Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “I’m not fooling, Mrs. Pope. You mess with us on this, we’ll put your ass in jail.”

  LUCAS FOUND HILL in his Minnesota atlas; more a crossroads than a town. The map showed two streets where a creek crossed a county road; the place might have a bar, maybe a gas pump. Still in Mower County, northwest of Austin. The sheriff had been at the meeting that morning . . .

  LUCAS HEADED EAST out of town, on his cell phone as he drove. The sheriff was still in his car somewhere, and the Mower County dispatcher wouldn’t give Lucas his phone number. “Then give him mine, call him and tell him to call me back,” Lucas said.

  Larry Ball got back five minutes later. Lucas could hear noise in the background, music and voices. The Rochester Mall?

  “I just talked to Marcia Pope,” Lucas told him. “There are a couple of guys just outside of Austin who hired Charlie Pope to work their gardens. They’re truck gardeners, out by a place called Hill. You know a couple of brothers, one’s got a port-wine mark on his face?”

  “Huh. Yeah, I sorta know the guy. Don’t know his name, but I talked to him once when I was campaigning. He was working at a roadside stand, mmm, I think where I-Ninety crosses Highway Sixteen near Dexter.”

  “Dexter. I saw that on my map.”

  “Yeah, listen, I’ll tell you who’d know, is Bob Youngie,” Ball said. “He’s one of my deputies. He’s working, I’ll call him, and have him call you right back.”

  LUCAS COULD SEE the interstate up ahead. He was fairly sure he should go east but wasn’t positive, so he pulled off to the side of the road, waiting. Youngie called a minute later. He had a gravelly voice, a whisky voice, and sounded like an older guy. “You’re looking for the Martin brothers, Gerald and Jerome,” he said, when Lucas answered the cell-phone call. “You going out there now?”

  “Yeah. I’m just coming up on Ninety-four.”

  “You want to go east, to Exit One Ninety-three. I’m in my car now, I’m a little closer, so you’ll see me when you come off. I’m calling another car, he’ll be a couple minutes behind you. He’s just leaving town.”

  “The Martins . . . they’re trouble?”

  “No, I couldn’t say that,” Youngie said. “They stay to themselves, they don’t like having people on their land. They’ve run some hunters off, and we’ve had to warn them about carrying guns when they do it. And they got dogs. I think it’s best if a couple of us came along.”

  “The sheriff told you what we’re doing?” Lucas asked.

  “Yup. That’s another reason.”

  “Glad to have you,” Lucas said.

  YOUNGIE WAS AS TALL as Lucas, maybe sixty, gray haired with a Marlboro-man mustache. He was leaning on the front fender of his car, smoking a cigarette, when Lucas came off the interstate and pulled in behind him.

  “Nice truck,” he said, when Lucas got out. Youngie had cool blue eyes like Lucas’s own, and they seemed slightly amused.

  “I got it for the Magic Fingers seats,” Lucas said, looking back at the blue Lexus. “Keeps you company on the long hauls.”

  Youngie glanced at the truck, biting just for a second, then back at Lucas, amused again. “You gonna catch Charlie?”

  “Yeah. Or else kill him.”

  “I heard that about you,” Youngie said. “The or-else part.”

  “Just the job I had,” Lucas said.

  “I hear you.” Youngie put out his hand and Lucas shook. Youngie’s hand was like a wood file. “Here come the kids . . .”

  Another sheriff’s car was coming off the interstate. Lucas could see two cops inside. “The kids?”

  “They got three, four years between them,” Youngie said. “I’ll have them come in last.”

  “You really think . . . ?”

  “If we ain’t ready, why’re we going out there at all?”

  “That’s a point,” Lucas said.

  YOUNGIE BRIEFED THE TWO young cops on the visit to the Martin farm. He would lead the way in, Lucas would follow, and the kids would come in and block and watch. “If there’s trouble, you call in first, help us later,” Youngie told them.

  One of the kids, who was trying to hide premature baldness by shaving his head, hitched up his pistol: “We’re cool,” he said.

  THE MARTIN PLACE was an aging farmhouse that sat foursquare at the top of a hill. A gravel driveway, badly humped in the middle, led up the hill to the side of the house and then behind it. Halfway up the driveway, a barn emerged from the umbra of the house.

  The house was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century structure of two stories, gray shingles on the top, with twin dormers over a front porch. The porch had space for a swing, but no swing. The house, barn, and lawn were on a quarter section, a hundred and sixty acres, a square a half mile on a side.

  To the left of the house was a cornfield; to the right, at the bottom of the hill, was an untended apple orchard, with knee-deep weeds growing up around a few dozen old apple trees, all crabbed over like aging crones. Farther up the hill, beyond the apple orchard and to the right of the drive, was a fallow field, deep in weeds. It had, in the not-too-distant past, been cultivated; Lucas could see the tangled yellow dead vines in what was once a squash or pumpkin patch.

  Lucas pushed the Lexus up through the cloud of dust thrown up by Youngie’s car. As they topped the hill, coming up to the space between the house and the barn, Youngie suddenly juked left.

  Lucas went right and hit the brake and saw what Youngie had seen a half second sooner: three men had burst from the barn and were running toward the cornfield. A second later, a fourth man ran out of the farmhouse, headed down the hill, then slanted toward the cornfield like the others. One of the first three was oversized, and not fast.

  Pope, Lucas thought, and then he was out of the car and running.

  “WAS THAT POPE?” Youngie shouted. He had his hand on his pistol.

  “I think so,” Lucas yelled back. “Get some help in here.”

  He was fifty yards from the cornfield and could see cornstalks rippling in front of the running men. Youngie was shouting something at him, but he kept going, trying to sort it out as he ran. The big guy had gone right, and Lucas plunged into the field after him.

  And was blinded.

  Though the tops of the cornstalks were only a few inches higher than his eyes, the field might as well have been a rain forest. He stopped, listened, ran after the thrashing sound to his right. The other two men, he thought, had gone straight in, but Pope had been curling away, as though he had a destination in mind, as though he weren’t simply trying to hide.

  Lucas had his gun out now, jacked a shell into the chamber, locked the safety down: cocked and locked and a quick click from action. Farmhouses had guns, so Pope might have one. He couldn’t see, the corn leaves were whipping him in the face; and it was hot in the field, stifling, and the leaves were sharp edged, cutting at him. What the hell had Youngie yelled? He knew what it was, but . . .

  Meth lab.

  That’s what he’d said; and Lucas remembered the smell now, the sharp tang that might have been hog urine but wasn’t. The Martins were making methamphetamine, which would probably explain their preference for privacy . . .

  Stopped: listened. Heard nothing. Pope might also have stopped, trying to pick out Lucas running after him. Lucas squatted, listening for footfalls, peering down the rows at knee-high level. He’d been in cornfield chases a couple of times, once as a uniformed cop, doing just what Youngie had the kids doing now, blocking, and once as a detective. You couldn’t see anything at eye level; too many leaves, but there was a cleared space from waist level on down, especially when the farmer used a weed suppressant.

  Lucas crawled across rows, looking down them; and then heard the sound of a man running away, still farther to the right. Lucas ran in that direction, then jumped, got above the level of the corn for just a half second, jumped again, saw what he thought was movement, and went that way . . .

  AND WAS HIT IN THE FACE.

  The blow came without any
warning and pitched him across two rows of corn and down on his stomach. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but the other guy was right there, and Lucas got the impression of size and red socks and heavy boots and thought one thing:

  hold on to the gun, hold on to the gun.

  He rolled, unsure of whether he’d been shot or punched, his face on fire, blood on his hands, and he saw legs and felt another blow on his thigh. He was losing it, he thought, and he dropped the safety on the .45 and pulled the trigger, blindly, hoping to freeze the other man just for a second, just long enough to get a break.

  And it worked; the other man lurched away with the explosion and Lucas caught sight of his lower body ten feet away, turned, and screamed, “I’ll fuckin’ kill you, stop . . .”

  The other man ran and Lucas rolled and fired a second shot, at knee level, missed, but the other man suddenly stopped and shouted, “I quit. I quit. Don’t shoot.”

  Lucas was on his feet now, blood streaming out of his nose and onto his shirt and suit; pain surged through his face and down his neck.

  “Get the fuck over here,” he told the big man. “Get the fuck over here and get down on your fuckin’ knees, get down on your fuckin’ knees . . .”

  And he heard Youngie, some distance away. “Davenport, Davenport . . .”

  “Over here, over here . . .”

  The other man was down on his knees, his back toward Lucas, his hands webbed behind his head. He’d done this before.

  “Look at me, Charlie,” Lucas said.

  “Look at you, who?” the other man said. He was overweight and blockheaded and going bald and thick through the shoulders and arms, like a bench-press freak. He turned just his head. “Who the fuck is Charlie?”

  LUCAS, STILL BLEEDING, held the man as he heard Youngie thrashing up through the field. “This way,” he shouted.

  Youngie pushed through the corn, pistol pointed at the sky, looked wide-eyed at Lucas and the kneeling man. “What happened? You shot?”

  “Naw, he hit me in the nose. Goddamn it, it hurts. It’s busted. Could you put some cuffs on this asshole? I’m leaking all over my suit.”

  They got the big guy on his feet and his hands cuffed, and Lucas put the .45 away, the stock all sticky with his blood. The guy’s wallet was chained to his belt, and Youngie jerked it off the chain, flipped it open, looked at the driver’s license. “Bobby Clanton, Albert Lea.”

  “I want a lawyer,” Clanton said.

  “Fuck you,” said Lucas. He shoved Clanton in the direction of the barn. “Walk.” To emphasize the order, he kicked Clanton in the ass, and Clanton stumbled and almost went down.

  “You need a doctor,” Youngie said to Lucas.

  “Yeah, yeah. They’re gonna push a goddamn stick up my nose and that’s gonna hurt worse than it does now . . .” He kicked Clanton in the ass again.

  YOUNGIE HAD SENT THE TWO young cops after the fourth man, and had called in a half dozen more on-duty deputies. “We’ll get more in here as soon as I can find the people,” he said. ‘I’m hoping the other two will hunker down in that field long enough that we can get some guys spotting the roads. If they get out of the field, they’ll be hard to track. They can be five miles away in an hour, if they can run.”

  “Where’s the lab? You said meth lab?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, I could smell it, but I didn’t look. The barn, I think. We’ve had a rash of them.”

  “Manufacture of a controlled substance, resisting arrest, assault on a cop. I bet we can get Bobby fifteen years in Stillwater, if he doesn’t have any priors. If he’s got priors, then, whoops, I guess it’s gonna be bye-bye,” Lucas said. He kicked Clanton in the ass a third time.

  Clanton staggered, caught himself, looked at Youngie, “You always torture your suspects?”

  “Fuck you,” Youngie said, but when Clanton was turned back toward the barn, he looked at Lucas and shook his head: no more ass kicking. Lucas nodded, touched the side of his nose. Everything felt solid, but there was an arcing pain when he pushed left to right, familiar from his hockey and uniform days. Maybe not busted, but cracked. He was still bleeding, bubbling blood, spitting, wiping his chin.

  WHEN THEY GOT BACK to the farmyard, they put Clanton facedown on a patch of grass and then Youngie said, “Got another one.” Down the hill, the two young cops were marching the fourth man out of the cornfield. Then another sheriff’s car, leaving a plume of gravel dust behind it, turned in at the drive and Youngie said, “Keep an eye on Bobby; I’ll put these guys on the road.”

  LUCAS SAT ON THE GRASS next to Clanton and tipped his head back, sniffing against the leaking blood. “You better talk to us, Bobby,” he said. Blood trickled into his mouth and he spit again. Clanton didn’t reply.

  Lucas dabbed at his face with his knuckles, trying to keep the blood off his suit. “You better talk, Bobby, because you are in some serious shit. Look at me. You’re gonna be as old as I am when you get out of Stillwater. You’re gonna spend your young life in a cell the size of a fucking Volkswagen. You need me to go to court and tell them you cooperated.”

  Nothing.

  Lucas: “You think you’re tough. Maybe you are. I give you that. But you’re stupid, too. Think how long it’s been since last summer, everything you’ve done since then. Think about being locked up for fifteen times that long. Think about being locked up forever, if we put you with Charlie Pope.”

  Clanton twitched. Lucas turned his head down just for a second, snorted blood, but saw that Clanton had started to cry. “Better talk, Bobby.”

  YOUNGIE CAME BACK with a big gauze first-aid pad and said, “Here. You’re still bleeding.” Lucas took it as another cop car pulled into the yard. “We’ll start pushing the field as soon as we have enough people.”

  Lucas said, “Ah,” through the pad.

  The two young cops arrived with the fourth man and put him on the grass a few yards from Clanton. “You shot?” one of them asked Lucas.

  “Nuh-uh,” Lucas said. The fire in his face was transforming itself into a first-class headache.

  “Got punched in the face by the fat guy,” Youngie said. He looked down at the fourth man. “Who’s this asshole?”

  “Sandy Martin, cousin to one of the Martin brothers. Says he doesn’t know anything about a meth lab, he just came up to check the farmhouse.”

  “Must be why he ran when he saw us coming,” Youngie said.

  “Goddamn this hurts,” Lucas said.

  The two cops from the new car came over and one asked Lucas, “You shot?”

  YOUNGIE AND THREE of the other cops cleared the barn. Lucas and the youngest of the deputies sat on the lawn next to the captives. “Take it easy in there,” Lucas said, as the cops went in with drawn guns.

  THEY WERE BACK OUT in ten minutes. Youngie, positively cheerful, said, so Clanton and Martin could hear him, “My, my, my. That’s the biggest and best meth lab I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a few. Bobby, Sandy, if I were you guys, I would do anything I could to cut down the time, because right now, you’re gonna do a stretch in Stillwater and then the feds are gonna want to talk to you.”

  “I want a fuckin’ lawyer,” Clanton said.

  “I didn’t do anything, I was just here to check the property,” Martin wailed.

  “Not giving us any help at all, are they?” Youngie said to Lucas. “I mean, we put them with Charlie Pope, that’d be a murder charge to go with the drugs.”

  Silence, then “Who the fuck is Charlie Pope?” Clanton asked. His face was still wet with tears. “This asshole”—he jerked his head at Lucas—“called me Charlie. Who the fuck is he?”

  “You don’t read the newspaper or watch TV?” Lucas said. “The guy who raped and killed a girl and then raped and killed a guy and killed the guy’s little boy? That guy?”

  Clanton was baffled. “That guy? What does that guy got to do with us?”

  “We know Charlie hung out here,” Lucas said. His whole face hurt when he talked. “His mom says so.”r />
  Clanton arched his back to get his head up out of the dirt. “Not since we been here. Maybe he worked with the Martins, but I don’t know no Charlie Pope.”

  Lucas turned his head to Sandy Martin. “Is that right? He hung with you guys?”

  “I can’t believe this,” Martin said. “I was just stopping off before I went fishing.”

  “The guys who ran . . . we believe one of them was Charlie Pope,” Youngie said. “Look, we’re gonna get them. All that plastic in the barn, all that is perfect for fingerprints. We got clothes and a couple of trucks. So tell us . . . what’s their names? If one of them isn’t Charlie Pope . . .”

  “Ah, fuck you,” Clanton said. He snorted once, then said something else.

  “What?”

  “Sean McCollum and Mike Benton, that’s who that is,” he said. “You’ll get all their stuff anyway. Isn’t no Charlie Pope.”

  “Where are the Martins?” Lucas asked.

  “Alaska, I guess,” Clanton said. “They rented us this place, and they went to Alaska. They aren’t coming back until November.”

  “How long you been here?” Youngie asked.

  “Since March,” Clanton said. Then, “I want a fuckin’ lawyer. I ain’t sayin’ no more, but there wasn’t no fuckin’ Charlie here.”

  Lucas turned back to Sandy Martin: “Is that right? The brothers are up in Alaska?”

  “I can’t prove it, but they said they were going there,” Martin said. “They bought a new truck for the trip.”

  “And you never met Charlie Pope.”

  After a moment of silence, Martin said, “Look, I’m just watching the house, okay?”

  Not a denial. Lucas looked at Youngie, who raised his eyebrows. “Sandy, this is a murder charge we’re talking about here,” Lucas said. “You give Charlie Pope one ounce of cover, man, you’re right in it with him.”

  Another moment of silence, then, “He was up here. A month ago.”

  “A month ago. With Bobby here?”