Extreme Prey

by John Sandford

  “You’re bleeding . . .”

  “Get the goddamned door!”

  Lucas picked up Robertson, and when the woman yanked the passenger door open, Lucas put him in the front passenger seat, strapped him in; Robertson’s head was rolling on his neck like a ball bearing, no control at all, a guttural growl coming from his throat. The Iowa cop was bleeding heavily from a chest exit wound and also from the entry wound on his shoulder blade.

  Lucas shouted at the woman, “Get in the backseat, take me to the hospital,” and as she got in the backseat, he ran around to the driver’s side. The engine was still running—Robertson hadn’t killed it—and he made a quick U-turn, his head low behind the steering wheel in case the shooter was still out there, yelling at the woman, “Get down, get low!” and then they hit the highway, throwing gravel and dirt, got back on the hard surface and he dropped the hammer, rattling over the patched pavement at a hundred miles an hour, then a hundred and fifteen, and a hundred and twenty-five.

  Robertson groaned and bubbled blood down his chin, made a choking sound like huh-huh-huh.

  As a cop, Lucas had had emergency lights on the truck: no more. He was running naked, and blew past a pickup that was probably doing eighty, the other driver’s stunned white moon face looking over at him through the window.

  The woman in the back hadn’t belted in, but was half-standing, leaning over the seat at Robertson, who was now sputtering blood, and she shouted, “I’m going to tip him right, so he doesn’t drown in his blood,” and Lucas shouted back, “Yes, yes . . .”

  She did that and then grabbed Robertson’s shirt and ripped it away from the wound, and as Lucas watched, she said, her voice down a notch, “Not a huge hole, but he’s bleeding bad, I’m gonna stick my finger in it.”

  Lucas: “Press your palm to it, press your palm to it, seal it up.”

  They got to the edge of town in less than three minutes. The woman had one hand over Robertson’s chest, and with the other she was on her cell phone, and then she was saying, shouting, “We’re bringing in a man with a gunshot wound, he’s hurt bad, he’s shot in the chest, he’s bleeding bad, we’ll be there in one minute, call the police, call the police . . .”

  She directed Lucas through Grinnell, Lucas barely slowing through the business district, leaning on his horn the whole way, running stop signs, and then around the hospital and up a ramp to the emergency entrance.

  The woman was out of the vehicle as soon as it stopped, tugging open the passenger door as two nurses, an orderly, and a doctor ran out to the car with a gurney. The orderly and the nurses lifted Robertson onto the gurney and rolled him inside. As Lucas followed behind, a cop came out the entrance and the woman pointed at Lucas and blurted, “This man has a gun.”

  The cop put his hand on his pistol and Lucas put up his empty hands and said, “State police. That’s Jerry Robertson of the Division of Criminal Investigation. He was shot by a sniper at this woman’s farm. We were going to interview her.”

  The cop looked at the two of them uncertainly, then Lucas lifted his shirt to show him the empty holster and said, “The gun’s in the car. It’s loaded and cocked but the safety is engaged. It’s been fired, so you’d be better off not to touch it until this is all sorted out.”

  The cop: “That’s a DCI guy in there?”

  “Yes. We need to get some people out to this woman’s farm,” Lucas said. “There was a sniper waiting for us across the road. I fired a magazine and a half into the cornfield where he was hiding, but I was probably too far away to hit anything.”

  The cop said, “All right. Back inside. I’ll get some help here . . .”

  The woman said to Lucas, “I didn’t do anything. Why did you come to my house?”

  Lucas looked at her shocked, reddened face and said, “You’re right. You didn’t do anything.”

  “But why . . . ?”

  “They set us up to kill us and they used you for bait. They must have known about your farm. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for helping Jerry like you did. You were . . . wonderful. You’re Sandra Burton?”

  “Yes.”

  —

  IN TEN MINUTES, the emergency room was swarming with Grinnell cops, Poweshiek County sheriff’s deputies, and one highway patrolman who’d come to the hospital after being alerted by the 911 operator that a truck had gone through Grinnell at a hundred miles an hour.

  As the cops were arriving, Lucas got on the phone to Bell Wood, who freaked.

  “Sniper? Sniper? Jesus, God, Lucas, what have we got here? Is Jerry gonna be okay?”

  “I don’t know. He was hit hard. Bleeding out his mouth, bright red blood, so he probably took a hit to his lung. He was alive when they took him into the operating room . . .” Lucas gave him the details he had, then gave the phone to the highway patrolman, who knew Wood, and Wood confirmed Lucas’s status.

  Robertson was in the operating room and no word on his condition was coming out. A bloody-handed nurse, who’d taken him in, stood washing her hands, and when Lucas asked, she said, “I’ve seen worse who lived. But then, I’ve seen better who died.”

  No help there.

  A nurse practitioner approached him and said, “You’re bleeding, your face is cut . . .”

  Lucas spotted a mirror, checked himself: four or five cuts on the side of his face opposite the black eye. Nothing serious, damage done when the sniper’s shot had hit his wing mirror, but if one of those shards had hit him in the eye, he’d have been blinded.

  The nurse said, “Here . . .” and touched Lucas’s face with a sterile pad wetted with something that smelled like alcohol. When he pressed on the cuts, Lucas felt nothing but the pain from the alcohol on three of the cuts, but the fourth cut delivered a sharp cutting jolt, and he flinched. The nurse took him to a side room, sat him down, and a few seconds later fished a tiny sliver of mirror glass out of the cut. He covered the cuts with tape and Lucas went back out the door.

  The sheriff showed up, checked his black eye and the taped cuts, and said, “We’ve got to go back out to Miz Burton’s place, see what there is to see. Maybe you hit that sucker and we’ll get some DNA. Or a body.”

  “Have you heard any more about Jerry?” Lucas asked.

  “They’re pumping blood and oxygen into him, that’s all I know. He’s alive, his heart’s okay.”

  “Let’s go then. It’s almost dark.”

  —

  LUCAS’S .45 WAS RETRIEVED from the floor of the truck, unloaded, decocked, and put in an evidence bag.

  The sheriff asked him to leave the truck where it was, so it could be processed, and they went back to Burton’s farm in the sheriff’s personal car, which he’d been driving when he got the call. Sandra Burton rode with them, in the backseat. Lucas told them his story, and when he was finished, the sheriff said, “You were set up, all right. That’d be you in the emergency room, if you hadn’t stopped at Jimmy John’s and switched to the passenger side.”

  “Why me?” Sandra Burton asked. “Why’d they pick me?”

  “Because somebody in the Progressive People’s Party knew you and knew it would be a good place to ambush us,” Lucas said. “You probably know whoever set us up. Might even be a friend. You have any ideas about that? Somebody seriously off balance, a Bowden-hater?”

  “No, no. Most of my friends are Bowden lovers,” she said.

  —

  FOUR SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES had followed them to the farm; when they all had pulled into the farmyard and parked, the sheriff called back to the hospital. Still no word on Robertson.

  Lucas wasn’t precisely sure where he’d seen the muzzle flash—the weeds along the edge of the field all looked about the same—but he remembered he’d stepped out of the truck onto a flagstone. He went back to the end stone, and looked toward the field, and that gave him an angle.

  Staying focused
on the spot, he led the sheriff and his deputies across the road, spread in a long skirmish line. Everyone had a powerful LED flashlight, three deputies had shotguns, one had a rifle. They found the sniper’s nest in a minute. The sheriff didn’t want to let anyone get right on it, not until they could set up a formal crime-scene perimeter, but they spent a few minutes looking for an expended shell, and for blood, but found neither.

  Lucas could see where the sniper had run through the field, knocking down or breaking some of the closely spaced cornstalks, and one of the deputies got a roll of blue tape and they marked out the trail as they followed it through the corn to a creek, and then along the creek to a side road. The trail disappeared at the road, but one of the deputies walked across the road, down into the roadside ditch and up the other side, and found vehicle-crushed weeds behind a stand of creek-side trees.

  “Parked here, walked back to his spot, and waited. He knew you were coming, and he probably knew what your truck looked like,” the sheriff said. “Shot the guy who got out of the driver’s side. Thought he shot you.”

  —

  THEY WALKED BACK through the field, staying clear of the sniper’s path. The sheriff said, “We’ll be back in daylight, we’ll go over every inch of it. In the meantime, we’ll talk to the neighbors, see if anybody saw a vehicle back there.”

  —

  BACK AT BURTON’S HOUSE, Sandra Burton said her husband and his partner were truckers on a West Coast run, out on I-80, and wouldn’t be back for three to five days, depending on their loads and destinations. They had three daughters, no sons. The daughters were all grown, two moved away, one living in Grinnell.

  She’d been a member of the PPPI since the eighties, she said, but had had little direct contact with other members for a long time.

  “Don never was a member. In fact, he was never a farmer. He’s my second husband. My first husband was a farmer, until we lost the farm. That’s when I got involved in the PPPI, but after, you know, twenty years, it started to seem pointless.”

  “Why pointless?”

  She shrugged and said, “Farmers, the ones that survived, were getting rich when the Chinese came online, and the fire died out. I wasn’t going to get the old farm back no matter what I did. Me’n Don have a quarter section here, a hundred and sixty acres, we rent it out, but we only paid two hundred and forty thousand for it back in the nineties. Now, it might be worth a million-five. So, I don’t feel like I got that much of a complaint anymore. But there are some people who never did get back—like my ex-husband. He’s still working in Des Moines, at the air-conditioner factory.”

  —

  THE SHERIFF SENT his deputies to knock on doors and Lucas showed his list of names to Burton, who recognized many of them. “I haven’t seen any of them in years, though, you know, I’m still on some e-mail lists. We had a PPPI party here one summer, oh, a long time ago. A lot of people came—I couldn’t tell you who they all were.”

  “But a lot of the people on the list knew where you lived. Had seen the place,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, but the garage is new, that’s only five or six years old. You said he mentioned the garage, and they wouldn’t know about that.”

  “He’d cruised the place, setting it up,” Lucas said. “He might already have been in the field when he called. He might have been looking at it.”

  —

  BELL WOOD AND ANOTHER MAN were getting out of an SUV when Lucas got back to the hospital. Lucas went to shake hands and Wood introduced the other man as Anthony Pole, head of the DCI. Pole was a blocky, crew-cut man in a brown suit, with tortoiseshell glasses, and he wasn’t interested in shaking hands. He snarled, “I knew having you interfere was a bad idea. Now you got one of our guys shot.”

  “Hey, fuck you,” Lucas said.

  “What!” Pole started to move at Lucas, but saw something in Lucas’s eyes that made him take a step back. Bell Wood got between them and Lucas growled, “Stay away from me, asshole.”

  He brushed by Pole and went into the hospital, where he saw the nurse practitioner who’d patched up his face. “What do you hear?”

  “They’re still working on him. We took in a couple of Pepsis a few minutes ago, for the surgeons. They said they’re gonna be a while. I think he’s going to make it, the way they were talking. Unless, you know, he has a stroke. I think that’s the big danger now.”

  —

  LUCAS LEFT the emergency suite and found an empty conference room, shut the door, got on the phone to Mitford, told him about the shooting, asked him to pass the word on to Henderson and to Bowden’s people, then called Weather to tell her.

  “You should come home—this really isn’t your business anymore,” she said.

  “Can’t now. Not with Robertson down,” Lucas said.

  “How bad are your cuts?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Little dings,” Lucas said. Weather did plastic surgery. “No scars, you won’t have to get involved.”

  “Lucas . . .”

  “I’ll call you again tonight.”

  —

  ROBERTSON WAS IN the operating room for three and a half hours. Lucas sat in a corner of the emergency area, doodling on his legal pad, trying to think how they could have been set up. Somebody he talked to must have done it, or somehow enabled it, either consciously or not: the shooter had his phone number. He’d given his card and phone number to twenty people and somebody must have passed it on. He had a good ear for voices and he hadn’t recognized the caller who sent him to the Burton place.

  He kept coming back to Grace Lawrence. He’d spoken to her several times now, and she was close to the center of the whole PPPI group. In fact, she was the center, now that Likely had been killed. He knew two things for sure about Lawrence: (1) she wasn’t the woman Henderson had spoken to, who’d set off the whole investigation, and (2) she hadn’t killed Likely. Those two things seemed to take her out of the loop.

  Of course, he thought, she could be guiding the other group, the shooters; she could have sent them to Likely’s place, and then to Anson Palmer’s. Or she could have sent them to Likely’s, while she took care of Palmer herself. She could be the ringmaster in the whole conspiracy.

  He’d have to think about that, when he had time. She’d seemed far too mellow for a killer, a leftover hippie working her garden and volunteering at the elementary school. The school principal said she’d been volunteering for years, so it wasn’t an act.

  —

  BELL WOOD CAME OVER, a big bluff man with a mustache and a gap between his two square front teeth; he wore round gold-rimmed glasses like Teddy Roosevelt. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and nudged the leg of Lucas’s chair. “Sorry about Pole. He can be an asshole.”

  “I picked up on that,” Lucas said, looking up. “You in decent shape with him?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m just a cop. If you’re just a cop, he won’t fuck with you too much. He’s more engaged with the politics of it all.”

  “I feel pretty bad about Robertson,” Lucas said. “They shot him because they thought he was me.”

  “Can’t feel bad about not getting shot,” Wood said. “Shit just happens.”

  —

  ROBERTSON CAME OUT of the operating room after eleven o’clock and was taken to an intensive care unit. “We’ll keep him here until we’re sure he’s stable, then we’ll move him to Mercy in Des Moines,” the lead surgeon told the waiting cops. “He’s obviously in critical condition, but unless we have some new event—we’re most concerned about blood clots resulting in a stroke—we think he’ll make it. If he’d gotten here five minutes later, he would have died.”

  He wouldn’t be talking for a while, the surgeon said—they’d need to keep him sedated. When Robertson was plugged into the ICU, Lucas said good-bye to Bell Wood and told the sheriff he’d like to watch the site search the next morning.

  The
sheriff said he’d be welcome, and when Lucas walked out, he found two TV vans waiting outside, and saw Pole talking to one of the reporters, under the lights. Lucas went by without looking at any of them. He’d checked out of the hotel that morning, so he had his clothes with him, and went to find a room.

  He’d begun to settle into a Comfort Inn when he took a late call from Governor Henderson. “I spoke to Bowden. She spoke to some guy named Pole . . .”

  “He’s the DCI director. He’s here in Grinnell because of the shooting,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. Well, he told her that she should go ahead and do the walk at the fair, but plan to cut it down to four blocks. He says there’s a stretch where there’s no long sight lines that she could be shot from—they’ll have it all covered. It’s not the whole traditional parade-route walk, but it’s long enough that they can do all the media shots.”

  “Not a good idea,” Lucas said.

  “I agree, but that’s what she’s going to do. This Pole guy told her that he holds you responsible for the shooting of his agent.”

  “Right.”

  “Wanna know what she said?” Henderson asked.

  “Sure.”

  “She said, and I quote, ‘You’d probably be better off holding the sniper responsible, don’t you think? I certainly would.’”

  “Good for her,” Lucas said.

  “But this short-walk thing . . . I dunno.”

  “Better than a long one,” Lucas said.

  “I guess. I’ll be right behind her,” Henderson said. “If she called it off, that’d give cover for the rest of us to call it off. But if she goes, I gotta go.”

  “That’s, uh . . .”

  “Stupid, I know. You wouldn’t have a spare bulletproof vest in your truck, would you? And maybe a helmet?”

  “No, I . . . Goddamnit, I gotta get these guys,” Lucas said. “I don’t think anyone else will.”

  “That’s why I called you in the first place,” Henderson said. “I don’t think they will, either. But I think you will.”

  TWENTY