Night Prey ld-6

by John Sandford

  “Biker rallies, I guess,” Beneteau said, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “Specialty shops. There’s a strong market in old Harleys, and the older parts go for heavy cash, if they’re clean.” They topped a rise and looked down at a series of rambling sheds facing the road, with a pile of junk behind a gray board fence. Three cars, two bikes, and two trucks faced the line of buildings. None of the vehicles were new. “That’s it,” Beneteau said, leaning on the accelerator. “Let’s try to get inside quick.”

  Lucas glanced back at Connell. She had one hand in her purse. Gun. He slipped a hand under his jacket and touched the butt of his. 45. “Let’s take it easy in there,” he said casually. “They’re not really suspects.”

  “Yet,” said Connell.

  Beneteau’s eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror again. “Got your game face on,” he said to Connell in his casual drawl.

  They clattered across a small board bridge over a drainage ditch and Lucas hooked the door handle with the fingers of his right hand as Beneteau drove them into the junkyard’s parking lot. The other car went a hundred feet down the road, to the end of the lot, while the panel truck hooked in short. There were four deputies in the van, armed with M-16s. If somebody starting pecking at them with a fifty, the M-16s would hose them down.

  The gravel parking lot was stained with oil and they slid the last few feet, raising a cloud of dust. “Go,” Beneteau grunted.

  Lucas was out a half second before Connell, headed toward the front door. He went straight through, not quite running, his hand on his belt buckle. Two men were standing at the counter, one in front of it, one in back, looking at a fat, greasy parts catalog. Startled, the man behind the counter backed up, said, “Hey,” and Lucas pushed through the swinging counter gate and flashed his badge with his left hand and said, “Police.”

  “Cops,” the counterman shouted. He wore a white T-shirt covered with oil stains, and jeans with a heavy leather wallet sticking out of his back pocket, attached to his belt with a brass chain. The man at the front of the counter, bearded, wearing a railway engineer’s hat, backed away, hands in front of him. Connell was behind him.

  “You Joe?” Lucas asked, crowding the counterman. The counterman stood his ground, and Lucas shoved his chest, backing him up. An open doorway led away to Lucas’s right, into the bowels of the buildings.

  “That’s Bob,” Beneteau said, coming in. “How you doing, Bob?”

  “What the fuck do you want, George?” Bob asked.

  A cop out front yelled, “We got runners…” and Beneteau ran back out the door.

  “Where’s Joe?” Lucas asked, pushing Bob.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Keep them,” Lucas said to Connell.

  Connell pulled her pistol from her purse, a big stainless-steel Ruger wheelgun, held with both hands, the muzzle up.

  “And for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot anybody this time, unless you absolutely have to,” Lucas said hastily.

  “You’re no fun,” Connell said. She dropped the muzzle of the gun toward Bob, who had taken a step back toward Lucas, and said, “Stand still or I’ll punch a fuckin’ hole right through your nose.” Her voice was as cold as sleet, and Bob stopped.

  Lucas freed his gun and went through the door into the back, pausing a second to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The walls were lined with shelves, and a dozen freestanding metal parts racks stood between the door and the back wall. The racks were loaded with bike parts, fenders and tanks, wheels, stacks of Quaker State oil cans, coffee cans full of rusty nails, screws, and bolts. Two open cans of grease sat on the floor, and two open-topped fifty-five-gallon drums full of trash were at his elbow. A metal extrusion that might have been a go-cart chassis was propped against them. The only light came from small dirty windows on the back wall, and through a door at the back right. The whole place smelled of dust and oil.

  Lucas started toward the door, gun barrel up, finger off the trigger. Then to the left, between a row of metal racks, he saw a scattering of white. Beyond it, an open door led into a phone booth… size bathroom, the brown-stained toilet directly in front of the door. He stepped toward the smear of white, which had broken out of a small plastic bag. Powder. Cocaine? He bent down, touched it, lifted his finger to his nose, sniffed it. Not coke. He thought about tasting it: for all he knew it was some kind of powdered bike cleaner, something like Drno. Put a tiny taste on his tongue anyway, got the instant acrid cut: speed.

  “Shit.” The word was spoken almost next to his ear, and Lucas jumped. The rack beside him lurched and toppled toward him, boxes of odd metal parts sliding off the shelf. Something heavy and sharp sliced into his scalp as he put an arm out to brace the rack. He pushed the rack back, staggering, and a man bolted out from behind the next row, ran down to the right toward the door, and out.

  Lucas, struggling with the rack, aware of a dampness in his hair, fought free and went after him. As he burst through the door into the light, he heard somebody yell and looked right, saw Beneteau standing in an open field, pointing. Lucas looked left, saw the man cutting toward the junkyard, and ran after him.

  Lost him in the piles of trash. Old cars, mostly from the sixties; he spotted the front end of a ‘66 bottle-green Pontiac LeMans, just like the one he’d owned when he’d first been in uniform. Lucas stalked through the piles, taking his time: the guy couldn’t have gone over the fence, he’d have made some noise. He moved farther in: wrecks with hand-painted numbers on their doors, victims of forgotten county-fair enduro races.

  Heard a clank to his left, felt a wetness in his eyebrow. Reached up and touched it: blood. Whatever had fallen off the shelf had cut him, and he was bleeding fairly heavily. Didn’t hurt much, he thought. He moved farther left, around a pile, around another pile…

  A thin biker in jeans, a smudged black T-shirt, and heavy boots looked up at the board fence around the yard. He was dark-complected, with a tan on top of that.

  The man goggled at Lucas’s bloody head. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

  “You knocked some shit on me,” Lucas said.

  The man showed a pleased smile, then looked at the top of the fence. “I’d never make it,” he said finally. He stepped back toward Lucas. “You gonna shoot me?”

  “No, we just want to talk.” Lucas slipped the pistol back in its holster.

  “Yeah, right,” the man said, showing his yellow teeth. Suddenly he was moving fast. “But I’m gonna kick your ass first.”

  Lucas touched the butt of his pistol as the man’s long wild swing came in. He lifted his left hand, batted the fist over his shoulder, hooked a short punch into the biker’s gut. The man had a stomach like an oak board. He grunted, took a step back, circled. “You can hit me all day in the fuckin’ gut,” he said. He’d made no attempt at Lucas’s pistol.

  Lucas shook his head, circling to his right. “No point. I’m gonna hit you in the fuckin’ head.”

  “Good luck.” The biker came in again, quick but inept, three fast roundhouse swings. Lucas stepped back once, twice, took the third shot on his left shoulder, then hooked a fast right to the man’s nose, felt the septum snap under the impact. The man dropped, one hand to his face, rolled onto his stomach, got shakily back to his feet, blood running out from under his hands. Lucas touched his own forehead.

  “You broke my nose,” the man said, looking at the blood on his fingers.

  “What’d you expect?” Lucas asked, probing his scalp with his fingertips. “You cut my head open.”

  “Not on purpose. You broke my fuckin’ nose on purpose,” he complained. Beneteau ran into the junkyard, looked at them. The man said, “I give up.”

  Beneteau stood in the parking lot and said quietly, “Earl says Joe is down at the house.” Earl was the man who’d fought Lucas. “He’s scared to death Bob’ll find out he told us.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. He held a first-aid pad against his scalp. He’d already soaked one of them through, and was on his second.


  “We’re gonna head down there,” Beneteau said. “Do you want to come? Or do you want to go into town and get that cut fixed up?”

  “I’m coming,” Lucas said. “How about the search warrants?”

  “We got them, both for this place and Joe’s and Bob’s. That’s a fine amount of speed back there, if that’s what it is,” Beneteau said.

  “That’s what it is,” Lucas said. “There’s probably six or eight ounces there on the floor.”

  “Biggest drug bust we’ve ever had,” Beneteau said with satisfaction. He looked at the porch, where Bob Hillerod and Earl sat on a bench, in handcuffs. They’d cut the customer loose; Beneteau was satisfied that he’d been there for cycle parts. “I’m kind of surprised Earl was involved with it.”

  “It’d be hard to prove that he was,” Lucas said. “I didn’t see him with the stuff. He says he was back there getting an alternator when everybody started running. He said one of the guys who went into the woods panicked, and threw the bag toward the toilet as they ran out the back. He might be telling the truth.”

  Beneteau looked at the woods and laughed a little. “We got those guys pinned in the marsh over there. Can’t see them, but I give them about fifteen minutes after the bugs come out tonight. If they last that long-they were wearing short-sleeved shirts.”

  “So let’s get Joe,” Lucas said.

  Beneteau turned the junkyard over to a half-dozen arriving deputies, including his crime-scene specialists. They took the same two sheriff’s cars and the panel truck to Hillerod’s house.

  Joe Hillerod lived ten miles from the junkyard, in a rambling place built of three or four old lake cabins shoved together into one big tar-paper shack. A dozen cords of firewood were dumped in the overgrown back, in a tepee-shaped pile. Three cars were parked in the front.

  “I love this backwoods shit,” Lucas said to Beneteau as they closed on the house. “In the city, we’d call in the Emergency Response Unit…”

  “That’s a Minnesota liberal’s euphemism for SWAT team,” Connell said to Beneteau, who nodded and showed his teeth.

  “… and we’d stage up, and everybody’d get a job, and we’d put on vests and radios, and we’d sneak down to the area, and clear it,” Lucas continued. “Then we’d sneak up to the house and the entry team’d go in… Up here, it’s jump in the fuckin’ cars, arrive in a cloud of hayseed, and arrest everybody in sight. Fuckin’ wonderful.”

  “The biggest difference is, we arrive in a cloud of hayseed. Down in the Cities, you arrive in a cloud of bullshit,” Beneteau said. “You ready?”

  They hit Hillerod’s house just before noon. A yellow dog with a red collar was sitting on the blacktop in front of the place, and got up and walked off the road into a cattail ditch when he saw the traffic coming.

  A young man with a large belly and a Civil War beard sat on the porch steps, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, looking as though he’d just got up. A Harley was parked next to the porch, and a scarred white helmet lay on the grass beside it like a fiberglass Easter egg produced by a condor.

  When they slowed, he stood, and when they stopped, he ran in through the door. “That’s trouble,” Beneteau yelled.

  “Go,” Connell said, and she jumped out and headed for the door.

  Lucas said, “Wait, wait,” but she kept going, and he was two steps behind her.

  Connell went through the screen door like a cornerback through a wide receiver, in time to see the fat man running up a flight of stairs in the back of the house. Connell ran that way, Lucas yelling, “Wait a minute.”

  In a back room, a naked couple was crawling off a fold-out couch. Connell pointed the pistol at the man and yelled, “Freeze,” and Lucas went by her and took the stairs. As he went, he heard Connell say to someone else, “Take ‘em, I’m going up.”

  The fat man was in the bathroom, door locked, working the toilet. Lucas kicked the door in, and the fat man looked at him and went straight out a window, through the glass, onto the roof beyond. He heard cops yelling outside and ran on down the hall, Connell now a step behind him.

  The door at the end of the hall was closed and Lucas kicked it just below the lock, and it exploded inward. Behind it, another couple were crawling around in their underpants, looking for clothes. The man had something in his hand and Lucas yelled, “Police, drop it,” and tracked his body with the front sight of the pistol. The man, looking up, dazed with sleep, dropped a gun. The woman sat back on the bed and pulled a bedspread over her breasts.

  Beneteau and two deputies came up behind them, pistols drawn. “Got ‘em?” He looked past Lucas. “That’s Joe.”

  “What the fuck are you doing, George?” Joe asked.

  Beneteau didn’t answer. Instead, he looked at the woman and said, “Ellie Rae, does Tom know about this?”

  “No,” she said, hanging her head.

  “Aw, God,” Beneteau said, shaking his head. “Let’s get everybody downstairs.”

  A deputy was waiting for them on the stairs. “Did you look in the dining room, Sheriff?”

  “No, what’d we get?”

  “C’mon, take a look,” the deputy said. He led the way back through a small kitchen, then through a side arch to the dining room. Two hundred semiautomatic rifles were stacked against the walls. A hundred and fifty handguns, glistening with WD-40, were slotted into cardboard boxes on the floor.

  Lucas whistled. “The gunstore burglaries. Out in the ‘burbs around the cities.”

  “This is good stuff,” Beneteau said, squatting to look at the long guns. “This is gunstore stuff all the way.” Springfield M-1s, Ruger Mini-14s and Mini-30s, three odd-looking Navy Arms, a bunch of Marlins, a couple of elegant Brownings, an exotic Heckler and Koch

  SR9.

  Beneteau picked up the H amp;K and looked at it. “This is a fifteen-hundred-dollar gun, I bet,” he said, aiming it out the window at a Folger’s coffee can in the side yard.

  “What’s the story on the woman up there?” Connell asked.

  “Ellie Rae? She and her husband run the best diner in town. Rather, she runs it and he cooks. Great cook, but when he gets depressed, he drinks. If they break up, he’ll get steady drunk, and she’ll quit, and that’ll be the end of the diner.”

  “Oh,” Connell said. She looked at him to see if he was joking.

  “Hey, that’s a big deal,” Beneteau said defensively. “There are only two of them, and the other one’s a grease pit.”

  Joe Hillerod looked a lot like his brother, with the same blunt, tough German features. “I got fifteen hundred bucks in my wallet, cash, and I want witnesses to that. I don’t want the money going away,” he said sullenly.

  Ellie Rae said, “I’m a witness.”

  “You shut up, Ellie Rae,” Beneteau said. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

  “I love him,” she said. “I can’t help myself.”

  A deputy helped the fat man into the room. He was bleeding all over his head, shoulders, and arms from the window, and was dragging one leg.

  “Dumb bunny jumped off the roof,” the deputy said. “After he crashed through the window.”

  “He was flushing shit upstairs,” Lucas said. Dumb bunny? The guy looks like a mastodon. “He got some of it on the toilet seat, though.”

  “Check that,” Beneteau said to one of the deputies.

  Connell had put away her gun, and now she stepped up behind Hillerod and pulled at his hand, immobilized by the cuffs.

  “What the fuck?” Hillerod said, trying to turn to see what she was doing.

  “See?”

  Lucas looked. Hillerod had the 666 on the web between his thumb and forefinger. “Yeah.”

  The woman who’d been on the fold-out couch had been watching Connell, taking in Connell’s inch-long hair. “I was sexually abused,” she said finally. “By the cops.”

  Connell said, “Yeah?”

  Lucas was climbing the stairs, and Connell hurried after him. In the bedroom, a decrepit w
ater bed was pushed against one wall, with a bedstand and light to one side and a chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed. Magazines and newspapers were scattered around the room. An ironing board sat in a corner, buried in wrinkled clothing, the iron lying on its side at the pointed end of the board.

  A long stag-handled folding knife sat in a jumble of junk on the chest of drawers. Connell bent over next to it, carefully not touching it, looked at it, and said, “Goddamn, Davenport. The autopsies say it’s a knife like this. The blade’s just right.”

  She picked up a matchbook and used it to rotate the knife. The excitement rose in her voice. “There’s some gunky stuff in the hinge or whatever you call it, where it folds; it could be blood.”

  “But look at the cigarettes,” Lucas said.

  A pack of Marlboros sat on the nightstand. There wasn’t a Camel in the house.

  CHAPTER

  17

  The Hillerods called a Duluth lawyer named Aaron Capella. The lawyer arrived at midafternoon in a dusty Ford Escort, talked to the county attorney, then to his clients. Lucas went to the local emergency room, had four stitches taken in his scalp, then met Connell for a late lunch. Afterward, they hung out in Beneteau’s office or wandered around the courthouse, waiting for Capella to finish with the Hillerods.

  The crime-scene crew called from the junkyard to say they’d found three half-kilo bags of cocaine behind a false panel in the junkyard bathroom. Beneteau was more than pleased: he was on television with each of the Duluth-Superior stations.

  “Gonna get my ass reelected, Davenport,” he said to Lucas.

  “I’ll send you a bill,” Lucas said.

  They were talking in his office, and they saw Connell coming up the walk outside. She’d been down at a coffee shop, and carried a china cup with her.

  “That’s a fine-looking woman,” Beneteau said, his eyes lingering on her. “I like the way she sticks her face into trouble. If you don’t mind my asking, have you two… got something going?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No.”

  “Huh. Is she with anybody else?”