John Sanford - Prey 12 - Chosen Prey.txt

by Chosen Prey(lit)

  “We got a new puppy,” the woman said. As she passed the table, she picked up a bottle half full of white wine and started working the cork loose. “We’re paper-training it. You guys want some wine?”

  Lucas said, “No, thanks,” and she took a pull on the bottle, and Del and Lucas walked over to the French doors and out onto a deck.

  The spa was big enough to seat eight, but in this case, sat three: DDT, a large, balding, and mildly fat man with scant chest hair, who was reading a folded copy of The New York Times; and two women, both with short mousy brown hair. Steam rose out of the spa into the cold air, but they all seemed comfortable: None of them were wearing any clothing at all, and when Lucas, Del, and Marshall pushed through the doors, one of the women said, “Better turn on the bubbler, Marie.”

  “Hey, Lucas, how they hanging, man?” DDT said, looking up from the paper. “Del, you fuckhead. What’s happening?” To the girls he said, “They’re cops.”

  “We got a problem, Darrell,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for a girl named, uh . . .” He looked at Del.

  Del said, “Charmin.”

  DDT pointed at one of the mice, who said, “Jesus Christ, it’s Charmin’, like in Charming, you asshole. It’s not sharmin, like the toilet paper.”

  “We thought maybe it came from Please Don’t Squeeze The,” Marshall said. The crow’s-feet around his eyes compressed a little, and the corners of his mouth may have turned up. He was being funny, Lucas realized.

  “No, it don’t,” the woman said frostily.

  “You guys want to get in? Plenty of room. Water’s hot,” DDT said, nodding at the bubbling surface.

  “Ah, we’re kinda running,” Lucas said, looking at Charmin’; she was the larger of two women, and her breasts were floating on the top of the water, her nipples pointing straight out like the prows on a couple of fancy powerboats. “Charmin’, you were working for Randy Whitcomb until not long ago, and we need to find him.”

  “What’s he done?” she asked.

  “Nothing. We’re trying to figure out where he might have bought some jewelry. This was back before he went to L.A.”

  “Yeah? I wasn’t with him them. I didn’t join up until after he got back.”

  “I know that,” Lucas said patiently. “But we need to find him now.”

  “I don’t know if I oughta talk to cops,” she said. “Randy’s a crazy motherfucker.”

  “Tell them,” DDT said.

  She looked at him and said, “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

  “I owe him,” he said. “Big-time. So you can tell him or move the fuck out.”

  She looked at DDT for a minute, then at Lucas, and said, “He’s in St. Paul, one of them gray apartments on Sibley. I don’t know the number.” She gave them a few details, and Lucas nodded: He knew exactly where she meant. “Thanks.”

  “You be careful. The crazy fucker’s been smokin’ crack since he got back—he ain’t got any brains left. And don’t tell him where you got this.”

  DDT said, “So what’re you driving?”

  “C4,” Lucas said. “Bought it new last year.”

  “Yeah? But you’re not right now. . . .” He raised his eyebrows and looked at the three large men.

  “Not with me. I’m in a company car,” Lucas said.

  “Whyn’t you bring it around sometime?” DDT asked.

  “I will,” Lucas said. “Probably when it warms up a little. We’ll take it out for a run.”

  “Do that,” DDT said.

  On the way out of the house, Marshall said, “That was pretty smooth. Why’d he owe you so big?”

  “Last fall, I found him a four-fifty-five Olds engine. He was really hurting for one,” Lucas said.

  Marshall looked at him strangely and said, “You pullin’ my weenie?”

  “No . . . I mean, it was absolutely cherry.”

  LUCAS CALLED ST. Paul from the car, got Allport and filled him in on the jewelry and the connection to Randy Whitcomb.

  “I thought that cocksucker had moved to San Diego or something,” Allport said. “I’ll check with the condo association and see where he is.”

  “We’re on our way right now,” Lucas said. “If you or one of your guys wants to hook up with us.”

  “Need some help?”

  “We could use a warrant and somebody to block the back.”

  “Warrant’s no problem, not with this case. I’ll get a couple of squads and come up myself,” Allport said. “What, half an hour, forty-five minutes?”

  “About that,” Lucas said.

  They were out on I-494, one of the outer-loop highways around the Cities. Marshall, in the back, leaned forward and asked, “What are we doing?”

  “St. Paul’s going to block for us,” Lucas said. He explained the layout of the apartment complex: a rectangular block of two-story townhouse condos, facing the streets on all four sides of a city block. The interior of the rectangle was a common lawn, with marked but unfenced private patio areas behind each town house.

  “Can you get a car in back?” Marshall asked.

  “Not without trying pretty hard. There’re arched entrances to the big lawn on all four sides, but they’re not used for vehicles. Not regularly, anyway. I think they’re more like an emergency thing if there was a fire or something. St. Paul guys’ll have to go in on foot.”

  “Think this guy’ll run?”

  “Can’t tell what Randy’ll do,” Del said. “He’s a rattlesnake and a crazy motherfucker. Comes from a decent family, and they just should have snapped his neck when he was a baby. Would have saved everybody a lot of grief.”

  “Known a couple like that myself,” Marshall said. He thought about it for a minute, then said, “Farm kids, usually. When it happens like that.”

  AFTER ANOTHER PHONE call to Allport, they agreed to meet three blocks from Randy’s to coordinate. Six St. Paul uniformed guys arrived in three squads, including one guy who was the designated hammer. They were all in their thirties—veterans—and Lucas guessed that it was not by chance: Allport was taking it seriously.

  “The problem is that the door is at the bottom of a set of stairs—the downstairs part is basically a garage and workshop, or extra bedroom, and the living quarters are upstairs. So we’re gonna be squeezed onto the stairs if we have to kick the door,” Allport said. He looked around at his crew. “Lucas and Del and I have known this asshole ever since he came downtown six or seven years ago. He can be bad news, so be careful. He’s not that big, but he’s crazy and he’s tough as a goddamn hickory tree. He’s a biter. He’ll bite your goddamn fingers off if you get too close.”

  The uniforms weren’t worried. “Give us a couple of minutes to get close,” one of them said. “He won’t run away from us.”

  “We’ve never found a gun on him,” Lucas said. “But he’s carried one from time to time. He’s been doing a lot of crack, we hear, and maybe some other shit. So . . . if you’ve got to tackle him, tackle him hard. Don’t hurt him—we need him to talk to us.”

  They were all starting to breathe hard, feeling the rush: a critical point on the case, and with a crazy.

  “Come in last,” Del told Lucas. “If there’s no trouble, it won’t make any difference. If there is trouble, maybe it won’t rub off on you—but if there’s big trouble, you’ll be in position to lay some shit on him.”

  Lucas nodded. Randy had been a new guy on the block when one of his girls had spent some time with Lucas, talking. Randy had heard about it. He’d learned from the cheaper TV shows that the girl had to be taught a lesson for her disrespect, or he’d be disrespected himself. He’d taught her the lesson with a church key, cutting an average-looking hooker into a scholarly paper in a plastic surgery journal.

  Lucas had felt pressured by street ethics to repay the attack. He and Del had gone to arrest Randy at a bar, but everybody had known it would come to a fight—and it had. Lucas had gone a little further than he intended, had lost it a little, and Randy had ended that pa
rticular day in Hennepin General’s critical-care unit.

  After a long tangled series of arguments and legal maneuvers, Lucas had left the department under the cloud of possible excessive-force charges. He’d been back for a while, but Randy Whitcomb still could be a political problem.

  The hooker had left the streets after she got out of the hospital, and now worked at a Wal-Mart checkout. She looked okay from three feet, though a close inspection showed a plaid pattern of scars across both of her cheeks. She didn’t talk to Lucas anymore.

  They went to Randy’s door by walking along the face of the apartment building, five of them, led by Allport, followed by the hammer, then Del, then Lucas, with Marshall trailing. At the door, Allport spoke into a handset: “Ready?”

  The uniforms were in position, and Allport slipped his gun, nodded, and pushed the doorbell. No answer. He pushed it again and they heard feet on the stairs, and then the bolt rattled and the door opened, just a crack, with a chain across the crack. Through the crack, Lucas saw a slice of Randy’s face and one eye. Randy jerked back and screamed, “Shit,” as Allport stepped forward and Lucas said, “Watch it!” The door slammed and the bolt slammed with it, and Allport said, “Hit it.”

  Lucas stepped out of the way, and the uniform swung his sledge-hammer at the doorknob. The door blew open with the sound of a Cadillac hitting a picket fence. Allport did a quick peek, pulled back, said, “Let’s go,” and burst in onto the landing. He was turning for the stairs, Del two steps behind him, when the first shot BANGED overhead and Allport screamed, “GUN,” and he and Del both went down and scrambled back off the stairs and out the door.

  Lucas did a quick peek, saw nothing, and heard Allport screaming, “Gun,” into his handset, and at the same time saw Del rolling off the porch and onto his feet, and then he was onto the stairs, moving up, felt Del behind him as a shadow, shouted, “Watch along the railing, watch . . .” And they both watched the railing at the stop of the stairwell. . . .

  From up the stairs Lucas heard glass break, then another shot BANGED through the apartment, and he flinched and looked back and it wasn’t Del behind him but Marshall, a trooper’s long-barreled .357 revolver in his fist. He had no time to think when Marshall said, “I’ll go to the top, you peek over the rail,” and then Marshall was past him to the top of the stairs, and Lucas did a quick peek between the rails at the top and couldn’t see anything.

  Marshall scrambled out onto the carpet at the top, and he was shouting, “Living room is clear, I don’t see him.”

  Another BANG from the back, and Lucas shouted, “He’s in the back, it sounds like he went out.” He heard somebody screaming, “Watch it, watch it, coming your way, watch it . . .”

  Allport, he thought, and then he was at the top of the stairs and saw Marshall, now up and moving in a crouch, headed toward a hallway leading toward the back. He did a peek as Lucas came up and said, “Clear, I think.”

  Lucas did a peek and heard more shouting from the back, and ran down the hallway just in time to hear a fusillade of shots, and more yelling. He was coming up on a room to his right and a closed door on his left. He did a quick peek into the bedroom, saw nothing, continued through a small kitchen, saw broken glass, shouted back, “Watch the rooms, they’re not clear, they’re not clear,” saw Del behind Marshall, got to the window, and looked out.

  Randy Whitcomb was lying faceup, spread-eagled on the grass below the back deck. His shirt was soaked with blood and one hand was flapping convulsively, as though he were fanning himself with a broken arm.

  Lucas turned, saw Del and Marshall in the hallway, and said, “He’s down out back. Check the rooms.” Allport and the hammer cop loomed from the living room. To Allport, Lucas said, “Get an ambulance moving.” Then he was out and down the stairs onto the lawn, where the St. Paul uniforms, guns still drawn, had gathered around Randy.

  Randy had been hit four times, twice in the legs, once in the stomach, and once in his left forearm, the arm that had been flapping. One of the uniform cops was now holding it to the grass so he couldn’t flap it. Randy wasn’t saying anything, not a sound: no whimpers, nothing. His eyes rolled, rolled, rolled, from this side to the other, up and down; and his mouth strained, not to say something, but as if it were trying to escape his face.

  “Got an ambulance coming,” Lucas said to him. He didn’t hear it.

  One of the St. Paul uniforms said, “He had a gun.”

  “Yeah, he let go a couple of times inside,” Lucas said.

  The cop said, “He had a gun. Up there, we heard it.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  One of the other cops said, “I think it’s in the bushes. He had it in his hand when he came out.”

  “Find it,” Lucas said. “Don’t touch, just find it.”

  Del came out on the deck. “Nobody in the house. But, uh . . .” He looked back into the condo, and Lucas could hear Marshall talking. Then Del turned back to Lucas and said, “There’s a lot of blood up here.”

  “Nobody shot at him up there.”

  “No, no, I mean, somebody else’s blood. He was trying to clean it up with paper towels, but it’s kind of splattered on the couch and there are little droplets on the wallpaper.”

  Now Randy moaned, just once. Lucas looked down at him and said, “What’d you do?” But Randy didn’t hear him; he just rolled his eyes again.

  From the corner of the house, one of the St. Paul uniforms said, “There it is.” To Lucas: “Got the gun, Chief.”

  “Just stay right next to it. Keep an eye on it until the crime-scene people get here. Don’t let anyone get near it.”

  Allport came out on the deck and asked, “Everybody okay?”

  “Everybody except Randy. He’s hit pretty hard.” Lucas looked down at him again. Randy’s shirt was soaked with blood, and Lucas noticed that even with the convulsions running through his upper body, his lower body never moved. Spinal, he thought.

  Allport yelled at one of the uniforms: “Freeze everything, John. Don’t let anything move.” Then, to Lucas: “You oughta come up and look at this mess.”

  Lucas said, “Okay,” then looked down at Randy again. “What the fuck did you do, you little asshole? What’d you do?”

  16

  MARSHALL AND DEL came down from the apartment to watch the paramedics working over Randy. Whatever they did brought the pain on, and the kid started a cowlike lowing that seemed to inhabit all the air in the common area. He was still doing it when they strapped him on a gurney, ready to move him.

  Two dozen kids, half of them white, the other half Hmong or black, most of them serious but a few cutting up, milled in a wide semicircle around the shooting scene, kept back by uniforms. Somewhere in the crowd was a young girl who’d periodically call out in her high-pitched TV-whore voice, “That motherfucker dead?” or “You shoot that motherfucker?” When the paramedics started wheeling the gurney toward the ambulance, she cried out, “Put him in the ’fridge, he dead.”

  When he was gone, the cops on the original blocking squads were isolated to make statements, and Randy’s revolver was photographed, measured, and carefully plucked out of the weed bed where it had fallen. The crime-scene guy who lifted it popped the cylinder and said, “Four rounds fired.”

  “That’s about right,” Allport told him.

  “Can’t tell when,” the crime-scene guy said.

  “About a half an hour ago, dickhead,” Allport said.

  Lucas, Del, and Marshall clustered around the bottom of the apartment steps. Marshall said, “He doesn’t look that bad, considering.”

  Lucas nodded. “If they get him to Regions alive, he’ll make it—as long as he doesn’t have too much shit in his bloodstream.”

  “I told the paramedics about the crack,” Del said. “They’ll watch out for it.”

  “I want to know what the heck happened,” Marshall said. “Why’d he open up? Because we took the door down?”

  Lucas rubbed his head, looking up at the apartment,
and said, “I don’t know. He’s always been a crazy sonofabitch, and he never worried about getting hurt. Not brave, just nuts. I never really thought about him being suicidal.”

  “It’s that blood,” Del said. He looked up, where Lucas was looking, and continued, “Something happened up there.”

  “He couldn’t be our guy,” Marshall said. “You didn’t have any goddamn twelve- or thirteen-year-old traveling around the countryside picking up women in their twenties. I mean, I don’t know what it means.”

  “He was probably just a connection,” Lucas said. “But he knows our guy.”

  “We could get a name tonight, then,” Marshall said. “They sew him up—”