The Lucas Davenport Collection, Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  Lucas took a sip of the beer and nodded, and the bartender went down the bar, to the only other customer sitting on a stool. Lucas took another sip, then turned and looked at the rooms, clusters of black-garbed Goths on their night out, mostly wine with a little beer here and there, quiet enough. The guy picked out by Jerry wasn’t wearing anything like a cowboy hat, Lucas thought; it was the kind of hat you’d wear with a cape, or with a pencil-thin mustache. Lucas turned back around, took another sip, and the bartender laughed with the other guy down the bar. Good time to move. . . .

  Lucas stepped over to the booth where the hat guy was, with two other Goths, one male and one female, and took out his ID and said, “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held out the ID, and the three of them looked at it doubtfully, and he said, “Some of you knew Frances Austin, and I’m trying to figure out what happened there. I’ve got a photo kit. . . . Could you tell me if this is Frances?”

  The girl said, “I didn’t know her,” but the two guys did, and they shared the photo kit, and both shook their heads. “It looks a little like her, but the hair’s wrong, and this woman is skinnier than Frances. She had a little heft to her. Not fat, but she wasn’t this small.”

  The hat guy looked over the back of the booth and said, “Hey, Darrell, look at this.”

  In a couple of minutes, a half-dozen Goths had checked the photo kit, and asked why he didn’t have a regular photograph, and then one of them said, “This isn’t Frances. This is the fairy Goth. I heard you guys were looking for her.”

  Lucas nodded. “The fairy Goth. You sure?”

  “Yeah. I saw her,” the guy said. “In this picture she looks a little like Frances, but she doesn’t look like her in real life. She’s smaller and skinnier and darker.”

  “You know both of them.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know the fairy, I just saw her one night. I didn’t know anybody was looking for her until tonight.” He glanced at the bartender. “Jerry told me. Anyway, they are definitely different people.”

  “Well, shoot,” Lucas said. But he’d known that. Frances Austin was dead. He spent a couple of minutes taking down names.

  Then, an odd event.

  A dark-haired man, with a funny fuzzy mustache, in sunglasses and a leather jacket, stepped through the back door and looked directly at Lucas, held his eyes until he saw Lucas look up at him, held them for another beat, then backed out through the door.

  Wanted to talk privately?

  Lucas said, “Excuse me,” and went after him.

  The alley behind the building, where Dick Ford had been killed, was illuminated by a single electric lamp above the A1 door, and by a streetlight down at the end of the alley. The mustachioed man was down there, at the end of the alley, looking at the door when Lucas came through, and behind him a slender dark-haired woman who darted out of sight. Lucas took a step that way, aware of the litter and the Coke can to his left, the uneven brick surface, and then the man made a gesture with his right hand, and everything seemed to go sideways.

  In the first millisecond, Lucas continued with the step he was halfway into; in the second millisecond he recognized the gesture; and in the third millisecond he may have thought, Gun . . . and his hand started moving toward the pistol on his hip. Then the man opened fire, white sparkles and firecracker bangs and Lucas caught the closing steel door with his hand and lurched back behind it, feeling pain in his left leg, and he sagged against the wall, fumbling his pistol out.

  He was hurt and bleeding, he thought, and he peeked, heard people shouting in the club, and he saw the man running out of the alley. There was something wrong with him, fire in his leg, but Lucas lurched that way, and he thought about getting hit in the groin and all the arteries down there and he followed his pistol down the alley, limping, hopping, hurting, then he was at the corner and he heard a car accelerating hard, around the corner, a half-block away, out of sight, and then he thought, Hope it didn’t hit me in the balls hope it didn’t hit me in the balls . . .

  And the pain came in a wave.

  He lurched back to the bar and the crowd growing around the door, waving his pistol with one hand, and he groaned, “I got shot,” and he sat down in the alley just outside the door, under the light, and people were shouting about ambulances and cops, and one of the Goth women said, “I’m a nurse, let me look at it,” and she and one of the Goth guys got his jeans down and they looked at his bloody thigh.

  “No artery,” she said, looking up at him. “You’re bleeding. We’ve got to get you to the hospital, but it’s not pumping, it’s not pumping, it’s through-and-through.” She shouted over her shoulder, “Ask Jerry if he’s got a first-aid kit.” And to Lucas: “We gotta get some pressure on it. Get some pressure on it.”

  Jerry shouted, “Cops are on the way, ambulance on the way.”

  The cops were there in one minute: a red-faced blond and his black partner, who looked down and said, “Holy shit, Davenport, man, what happened?”

  “Motherfucker mustache guy shot me,” Lucas said.

  The Goth nurse was pressing an antique gauze pad, from a thirty-year -old first-aid kit, against the hole in his thigh. “I’m working the Austin case, ahhh . . . and the Dick Ford case, with Harry Anson,” Lucas told the cop. The leg was on fire, was burning up. He grunted to the nurse, “Goddamn, that hurts. That hurts.” And to the cop again, “Call Anson. Guy ambushed me. Middle height, black hair, mustache, black leather jacket, had a car parked around the corner. Might have a limp. Jesus, that hurts.”

  The ambulance was there a minute later and they put him on a gurney and ran him out, and the EMT started running down his list, asking about aspirin and street drugs and heart medications, and Lucas answered and then got his cell phone out and the EMT said, “You can’t use that here,” and Lucas said, “Bullshit. I’m gonna call my wife before anybody else does.”

  He did and it was confusing, but she was coming. Because his mind was still operating in some cold not-quite-shocked mode, he made one more call, almost fumbling the phone as he worked down through his call list. But he got it, finally, and Alyssa Austin answered the phone. He hung up without saying anything: but Austin was at home. If the woman he saw running away was the fairy, and it could have been, then Austin was not her.

  The ambulance made a swooping move and one of the EMTs said something he didn’t understand, and then the doors were popping open: the hospital. He’d been there before, rolling down a hallway looking up at the passing lights, talking to the docs in their scrubs. One of the docs said, “Sir, you understand me? Sir? It’s more than a couple of stitches, you’ve got a hole there and I’m going to have to clean it out? Do you understand that, sir?”

  They were pulling his pants off as they talked and Lucas asked, “What’d it hit?”

  “Your leg; I’m going to have to clean it out, okay? We have your permission to clean it out?”

  “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”

  “Do you take a heart aspirin or Plavix or Coumadin, any drugs that you think might affect . . .”

  Some time passed; he didn’t know exactly how much, and then he was moving again. He was out of his clothing and there was something cold and wet on his leg and belly and nurses were pushing and pulling on him, transferring him to an operating table, and a masked man looked down at him and then he went away for a while. . . .

  Weather was sitting white-faced in a chair next to the bed when he came back. He was in a recovery room, and she must’ve gotten in on her physician’s ID. He groaned, “Ah, man,” and she stood up clutching a purse to her chest and she began to weep and said, “Oh, God you scared me, goddamn, you scared me. . . .”

  Lucas said, “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.”

  9

  At the surgeon’s insistence—backed up by a brook-no-argument Weather—Lucas stayed in the hospital overnight, all the next day and the next night, forced to sleep on his back, which he never did. By the end of it, he had a crippling
ache at the juncture of his back and butt.

  Before that, though, he’d been heavily fussed over.

  The morning after the shooting, at first light, the surgeon showed up. End of his shift. He looked at the wound and said, “I do good work.”

  “Everybody keeps saying, ‘It wasn’t much,’” Lucas said.

  “It really wasn’t,” the surgeon agreed. He was a small, compact, swarthy man in good shape; looked like a handball player. “But man, it should have been. One inch to the left, it would have taken out your femoral artery. You’d have been forty-sixty getting to the hospital before you bled out. Two inches to the right, and we have massive genital involvement. You’d still be on the table, with the microsurgeons trying to sort out the pieces.”

  “Ah, jeez.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, we’re gonna keep you here today at least, overnight, and maybe tomorrow, depending,” the doc said. “There was some crap in the wound, material from your jeans. I got it pretty clean, but we want to watch it.”

  “Is it gonna hurt?”

  “On a scale of one to ten, about a five, to start, then going to a three, and then fading away,” the surgeon said. “But it’ll go away pretty quick. You’ll be good as new in a couple of weeks. Or three or four. Depending.”

  Weather showed up. She’d gone home when Lucas had been given a sleeping aid the night before, mostly to comfort the kids, and hustled back in as the surgeon was leaving. They talked for two minutes, out of Lucas’s earshot, and he heard them laughing, and then Weather came in and said, “You stay in bed all day, and all night, pee in a bottle like a good boy, and maybe go home tomorrow.”

  “What were you laughing about?” Lucas asked.

  “Ah, nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Ah, it’s pretty funny.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Well, they didn’t know what they were going to have to do to you last night, so when they put you on the table, they scrubbed you up and . . . shaved. You got what we call a winky cut.”

  “Aww . . .” Lucas pulled the robe apart and looked. A nether Mohawk, actually, both sides shaved, with a strip left up the middle. “Awww, man . . .”

  They gave him Egg Beaters and a muffin for breakfast, which the breakfast lady said was heart-healthy, but seemed to Lucas to be nutrition-deadly. There couldn’t have been more than fifty calories in it.

  “Quit complaining,” Weather said. “There are little children starving in Texas.”

  Anson showed up at eight o’clock, as Weather was gathering up her purse to leave. She stayed to listen.

  Lucas told the story again, in minute detail and gave Anson his car keys, and Anson said he’d have a cop drive the Porsche over to Lucas’s place. “He might want to take a dogleg through Milwaukee, first. He’s kind of a motorhead,” he said, and Lucas said, “He probably shouldn’t; I’m not in that good a mood.”

  “You saw the shooter.”

  “Yeah, but I couldn’t positively identify him if I saw him again,” Lucas said. “I saw him twice, once when he stuck his head in the door, and once in the alley. He had a mustache and sunglasses, and the sunglasses should have tipped me off. . . . In the alley, I only got to look at him for half a second before I started tap-dancing.”

  And he remembered: “By the way, about two minutes after I got shot, in the ambulance, I called Alyssa Austin. She was at home.”

  “So she’s not the fairy,” Anson said.

  “She could be, but then the woman in the alley wasn’t. And I have no idea who else she’d be, or the guy with the mustache, or why they’d want to shoot at me. I’ll tell you something else: I think the mustache might have been a Halloween mustache. I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking about when he looked at me in the bar, and there was something wrong with it.”

  Anson had heard about the raid on Antsy Toms and wondered if the shooter might have been a Lithuanian crazy, getting some payback. But they couldn’t figure out how one of Antsy’s pals would know that Lucas would be at the A1.

  “One of the Goths might have called the shooter when I came in—and it’s possible that they thought that I was you,” Lucas told Anson. “You were walking around talking to all those guys today . . . you might want to take it a little easy.”

  “I’ll think about that,” Anson said.

  “So what’d you get out of the alley?”

  “No shells, so the guy was using a revolver. A .38. We’ve got three slugs, two of them pretty bad ricochets—he seemed to be shooting way low, we’ve got at least one hit right about where your feet would have been. The third one was higher and went into a nice soft wood two-by-four at the corner of the door. It’s in pretty good shape, so if we can find the pistol, we can match it up.”

  “Excellent,” Lucas said.

  “And we got a half-assed witness,” Anson said. “A guy walking back home with a sandwich heard the shots, and he looked back down the street and saw two people running, one tall and one short, man and a woman. Just what you saw. He also saw their vehicle. He doesn’t know what kind, but it was a pickup.”

  “That’s something,” Lucas said. “But not much.”

  When Anson was gone, Weather asked, “Antsy Toms? What was that?”

  But Lucas had drifted away from her, rerunning the shooting in his head. The shooter had been too far from him—too far for accurate shooting. Probably sixty or seventy feet. Lucas could see him jerking at the trigger with each shot, the gun barrel all over the place.

  And in that mind’s-eye image, Lucas counted off the shots: he’d been shot at, he thought, six times, and hit once. He might have been hit in the head or the heart or he might not have been hit at all—the shooter was a fuckin’ amateur, and he’d been nervous and probably scared and maybe desperate.

  What had Lucas done to make anybody desperate?

  "Antsy Toms,” Weather repeated. “Isn’t he the guy who beat up those officers?”

  His boss, Rose Marie Roux, came by for a look: “Jesus, Lucas, you’re supposed to be the brains of the operation. You’re not supposed to get shot in alleys. Not any more. Those days are over.”

  “Hey, I didn’t go looking for it.” He got the flash again: the guy’s hand pumping out the bullets. How long? A second and a half?

  “Then what were you doing in the alley?”

  “Working. And this isn’t much—shit, I’ve been hurt worse than this doing home repair,” he said.

  The governor’s chief hatchet man called, and Carol, his secretary, called, crying, and then Del stopped by, and the governor himself called.

  Del wanted to look at the bullet hole, but was satisfied by looking at the bruising. “Nasty. But remember that time Gutmann got shot through both cheeks of his ass . . . ?”

  Alyssa Austin called, and wanted to come see him, but he told her he was too tired.

  Lucas spent much of the day watching TV and reading the papers, saw pictures of himself on all the nightly newscasts—top story on two stations—and tried to think about the case, but found himself sleeping, instead. The photo kit of the fairy was featured as the possible Female Assassin, and a Goth, interviewed at the shooting site behind the A1, described her as gorgeous, and the TV guy inflated that to “mysterious raven-haired beauty.”

  Weather came and went. Sometimes, her chair was empty, and he’d close his eyes for just a second, and when he opened them, she’d be there.

  After a second restless night, the surgeon came in at the end of his shift, looked at the wound, pronounced it not bad, and told him that he could go home, but he’d still have to be signed off by the medicine guy, who’d given him a couple of prescriptions for pain pills. The wound itself was a harsh line of stitches, purple and black, and around it, a bruise the size of his hand, and growing.

  He had Egg Beaters again, and read stories about himself in the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune. Ruffe, the crime reporter, had taken care of him, but the editorial page had done a snide, “Davenport, Again” story, whic
h recalled that Lucas had once beaten up a pimp and had had to leave the Minneapolis police force for a while. The paper did not mention that the pimp had church-keyed one of Lucas’s street sources.

  Weather showed up and said, “They redid that story about me doing the tracheotomy.”

  “Yeah, I saw.” The story about him getting shot in the throat by a little girl, his life saved with a pocketknife . . . Hardly ever thought about that anymore, but when he touched his throat, he could still feel the scar that Weather had left behind. She asked him once if he’d married her because of it, and he’d grinned and said, “No, but if you hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have married you.”

  “What?”

  “Think about it.”

  He finally got out at 11 A.M., wheeled to Weather’s car in a wheelchair, given a crutch for the last four feet. In the car, as he settled down, she said, “If you were a little smarter, I’d worry about post-traumatic shock.” Her eyes caught his when she said it.

  “That’s no way to talk to a patient,” he said.

  The fact was, he hurt more this second morning than he had the first morning-after. His leg now felt as though he’d been hit with a baseball bat, rather than a pointer. He was grateful for the pain-killers.

  He stayed home for the day, and made the housekeeper lie for him: when the phone rang, and it was media, she told them he was at work. He first lay in bed and then on the couch in the living room, and read a book called The Seasons of Tulul, by Egon Lass, about living with Bedouins, and a cop novel, Death Comes for the Fat Man, by Reginald Hill.

  He couldn’t get comfortable with the leg, and the housekeeper bothered him with food, as though she were feeding a favored canary. The pain in the leg seemed to be diminishing when he made two trips to the bathroom, but flared up again late in the day.

  They all ate dinner together, and Letty talked about bullet wounds she’d seen, which were numerous, considering her age, and compared his current wound to a hangnail.

  He snapped at her: “It might be a hangnail, but it hurts like hell,” and she suddenly got teary, and pushed away from the table and stalked out of the room and when he called, “Hey,” she called back, “I was just trying to cheer you up.”