“Yeah, but with somebody like Shafer, dealing with somebody like this what’s-her-name . . .”
“Elena Diaz.”
“Yeah. I mean, she got the key, somewhere along the way,” Del said. “That’s all we could come up with.”
“You’re okay with that story?”
“Yup. Lucas—this kid is no planner. He’s gonna wind up eating out of garbage cans, if he doesn’t wind up facedown dead before that,” Del said. “He’s being set up. I keep thinking about that Kennedy assassination movie, Lee Harvey Oswald. Some people think he was set up.”
“He wasn’t; he did it.”
“The point is, that idea could be floating around in some nutcake’s head,” Del said. “Like Cohn’s. Shoot McCain, shoot somebody, and blame Shafer. I mean, Justice is defenseless. He’s a goof.”
WHEN LUCAS GOT HOME, the house was asleep—Weather always went to bed early on nights before she was operating, and she operated on most days. The baby and the housekeeper went to bed almost as early. But as he turned in the drive, he saw a glow from under the blind in Letty’s room. A night owl like Lucas, she was sneaking a read.
Lucas went inside, checked all the doors, took his shoes off before he tiptoed upstairs, left his shoes on his bedroom floor, listened to Weather’s even breathing for a couple of seconds, then tiptoed down to Letty’s door and tapped a couple of times.
“Yes. Come in,” she said.
She was finishing To Kill a Mockingbird in the light of a bedside lamp. He asked, “You almost done?”
“Almost; but I can sleep in tomorrow. I’m going back downtown with Jen.”
“Your mom says you’re getting some serious airtime,” Lucas said. “I wish I’d been here to see it.”
“Ah—it’s kid stuff. They won’t let me get near the better stories,” Letty said. “Too young.”
“Just . . . be patient.” He perched on the end of the bed. “Beverly called this morning, before I caught the plane. I was going to call and tell you, but I got really busy. Anyway, we’re set for Monday.”
“Monday.”
“Yup. We go see the judge on Monday afternoon, three-thirty. The last decision you’ve got to make is what to do about your name. You can be Letty Jean West, or Letty Jean West Davenport, or Letty Jean Davenport, or Letty West Davenport—however you want to do it.”
“Huh.” She made a moue. “The thing is, I never knew my father, hardly. He wasn’t really my father, he ditched us, but Mom kept his name. Her maiden name was Martin. I wonder if they’d go for Letty Jean Martin Davenport. Or Letty Martin Davenport. I’d like to, you know, keep my first mom a little bit.”
“We can do that,” Lucas said. “You gotta let me know by tomorrow night, exactly, so they can fill out the paper. Then, we’re done.”
“That’s . . .” She teared up a little and wiped her eyes with a corner of the sheet.
“You’re still all right with it?” Lucas asked.
“I’m perfect with it,” she said, with a choked-off laugh. “I can’t wait.”
Lucas patted her foot, under the light blanket, and said, “If I don’t see you tomorrow before I leave, call me on my cell, let me know about the name.”
“All right. Night, Dad.”
WHEN LUCAS was out of the room, Letty dug her cell phone out from under her pillow, poked redial, and Briar picked up. “I’m back,” Letty said. “So he gets out tomorrow—then what?”
“I don’t know. He’s really freaked out. Maybe it’s the medicine they’re giving him, it’s something to stop blood clots in his legs. But it’s making him crazy.”
“Has he talked about my dad or me again?”
“Well . . . yeah, a couple of times. He was talking to Ranch, and they’re going to try to do something, but Ranch is so crazy . . . I don’t know. If you see the van coming, you should run.”
“But you’ll be driving it,” Letty said.
“He makes me . . .”
“But you don’t have to,” Letty said.
“You don’t know . . .”
“All right. All right. Stay calm,” Letty said. “I’ll think of something.”
17
LUCAS WOKE UP TIRED BUT clear-eyed, and looked at the clock: 9 A.M. Perfect. He always felt better when he slept past 8:59. The eight o’clock hour was, in his opinion, when farmers get up, and God bless them, they were critical to the economy, and so on and so forth, but he was not a farmer.
Not only that, he had ideas when he slept late, and now he turned over on his stomach and got another fifteen minutes. When he popped open his left eye and looked at the clock, and then realized that he’d been sleeping on a crooked wrist and that his hand had fallen asleep, he straightened out on the bed and stretched and shook out the hand and yawned and picked up the bedside phone and dialed Del.
Del, panicked, snatched up the phone and said, “Jesus Christ, her water broke,” and Lucas said, “Ah, shit. Well, talk to you in a couple of days, buddy.”
So then he called up Jenkins, who asked, “You know what time it is?”
Lucas said, “Nine twenty-one. Get Shrake, meet me downtown in an hour. By the way, Del’s old lady’s water broke.”
“That whole concept, Del having a child, is a little frightening,” Jenkins said. “See you in an hour.”
Lucas rolled out of bed, headed for the bathroom, turned around when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was Jenkins again. “Yeah?”
“You know, we gotta think about a baby present. Or a whole bunch of them, or whatever you do.”
“I’ll get Carol to organize it,” Lucas said. “See you in fifty-nine minutes.”
LUCAS MADE CALLS from his car, the first to the Minneapolis FBI office, the next to the Ramsey County attorney, and then to the Ramsey County public defender. He made a stop at the Ramsey County jail and spoke to Justice Shafer for one minute; got up and said, “You might be able to help us, Justice, and get your ass out of this crack. I’ll get back to you. Talk to your lawyer. Do what she says.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Shafer said.
LUCAS’S OFFICE was on the second floor of the BCA building, which had cost a bit more than eighty million bucks and was only six years old, so even the government-gray carpet was still in good shape. He had one of the larger offices, overlooking a parking lot and the evidence collection garage on the ground floor. It had come with the standard new-building desk, but it was a desk that positioned him with his back to the door, which he disliked, with a conference table so stark in its design that it would have shocked a Scandinavian architect.
On the grounds that he had a bad back, he’d brought in a personal business chair, and then, the soil having been prepared, a simple dark-maple desk and conference table, with comfortable chairs, that allowed him to face the door; and an old, but not antique, coat-rack, and a few metal file cabinets so he’d have a place to put his feet. He had pictures of Weather, Sam, and Letty on the wall, along with framed shots of the University of Minnesota hockey team, where he’d been a defenseman who wasn’t quite good enough to turn pro. A hockey stick was mounted above the hockey photos. Also, stuck casually to the exposed side of one of the metal file cabinets, a shooting range target with five .45-caliber bullet holes in the ten-ring. Like he did it every day . . .
Carol was sitting at her desk outside the office.
“Del’s wife has gone into labor and you’re supposed to organize baby gifts,” Lucas said. “I don’t know if you take up a collection or what.”
“Don’t worry about it. Give me fifty dollars.”
He gave her fifty dollars, said, “That seems like a lot,” and she said, “You’re rich, you can afford it,” and then Shrake showed up and she said, “Give me twenty dollars.”
Jenkins was a minute behind Shrake, and they scattered themselves around the chairs in Lucas’s office.
“I just talked to Shafer again,” Lucas said. “Diaz called him on his cell phone, which we didn’t pay too much attention to because we a
lready had the number. But. That means that Shafer can call her back. If we can get some FBI backup here, they’ve got choppers with location-finding equipment that can get pretty close to where she is, if Shafer calls her, and she answers.”
“What if she tossed the phone?” Jenkins asked.
“Then we’re out of luck. But, if she still has it, and answers, we can get it narrowed down to a couple of blocks. Then we can saturate the area, dig them out,” Lucas said. “I talked to Shafer and he’ll call them. Actually, he’ll ask her for a meeting. Maybe we can suck them in.”
“When?”
“The choppers are out at the airport, backup for the convention, so the feds have to ‘retask,’ whatever that means,” Lucas said. “That’s gonna take a couple hours, but the AIC says he’ll push it and says he can get it. We’ll know by noon and we can be up in the air by one.”
Jenkins looked at his watch: just ten-thirty. “We might want to jack up the SWAT guys,” he said.
“Most of them are out in the city, working with the street teams,” Lucas said. “I talked to Sandy, he’s going to pull back whoever he can. We’ll at least have a few.”
“Like we were saying, Shafer ain’t no wizard. You think he can do this?” Shrake asked.
“We’re gonna drill him,” Lucas said. “I could only talk to him a minute, because the public defender wasn’t in the house. I talked to the PD this morning and he says a deal can be done. The prosecutor is willing to go along because, basically, you know, we don’t have a case. And they got all those demonstration arrests in their hair and they just as soon get rid of Shafer if they can.”
They all sat for a minute, then Jenkins said, “What do you think we ought to get for Del’s kid? It’s gonna be a boy, right? Something blue?”
“It’s Del’s kid; you gonna get him a blue gun?” Shrake asked.
“Let Carol do it,” Lucas said. “But I like the blue gun idea.”
“Now what?” Jenkins asked.
“Let’s go over to the jail. Get Shafer going.”
JENNIFER CAREY picked Letty up and asked, “How’d it go with Juliet?”
Letty shook her head. “She’s not going to leave him. Says he’s hurt, so she can’t go. At least not until he gets better, which means never, because he’ll get on top of her and make her do what he wants.”
“Ah, boy. I don’t know, Letty,” Jennifer said. “Maybe we should talk to Lucas, explain the situation, tell him that our biggest worry is that he’ll do something irrational.”
“Let me ask you something,” Letty said. “What would you do if suddenly, someday, in a couple of weeks, Randy just disappeared and was never heard from again? Or maybe, he’s found in an alley with four bullet holes in his heart. Would you do anything about it? Ask any questions? Talk to Dad?”
Jennifer shook her head: “Couldn’t tell you that until I got there. You know about Lucas and me; we almost got married, except that I knew I couldn’t deal with him. He’s too . . . harshly . . . smart. He’s too intense. He’s like Weather—he’s like you. Not like me; I’m all over the place. But I don’t think cops should kill people. I mean, murder people. People get trials, they get lawyers.”
Letty sighed. “Let me think about it for a couple of days. I’m so confused.” A little song and dance, she was thinking as she spoke: a little song and dance, because Jennifer Carey was no longer to be trusted. I don’t think cops should kill people.
Bullshit, Letty thought.
A PUBLIC DEFENDER met Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake at the jail, with an assistant from the county attorney’s office, and they cut the deal: no harm, no foul. Nobody gets charged, nobody gets sued for false arrest. Shafer expresses his good citizenship by cooperating with the police.
Outside the jail, on the sidewalk, Shafer said, “She’s a pretty good lawyer. Got me outa there, slicker’n snot on a doorknob.”
“Yeah, right,” Jenkins said. “You ride shotgun; that little lump in the back of your head is Shrake’s pistol.”
“Hey, I’m out,” Shafer said.
“Yeah. One inch. You’ll be back in just as fast, if we need you back in.”
THEY GOT TOGETHER with the FBI team in a temporary office on Wabasha Street, six blocks from the convention center. The FBI’s local agent-in-charge, Wilbur Rivers, told Lucas that the choppers were gassed and ready to go, and could be in the air over Minneapolis or St. Paul in twenty minutes. “The problem might be that she’s out in Burnsville, or Stillwater, or somewhere. We won’t be able to get close enough during a short phone call. We’d be able to identify the cell, but not where the signal’s coming from—so we need some talk time.”
“The call to LA came from a St. Paul cell, so there’s a good chance she’s here,” Lucas said. “If we were willing to risk it, we might even want to bring both choppers here.”
“Your call,” Rivers said.
Lucas looked at Jenkins and Shrake, who shrugged, and so he said, “Screw it. We’re already set, let’s go with it. One each in Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
They’d made Shafer sit in a corner while they talked, and Rivers looked at him and asked, “You think he can pull it off?”
“We talked to him on the way over. He keeps it simple. He says he got a call from his daddy, and his daddy says the sheriff has been asking about him, because the Secret Service says he’s up here with a big gun. That the Secret Service thinks he’s going to do something bad. So he’s heading back down I-35, going home.”
Shrake said, “I actually called him on his phone, in the car, and we pretended I was his daddy, and we . . . got him talking. I think it’ll work, somewhat. Maybe not perfect.”
“Well, even if it doesn’t work, we’ll get a shot at the phone, if she stays on long enough,” Rivers said. “You want me to put the choppers up?”
“Let’s do it,” Lucas said.
COHN WAS hungover, lying on a couch with his forearm over his eyes. Cruz had found a police report about the fight in the bar, about a crippled man being thrown in front of a car. Randy Whitcomb had been hit by one car, and run over by another. He was listed in good condition at Regions Hospital.
“Dumbest thing I ever heard of,” Lane had said. “Wish I’d been there to see it, though.”
“Felt good, after McCall. Didn’t do any harm, doesn’t look like,” Cohn said. “They don’t know who did it.”
But Lindy was scared, Cruz was worried, and Lane was talking about bailing out. “I’m not hurting that bad, financially,” he explained to Cohn. “I got the farm, I got the business, they do okay. Nothing great, but I like it.”
Cohn said, “Goddamnit, Jesse, the only reason you keep them running is because you got money packed away from the jobs. You put more goddamn money into those businesses than you ever get out—you keep saying you need this tool or that tool and that’ll get you over the top, but it ain’t the tools you need. You need customers, and you ain’t got them. If you don’t do these jobs, you ain’t gonna have a business, either.”
Lane sulked: “I always got the farm. That does make some money.”
“Okay, it makes some money. But you’re not a farmer, Jesse. You don’t mind going out there and shoveling a little horse poop and tellin’ Roy to plow the south forty, or whatever he does, but you don’t want to do that every day. Sittin’ up there on the John Deere in that hot sun, rolling up and down those rows every fuckin’ day . . .”
“Air-conditioned,” Lane said. “Got Sirius radio. Outlaw Country.”
“Fuck Sirius radio,” Cohn said.
CRUZ ASKED, “What about Lindy?”
Lindy said, “I’m not doing it. I don’t stick up places. I don’t even know how to hold a gun. I’m gonna pee my pants just thinkin’ about it. I’m not doing it.”
“All you have to do is be a desk clerk. You’ve even done that,” Cruz said.
“They’ll wind up with a picture of me, and I’ll be right out there in some fuckin’ African jungle with you and Cohn.” She started to cry. “I j
ust wanna go back to B-B-Birmingham.”
Lane jumped in on her side: “If you make her do it, I ain’t going. She’ll screw it up. No offense, Lindy, it’s what you’re saying your own self. If she screws it up, we could all go down. I’m telling you, this whole thing is running off the tracks.”
Cohn asked lazily, “Does that mean you’ll do it if she doesn’t go?”
LANE NEVER got a chance to answer, because Cruz’s cell phone rang. She had three cell phones in her purse, all with different rings, and she looked at her purse and then back at Cohn and said, “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“Nobody’s got that number,” she said.
She went to the purse and took the cell phone out, looked at the LCD screen and frowned.
“Who is it?”
“Says it’s Shafer, but that can’t be right.” She clicked on the phone and said, “Hello?”
“You know who this is?” Shafer asked.
She did: “Yes. How did you get this number?”
“It’s the only number on my phone, from when you called me before,” Shafer said. “Listen, my daddy called me. He said the sheriff came around and they’re looking for me. He said the Secret Service called the sheriff from St. Paul and they say that I’m up there with my .50-cal and they think I’m going to shoot McCain.”
“Justice . . .”
“So I’m going home. I’m headin’ out,” Shafer said. “I got to get this straight with the sheriff.”
“Justice, damnit, we might need you,” Cruz said.
“I want to talk about it, face-to-face,” Shafer said. “From what my daddy says, you’ve been lying to me. They say Bill is in jail somewhere.”
“You sit right there,” Cruz said. “I’m coming to talk to you. Give me an hour.”
“Well, I don’t know . . .” There was an odd pause, and then Shafer said, “My daddy said the sheriff was looking for me, and that the Secret Service, you know . . .”
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