Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “If we see him outside without the rifle, we could try to rush him.”

  “We could, but he might have something else with him—the pistol he used on Jerry Reasons,” Lucas said.

  The radio guy came back: “All right, I talked to Jim, and they’re on the way, the whole bunch of them. Half hour.”

  “Let’s move in close, and then wait,” Lucas said. “Just close it up . . .”

  Nadya stayed at his elbow, her face flushed, intent.

  THE HOUSE SAT on the north side of the narrow river, with a tiny roll-out dock already pulled up on shore; a twelve-foot aluminum rowboat was turned upside down on the bank beside the dock. The house itself was surrounded by an open grassy yard that extended perhaps thirty feet on all sides, before the trees began; a few marigolds were spotted along the sidewalk to the front door. The driveway cut across the north edge of the yard, leading to the pole barn.

  The sniper went with Lucas and Nadya, with Wolfe trailing. One of the other deputies took the east side of the house, the second the west side. They sat and waited. Five minutes passed, then ten.

  And then Carl Walther burst from the house, running, rifle in hand, a fat cloth laundry bag over his shoulder. He went straight into the pole barn, head down.

  “What’s happening?” The sniper asked.

  Lucas looked at the cabin roof. “You’ve got a satellite TV in there, don’t you?” he asked Wolfe. He could see the pie-pan dish.

  “Yeah.”

  “The fuckin’ TV people saw them tearing out of the police station,” Lucas said. The Honda’s engine rumbled to life, and Carl backed out of the garage. The cloth bag was attached to a rack behind the seat, held in place with bungee cords. The rifle was in a plastic scabbard.

  “Take the tires as soon as he’s clear of the garage,” Lucas said to the sniper. “Watch your guy there in the background.”

  The sniper spoke into his shoulder radio and then the Honda was easing out of the garage. “Take it,” Lucas said.

  The sniper waited another two seconds, waiting for an angle, and then took the back tire with a burst of three shots.

  Carl tried to accelerate, but the tire flopped on the driveway and he jumped off the Honda, grabbed the gun, looked wildly in their direction, fired a single shot straight up in the air and then ran into the house again.

  “What was that about?”

  “Scared,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch. “The other guys are still twenty minutes out. I’m going to call down to him. I’ll move off your position, get as close as I can, and yell at him.”

  “What if he comes out with the gun?”

  “You have to decide. I don’t want him killed.”

  “Sure you don’t want to wait?”

  “I’m worried about what he’s thinking in there,” Lucas said. “His grandpa just killed himself.”

  LUCAS WORKED HIS way back into the woods, so the pole barn was between himself and the house. Wolfe stayed with the sniper, but Nadya followed Lucas.

  “You can come,” he said, when he saw she was coming no matter what he said, “but stay out of the way.”

  “A woman’s voice . . . ,” she said.

  “You’re the woman he once tried to kill. And he almost cut the head off another woman, if he’s the one who killed the old lady in Duluth.”

  “Still. He might believe he would be safer with me.”

  “Just stay out of the fuckin’ way, okay?”

  They slipped around the corner of the pole barn, inside, out of sight. “Now just . . . just get behind the car or something,” Lucas told Nadya.

  She was peeking around the corner of the garage access door. The house was fifty feet away, with the Honda disabled halfway between. She didn’t move, so Lucas took her by the arm and steered her toward Carl’s Chevy. “Just . . . stay.”

  “I’m not a dog,” she said.

  LUCAS WENT BACK to the garage door and shouted at the house. “Carl. We need to talk with you. Put the gun away. Put the gun away. If you shoot it at us, you’ll go to jail. We need to talk to you, son.”

  No answer. Movement on the drapes? Maybe.

  “Carl . . .”

  “Go away. You killed my grandpa.” Lucas peeked. Definite movement on the drapes on the far corner of the house. A bedroom, maybe.

  “We didn’t kill your grandpa.”

  Nadya stepped up beside him and Lucas said, “Jesus Christ, Nadya . . .”

  Nadya called, “Carl. I have just spoken to your mother. She’s afraid you’ll be hurt. She wants you to come home, Carl . . .”

  “Go away.”

  Lucas: “We can’t go away, son . . .”

  The glass broke in the window where Lucas thought he’d seen drapes moving, and Lucas shoved Nadya, hard, and went after her, pulling her down, and a second later a bullet smashed through the metal side of the building where they’d been standing.

  “Jesus . . .” He pulled at Nadya, and they scrambled behind Carl’s Chevy.

  Somebody yelled, “Davenport, you okay?”

  “We’re okay, hold your fire.”

  Another shot ripped through the garage, and then another, and small pieces of metal showered over the Chevy. Daylight streamed through the holes, and Lucas could see inch-long peels of the thin sheet steel where the slugs had punched through. Another shot didn’t hit the garage. “He’s shooting up in the woods, now,” Lucas said.

  Nadya, on her hands and knees behind the John Deere, shouted, “Carl, please, we are trying to help you.”

  Bam.

  Another shot hit the garage and maybe ricocheted off one of the snowmobiles. Wolfe wasn’t going to be happy.

  A burst of three—one of the deputies up in the woods was shooting back.

  “Hold on!” Lucas shouted. “Hold on . . . Carl, we’ve got the house covered. Come on, man, you haven’t done anything yet . . .”

  Two more shots tore through the garage. Lucas yelled, “Carl, man, you’re shooting up your own car. You’re shooting up your car, Carl . . .”

  CARL RELOADED ; he had a full load plus two for his pocket. No way out? If he could get to the garage, there was still the car, he could come flying out in the car and go the other way, they’d never think of that, he could drive out the utility access, there might be a couple of small trees and some brush in there . . . and he thought, nah, you’d never fuckin’ make it.

  Grandpa’s image flashed up in his head: Grandpa dead. The gun’s muzzle floated in front of his eyes, a few inches away. He could put the muzzle up under his chin . . . wouldn’t hurt. He’d go from here and now, to nothing, with nothing in between. Be better than landing in some prison where he’d be living in a shoe box and getting fucked by some old guy.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be underground, or a guerrilla fighter, or something—but not stuck on the bedroom floor of a crappy cabin with a half dozen shells and no food except six cans of soup and some peanut butter. When he saw the thing on TV, the cops suddenly speeding out of town, he’d thought they’d be coming, that he’d been spotted somehow, or the Wolfes had talked to somebody. He’d taken five minutes to throw a little camping equipment in a nylon laundry bag, along with the soup and peanut butter, but it was all bullshit, he really knew that—he didn’t even have a sleeping bag, or a tent, or good clothes. He’d freeze out there at night.

  The muzzle of the gun just hung there, the smell of the powder, not bad; from something to nothing, no pain, no transition . . .

  Then the guy in the garage yelled, “ . . . you’re shooting up your own car. You’re shooting up your car, Carl . . .”

  A wave of rage went through him. He worked at the fuckin’ pizza place every night for six months to buy that car, then he got screwed on the car, it was a piece of junk. But it was his car, and these people . . .

  He picked up the gun and headed for the door.

  THEN CARL CAME OUT, the front door slamming behind him. He walked, striding, angry, swift, toward the garage. />
  Lucas said, “Oh, shit, stay down . . .”

  Carl had the rifle, held low, pointed into the gararge. He screamed, “Get away from my car, get away from my fuckin’ car . . .”

  Lucas pulled his pistol and shouted, “Don’t come in here, put down your gun, I don’t want to have to shoot you.”

  “Fuck you,” Carl shouted back.

  “Carl, don’t do this,” Nadya screamed.

  Carl was moving across the front of the garage, and Lucas and Nadya tried to move back, so they could get around the back fender, but Lucas thought he was coming too fast, that he wouldn’t make it, and braced his shoulder against the back door and pointed the .45 . . .

  Boom. Carl fired the rifle, and the bullet went through the car’s windshield, Lucas thought; and maybe the back window. He heard the glass crack, not shatter, but pop with a funny glass sound, and Carl was still coming and then, Crack.

  The shot came from the woods and Carl went down, screaming, lost the gun. Lucas was around the car in three quick running steps, kicked the rifle, the kid twisting in the dirt like a broken-back dog.

  The sniper was running down the hill with his rifle, and Lucas yelled to the radio guy, “Call an ambulance, tell them we need an ambulance . . .”

  He pushed Carl down, the kid moaning in pain, checked his belt for a gun, found nothing, picked up the rifle, carried it out of arm’s reach, and put it down again.

  The sniper had stopped and was talking into his shoulder microphone; Wolfe was in the woods, standing, looking down at them. Another deputy was running in from the other side of the house.

  CARL STARTED CRYING. He looked very young, lying on the ground, with his slender blond face and pink cheeks. Lucas bent over him and asked, “Where are you hit, where are you hit?” and Carl began stuttering incoherently. The sniper came up and said, “I tried to take him in the butt. I was sure he was going to get you.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “Help me roll him.”

  Another deputy came up, and Wolfe, and then the third deputy, and they rolled Carl up on one hip and Lucas saw the blood soaking into his jeans. “Let’s get his jeans off, make sure it’s not arterial.”

  Nadya helped, held Carl’s hand, and Lucas noticed that she was bleeding; she had three or four small cuts on her face. She said to Carl, “You will be okay, you will be okay,” and stroked his hair as a mother would.

  The single, copper-jacketed bullet had penetrated the top of Carl’s left buttock, angling down, then went through his right buttock and exited. Blood was flowing from all four wounds, but the flow wasn’t too heavy. “I got a first-aid kit in the car; I’ll bring it over,” one of the deputies said. He left his rifle behind and ran off through the woods for the cars.

  “Am I gonna die?” Carl asked.

  “No, but you’re gonna spend some time in the hospital,” Lucas said. “Hell of a lot better than what you did to Oleshev or Jerry Reasons.”

  Carl, in pain, opened his mouth to say something, then a light came on in his eyes and he looked at Lucas and said, “I want a lawyer.”

  “FUCK YOU,” LUCAS SAID. He stood up and said to Nadya, “What happened to you? Let me look.”

  She stood up and Lucas took her chin between two fingers, turned her face. “You have four small cuts, probably from glass. There may still be glass . . . here. Here’s a piece.” He could see a small sliver of glass protruding from one of the cuts. He caught it between the fingernails of his two index fingers, and lifted it out. Blood tricked down her face. “That’s what happens when you don’t behave.”

  “Bad?” she asked.

  “Nah. You might have to have some glass picked out, but nobody’ll even see the cuts after they heal up. You’ll still be gorgeous.”

  He looked back at the kid, and Nadya walked away, back into the garage and behind the car. He turned back in time to see her pick up a long, thin piece of glass from the car’s trunk. “Careful with that . . . ,” he called.

  She fit it between two fingers and then lightly slapped herself twice on the forehead. Blood trickled from two long new cuts, running across her fair skin into her eyebrows.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Politics,” she said.

  34

  THE AMBULANCE TOOK a full half hour to get to the shooting scene. Carl had slipped into shock, and while the wounds were serious, they weren’t life threatening, an EMT told them—Carl was young, in good shape, and should recover quickly. Before they took off in the ambulance, the EMT looked at Nadya’s face, and found one additional small shard of glass, which he removed with a pair of tweezers.

  When he’d finished, Nadya asked Lucas to take a picture of her with the blood on her face: “This I can use,” she said. She posed next to the ambulance, with Carl’s feet visible on a gurney, her face smeared with blood.

  TWO DAYS LATER, she was gone. Lucas dropped her at Minneapolis–St. Paul International, and said, “Well: it’s been real.”

  “What is this ‘real’?”

  “I mean, it’s been interesting.”

  “I think I have been a pain in your ass,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Ah, well . . .”

  “I’m so sorry about Jerry . . .” Her smile disappeared. “This will not go away.”

  “Nothing you could do. You did nothing wrong—except run into a crazy kid.”

  “Who thought he was working for Mother Russia.” They were coming up to the security screening, and she sighed, stood on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek. “If you ever come to Russia . . .”

  “Right.”

  She smiled again. “I know—you won’t. But if you do . . .” She patted him on the chest. “Say good-bye to Weather for me. I like her very much. And I think she has a very good husband.”

  THE DAY AFTER THAT, he’d gotten comfortable with his couch again.

  He was lying on it, reading GQ, an article about a specially spun wool used by an Italian tailor, for suits that cost six thousand dollars. He would not pay six thousand dollars for a suit under any conditions, he decided. Well. It’d have to be a really good suit.

  He was reading about bespoke shoes when heard a car enter the driveway, and then a quick beep on a horn. He’d been waiting for it. He dropped the magazine, rolled off the couch, and headed out the front door. Weather was there, standing back, looking at her new red BMW 330 sedan. “It’s not as good-looking as the Prelude,” she fretted.

  “It’s better-looking than the Prelude,” Lucas said, walking around the car. “It’s just different.”

  “More practical,” she said. “All-wheel drive and you can carry more stuff.”

  “I got your practical right here,” Lucas said. “You don’t buy a forty-thousand-dollar car to haul celery.” He patted the car on the ass. “You buy it because it’s an artwork. Just don’t drive it through the fuckin’ garage door.”

  She looked at the new garage door, then said, “What about Carl?”

  When they’d gotten Carl to the hospital, an examination showed that a piece of the bullet jacket had fragmented off and had ripped into his sphincter muscle. That could have been serious, but a delicate operation had removed the remains of the bullet and had repaired the damage to the muscle.

  “I talked to the doc about an hour ago—everything went fine. He won’t be running for a while.”

  “Thirty years, if you have anything to say about it.”

  “The little asshole killed Jerry Reasons,” Lucas said. “And the Russian. I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for him.”

  “Good-looking guy, though,” Weather said. She turned back to her car. “Would blue have been better?”

  A FEW MORE days went by. Weather began driving the new BMW into the driveway at fifty miles an hour, and Del got surveillance on the McDonald’s truck deliveries.

  The St. Louis County attorney announced that the grand jury had indicted Carl Walther on charges of first-degree murder in the killings of both Rodion Oleshev and Jerry Reasons.
The feds indicted Anthony Spivak on espionage charges, and the county attorney dropped charges of accessory to murder, saying that they were redundant in light of the federal charges. In fact, he seemed pleased to get out from under the Spivak case.

  Lucas heard from Harmon, unofficially, that Janet Walther was willing to talk about the espionage ring if she could make a deal for Carl.

  The deal would be a tough one, though: the Duluth cops were convinced that Carl had killed Jerry Reasons, and they wanted him put away. The only problem was that they had little evidence, other than Lucas’s story of chasing a man up and down the hills, and some general descriptions from the women behind the hotel desk.

  On the other hand, the blood from the switchblade definitely was Carl Walther’s, and Carl had definitely gone to the emergency room the night Oleshev was murdered, within a couple of hours of the murder taking place.

  Carl claimed that the cut on his arm had come from a broken window in Grandpa’s basement. The feds, as it happened, had spotted and processed the window, and confirmed that the blood was in fact Carl’s.

  Still, if they could get the knife into evidence—not a sure thing—nobody believed that the blood-on-the-window alibi would hold up.

  If Duluth couldn’t get Carl for killing Reasons, they would be somewhat satisfied with a life sentence on the Oleshev murder.

  Yet another complication: Roger Walther was still missing. The feds said that Janet Walther was now blaming everything on him.

  “JUST BETWEEN YOU and me,” Harmon told Lucas, “I think perhaps the best we can hope for is to identify this entire Soviet ring and debrief all the participants. I don’t think there will be much jail time—too many lawyers involved now. The cooperation of Janet Walther is critical to that end.”

  He was wheedling.

  “That would be the best deal for you spooks,” Lucas agreed. “For the rest of the world, including both Russia and the United States, the best deal would be to nail Carl Walther for murder. We’ve got to get him for something . . .”