John Sandford

by Shadow Prey

  “Shit,” Lucas said. “No point in trying to jam that. He’ll be looking right through the barrel when he puts a shell in.”

  “Don’t see any shells,” Lily said. “Should we take it?”

  “Better not. If his roommates are involved, we don’t want anything missing . . . .”

  Lucas went back to the bedroom and looked through the other man’s boxes. There was nothing of interest, no letters or notes that might tie the others more intimately to Hood. He went back into the living room. “Lily?”

  “I’m in the bathroom,” she called. “Find anything else?”

  “No. How about you?” He poked his head into the bathroom and found her carefully going through the medicine cabinet.

  “Nothing serious.” She took a prescription-drug bottle out of the cabinet and looked at it, her forehead wrinkling. “There’s a prescription here for Hood. Strong stuff, but I don’t see how you could abuse it.”

  “What is it?”

  “An antihistamine. The label says it’s for bee stings. My father used it. He was allergic to bees and fire ants. If he got stung, his whole body would swell up. It used to scare the shit out of him; he’d think he was smothering. And he might have too, if he didn’t have his medicine around. The swelling can pinch off your windpipe . . . .”

  Lucas shrugged. “No use to us.”

  Lily put the plastic bottle of pills back in the cabinet, closed it and followed him into the living room. “Anything else?”

  “I guess not,” Lucas said. “We fucked up a gun; I hope there aren’t any shells for the shotgun.”

  “Didn’t see any. Are you going to do any pictures?”

  “Yeah. Just a few views.” Lucas took a half-dozen Polaroid photos of the rooms and paced off the main room’s dimensions, which he dictated into the tape recorder.

  “You know, we really could spend more time going through the place,” Lily suggested.

  “Better not. What you get quick is probably all you’re going to get,” Lucas said. “Never push when you’re inside somebody else’s house. All kinds of shit can happen. Friends stop by unexpectedly. Relatives. Get in and get out.”

  “You sound more and more experienced . . . .”

  Lucas shrugged. “You got the warrant?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Lily took it out of her purse and stuck it in the sleeve of a winter coat in the living room closet. “We’ll tell the court we put it one place he’d find it for sure. Of course, he’s got to put on the coat.”

  “Which he probably wouldn’t do until winter . . .”

  “Which is not that far away,” Lily said.

  “So all right,” Lucas said. “Did we change anything?”

  “Nothing I can see,” Lily said.

  “Let me take a last look in the bedroom.” He stepped into the bedroom, looked around and finally opened the closet door an inch. “I’m slipping,” he said. “The damn door was open when I came in and I closed it.”

  Lily was looking at him curiously. Lucas said, “What?”

  “I’m really kind of impressed,” she conceded. “You’re pretty good at this.”

  “That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me.”

  She grinned and shrugged. “So I’m a little competitive.”

  “I’m sorry about ragging you this morning,” Lucas said, the words tumbling out. “I’m not a responsible human being before noon. I don’t daylight; I really don’t.”

  “I shouldn’t have picked on you,” she said. “I just want to get this job done.”

  “Are we making up?”

  She turned away toward the door, her back to him.

  “It’s all right with me,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.” She opened the door and peered down the hallway.

  “Clear,” she said.

  Lucas was just behind her. “If we’re going to make up, we ought to do it right,” he said.

  She turned and looked at him. “What?”

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth, and the kiss came back for just the barest fraction of a second, a returned pressure with a hint of heat. Then she pulled away and stepped out into the hall, flustered.

  “Enough of that shit,” she said.

  It was a five-minute walk down the block, around the corner, up the alley and into the surveillance apartment. Lily kept her head turned, apparently interested in watching the apartment buildings go by. Once or twice, Lucas felt her glance at him, and then quickly away. He could still feel the pressure of her lips on his.

  “How’d we do?” Del asked when they got back to the apartment. Sloan stood up and wandered over. A third detective had arrived and was sitting on an aluminum lawn chair, reading a book and watching the street. A man in a gray suit sat on a folding canvas camp stool next to the window. He was reading a hardcover book and smoking a pipe.

  “Found a couple of guns, fucked one of them up,” Lucas said. Under his breath he asked, “Feeb?”

  Del nodded, and they glanced at the FBI man in the gray suit. “Observing,” Del muttered. In a louder voice he said, “Get anything else?”

  “A phone number,” Lily said. “I’ll call Anderson and see how quick he can run down that Ohio phone.”

  Anderson called Kieffer and Kieffer called Washington. Washington made three calls. Ten minutes after Lily talked to Anderson, Kieffer got a call from the agent-in-charge in Columbus, Ohio. The number was for a motel off Interstate 70 near Columbus. An hour later, an FBI agent showed a motel desk clerk a wire photograph of Hood. The clerk nodded, remembering the face, and said Hood had stayed at the motel the night before. The clerk found the registration, signed as Bill Harris. There was a license-plate number, but a check showed that the number had never been issued in Minnesota.

  “He’s careful,” Anderson said. They were gathered in Daniel’s office.

  “But he’s moving right along,” said Kieffer.

  “He ought to be here. Or close,” Lily said, looking from Lucas to Anderson to Daniel to Kieffer.

  Kieffer nodded. “Very late tonight or sometime tomorrow, if he keeps pushing it. He’s got Chicago in the way. He either has to go through it, or go way around it . . . . He’d have to push like a sonofabitch to make it here tonight. It’s more likely that he’d make it to Madison tonight and get into the Cities tomorrow.”

  “How far is Madison?” Lily asked.

  “Five hours.”

  “He is pushing it,” she said. “So it could be tonight . . . .”

  “We’ll keep a watch,” Daniel said. He looked around. “Anything else?”

  “I can’t think of anything,” Lucas said. “Lily?”

  “I guess we wait,” Lily said.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Lily went back to the surveillance post with Del, the undercover cop, while Lucas filled out the return on the search warrant. As he was finishing, Larry Hart walked in, carrying an overnight bag.

  “Anything more?” Lucas asked.

  “Nothing but a bunch of rumors,” Hart said, dumping the bag against the wall. “There was something weird going on, just about the time of the bikers. There was a sun dance up at Standing Rock, but that was on the up-and-up. But there was maybe a ceremony of some kind at Bear Butte. A midnight deal. That’s the rumor.”

  “Any names?”

  “No. But the guys out there are asking around.”

  “We need names. In this business, names are the game.”

  Hart checked in with Anderson, then went home to clean up. Lucas filed the return on the search warrant, walked across the street to a newsstand and bought half a dozen magazines, then headed down to Indian Country.

  Del was asleep on an inflatable mattress, his mouth half open. He looked exactly like a bum, Lucas decided. Two Narcotics cops were perched on matching aluminum lawn chairs, watching the street. A cooler sat next to the cop on the left and a boombox was playing “Brown Sugar.” The FBI man was gone, although his stool was still there: the seat read L. L. BEAN. Lily was sitt
ing on a stack of newspapers, leaning back against a wall.

  “You guys are such a bunch of cutups,” Lucas said as he walked in.

  “Fuck you, Davenport,” the two surveillance cops said in unison.

  “I second that,” Lily said.

  “Anytime, anyplace,” Lucas said. The cops laughed, and Lily said, “You talking to me or them?”

  “Them,” said Lucas. “Duane’s got such a nice ass.”

  “Takes a load off my mind,” said Lily.

  “Puts a load on mine,” said Duane, the fat surveillance cop.

  “Nothing happening?” asked Lucas.

  “Lot of fuckin’ dope,” Duane said. “I was kinda surprised. We don’t hear too much about it from this area.”

  “We don’t know too many Indians,” Lucas said. He looked around the bare apartment. “Where’s the feeb?”

  “He went out. Said he was coming back. He seems kinda touchy about his chair, if that’s what you were thinking,” said the thin cop.

  “Yeah?”

  “Stacks of newspaper down the hall,” Lily said.

  One of the magazines had a debate on ten-millimeter automatic pistols. A gun writer suggested that it was the perfect defensive cartridge, producing twice the muzzle energy of typical nine-millimeter and .45 ACP rounds and almost half again as much as the .357 Magnum. The writer’s opponent, a Los Angeles cop, worried that the ten-millimeter was a little too hot, tending to punch holes not only through the target but also through the crowd at the bus stop two blocks away. Lucas couldn’t follow the details of the argument. His mind kept straying to the shape of Lily’s neck, the edge of her cheek from the side and slightly behind, the curve of her wrist. Her lip. He remembered Sloan saying something about her overbite, and he smiled just a bit and nibbled at his own lip.

  “What’re you smiling about?” Lily asked.

  “Nothing,” Lucas said. “Magazine.”

  She heaved herself to her feet, stretched, yawned and wandered over. “Hot-hot-hot,” she said. “It’s a ten-MM?”

  Lucas closed the magazine. “Dumb fucks,” he said.

  Anderson called on the portable a few minutes after one o’clock: The killer in Oklahoma City had vanished. Kieffer had talked to FBI agents in South Dakota about the rumors Hart had heard of a midnight ceremony, Anderson added, but nobody had much.

  “There’s some question about whether there ever was such a thing,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kieffer talked to the lead investigator out there and this guy thinks the rumors came out of the confrontation with the bikers. One night the Indians surrounded Bear Butte, wouldn’t let the bikers down the road around it. The bikers supposedly saw fires and so on, and heard drum music—and that eventually got turned into this secret-ceremony business.”

  “So it could be another dead end,” Lily said.

  “That’s what Kieffer says.”

  “I could be watching The Young and the Restless,” Lily said twenty minutes later.

  “Go for a walk?” Lucas suggested.

  “All right. Take a portable.”

  They went out the alley, two blocks to a 7-Eleven, bought Diet Cokes and started back.

  “So fuckin’ boring,” Lily complained.

  “You don’t have to sit there. He probably won’t be in until this evening,” Lucas said.

  “I feel like I oughta be there,” Lily said. “He’s my man.”

  On the way back, Lucas took a small gun-cleaning kit out of the Porsche. Inside the apartment, he spread newspapers on the floor, sat cross-legged, broke down his P7 and began cleaning it. Lily went back to her stack of newspapers for a few minutes, then moved over across from him.

  “Mind if I use it?” she asked after watching for a moment.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks.” She took her .45 out of her purse, popped the magazine, checked the chamber to make sure it was empty and began stripping it. “I break a fingernail about once a week on this damn barrel bushing,” she said. She stuck her tongue out in concentration, rotated the bushing over the recoil spring plug and eased the spring out.

  “Pass the nitro,” she said.

  Lucas handed her the cleaning solvent.

  “This stuff smells better than gasoline,” she said. “It could turn me into a sniffer.”

  “Gives me headaches,” Lucas said. “It smells good but I can’t handle it.” He noticed that her .45 was spotless before she began cleaning it. His P7 didn’t need the work either, but it was something to do.

  “Ever shot a P7?” he asked idly.

  “The other one. The eight-shot. The big one, like yours, has a lot of firepower, but I can’t get my hand around the butt. I don’t like the way it carries either. Too fat.”

  “That’s not exactly a Tinker Toy you’ve got there,” he said, nodding at her Colt.

  “No, but the shape of the butt is different. It’s skinnier. That’s what I need. It’s easier to handle.”

  “I really don’t like that single-action for street work,” Lucas said conversationally. “It’s fine if you’re target-shooting, but if you’re only worried about hitting a torso . . . I like the double-action.”

  “You could try one of the forty-five Smiths.”

  “They’re supposed to be good guns,” Lucas agreed. “I probably would have, if the P7 hadn’t come out first . . . . How come you never went to a Smith?”

  “Well, this thing just feels right to me. When I was shooting in competition I used a 1911 from Springfield Armory in thirty-eight Super. I want the forty-five for the street, but all that competition . . . the gun feels friendly.”

  “You shot competition?” Lucas asked. The cops at the window, who had been listening in an abstract way, suddenly perked up at an undertone in Lucas’ voice.

  “I was New York women’s champ in practical shooting for a couple of years,” Lily said. “I had to quit competition because it was taking too much time. But I still shoot a little.”

  “You must be pretty good,” Lucas offered. The cops by the window glanced at each other. A bet.

  “Better than anybody you’re likely to know,” she said offhandedly.

  Lucas snorted and she squinted at him.

  “What? You think you can shoot with me?”

  “With you?” Lucas said. His lip might have curled.

  Lily sat up, interested now. “You ever compete?”

  He shrugged. “Some.”

  “You ever win?”

  “Some. Used a 1911, in fact.”

  “Practical or bull’s-eye?”

  “A little of both,” he said.

  “And you think you can shoot with me?”

  “I can shoot with most people,” Lucas said.

  She looked at him, studied his face, and a small smile started at the corners of her lips. “You want to put your money where your mouth is?”

  It was Lucas’ turn to stare, weighing the challenge. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Anytime, anyplace.”

  Lily noticed the cops by the window watching them.

  “He’s sandbagging me, right?” she said. “He’s the North American big-bore champ or some fuckin’ thing.”

  “I don’t know, I never seen him shoot,” one of the cops said.

  Lily stared at him with narrowed eyes, gauging the likelihood that he was lying, then turned back to Lucas. “All right,” she said. “Where do we shoot?”

  They shot at a police pistol range in the basement of a precinct house, using Outers twenty-five-foot slow-fire pistol targets. There were seven concentric rings on each target face. The three outer rings were marked but not colored, while the inner four rings—the 7, 8, 9 and 10—were black. The center ring, the 10 ring, was a bit smaller than a dime.

  “Nice range,” Lily said when Lucas turned on the lights. A Hennepin County deputy had been leaving just when they arrived. When he heard what they were doing, he insisted on judging the match.

  Lily put her handset on the le
dge of a shooting booth, took the .45 from her purse, held it in both hands and looked downrange over the sights. “Let’s get the targets up.”

  “This P7 ain’t exactly a target pistol,” Lucas said. He squinted downrange. “I never did like the light in here either.”

  “Cold feet?” Lily asked.

  “Making conversation,” he said. “I just wish I had my Gold Cup. It’d make me feel better. It’d also punch a bigger hole in the paper. The same size as yours. If you’re as good as you say, that could make the difference.”

  “You could always chicken out if the extra seven-hundredths of an inch makes you nervous,” Lily said. She pushed a magazine into the Colt and jacked a shell into the chamber. “And I don’t have my match guns either.”

  “Fuck it. We’ll flip to shoot,” Lucas said. He dug in his pocket for a quarter.

  “How much?” Lily asked.

  “It’s got to be enough to feel it,” Lucas said. “We ought to give it a little bite of reality. You say.”

  “Best two out of three rounds . . . One hundred dollars.”

  “That’s not enough,” Lucas said, aiming the P7 downrange again. “I was thinking a thousand.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Lily said, tossing her head. The deputy was now watching them with real interest. The story would be all over the sheriff’s department and the city cops, and probably St. Paul, before the night was done. “You’re trying to psych me, Davenport. A hundred is all I can afford. I’m not a rich game-inventor.”

  “Hey, Dick,” Lucas said to the deputy. “Lily’s not gonna let me put the targets up, you want to . . .”

  “Sure . . .”

  The deputy began running the target sheets out to twenty-five feet. Lucas stepped closer to Lily, his voice low. “I’ll tell you what. If you win, you take down a hundred. If I win, I get another kiss. Time and place of my choosing.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “That’s the most goddamned juvenile thing I ever heard. You’re too fuckin’ old for that, Davenport. You’ve got lines in your face. Your hair is turning gray.”