—
LUCAS PICKED UP A CARBINE in Arlington, from a marshal who wanted to make sure he knew how to operate it and that he’d eventually get it back—Lucas had to tell him that he’d already been shot by one, which did make an impression. The case was big and awkward, but about as secure as a case could get, with an actual padlock holding it closed.
“That’ll put a bullet where it’s aimed, if you know how to shoot,” the marshal said. “Try not to whack it around too much.”
Lucas stopped at the Watergate to grab some clothes and made it back to National forty minutes before they’d close the door on his flight. Checking the gun and ammo took up half that time, even with his marshal’s ID, and he made it through security and as he was jogging down to his gate, took a call from Chase.
“Where are you?”
“Jogging,” Lucas said.
“You know, jogging can be dangerous in DC.”
“I’m in DC and I’m jogging, but I’ve got a gun.”
“All right. I’m calling to tell you that we got a return from Rapid DNA. Dunn’s our man,” Chase said. “No question. We tracked down that cabin in West Virginia, maybe a survivalist deal, the way it looks from a satellite view. We’ve got two SWAT teams on the way.”
“Luck,” Lucas said.
He was jogging under a speaker when a plane announcement was made and Chase asked, “What was that sound?”
“Bus,” Lucas said. “Jesus, almost got hit. Gotta go.”
He turned off his phone and the airline attendant at the gate said, “You made it. Last guy on.”
* * *
—
HENDERSON HAD GOTTEN him a seat in first class. The woman in the seat next to him, who’d already begun knitting something in a color of green so dreadful that Lucas didn’t want to sit next to it, said, “You must be important.”
Catching his breath, as he settled into the seat, Lucas asked, “Why?”
“They told us they might have to hold the plane for you.”
“I’m not that important,” Lucas said. “Must’ve been somebody else.”
She shook her head. “No, I think it was you.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Dunn gassed up at an I-95 truck stop north of Savannah, where he took a few minutes to go online with the truck stop’s Wi-Fi and check his security cameras.
And saw the FBI agents crawling through his house.
They’d found him.
He’d felt it coming, wasn’t completely surprised. He decided that he was going in, way back when he’d first found the 1919 site, even if it cost him. He’d already begun preparing for it, when he’d pulled the battery from his cell phone that morning.
* * *
—
HE SAT IN THE TRUCK, watching the agents tear through his house, his mouth beginning to tremble, but he fought back tears. He wouldn’t cry about it. He wouldn’t exactly be martyred, since the website was a fake, but if he took out the Coil girl, at least people would see a lesson: you don’t fuck with serious people.
And he fantasized about hiding out in a wilderness—that had been done, and successfully—but it was, he thought, a fantasy. He could try, but the deep state would get him.
Before he left the truck stop, he called up a map program and found a Walmart Supercenter in Fitzgerald, Georgia, a half hour northeast of Tifton. He’d stop there for the night, he thought, outside the target town, in case somebody might have anticipated him.
He’d scout the next morning, find a spot, hit the girl, and run. The truck would be a liability after he hit her, because they’d have a starting point for him. Had to think about that.
From Savannah, he picked up a few miles of I-16 going west, then cut cross-country to Fitzgerald, arriving well after dark. He went inside the Walmart, got a sandwich, ate in the truck, then crawled inside the camper back, wrapped himself in a sleeping bag and tried to sleep.
He was almost there when Rachel Stokes showed up.
* * *
—
“WELL, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?” she asked. She was standing outside the truck, but spoke through the side window, so he could only see her shattered face. “Everybody in the world is looking for your truck. You’re a rat in a trap: they’ve got your face, they’ve got your license tag, they’re going to put you in one of those supermax prisons where you’ll see nothing but four white walls all day, every day, for the rest of your life.”
“No, no, I’ll be down in hell with you,” Dunn said.
“Audrey Coil won’t be here with us, because Audrey Coil will get away with it. Her mother’s a senator and well connected with the deep state, they’ll take care of her, the girl who chumped you, the girl who made you a fool.”
“Get the fuck away from me . . .”
She cackled. “Your ass hurts, doesn’t it? Shot yourself right down the ass crack. What a fool. They’re going to find you with a bullet hole in your ass crack.”
He resented her hilarity, but also the vulgarity of it all. A quality woman like Rachel shouldn’t be using works like “ass-crack.”
The fact was, he did hurt after the long drive. He wasn’t bleeding, didn’t think he was infected, but he hurt.
* * *
—
RACHEL STOKES STAYED FOR A WHILE, bobbing up and down in the side window, to taunt him, the Walmart sign in the background. Dunn never slept—he didn’t think he slept—but he might have, when he thought about it, because he wasn’t as exhausted as he should have been, getting up in the dark, at five o’clock in the morning. The sun wouldn’t be up until after seven o’clock.
He pulled out his dopp kit, removed the razor, toothbrush, a travel-sized tube of Crest toothpaste, and a bar of motel soap, got a washcloth from his go-bag, went inside. In the otherwise empty men’s room, he peed, brushed his teeth, washed his face, then quickly shaved and scrubbed his armpits without taking off his shirt. Parts of the store were still closed, but the bakery was open and he could use the sugar.
He felt better with a couple of apple fritters inside him, saw a Wi-Fi symbol on his way out. He hadn’t realized that Walmarts had Wi-Fi, but they apparently did. Back in the truck, he tried to go online, but could only see the Walmart Wi-Fi sporadically. He moved the truck across the lot, closer to the store, and got a solid signal.
He spent ten minutes looking at satellite views of the Coil house, decided the best play would be to shoot from the woods across the street from the house. The woods were a couple of hundred yards across, running in a band along the road; another road ran parallel to the woods, a few hundred yards back. If he took down Coil, and whoever was with her, he should have time to make it back to the truck. From there . . . well . . .
And he took a moment to look up Tifton area schools. With a bit of research, he decided that if Audrey was going to school, as the news reports had said, it would be the Tift County High School. The Coils were Democrats and, given the various political pressures, were unlikely to be patronizing Christian schools. A public school would be the thing; and the public school’s first bell was at 7:55.
* * *
—
HE CONSIDERED THE PROBLEM of his truck and what was undoubtedly a widespread police search for it. If he left it parked at the side of a country road, a sheriff’s patrol well might run the tag. Then he’d be done.
So, forty-five minutes after he got up, he left the Walmart parking lot and headed east and north, away from Tifton.
Looking.
He thought he might have found his place twice, but both times, there was a problem. Once, too many cars; too many people. Another time, two people already outside, could have been a father and a son.
The third time, he turned up a dirt driveway with a single battered mailbox at the end of it, to find a trailer in the woods, a light on in the back—the bedroom?—and o
ne in the kitchen. A blue Ford pickup, maybe ten years old, sat by the door. Dunn put the Sig 938 in his pocket, safety off, told himself to remember to keep his finger off the trigger—that’s what he’d forgotten when he shot himself in the ass—and got out of the truck.
As he walked up to the door, a man opened it and peered out. “Who’re you?” he asked. A middle-sized dog stood behind him, which wasn’t ideal, but Dunn said, “Are you Clayton Delaney?”
He chose the name because the last thing he’d heard in his truck was the song, “I Remember the Day Clayton Delaney Died.”
The man said, “What?”
Dunn pulled his hand from his pocket, put his finger through the trigger guard and shot the man twice in the chest. The man fell inside. The dog leaped over him, coming for Dunn, but Dunn hit the dog on the side of the shoulder and then leaped past him, into the trailer, and slammed the door.
Nobody else there, nothing but the body. The man was sure-enough dead. The place stank of nicotine and bacon and potatoes, but the keys to the truck were right there, on the kitchen counter.
Dunn looked out the door, where the dog had retreated halfway across the dirt circle that marked the driveway turn-around, and then stood, whimpering, then growling. He didn’t want to shoot again, so he walked half-sideways past the dog to his truck, and moved it around behind the trailer.
He went back to the blue Ford, got inside, fired it up. Half a tank of gas, more than he’d need.
He left the trailer, with the dog standing outside, and headed south toward Tifton. A plan formulating, now. Getting the truck had been easy—you could get any number of trucks that way, he thought.
He wasn’t that far from the coast. Maybe get a job on a boat headed south; get into Mexico or Venezuela or one of those places.
Maybe.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Lucas had become a police detective at a time when he always kept quarters in his pocket, in case he had to make phone calls. From phone booths. After looking up people in a phone book, which hung inside the phone booth on a chain—the book was always missing a few critical Yellow Pages and almost always smelled like somebody had peed on it.
Now, there were no phone books and no booths in which to hang them, or in which you might take an emergency leak. Quarters were worth half as much as they had been.
But, he thought, a cell phone had its advantages. He got out of Hartsfield-Jackson in a Nissan Pathfinder, at five o’clock. Before he left Hertz, he used his phone to check Google for sporting goods stores in Macon and found a Bass Pro Shops store that was open until seven.
He opened his phone’s navigation app, asked, and was told that with current traffic conditions, he could be there a few minutes after six. The app’s voice—a woman’s—sounded impatient. If he wanted to get there before the store closed, he’d have to move. And he could move, at illegal speed, because his phone also had the Waze app, which warned of speed traps and patrolling cops.
The nav app was correct, almost to the minute, as was the Waze. He spent twenty minutes in the store, and emerged with a double-extra-large camo shirt and large-size pants. On an impulse, and because he’d always wanted a pair anyway, he bought a pair of Fujinon image-stabilized marine binoculars.
He could have made it to Tifton by eight, but, after a quick search on his phone, stopped at an outlying Burger King for a no-meat Impossible Whopper, fries, and a Diet Coke. The Whopper was okay, maybe a six on a scale of one to ten, but he was burping salt all the way to Tifton.
* * *
—
LUCAS LANDED A SMALL SUITE at the Country Inn in Tifton, where he arrived at 8:30. After inspecting his room, he carried the rifle up the back stairs, took it out of its case and worked it, loading and unloading it: it worked smoothly and had been freshly cleaned. That done, he put it back in its case and hid it behind the bed, in case a motel employee came into his room while he was gone.
He pulled on his bulletproof vest with the yellow “U.S. Marshal” lettering on the back, and pulled the double-extra-large camo shirt over it. It was sloppy, but workable, if he rolled up the sleeves. The pants fit fine. He folded the new clothes and set them aside.
The binoculars came in their own hard case and he took them out, inserted the batteries, put on the neck strap, fiddled with them until he understood how they worked.
Next, he set up his iPad, went on the motel Wi-Fi to Google Earth and called up a satellite view of the Coil house, which was in an exurban area northwest of town. From the satellite, the countryside around Tifton looked like a giant yellow-and-green jigsaw, the yellow being irregularly-shaped farm fields, interspersed with forest land.
The Coil house, which appeared to be long and single-storied, was on a small lake or a large pond. In addition to the pond, the Coils had a good-sized swimming pool, glowing aqua-green in the satellite image, screened from the road by the house and what in the north might have been called a woodlot.
Lucas didn’t know what you’d call it in the south, but there were a lot of trees, which was both good and bad. Nobody would see him, but he might not see Dunn, either.
Had to think like Dunn. He peered down at the satellite view, thought that Dunn might be looking at the same thing. Where would he put himself? How would he kill Audrey Coil—or maybe all the Coils?
An ambush at the house seemed simplest; otherwise, how would Dunn know where she’d be? Maybe the Tifton high school? Was there a private school? Lucas didn’t know, but, he thought, neither would Dunn.
Would Dunn risk a straightforward house invasion, going in with a high-capacity gun in an effort to kill everybody? He might . . . but if he did, there would be no guarantee that Audrey would even be in the house. He’d want to see her, Lucas thought.
* * *
—
THOUGH IT WAS DARK, he decided to have a look at the house and headed out again, across Tifton—a bigger town than he’d expected—past an ag college and around a couple of corners and then out Carpenter Road. The road was flat blacktop, with widely spaced houses set well back, usually in stands of pine trees. With a couple of turns off Carpenter, he was cruising past the Coil place, which was lit up like Christmas, with five cars in the circular driveway.
No signs of media, but two of the cars had a cop-like appearance—rode hard and put up wet, bland sedans, older.
There were woods across the road from the Coil house, and from two particular angles, a shooter could see down the opposite ends of the driveway right to the front door. The ends of the driveway were thirty-five or forty yards apart, the wooded shooting positions perhaps sixty to seventy yards apart. He drove on past for a half-mile or so, then turned around, waited a bit, and then drove past the house again. No change. Still a cop vibe from the sedans. Maybe there were cops inside the house, as bodyguards.
The woods across the road from the south end of the driveway seemed to have a piece of higher ground, a hump, that would make a better shooting platform than the lower ground on the north. Lucas made a mental note.
* * *
—
WHEN HE GOT back to the Country Inn, he called Weather to tell her where he was; they talked for fifteen minutes and she said, “I still don’t understand why you’re there by yourself. What happened to Bob and Rae?”
“I sent them home—at the time, it didn’t seem like we’d need them,” Lucas said. “Now . . . well, this was a last-minute thing. I’m operating on a hunch.”
“You’re going to talk to the local police tomorrow, right?”
“Sure. If . . . I can. I need to look at the situation. I could be embarrassing myself.”
“Lucas . . .”
“I’ll talk to them,” he said. When they were off the phone, he added, “After I look at the situation.”
* * *
—
HE HADN’T COMMITTED to calling the Tifton police to
alert them of his presence, as Weather had demanded, because he didn’t want to lie directly to her. He would eventually call the police, he believed, but not until after he’d dealt with Dunn.
If he talked to the police, and told them what he believed about Dunn’s movements, they’d probably throw a cordon around the house, which Dunn would see. And the cops would probably call the feds, who’d send in even more troops. The same thing would be true if he talked to the Coils ahead of time. If all those officers and agents did everything right, and Lucas had guessed right about Dunn, they’d wind up surrounding him and maybe arresting him.
They’d make him a hero to a segment of the population.
Rae had guessed right about why Lucas had sent her, and Bob, back to Louisiana. He didn’t want witnesses.
Lucas hadn’t come to Tifton to arrest Dunn.
He’d come to kill him.
* * *
—
HE WENT TO BED EARLY, after spending more time with the Google Earth satellite views of the Coil house; by the time he was finished with them, he felt he could find his way around the timberland across from the house. He also found a place where he could leave the car, before walking into that timber. The walk would cover the best part of a mile, on the margin between a long strip of timber and an agricultural field of some kind, so he’d have to be careful not to be seen with the rifle, which would attract the police.
Dunn had different problems. Unless he was on a straightforward suicide run, which seemed unlikely for a man of his qualities, he’d want his truck nearby. The most likely place for it, Lucas thought, was a farm road that ran parallel to the road where the Coil house was located, but on the other side of the woods and perhaps four hundred yards away from either shooting position.
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