Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  They talked about the foot, and then about the chase at the hospital, and Cappy said, “I don’t know if I dinged either of them, but I don’t think so. I tricked them at the end, though ...”

  “Do you think they might know your name?” Barakat asked.

  “I don’t know what they know. They might know my name. The woman in the operating room ... it sounded like she said, ‘Cap,’ like my name.”

  “Hmm. If they don’t know your name, it would be best if you could stay overnight, leave in the morning, after this snow goes through. The highways will be impossible tonight. You don’t need to get in an accident now.”

  “But I need to get back and load up my stuff,” Cappy said. “I need to get my bike in the van.”

  “Do you need me to help?”

  “Naw. I’ve got a ramp, I’ll ride right up it. I don’t have anything else heavy,” Cappy said. And, “What are you going to do?”

  Barakat said, “I am going to ask the hospital to give me time to fly home to Lebanon to see Shaheen’s parents and talk to them about what a fine fellow their son was. I don’t think they can say ‘no,’ so I will be out of sight. I will stay one hour there, and then go to Paris, maybe for a month. You should see Paris someday ...”

  “Don’t think I’ll see Paris,” Cappy said.

  “When I come back, I will think some more about this Karkinnen woman, and what she has done to us. If not for her, we would be done here.”

  “Good luck on that,” Cappy said. “She reminds me of this dude out in California. He was the foreman at this company I worked for, and he used to give me shit all the time. I was going to kill him, but when I was ready to, he was always off somewhere. I couldn’t find him. When I could find him, I wasn’t ready. Just luck. Maybe this bitch is one of those.”

  “This is not a good thought,” Barakat said.

  AT NINE O’CLOCK, Cappy couldn’t stand lying on his back anymore, managed to get to his feet without help. He couldn’t walk on the front of his damaged foot, but could stump along on the heel. “Not as bad as I thought,” he said.

  Barakat was heavily stoned, flying: “You still have residual effect from the local anesthetic. It will get worse, believe what I say.”

  “That’s great,” Cappy said.

  “One thing more,” Barakat said. “We have not talked about Joe Mack. Joe Mack is the other threat. I believe that sometime he will call me again. If I find out where he is, it would perhaps be better if Joe Mack died.”

  “I think you’re right. He is a dumb guy who’ll get caught sooner or later,” Cappy said.

  “I will try to find out where he is, and will call you. Perhaps you could deal with him.”

  “If I can,” Cappy said.

  “And I will deal with Karkinnen. I will think of something.”

  THEY WERE STILL rather pleased with their friendship, and Barakat helped Cappy keep his balance as he stumped out to his van, where Barakat gave the younger man a quick Lebanese hug with a backslap. “I will call you. I will pack the drugs from the hospital, I will send them to you wherever you’re at. You can make the connection, and sell them. I trust you for my share.”

  Cappy was embarrassed about the hug and the trust, but smiled and said, “Keep on truckin’, dude.”

  As his van rolled into the night, Barakat turned back to his house and began to think about talking to the cops about Shaheen’s funeral, and talking to the hospital about compassionate leave.

  Cappy’s taillights winked at the corner, and he thought, That might be the end of Cappy.

  Now, he had to spend some time thinking about himself.

  But first, he could use another twist. He had to think clearly.

  21

  LATE, DARK, SNOWING. Lucas kept the speed down, watching the nav screen, and Jenkins said from the backseat, “It should be right around here.”

  “Hope the guy hasn’t left for work.”

  “He doesn’t have to be there for three hours, so ... might be out getting a drink,” Shrake said from the passenger seat.

  “Night like this?”

  “Night like this tends to make me drink,” Shrake said. “It’s snowing so goddamn hard you can’t see your own feet.”

  The car spoke up: “You have reached your destination. ”

  The house was a dark tuck-under that Lucas thought might be red in daylight, when it wasn’t snowing. He pulled into the driveway and said, “Wait,” and hopped out, with a flashlight from the storage bin under the armrest. He walked up to the house and shined it on the house number: 1530. He walked back and said, “The car’s right, this is it.” He killed the engine, and they climbed two short sets of stairs to the front door; five inches of snow on the ground, Lucas thought, and coming down at two inches an hour.

  There were lights in the front window, above the garage, but nothing on the left side of the house. Lucas rang the doorbell, and knocked, and somebody came to the front window and looked out at the porch, and a minute later, a man with a short, neat Afro looked out and asked, “What?”

  “Are you Dave Johnston?”

  “Yeah? What happened?”

  Lucas held up his ID. “We need to talk to you about your employees. We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The people at your office said you’d be the guy to talk to.”

  The guy looked at them for a few more seconds, then unlatched the door and pushed it open. “Come in ... who is it?”

  Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins all stepped into an entry hall, and the guy’s wife, a heavyset woman with skeptical eyes, came and looked at them, her arms crossed nervously under her breasts.

  “A guy named Cappy—that’s all we know,” Lucas said.

  “What’d he do?”

  “We need to talk to him about several murders, and attempted murders. If you’ve seen the stories on television about the attack at the hospital this afternoon—”

  “That was Cappy? Ho, shit,” Johnston said. “I knew he was one crazy cracker.”

  “So—you know his last name, anything about him?”

  “Caprice M. Garner,” Johnston said. “He came in from California, rides a big expensive BMW That’s about it. He doesn’t talk much to anybody. Comes in, does the job, goes away.”

  Shrake said, “Garner. G-A-R-N-E-R.”

  Johnston bobbed his head: “Yup. Caprice, like the car.”

  Shrake said, “I’ll be in the truck,” and left.

  “Hard worker?” Lucas asked.

  “Does the job. Doesn’t bitch about it, doesn’t seem happy about it. Just does it.”

  “What else?” Lucas asked. “You know where he lives? We’re really kind of hurting here. The guy doesn’t leave much of a trail.”

  “I think, but I’m not sure, that I heard that he had a room somewhere, in a house,” Johnston said. “Not like an apartment, but just in a house.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  “Got no idea. I don’t know who’d know, either—he doesn’t hang with anybody at work.”

  “You got a phone number for him?”

  “You could check with the office, but I bet they don’t. When he first took the job, he was living in a motel. No phone, and, you know, a motel address. He moved later, when he started getting paid, and I told him a couple times that he ought to update his file, but I don’t think he did.”

  “And he’s got no particular friends.”

  “Not that I know of,” Johnston said.

  They kicked it around for another minute, getting nowhere, then Shrake came back in and said, “The duty officer hooked up with California. They’ve got a current driver’s license file for a Caprice M. Garner. They’ve also got a note in the file that his whereabouts should be reported to Bakersfield PD intelligence.”

  “Wonder what that’s about?” Lucas asked.

  “Don’t know. Duty officer is getting the ID photo. We’ll have it in ten minutes.”

  “Hey,” Johnston said, “that reminds me. I do know one more thing about
Cappy. He’s got a credit card.”

  Jenkins said, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I saw him buying gas once, with a card. You reminded me when you said that thing about the ID, because the girl at the counter asked for an ID.”

  “You know what kind of card?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, it was at a SuperAmerica, and he hadn’t been here long, and I don’t think they’ve got SuperAmericas in California, so ... I guess it was a Visa. And it oughta have a billing address.”

  “That’s good,” Lucas said. “Can you give me one more thing? Anything?”

  Johnston scratched his chin, then asked, “Can I make a call? I know a guy who might know more than me.”

  “He won’t call Cappy, will he?”

  “Not if I tell him not to—he’s not one of Cappy’s good friends, but he works around him a lot.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Johnston made the call, talked to a guy named Roger Denton, described the situation, and then said, “You don’t, huh. Well, that’s better than nothing. Anything else you can think of? ... Call me back if you do.”

  He hung up and said, “He thinks Cappy’s got a place somewhere, St. Paul Park, Cottage Grove area. But he wouldn’t swear to it.”

  They thanked Johnston, Lucas gave him a card with his cell-phone number on it, told him to keep his mouth shut, and headed back to the truck. Lucas gave the keys to Shrake and said, “If you break it, you buy it.”

  Sitting in the passenger seat, he called the duty officer and got phone numbers for Bakersfield, and got the duty guy working on the Visa card. The Bakersfield desk officer referred him to a detective named J.J. Ball, and said Ball would call him back. Ball did, a couple of minutes later, and Lucas identified himself and said, “You’ve got a note on the driver’s license file of a Caprice M. Garner, who calls himself Cappy.”

  “Not me,” Ball said. “I never heard of the guy. Let me check with a couple other guys, see if anybody knows him.”

  BALL CLICKED OFF, and Lucas called Virgil. “Anything?”

  “Your wife is tipsy. I’m thinking about taking advantage of her.”

  “You wouldn’t survive,” Lucas said. “She’s a bear when she gets loaded.”

  “Yeah, well. I’d take care when you get home, then,” Virgil said. “Because she is getting loose.”

  “That’s okay,” Lucas said. “It’ll make the corn grow.”

  “What?”

  “That’s always what you say when the Weather is fucked up.”

  Silence. Then, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. See you at your place, if I can get her loaded into my truck.”

  LUCAS SMILED and hung up, and Shrake asked, “Where’re we going?”

  “Let’s head back to my place. We can wait awhile, see if anything develops. If not, we’ll wait until morning.”

  “If the guy got out of the hospital, and he’s running, and hurt, he won’t get far tonight,” Jenkins said. “This is awful ...”

  The whole world was white, and the streets were nearly empty. They found an entrance to I-35 North, took it, and plowed along the freeway at thirty miles an hour, through most of St. Paul, then west on I-94, following a snowplow.

  They’d just turned back toward Lucas’s place when he took a call from Bakersfield. “Al James. I work Intel with J.J. He said you’re asking about a Caprice Garner.”

  “That’s right. We think he may be involved in a number of homicides.”

  “That’s why we want to keep an eye on him. We’ve had guys from the biker gangs here tell us that Garner might have killed some people,” James said. “They’ve had some guys disappear after they had dealings with him. We don’t have anything solid, except some people have definitely dropped off the radar.”

  Lucas filled him in on the trouble in the Twin Cities, and James said, “That’d fit with the rumors out here. I can make a couple calls, see if I can find somebody still in touch with him. Probably won’t be able to get back to you until tomorrow.”

  “Okay. If he’s running, he may be coming back your way,” Lucas said. “Keep it in mind.”

  “I’d prefer to have you hang on to him,” James said.

  Lucas clicked off, told Jenkins and Shrake what James had said, and Jenkins said, “Building a file.”

  THEY WERE HEADING south on Cretin Avenue when the duty officer called. “I’ve got a mailing address for a Caprice Garner in St. Paul Park.”

  “That’s good, that’s what we’ve got,” Lucas said.

  The duty officer said, “I’m looking at the address on the Google Maps Satellite, and it’s a house.”

  “We heard that he had a room in a house,” Lucas said. “And how many Caprice Garners can there be? We gotta get some people together and take a look at it. Get the SWAT guys out of bed.”

  Shrake asked, “You gonna call Marcy?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “Later.”

  THEY WERE six BLOCKS from Lucas’s house, so they went on, found Virgil’s truck in the driveway, and Virgil in the kitchen. “Weather’s upstairs,” he said. “She’s tired, drunk, going to bed.”

  “We got a name and address,” Lucas said.

  “Terrific. I’m coming,” Virgil said.

  “Nope, bullshit. We need somebody here.”

  “I’m going,” Shrake said. “I’m SWAT.”

  “So am I,” said Jenkins. “No way I’m sitting on my ass for this one.”

  Virgil wanted to get some St. Paul cops to come sit, but Lucas shook his head: “I trust you. Also, what would happen if Weather or the kids woke up and there were a bunch of strangers in the place?”

  “Goddamnit ...”

  They argued off and on for another ten minutes, with Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins eating microwave pizza. Lucas snuck into the bedroom and got a set of long underwear; Weather was sound asleep and didn’t stir.

  He snuck back out, down to the basement, got hunting boots, slacks, a wool sweater, parka, and ski gloves. From his gun safe, a twelve-gauge semiauto Beretta shotgun, with two four-shot magazines loaded with four-O buckshot.

  He changed, clumped up the stairs with the gun case in one hand and his work clothes in the other, and Shrake said, “Goin’ huntin’.”

  Virgil said, “Goddamnit, Lucas ...”

  Lucas said, “Stay, boy.”

  22

  THEY ALL RENDEZ VOUS ED at the BCA building; Shrake and Jenkins went to get armored up, and Lucas got his vest. The snow lightened up for a while, then got strong again: the radar showed crescent-shaped waves coming in from the southwest, and it didn’t look like it would quit until morning.

  A cop came in, crusted with snow: “Got the warrant,” he said.

  The duty officer, he said, had yanked a Ramsey County judge out of bed, found out that St. Paul Park was actually in Washington County, and so yanked a Washington County judge out of bed.

  “That’s what judges are for,” Lucas said.

  Lucas looked at his watch. One A.M. Marcy should be sound asleep. If he went without calling her, he would profoundly piss her off. He listened to the SWAT commander talking to the team, laying out maps of the house, pulled off the Internet, decided he’d waited long enough, and went to call her.

  Her phone rang five times, then clicked to a message service. He hung up, let it ring another five times, and this time, he left a message. “We got a fix on the grenade guy. We can’t wait, I’m putting the BCA SWAT guys on line. If you get this, call me—we’re heading for the guy’s house down in St. Paul Park. If you come, you need a four-wheeler and it would be better if you had two or three trucks: it’s a blizzard out here.”

  He figured she’d call back in two minutes. It took a minute and a half: “What’s his name and how did you find him?”

  Lucas gave her the details and said, “We’re ready to launch here. Are you coming?”

  “Lucas, this is my case—”

  “Marcy, bullshit. This guy could pull out of town, it could take us weeks to find him. He might already be gone
. We’re going. I’ll be on my phone.”

  “Give me the address ... Goddamnit, Lucas, you did this on purpose.”

  “You can talk to the TV people,” Lucas said.

  VIRGIL CALLED: “Listen, Weather woke up to go to the bathroom and saw what time it was, and came down, and I told her what happened. She said if I called a couple pals of mine from the St. Paul cops, they could come over ...”

  “No. Virgil. Stay there.”

  THEY LEFT in a convoy of sixfour-wheelers, vans, and SUVs and one truck, eight SWAT guys and four unarmored investigators. St. Paul Park was southeast of the Cities, along the Mississippi, right down Highway 61, the same highway famously revisited by Bob Dylan. They were good as long as the light poles lasted, but after that, it was a matter of staying inside each other’s headlights.

  Lucas rode down alone, Shrake and Jenkins riding with the rest of the SWAT team; the snow felt soft and slick under his tires: he turned on the radio, picked up Tanita Tikaram singing “Twist in My Sobriety,” a good old golden oldie; he’d last heard it trickling out of an overhead speaker at a gas station, years earlier.

  Twenty minutes after they left, moving slowly, they crawled past the Ashland refinery, the gas flares burning weirdly through the pounding waves of snow. Close now, he thought, watching the nav screen. They planned to hook up with St. Paul Park cops in the City Hall parking lot, and walk from there, four short blocks.

  The first of the trucks took the off ramp, the rest followed, down through the quiet town. The local cops were waiting, and they all went inside, where the SWAT team commander, John Nelson, took the locals through the program.

  “As we understand it, the house is owned by an old lady named Ann Wilson, and she probably sleeps in a bedroom in the back, and rents the bedroom upstairs. We’re not going to rush the place because the noise will wake the guy up, and at this point, he’s got no reason to give it up.