John Sandford

by Shadow Prey

  “Our friend with the braids?” asked Hart.

  “No. And they got this guy. They shot him, anyway. He’s in a trauma room right now. Some cowboy saw the shooting, pulled a rifle out of his pickup and nailed him.”

  “Okay. Well, fuck. Better go see Yellow Hand, first thing. If it is Yellow Hand. I can’t worry about this SoDak thing, not yet.” Lucas stood up and wandered in a circle, stopped by the door. Lily, Daniel and Hart watched him, worried, and he tried to smile. “You guys look like Dorothy, the Lion and the Tin Man. Cheer up.”

  “So what, that makes you the Wizard of Oz?” asked Lily, still worried.

  “I feel more like the Wicked Witch when the house fell on her,” Lucas said. He lifted a hand. “See you.”

  • • •

  Yellow Hand’s body was at the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office, lying faceup on a stainless-steel tray. Lucas hated floaters. They no longer looked human. They looked . . . melted.

  “Yellow Hand?” asked a deputy medical examiner.

  Lucas looked the melted thing in face. Yellow Hand’s eyes were open and bloated and had no pupils; they resembled milk-jug plastic. His features were twisted, some enlarged, some not. But the thing was still recognizable. He turned away. “Yeah. Yellow Hand. He’s got people out in Fort Thompson, that’s in South Dakota. His mother, I think.”

  “We’ll call . . .”

  “Do you have a cause of death yet?” Lucas asked.

  “We took a quick look. He’s got a hole at the base of his skull. Like one of those Chinese executions, one bullet. That’s not official yet: the wound might not have killed him, he might have drowned or something . . . .”

  “But he was shot?”

  “Looks like it . . .”

  Sloan arrived with the Porsche as Lucas was getting out of the squad car at his house.

  “What a fuckin’ car,” Sloan said enthusiastically. “A hundred and fifty-five on the interstate, I couldn’t believe it . . . .” He checked Lucas’ face. “Just joking,” he said. “Jesus, you okay? You look like shit.”

  “It’s been a bad day. And not even noon yet,” Lucas said, trying to put some humor in his voice. It came out flat.

  “Was it . . . ?”

  “Yeah. It was Yellow Hand.”

  Sloan gave him the keys and said that Lily would be up to her neck in paperwork. A couple of local stations, and one from New York, were already asking why she had been carrying a pistol in Minneapolis. Daniel was handling it, Sloan said.

  “Well, I gotta go, if I want a ride back in the squad,” Sloan said.

  “Yeah. Thanks for bringing the car.”

  “Take it easy . . . .” Sloan seemed reluctant to leave him, but Lucas turned his back and walked to the house. As he unlocked the front door, he could hear the phone ringing. The answering machine kicked in before he could reach it. Jennifer Carey’s voice said, “It’s ten twenty-eight. We’ve been on the air about the Hood thing. Call me . . .”

  Lucas picked up the phone. “Whoa. You still there?”

  “Lucas? When did you get in?”

  “Just this minute. Hang on a second, I’ve got to shut the front door.”

  When he got back to the phone, Jennifer pounced: “Damn you, Davenport, I’ve been going crazy. I talked to Daniel and he said he didn’t know where you were, but that you were okay.”

  “I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine, I’m feeling a little fucked up. Where are you?”

  “At the station. When I found out what was happening—thanks for not calling, by the way, we got our asses kicked by Eight, and since everybody knows that we go together, they’re looking at me like I’m an alien toad . . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah. Where’s the baby?” Lucas asked.

  “I called Ellen, the college girl. She has her. She can stay as late as I need. She can stay over if she has to.”

  “Can you come over later?”

  “You’re okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. But I could use some heavy-duty succor.”

  “Things are going crazy here. You heard about Elmer Linstad, out in South Dakota?”

  “Yeah. The attorney general.”

  “Dead as a mackerel. The guy they shot, this Liss guy—”

  “Whoa, whoa, you’re ahead of me now. Who is he?”

  “He’s an Indian guy named John Liss. He’s from right here in the Cities. He’s in the operating room, but the word is, he’s going to make it. They’re talking about putting me on a plane later this afternoon. I’ll be running the crew out there . . .”

  “Okay.” Lucas tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

  “ . . . but I could sneak away around lunchtime.”

  “I’d like to see you,” Lucas said. “I’m feeling kind of weird.”

  “If we sent a crew over there, could you talk . . . ?”

  “No, I can’t, Jen. Really. Tell them I’m not here. I’m going to turn off the phone. I’ve got to lie down.”

  “All right . . . Love you.”

  Lucas crawled into bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. His brain was turning over, hot, he could feel the touch of muzzle behind his ear, the grotesquely bloated face of Yellow Hand floated up in front of his eyes . . . .

  He was lying flat on his back, sweating. He turned his head and looked at the clock. He’d been in bed for more than an hour; he must have been asleep, he must have been somewhere, it felt like five minutes . . . .

  Lucas sat up and winced as the headache hit him. He went out to the kitchen, got a bottle of lime-flavored mineral water from the refrigerator and walked unsteadily back to his workroom. The answering machine was blinking at him: eight messages. He punched the replay button. Six calls were from TV stations and the two papers. One was from Daniel, the last from Lily. He called her back.

  “I’m up to my ass in paperwork,” she said.

  “I heard.”

  “And I’ve got a deposition tomorrow morning . . . .”

  “Lunch, maybe?”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “I’ll be on the street. I’ll have a handset . . . .”

  Daniel had called to see how he was. “We’ve got the feebs by the nuts,” he said. “We’ve got one team working the people in Hood’s apartment house and his roommates; Sloan and Anderson are digging for stuff on this guy in South Dakota. You heard he was from here?”

  “Yeah. Jen told me.”

  “Okay. Listen, I’ve got to go. You take it easy. We got it covered.”

  When he got off the phone with Daniel, Lucas poured the mineral water into a tumbler and followed with three fingers of Tanqueray gin. The combination made a bad gin and tonic. He sat in the kitchen and drank it down. Fuckin’ Yellow Hand. Hood and the shotgun. He reached back and rubbed the spot where the shotgun had been, then walked unsteadily back to the bathroom and got in the shower. The liquor was working on him and the hot water beat on his face, but the images of Hood and Yellow Hand would not go away.

  He was out of the shower, toweling off, when the doorbell rang. He wrapped the towel around his waist, padded through the kitchen and peeked out a window at his porch.

  Jennifer.

  “Hi,” she said, taking him in. “You still okay?”

  “Kind of drunk,” he said.

  A worry line appeared between her eyebrows, and she leaned forward and kissed him. “Gin,” she said. “I never would have believed it.”

  “I’m fucked up,” he said, trying on a grin.

  “Follow me,” she said, tugging at his towel. “We’ll try to unfuck you.”

  The afternoon sun dropped below the eaves and lit up the curtain in Lucas’ bedroom. Jennifer pushed him off and swung her legs over the side of the bed, and looked back and said, “That was . . . frantic.”

  “I’m not sure I’m still alive,” Lucas said. “Christ, I could use a cigarette.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Almost paralyzed. I wanted to plead, but . . . it just . . . I don’t know, it wouldn’t
have done any good . . . . I just wanted to get it off me . . . .”

  “This policewoman from New York . . .”

  “Lily . . .”

  “Yeah. There was a press conference, a short one, with Daniel and her and Larry Hart. She looked tough,” Jennifer said, watching his face. “She looked like your type.”

  “I could give a shit about that,” Lucas grunted. “The best thing about her is that she used to shoot in combat competition. She had that forty-five in Billy Hood’s face in maybe a tenth of a second. Boom. Adiós, motherfucker.”

  “She looked pretty nice,” Jennifer said.

  “Jesus, yeah. She looks pretty nice. She’s a little chubby, but nice-looking.”

  “She looked a little chubby,” Jennifer agreed. Jennifer worked out every morning at a hard-core muscle gym.

  “She eats everything in sight,” Lucas said. “Jesus, I wish I still smoked.”

  “So you’re all right . . . .”

  “Nothing like this has ever happened,” he said, bewildered. “I’ve come close before, shit, with the Maddog I almost got my ass killed. But this got to me . . . I don’t know.”

  She rubbed his still damp hair and he asked, “Did you go on the date? To the symphony?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How was it?”

  “It was okay,” she said. “I’ll go with him again if he asks, but I won’t be sleeping with him.”

  “Ah. Decent of you to tell me.”

  “He’s just too fuckin’ nice,” Jennifer said. “No edges. Everything I said, he agreed with.”

  “He’s probably hung like a Tennessee stud horse.”

  Jennifer’s forehead wrinkled. “Men worry about the goddamnedest things,” she said.

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  “Sure. That’s why you mentioned it,” she said. “Anyway, even if I did plan to sleep with him, I’d put it off for a while. I keep looking at the baby, and I keep thinking I want to do it again. With the same daddy.”

  Lucas turned on his side and kissed her on the forehead.

  “I’d like to help, whenever you want to. Soon?”

  “I think so. In a couple, three months. This time, I’ll tell you when I go off the Pill.”

  He kissed her again and his hand crept over her breast, circling and pressing her nipple with the palm of his hand.

  “I’d like a boy,” she said.

  “Whatever,” said Lucas. “Another daughter would be fine with me.”

  “Maybe we could move it up. Next month, maybe.”

  “I’ll be on the job,” he said.

  She laughed, shook her head and looked at her watch. “Think you could stand some more succor? I’ve got barely enough time.”

  “Christ, I don’t know, I’m getting old . . . .”

  They made love again, more sedately, and later, when Jennifer was getting dressed, Lucas said, hoarsely, “I didn’t want the world to go away. I would never have known, but I kept thinking . . . I don’t even know if I was thinking it, but I was feeling it . . . I wanted more. More life. Jesus, I was afraid I’d just wink out, like a soap bubble . . . .”

  After Jennifer left for the airport, Lucas tried again to nap. Failing, he turned on the television and caught the cable news from Sioux Falls. John Liss was out of surgery; he’d live, but he’d never walk again. The cowboy’s shot had taken out a piece of spinal cord just above the hips. They ran the tape of the shooting again, then another time, in slow motion, and then cut to a picture of Lawrence Duberville Clay. It was a well-known shot, the director in shirtsleeves on the Chicago waterfront, working a cocaine bust. He had a huge Desert Eagle automatic pistol packed under his arm in an elaborate shoulder holster.

  “In a related development, FBI director Lawrence Duberville Clay has announced that he will go personally to Brookings to take charge of the investigation, and said he expects to set up a temporary national FBI headquarters in Minneapolis until the conspirators are captured,” the anchorwoman said. “Clay said the move should be accomplished in the next two or three days. This is the third time that the FBI director has involved himself with a specific investigation. His action is seen as an administration effort to emphasize the importance given to its war on crime . . . .”

  Lucas poked the remote control and Clay’s face went away. Three o’clock. He stood, thought a moment, then went back in the kitchen for the rest of the Tanqueray.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Shadow Love saw Billy Hood’s death on a television set in the corner of a Lake Street grill. The camera was a full block from the scene, but up high, and it was all as clear as a running play on Monday Night Football.

  Billy and the hunter cop. The woman with the purse. Billy moving. Why did he do that? Why did he take his finger off the trigger? The woman’s hand coming up with the pistol. The shot, Billy going down like a rag doll, and Davenport kneeling on the pavement, vomiting . . .

  Shadow Love watched it once, watched it again, watched it a third time as the station endlessly ran the tape loop. “The following news broadcast contains scenes of violence and death and may not be appropriate for children. If there are any children in the viewing area . . .”

  And then a running press conference at the shooting scene. Larry Hart: “ . . . have developed evidence that these people are not just killing whites, but have killed one of our own, a Dakota man from Fort Thompson, Yellow Hand . . .”

  Larry Hart on the TV. Sweating. Pleading. Twisting his hands like Judas Iscariot.

  The black spot popped up, twitching, growing, blurring his vision. Shadow Love tried to blink it away, but the anger was stirring through his chest.

  Judas. Sweating, pleading . . .

  Hart’s face vanished in an electronic instant, to be replaced by that of a woman newscaster. “We’ve just gotten word that there has been another assassination attempt in Brookings, South Dakota, apparently related to the killings done by the Indian extremist group responsible for the assassinations of the New York commissioner of welfare and a federal judge in Oklahoma. The target of the South Dakota attempt was Elmer Linstad, the state’s attorney general . . . .”

  The woman paused, looked at her desk, then up again. “CBS news is reporting that Elmer Linstad, attorney general of South Dakota, is dead in an assassination in Brookings, South Dakota. His assailant was shot by a bystander and has been taken to a Brookings hospital . . . .”

  “Billy’s dead and John’s been shot.” Shadow Love, carrying a long cardboard box, pushed into the apartment. He kicked the door shut and tossed the box on the couch. A printed label on the side of the box said CURTAIN RODS.

  “What?” The Crows, startled, stared at him.

  “You deaf?” Shadow Love asked. “I said Billy’s dead. John’s been shot. It’s on the TV.”

  The Crows’ apartment had come with a television, but they rarely turned it on during the day. Now they did, and the loops were running.

  William Two Horses Hood, the anchorman said, had been positively identified as the slayer of John Andretti, the New York City welfare commissioner. He had been shot to death by a New York police officer after Hood had taken a Minneapolis officer hostage. The Minneapolis officer was not hurt. John Liss, a Sioux Indian from Minneapolis, was in guarded condition in a Brookings hospital . . . .

  “That’s the hunter cop,” Shadow Love said, tapping the screen over the film sequence of Lucas. “He found him.”

  “Motherfucker,” Sam whispered as they watched the tape. Aaron began to weep and Sam patted him on the shoulder. They watched the tape again, then the one of the killing of Linstad, and then a rerun of the on-street press conference, with Larry Hart.

  Sam looked at his cousin. “Remember him? He’s one of the Wapeton Harts, Carl and Mary’s boy?”

  “Yeah. Good people.” said Aaron. He turned to Shadow Love. “He’s working with this cop?”

  “Yes. And everybody likes him, Larry Hart. I went to school with him. Everybody liked him in school. E
verybody likes him now. The hunter and Hart and this bitch from New York, they’ll find us. There are people who know the Crows, who’ve probably seen you on the streets. And they’ll talk . . . .”

  “You don’t know that,” said Aaron.

  “Yes, I do. Just like I knew they’d find Billy. If they don’t find us by accident, somebody will turn us in. And it could be one of you, or Leo, or John. Or maybe one of their wives.”

  “Nobody would do that . . .” Aaron objected.

  “Sure they would, if this hunter pushes the right buttons,” Shadow Love said.

  “And of all of us, you’d be the only one who wouldn’t break?”

  “That’s right,” said Shadow Love. “Because you know what gets people? Love. That’s what it is. Cops use it. They say, Help your friend; betray him. They catch Sam and they want Aaron. So they say on the news that Sam is dying, he wants his cousin to pray him into death . . . . Could you stay away?”

  Aaron didn’t answer.

  “I’d never betray us, because I don’t have anyone I love enough,” Shadow Love said with a subdued sadness. “Sometimes . . . I wish I could. I never had a laugh, you know. Never got to play catch-me-fuck-me with some chick. The only one, ever, they could use against me was Mama. With her dead, there’s no pressure they could put on me.”

  After a moment, Aaron said, “That’s the most awful thing I ever fuckin’ heard.” Behind him, Sam nodded, and Shadow Love turned away.

  “That’s the way it is,” he said.

  Aaron, tears running down his face, said, “They’re all going. There’s only Leo now.”

  “And us,” said Sam.

  Aaron nodded. “If Clay doesn’t come in after South Dakota, one of us may have to go to Milwaukee.”

  Sam glanced at Shadow Love, involuntarily, just a peek, but Aaron caught it. “No,” he said.