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Valium hadn’t helped. He’d just had time to drive to Weather’s place, put some clothes and his shaving kit together, along with a small tube of drugs, and make it back to the airport in the Tahoe. He didn’t want to leave the Porsche in the airport ramp because it might get stolen, and even if it didn’t, he might not ever find it again. And pound for pound, he’d rather lose the Chevy than the Porsche.
    The plane failed to crash either on the way to Houston or on landing—when he really expected it, so tantalizingly close to safety—or even when it was taxiing up to the gate, and a little more than five hours after speaking to Mallard, Lucas led the parade through the gate into the terminal.
    Louis Mallard, who pronounced his name “Louie,” was a stocky, professorial man who wore gold-rimmed professorial glasses and a dark professorial suit. He had a wrestler’s neck and sometimes carried a .40-caliber automatic in a shoulder holster. Waiting with him, in a lighter-blue professorial suit, and carrying a black briefcase, was a lanky gray-haired woman named Malone. The last time Lucas had seen Malone, he’d seen quite a bit more of her.
    “Louis,” Lucas said, shaking the other man’s hand. Malone turned a cheek, and Lucas pecked it and said, “Louis tells me you got one on the line.”
    She looked at Mallard, who said hastily, “I didn’t exactly say that.”
    “Mmmm,” Malone said. To Lucas: “It’s somewhat true.”
    “Somebody conservative, well-placed in government,” Lucas suggested. “Maybe a little money of his own.” Malone was a four-time loser with a taste for artists and muscle workers.
    “No,” she said. “He’s a Sheetrocker.”
    “A Sheetrocker.” He waited for a smile, and when he didn’t get one—he got instead a defensive brow-beetling—he said, “Well, that’s good. Always jobs out there for a good Sheetrocker.”
    Before Lucas sank completely out of sight, Mallard jumped in. “He’s also a writer. He’s almost done with his novel.”
    “Okay, well, good,” Lucas said.
    “You gotta get some clothes?” Mallard asked, trying to keep the anti-Sheetrocker momentum going. “There’s a place…”
    “Nah, I’m okay. I had time to get home.” He looked around. “So where’re we going? We leave out of here?”
    “We catch a ride to another terminal,” Mallard said. “The ride’s outside.”
     
    THEY RODE TO the next terminal in a dark-blue government car, driven by a man whom Mallard never introduced. A junior agent from the Houston office, Lucas thought, who looked a little sour about the chauffeur duties. Malone rode in the front with the agent, while Lucas and Mallard rode in the back.
    During the walk to the car and the two-minute ride, Mallard quietly sketched the series of circumstances that had led to the identification of Rinker as the woman who was shot, and to the belief by the Mexican cops that a shooter from St. Louis was involved. The shooter was now dead, probably killed by a Mexican man who was still on the run. “She was pregnant,” Malone said. “They killed her lover, and when she was wounded, she lost the baby.”
    Lucas winced, and Weather’s face popped into his head. “You think she’s headed back here? Back across the border?”
    Mallard shook his head. “We don’t know. We’ve put sketches of her everywhere. Every port of entry. The problem is, she doesn’t look all that special. Mid-thirties, middle height, athletic, pretty, that’s about it. The other thing is, Rinker just got out of the hospital, so it’s possible that she’s lost some weight, and might not look like she used to.”
    Malone turned and said, over the seat, “It’s also possible that she’s just running, that she’s already in Majorca or someplace. The Mexican police have been tracing the phone calls she made from this ranch where she was recovering—there were six calls up to Missouri and two went out to banks in Mexico. We got on top of the banks