Middle Of Nowhere

offered only a blurred image, but he could still see his face. He could still pass for late thirties. Mid-thirties in low light. In truth, forty had come and gone a few years ago.

   These days he was making an effort. No more neckties bearing catsup stains, no more permanent wrinkles in his khakis. A single comment from Liz about how "the run-down-professor look adds ten years" had cleaned up his act. Since then, he'd looked like a new man.

   The burn came out of the bottom of the pan, but his elbow ached.

   "You know I'll be supportive," Liz said, now tossing the wet wash rag into the sink. "But, Lou, please, try to see that it stays outside the family. I'm afraid for you, for us—" She didn't need to complete the sentence. Those threatening phone calls of the past few nights were on both their minds.

   As if on cue, the phone rang. Liz looked over at her husband. They had talked about just letting it ring, to allow the machine to pick up, but Liz instinctively lifted the receiver from its cradle and held it out to him.

   Boldt dried his hands and accepted the phone. Liz pushed through the swinging door and into the family room.

   "Hello?" Boldt said into the phone.

   For a moment he believed whoever had called might have hung up. But life these days just wasn't ever that simple. "Hello?" he repeated.

   He heard music, not a voice. His stomach turned: another threat? Pop music—a woman's plaintive voice. "Hello?" he repeated a third time. At first, he took it as wallpaper—background music—and waited for a voice. But then he listened more clearly. It was Shawn Colvin, a recording artist he admired, whose lyrics now gripped his chest. "Get on out of this house," the anguished voice cried out in song.

   Boldt understood, though too late: it wasn't a threat, but a warning.

   The best explanation for why he ripped the phone from the kitchen wall was that he'd forgotten to let go of the receiver as he ran into the family room to alert Liz, failed to let go until he heard the explosion of breaking glass from the other side of the swinging door. At that instant, both the cop and the husband and the father in him warred over his having locked up his handgun in a closet safe in the bedroom—family policy whenever he crossed the threshold into their home.

   He burst through the swinging door, his wife's screams ringing in his ears. He heard a car racing away at high speed. Liz lay on the floor in a sea of broken glass. She wasn't moving.

   "No!" he hollered, lunging across the room toward his fallen wife. He heard one of the kids wake up crying. Liz had a strange mixture of fear and confusion in her eyes. He would not soon forget that look . . . it seemed to contain an element of blame.

   He reached out to her and rolled her onto her back. Her forearms bled. Her face was scratched, though not cut badly. She mumbled incoherently at first.

   "Shhh," he whispered back at her.

   "I thought it was a bomb," she mumbled.

   Underneath her lay a brick. It had been painted policeman's blue.

C H A P T E R

4

"Feeling a touch of the Flu coming on, I hope?" Mac Krishevski asked. Boldt shoved the man back into the living room, kicked the Krishevski front door closed and removed his gun from his own holster, setting the piece down by a bowling trophy alongside a faux-marble lamp made out of formed plastic. The gesture made it clear to Krishevski that no weapons were to be involved. Beyond that, there were no promises made.

   "Lieutenant?" a cocky but concerned Krishevski queried.

   Harold "Mac" Krishevski reminded Boldt more of the man's Irish mother than his Polish father, though he'd never met either. The capillaries in his cheeks had exploded into a frenzied maze of red spider webs. His nose, with its sticky, moonlike surface, fixed to his face like a dried autumnal gourd. His rusty hair, awkwardly combed forward to hide the acreage of baldness, failed miserably in this purpose, so that in strong overhead light, the shadows that were cast down onto his scalp looked like cat scratches. His teeth belonged to a heavy smoker, his plentiful chins to an overeater or beer drinker. A man in his early fifties, he wore his Perma nent Press shirt unbuttoned at the collar, a threadbare undershirt attempting to contain escaping chest hair.

   "You want an appointment," Krishevski suggested, attempting to sound in control but clearly under the effect of Boldt's fixed stare, "you gotta call ahead."

   "My wife dove onto this, thinking it was a bomb." Boldt tossed the blue brick into the center of the room. "She cut her arms on the broken glass. We just got back from having her sewn up."

   Boldt believed that, as president of the Police Officers Guild, Krishevski bore the responsibility not only for the walkout but also for the blue brick.

   "Teenage vandalism," Krishevski said. "It's amazing how the kids go wild when there are fewer officers on the beat."