Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Gonna be tough. This is a small town,” Terry said.

  “If you jump right on the story, it oughta work. I’m not worried about rumors: I just don’t want Micky on the TV news, where out-of-towners are gonna hear about him. These guys, these Russians, I don’t think they have local sources. They won’t hear the rumors.”

  “Do what I can,” Terry said.

  LUCAS HAD MET Micky Andreno on a case in St. Louis. Andreno had retired early from the St. Louis Police Department, had a decent pension and a part-time job at a golf course, and, in his middle-fifties, was good undercover. He looked more like an Italian grocer than a cop. Lucas had used him twice before, on minor lookout jobs.

  They found an all-night diner out on the highway, got a booth in the back where they could talk, and ordered cheeseburgers. Andreno said, half laughing, “Hell of a night.”

  “I’m sorry about this,” Lucas said. “I never thought you’d get tangled up in anything rough.”

  “Hey, I like it,” Andreno said. “I’m having a good time. I’m just sorry I got busted so fast. I could use an ID. If I’d had an ID, it would have cooled things out a lot quicker.”

  “I’ll get you something,” Lucas said. “When did you get here?”

  “Flew in at noon. Rented a van.”

  “Nothing going on until this?”

  “Hard to tell. Must’ve been two hundred people in and out of the bar. Any one of them could have been talking to Spivak that I couldn’t see.”

  “Nothing we can do about that,” Lucas said.

  “One thing: the guy who hanged Spivak. Spivak said tall and thin and dark haired. I don’t think tall. And he didn’t look especially thin, either. I don’t know about the hair. I couldn’t see him when he was inside and only got a quick shot when he came banging out of there. But . . .”

  Lucas nodded. “Spivak is bullshitting us. About a guy who tried to hang him.”

  “It’s a goddamn good thing I didn’t go chasing this asshole, if he really had a silencer on the gun. Don’t want to go running after any pro fuckin’ executioners with nothing in your hand but your dick.”

  “You had your dick in your hand?”

  The waitress came with the cheeseburgers; she had a small smile on her face, and Lucas thought she must have overheard the last question. When she was gone, Andreno said, “So. I’m headed home?” He sounded unhappy.

  “No. I’ve got another thing for you.”

  “Excellent,” Andreno said. He rubbed his hands together and looked around. “I like this town. This is like a town in the old country. Maybe they could use an Italian restaurant.”

  “They’d have to find somebody who could cook Italian food,” Lucas said.

  “Little wine, little checkered tablecloths, fat guy with an accordion . . .”

  Lucas drifted away for a moment, then shook his head: “That fuckin’ Nadya. She’s fuckin’ with me, Micky.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’d beat the shit out of her if I were you,” Andreno said. “Pass the ketchup.”

  THOUGH IT WAS late when Lucas got back in his truck, he decided to call Andy Harmon, the FBI counterintelligence contact. Once clear of Virginia, on the highway, he found Harmon’s cell-phone number in his address book. Harmon answered on the first ring, in a quiet, wide-awake voice: “Harmon.”

  “This is Davenport. You awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you always awake?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think you went around sleepy all the time.”

  “Is this about something, or did you just call to chat?”

  Lucas told him—the hanging of Spivak and the call from the unknown woman. He didn’t mention Andreno. When he was done, Harmon whistled: “This is turning into something.”

  “The big question is, do I confront Nadya? She must’ve sicced this hangman on Spivak. Unless it was Reasons, but I don’t see Reasons being involved in any of this.”

  “He has a Russian wife.”

  “That crossed my mind, but I’ll tell you: I don’t believe it. From what Reasons has said, she was one of those people who got out of Russia when the getting was good. She worked for an optician in Russia, and she works for an optician here.”

  “So it’s just a coincidence . . .” Harmon said it with a brooding tone, doubt right on the surface.

  “Hey, it’s your call. I’m not going to spend any time with it, but if you want to check Reasons out, be my guest. My main thing is Nadya. I feel it in my bones, she set this thing up with Spivak.”

  “Let me make some calls. I’ll talk to you in the morning. Don’t do anything before then.”

  “What time in the morning?”

  “I’ll call you before nine.”

  “All right. But listen, Andy: people are being killed. I don’t much give a shit about spies or anything you guys deal with, but I get a little pissed when people are being murdered and I can’t stop it. So . . . come up with something. Or I will.”

  “Take it easy, okay? Take it easy. I’ll call before nine o’clock.”

  10

  SVOBODA’S BAKERY IN downtown Hibbing had a U-shaped glassed-in counter with the cash register at the bottom of the U. If a customer wanted bread, which was kept in the case to the left of the cash register, he had to walk between fifteen running feet of glazed, frosted, powdered, and jelly doughnuts, cherry, apple, and blueberry popovers, poppy-seed kolaches, six kinds of Danish including prune, apple, and apricot, and a variety of strudels, cakes, jelly rolls, and cookies.

  Two small bathroom-style exhaust fans, mounted in the corners of the wall behind the cash register, blew odors from the ovens into the sales space, a mixture of yeast, dough, spice, and just a touch of sea salt. Few customers made it back to the street without a load of extra calories.

  LEON WITOLD AND his wife, Wanda, arrived two minutes after the bakery opened at six in the morning. Karen Svoboda, the stay-at-home daughter, was standing at the cash register and tipped her head toward the back. The Witolds nodded at her and went on past the cash register, through the preparation and oven rooms, down a short corridor past the single rest room to a small employees’ lounge. The lounge was a cube with yellowed walls and a flaking ceiling, furnished with three tippy plastic-topped tables, a dozen folding chairs from Wal-Mart, and an E-Z clean vinyl floor. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, disinfectant, and warm cookies.

  Rick Svoboda, a round-faced man with steel gray hair, was pushing chairs around. When the Witolds walked in, he said, his eyes downcast, worried, “Hi, guys.”

  “You know what it’s about?” Leon Witold asked. Leon was an accountant, a tall, thin-lipped, thin-faced man with overgrown eyebrows.

  “Something serious,” Svoboda said. “Marsha Spivak called last night and said Anton was in the hospital. Somebody tried to hang him—and she thinks it’s the Russians.”

  “Oh my God,” Wanda said. The blood had drained from her narrow face, and she pushed a knuckle against her teeth. “Hanged him?” she breathed.

  “He’s not dead, but the cops are all over the place,” said Svoboda. There were footsteps in the hallway outside, and Grandpa Walther was in the doorway, ancient, shaking a little, his eyes blue as the sky. Then Grandma appeared, in a wheelchair pushed by their grandson, Carl.

  Svoboda looked at Carl and then Grandpa, who said, “He’s been in for five years. I’ve been teaching him for more than twelve.”

  “Aw, boy. Does Jan know?” Svoboda kept his eyes on Carl, who looked back with the flat stare of a garter snake.

  “No. She turns her back on us, so we tell her nothing,” Grandpa said.

  “Carl’s her kid,” Svoboda said.

  “I’m in,” Carl said. “I don’t care what Mom thinks.”

  “I’m not sure what the others will say,” Leon Witold said.

  “It doesn’t matter what they say,” Grandpa said. His voice had an edge of the Stalin steel. “He is in. He knows our story. He kno
ws enough to send every one of us to prison. Some of us were younger than he is, when we got in. He’s our future, and he’s in.”

  Svoboda rubbed his face. “Oh, brother. I thought it would stop with us.”

  “Never stop,” Grandpa said. “We have a duty.”

  MORE PEOPLE: Marsha Spivak, Anton’s wife, a heavyset woman with a hound-dog face, a babushka over her hair, the woman who raised the alarm.

  “Good to see you, good to see you,” she said. “My Anton is terrible hurt, terrible hurt . . .” She’d been born in the United States, but somehow managed a middle-European accent. She’d been to church already, not to Mass, just inside the door to dab her forehead with holy water and to say a prayer for Anton. She was a Communist, all right, but of the practical sort, the just-in-case kind, who had no personal problem with Jesus.

  Janet Svoboda, as round faced as her husband, blond, with a long nose that looked a little like one of her bagel sticks, came in with a pot of coffee and a tray of doughnuts. “Karen will stay at the counter,” she said. “What else can I get for everybody?”

  Marsha Spivak sat heavily in a folding chair, dabbed at her face, took a jelly doughnut and said, “Maybe a little milk to wash down the doughnuts?”

  “Oh, sure,” and Janet darted away to get a carton of milk.

  Bob and Carol Spivak came in, two walking fireplugs, twin brother and sister. They both looked at Carl Walther, and then Bob stooped to kiss his mother, who burst into tears again, finished her first doughnut, and took a second.

  Nancy Witold Spencer came in: “Hi, Mama.” She didn’t speak to her father or look at him, but he said, weakly, “Hi, Nance.” She nodded, a bare acknowledgment: they’d had a financial falling-out over a loan to her dance studio.

  “Everybody got a seat?” Rick asked.

  Everybody had a seat; the men, in plaid cotton shirts and blue jeans, the women in jeans and pastel blouses and cardigans with the sleeves pushed up. Leon Witold, working his way through a doughnut, said, “Boy, them are good, gimme a little more of that coffee, will ya, Janet?” They were using small paper cups and she gave him a refill and he said, again, “Boy, them are good doughnuts. I gotta get down here more often.”

  “We could use the business,” Rick Svoboda said.

  “Ah, bullshit, Rick, you’re richer ’n Bob Dylan.” Bob Dylan had been born and raised in Hibbing, and was the local standard for obscene wealth.

  “I sure wish.” After arranging the chairs, Svoboda took an electronic box out of a paper sack, pulled out an antenna, and walked around checking for bugs. He didn’t find any. He never had; the only thing he’d ever detected was transistor radios. “Okay, guys—Marsha called for this and she is going to tell us what happened last night.”

  “First things first,” Leon Witold said. “I want to know about Carl, before we talk.”

  Grandpa Walther cleared his throat and said, “When it was time to decide, Grandma and I told him about the early days, and he was a good student. He wanted to hear. So we told him. You know Jan and Ron were breaking up, and Carl was living with us, so he began to . . . understand that something else was going on. That things were not exactly as they seemed. So, when he was far enough along, we told him: five years ago. And he is a believer. A believer on his own. A good boy. We haven’t forced it on him.”

  Carl was nodding during this, and he said, “I made up my own mind.”

  They all looked at him for a moment and then Leon said, “I hope to God that’s the truth, because you could hang all of us. And your mom, for that matter.”

  “She’s not one of us,” Carl said.

  “But she knows, and anyone who knows would be in as deep as the rest of us.”

  “If the kid is in, he’s in,” said Rick Svoboda. “Can’t go back now.” He looked at Carl for a moment, then nodded, and turned to Marsha Spivak. “So tell us what happened with Anton.”

  Marsha Spivak started leaking tears again and muttered around, trying to find a start, and then she sighed and lifted her heavy head and said, “Yesterday, the police came. They knew about the meeting in the back. Anton tells me that they had a receipt from this Russian, who has so many names now that I can’t keep track. Remember the Russian puts all the drinks on the American Express. So stupid. Why? Why? Why did we let him do that?”

  “He wanted to put it on the card so he’d have the extra unaccountable cash to go to Wal-Mart.” Svoboda said.

  “But he said he had all that money . . .”

  “Not his money. He had to account for it,” Svoboda said. “He was chipping off a couple hundred bucks, and probably a few more here and there. The stupid thing wasn’t putting it on the card—the stupid thing was keeping the receipt.”

  “He didn’t know he was going to die,” Leon Witold said. “But to get back to Anton . . .”

  Marsha Spivak dabbed at her eyes: “He told them nothing. They went away, they knew nothing. They knew only what they had on the receipt, that the Russian paid for drinks. Anton tells them that he’d never seen anybody before, he thought they were fishermen stopping on the way to the border.”

  Grandpa Walther nodded. “That’s reasonable, anyway.”

  “Of course it is.” Spivak sniffed. “They went away, but then this other man came. He sat in the bar late, the last one, and when Anton says it’s closing time, he says that he wants to talk, that he is from Russia. So Anton locks the door and turns out the lights and they go in the back and when Anton turns around, this man has a gun. He makes Anton throw a rope over a beam and put it around his neck, and then he makes him stand up on a six-pack of beer bottles—beer bottles! Anton says, ‘No!’ and the man shoots him in the ear, and Anton must stand on the beer bottles. The man wants everybody’s name, but Anton, he tells him nothing. He says he knows no names. The man says he will leave him on the beer bottles. Anton says he knows no names. And then, the man has a radio and he hears the police are coming and he kicks the beer bottles out and Anton is hanging by the neck and the man goes running out, and another man comes in and lifts up Anton and then the police come and cut the rope and they take him to the hospital . . .”

  She started weeping again and finally Svoboda said, “He never saw the guy with the gun before?”

  “No. Never.”

  “It all comes back to the fuckin’ Russians,” Leon Witold said. “We never should have met with that guy. I hope to hell nobody here had anything to do with that murder down in Duluth.” His eyes scanned across the room and stuck for a moment on Grandpa Walther.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Nancy Witold Spencer said. “We’re not operators. It must be from Russia, somehow.”

  “She’s right,” Rick Svoboda said. “There’s something going on in Russia that we don’t know about. The first guy didn’t even know for sure who we were, how many there were, who the families were.”

  “He knew about me,” Grandpa Walther said.

  “You’re the only one,” Svoboda said. “The question is, how did this second man get to Anton? Why didn’t they go back to Grandpa?”

  “Maybe they will.” Leon Witold said.

  Marsha Spivak opened her mouth to say something, but Grandpa jumped in: “We’ve been thinking about this,” Grandpa said, “And we do have an answer, Carl and I. There was a story in the newspaper about the Russian killed in Duluth, this accident, this . . .”

  “Wasn’t no accident,” Leon Witold snorted.

  “Whatever it was,” Grandpa said impatiently. “Moshalov, Oleshev, whatever his name is, is killed. We know he did not come from an official office: he was working outside the apparat. So the apparat sends its own investigator, this Rusian policewoman. I believe she must have a shadow. The story said the state police, and the Duluth police, were cooperating with the Russian. If they went to Anton, and he told them nothing, then maybe the Russian shadow went to Anton to see if Russian interrogation might work.”

  “Anton tells them nothing,” said Marsha Spivak.

  Grandpa turned to her. “
Did the police say who this other guy is, who helped Anton?”

  Carol Spivak shook her head, answering for her mother. “No. They won’t release his name because the crazy man is still on the loose. They say he was walking past the back of the business when the crazy man came running out the back, and he saw Anton hanging there, and he ran in and lifted him and then the police came.”

  Carl frowned: “That’s sounds weird.”

  Grandpa Walther nodded: “We should all ask. We should all listen. People will be talking.”

  “The main problem, as I see it, is that we have cops all over the place, asking questions. Probably the FBI and the CIA, too,” Rick Svoboda said. “They have Anton’s name, and they must suspect something. First there’s the meeting, then the Russian gets killed, then Anton gets hanged. We have to believe that they will come after him.”

  “He will say nothing,” Marsha Spivak said vehemently. Her son and daughter nodded, but Janet Svoboda said, “What if this shadow, whoever he is, catches one of you and . . . you know. What if they catch Carol, and then they call Anton and say, ‘We’ll cut her throat if you don’t answer.’ You think Anton wouldn’t answer to save his daughter’s life?”

  They had nothing to say about that, and Carol Spivak lightly pinched her Adam’s apple with two fingers, as if closing a cut.

  WANDA WITOLD SAID, “The big question now is, what do we do? We have no contact with Russia, everybody was swept away. We thought it was done.”

  “It’s not done,” Grandpa insisted. “How many times do I have to tell you, the party is . . .”

  “Not time to argue about that,” Janet Svoboda said, cutting him off. “What do we do? Do we just sit?”

  “We have no choice,” Leon Witold said. “We don’t know who this Russian is, and even if we did, what would we do about him? We’re not operators.”