John Sandford: Shadow Prey

Light from the hallway flooded the room, and Lily saw movement toward her and realized it was too small to be Shadow Love: maid.

She pivoted to a shooting line past the falling woman and saw Shadow Love in the doorway, his gun arm out toward her. She was still turning past the woman, and then he was gone, his arm trailing behind, like a bat in a drag bunt. Lily was still following with the.45 when Shadow Love pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit her in the chest.

Lillian Rothenburg went down like a tenpin.

Lucas was chatting with a gambler outside a riverfront bar when his handset beeped. He stepped off the curb, reached through the open window of the Porsche and thumbed the transmit switch.

"Yeah. Davenport." The sun had set and a chill wind was blowing off the river. He stuck his free hand in his pants pocket and hunched his back against the cold.

"Lucas, Sloan says to meet him at Hennepin Medical Center just as fast as you can get there," the dispatcher said. "He says it's heavy-duty. Front entrance."

"Okay. Did he say what it's about?"

After a second's hesitation, the dispatcher said, "No. But he said lights and sirens and get your ass over there."

"Five minutes," Lucas said.

Lucas left the gambler standing on the sidewalk and pushed the Porsche across the bridge, south through the warehouse district to the medical center, wondering all the time. A break? Somebody nailed a Crow? There were three squad cars and a remote television truck at emergency receiving. Lucas wheeled around front, dumped the car in a no-parking space, flipped down the sunshade with the police ID and walked up the steps. Sloan stood waiting behind the glass doors, and Lucas saw a patrol captain and a woman sergeant standing in the lobby. They seemed to be staring at him. Sloan pushed the glass door open, and when Lucas stepped inside he linked his arm through Lucas'.

"Got your shit together?" Sloan asked. His face was white, drawn, deadly serious.

"What the fuck you talking about?" Lucas said, trying to pull away. Sloan hung on.

"Lily's been shot," Sloan said.

For just a second, the world stopped, like a freeze frame in a movie. A guy being wheeled across the lobby in a wheel-chair: frozen. A woman behind an information desk: caught with her mouth half open, staring carplike at Lucas and Sloan. All stopped. Then the world jerked forward again and Lucas heard himself saying, "My fuckin' Christ." Then bleakly, "How bad?"

"She's on the table," Sloan said. "They don't know what they got. She's breathing."

"What happened?" Lucas said.

"You okay?" asked Sloan.

"Ah, man…"

"A guy-Shadow Love-forced a maid to open her hotel room. Lily was taking a bath, but she got to her gun, and there was some kind of fight and he shot her. He got away."

"Motherfucker," Lucas said bitterly. "We were over looking at Clay's hotel security, we never thought about hers."

"The maid's all shook up, but she's looked at a picture and she thinks it was Shadow…"

"I don't give a fuck about that, what about Lily? What are the docs saying? Is she bad? Come on, man."

Sloan turned away, shrugged, then turned back and gestured helplessly. "You know the fuckin' docs, they ain't gonna say shit because of the malpractice insurance. They don't want to say she's gonna make it, then have her croak. But one of the hotel guys was in combat in Vietnam. He says she was hit hard. He said if she'd of been in Vietnam, it would of depended on how fast they got her back to a hospital whether she made it… He thinks the slug took a piece of lung, and he rolled her up on her side to keep her from drowning in blood… The paramedics were there in two or three minutes, so… I don't know, Lucas. I think she'll make it, but I don't know."

Sloan led the way through the hospital to the surgical suite. Daniel was already there with a Homicide cop.

"You okay?" Daniel asked.

"What about Lily?"

"We haven't heard anything yet," Daniel said, shaking his head. "I just ran over from the office."

"It's Shadow Love, you know. Doing security work for the Crows."

"But why?" Daniel's forehead wrinkled. "We're not that close to them. And there's no percentage in killing Lily, not for political reasons. I'm a politician and they're politicians, and I can see what they're doing. It makes sense, in a bizarre way. They were so careful to explain the others-Andretti, the judge in Oklahoma, the guy in South Dakota. This doesn't fit. Neither did Larry. Or your snitch."

"We don't know exactly what's going on," Lucas said, his voice on the edge of desperation. "If I could just find something… some little hangnail of information, just a fuckin' scrap… anything."

They thought about it in silence for a moment, then Daniel, in a lower voice, said, "I called her husband."

Two hours later, long done with conversation, they were staring bleakly at the opposite wall of the corridor when the doors from the operating suite banged open. A redheaded surgeon came through, still wrapped in a blue surgical gown dappled with blood. She snapped the mask off her face and tossed it into a bin already half full of discarded masks and gowns, and began peeling off the gown. Daniel and Lucas pushed off the wall and stepped toward her.

"I'm good," she said. She tossed the used gown in the discard bin and wiggled her fingers in front of her face. "Seriously gifted."

"She's okay?" Lucas asked.

"You the family?" the surgeon asked, looking from one of them to the other.

"The family's not here," Lucas said. "They're on their way from New York. I'm her partner and this is the chief."

"I've seen you on TV," she said to Daniel, then looked back at Lucas. "She'll be okay unless something weird happens. We took the slug out-it looks like a light thirty-eight, if you're interested. It entered through her breast, broke a rib, pulped up a piece of her lung and stuck in the muscle wall along the rib cage in back. Cracked the rib in back too. She's gonna hurt like hell."

"But she'll make it?" Daniel said.

"Unless something weird happens," the surgeon nodded. "We'll keep her in intensive care overnight. If there aren't any problems, we'll have her sitting up and maybe walking around her bed in a couple of days. It'll take longer before she's feeling right, though. She's messed up."

"Aw, Jesus, that's good," said Lucas, turning to Daniel. "That's decent."

"Bad scars?" asked Daniel.

"There'll be some. With that kind of wound, we can't fool around. We had to get in to see what was going on. We'll have the entry wound from the slug, and then the surgical scars where I went in. In a couple or three years, the entry wound will be a white mark about the size and shape of a cashew on the lower curve of her breast. In five years, the surgical scars will be white lines maybe an eighth-inch across. She's olive-complected, so they'll show more than they would on a blonde, but she can live with them. They won't be disfiguring."

"When can we see her?"

The surgeon shook her head. "Not tonight. She won't be doing anything but sleeping. Tomorrow, maybe, if it's necessary."

"No sooner?"

"She's been shot," the surgeon said with asperity. "She doesn't need to talk. She needs to heal."

David Rothenburg came in at two o'clock in the morning on a cattle-car flight out of Newark, the only one he could get. Lucas met him at the airport. Daniel wanted to send Sloan, or go himself, but Lucas insisted. Rothenburg was wearing a rumpled blue seersucker suit and a wine-colored bow tie with a white shirt; his hair was messed up and he wore half-moon reading glasses down on his nose. Lucas had talked to the airline about the shooting, and Rothenburg was the first person out of the tunnel into the gate area. He had a black nylon carry-on bag in his left hand.