble came down to Henderson’s request and Lucas’s occasional political missions. The argument started there, compounded by Weather’s unease with the increasing levels of violence in Lucas’s job, and had moved to a more general political dispute.

Weather, a surgeon, was an unabashed liberal. Because they had much more money than they really needed, Weather had freed herself from the usual routine of plastic and micro surgeries. She no longer looked for clients, but spent much of her time going from one hospital to the next, doing necessary surgical repairs on indigent cases.

There was more work of that kind than she could handle and she was constantly exposed to a population that was unable to care for itself—including people literally driven into bankruptcy by medical costs, who’d had to choose between eating and medical care.

The American medical system was broken, she thought, and needed to be fixed. She’d gone to a convention of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in Los Angeles, and had been traumatized by the sight of thousands of street people, including small children, living under bridges and viaducts.

“Worse than anything we had in the Great Depression,” she said.

Lucas was not so liberal. He believed that no matter how much money or time you spent on the poor, there’d always be people at the bottom unable to care for themselves, and that was simply a fact to be lived with. Also, some people really needed to be shot, and, if only wounded, shot again.

“Your mistake,” he’d told Weather, after one beer too many, and to his regret, “is that you characterize everything as a problem. A problem is something that can be solved. Some things aren’t problems—they’re situations. A situation can’t be solved, it just is. Medical care is a bottomless hole. We could spend every nickel everyone makes in the country on medical care, and it still wouldn’t be enough. If a guy thinks he’s dying and somebody else is paying for all his care, why shouldn’t he ask for the very best for the very longest time possible, right into the grave? And they do. We can’t afford that, sweetheart.”

“We can afford a lot more than we do. You can’t possibly think . . .”

And so on. Snarling, just a bit.



* * *



—

SO THEY’D GONE TO BED GRUMPY. Lucas had packed that night, woke, groaning, at 6:55, and lay thinking about getting shot, and about the problems of the street people, until the alarm was ten seconds from erupting. He reached out and clicked it off, rolled over, and put his arm around Weather. “Love you, babe.”

Weather muttered into her pillow, “Thank you. Let me know when you’re out of the bathroom.”

“You still pissed off at me?”

“No. I got over it at three o’clock when I realized I was completely right.”

“God bless you, Weather. You’re a good person.”



* * *



—

LUCAS GOT CLEANED UP, dressed himself in a blue, lightweight wool suit from Figueroa & Prince, a tailor in Washington, with just a bit of extra room on the left-side hip to accommodate his gun. Black oxfords from George Cleverley, a Brioni shirt in pale blue stripes, and an Hermès tie completed the ensemble. He checked himself in a three-way mirror and thought that the soft colors of the suit, shirt, and tie did nothing but emphasize his grayness, putting colored threads on a scarecrow.

Weather, out of the bathroom and dressed in a T-shirt and underpants, turned him around and said, “You look great.”

“Not gray?”

“Lucas . . . you don’t have all the weight back yet, but you look good. Really good. Maybe a year or two younger, even . . .”