“I don’t . . . ” she began, and at that moment, Singleton kicked in the door. He did it like a cop, a quick heavy kick at the doorknob, and the door buckled, without quite breaking clean. Then he kicked it again, and Ruth said to the older woman, “Hide. Anywhere.” She turned toward the door to confront Singleton.
Singleton loomed in the doorway and Ruth shouted at him, “The sheriff’s coming. They just called and they know!”
Singleton had a gun in his hand, but the message got through to him and he stopped, breathing hard, maybe thinking, and then Letty, from up in the loft, yelled, “You killed my mom, you sonofabitch.”
Ruth’s heart sank.
Letty added, “I shot you once and I’ll shoot you again if you don’t get out of here.”
Singleton saw her up in the loft, and shouted, “You little . . . ” He lifted his gun hand as though he might shoot at her, and Letty shot him and he fell down.
“Letty,” Ruth yelled. “Stop. Stop!”
“Get up and I’ll shoot you again, you sonofabitch,” Letty yelled.
Ruth walked carefully toward the front of the church, where Singleton was trying to roll over on his stomach. Ruth could see a gun lying on the floor off to the side. He couldn’t see her coming as he tried to push himself up, and she stepped around him and kicked the gun off to the side and waved at Letty, who shouted, “Get away from him, Ruth.”
Singleton got his feet underneath himself, and he looked sideways at Ruth and said, “Little bitch shot me right in the stomach. God that hurts.”
“We can get you to the hospital.”
“Fuck that,” Singleton said. “How did you know I was coming?”
“Your mom called, I guess. She was afraid you’d hurt somebody. Was it . . . did you . . . are you the one who hurt Katina?”
Singleton was puzzled. “Mom?”
“Called the sheriff,” Ruth said. “Did you hurt Katina?”
From the back of the church, Letty shouted, “Get away from him, Ruth. Get away from him.”
Ruth waved at her. “Did you . . . ”
“But, Mom . . . ” Singleton was puzzled.
“What?”
He looked at her, his eyes rolling a little. “But, Mom . . . I mean, she did it all. She had the idea. She gave the shots to the girls. She got the money. She shot Katina . . . ” He managed to focus on Ruth, and tears started. “I wouldn’t hurt Katina. I didn’t, I didn’t . . . ”
There was a scuffling, sliding gravel sound outside, cars pulling into the graveled lot, and Singleton pushed himself to his feet and said, “You better get out of here.”
He pushed his parka back and slipped a service revolver out of a holster and said, “Better back away . . . ”
She backed away and he lurched into the doorway and Letty yelled, “Watch out, watch out,” and shot him again in the back, and he lurched forward and lifted the pistol and Ruth heard men yelling outside and Letty shot him in the back again, and Singleton pulled the trigger on his pistol once and then buckled under a volley of pistol shots, taking two steps back and falling into the church.
Then she heard somebody shout, “Del . . . Del . . . ”
THE ACURA COULD go a hundred and five, but didn’t like it: didn’t like the tar joints on the county highway and Lucas felt like a pea being rattled in a tin can. Del was shouting, “Go, go,” and in the rearview mirror, Lucas could see Zahn slowly closing on them. Within a minute or two, Zahn was fifty yards back, and he hung there; they were only two minutes out of town.
They were still more than a mile out when they saw somebody walking across the highway far ahead. At that distance, he was the apparent size of a flea seen from across a room, but Del said, “That’s him: that’s gotta be him.”
They were a little more than a mile out when they saw him kick in the door of the church, and Del pulled out his pistol and said, “Put me right on the door.”
Lucas said, “Going too fast. I don’t know where I can put us. That’s all gravel in there.”
Seconds later, they were skidding across the gravel, Zahn fishtailing into the lot right behind them, trying to keep from colliding. Lucas stopped a little beyond the church door and Del was out and then Lucas was out and he saw Zahn drawing his pistol and aiming over the roof of the cruiser and then Singleton was in the door and Lucas leveled his gun at him and started shouting—didn’t know what he was shouting, he was shouting a noise, and he heard what sounded like gunfire—and then Singleton, who’d been moving in a slow jerking motion, suddenly and spasmodically lifted one hand and there was a gun in it and he fired and Del went down and Lucas and Zahn opened fire and Singleton slumped back into the church.
Lucas ran around the truck. “Del . . . Del . . . ”
RUTH LEWIS CAME to the door, cautiously. Letty was right behind her with her gun. Lewis stopped to look at Singleton, but Letty came through and saw Del on the ground and said, “Oh, no, is he hurt bad? Is he hurt?”
Lucas was kneeling beside him, Zahn standing over them both, and Del asked, “How bad?”
“Your leg is fucked up,” Lucas said. “Doesn’t seem to be pumping blood. You want to wait for an ambulance or you wanna go for a ride?”
Zahn, above them, said, “I called for an ambulance, it’ll be here in seven minutes. I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse. If you wait, you’ll have a comfortable ride.”
“I’ll wait,” said Del.
“Let’s get some blankets under him,” Ruth Lewis said. “Loren’s dead.”
“We found the Calbs out at the dump—Loren killed your sister, and the Calbs, and Letty’s mother, and the Sorrells, and probably the two children,” Lucas told her. “Guy’s done a lot of damage.”
“Mmm,” she said, distantly. Lucas thought she might be going into shock. Then, “I’ll get the blankets. The ground’s so cold.” She hurried back into the church.
Letty squatted next to Del. “I shot him three more times,” she said. “I heard you coming and he went to the door with his gun, and I shot him three times but he kept going.”
“Aw, man,” Lucas said. “This is awful.”
“Guy committed suicide,” Del said. “Just wish . . . just wish . . . ”
Ruth Lewis ran inside, saw the .380 kicked against the wall. Blankets. She needed blankets for Del. She went to the closest bed, stripped off the blankets, then got some more from the next cubicle. And she thought: Mom?
On the way back out, she saw the cluster of people around Del, and she stepped sideways and picked up the little .380 and put it in her pocket.
RUTH CAME BACK with the blankets, and they pushed them under Del’s butt and back and good leg, and Del asked everybody, pain in his eyes, “I won’t lose the leg, will I?”
Zahn said, “With our hospital, you never know,” and when Del did a kind of eyeball double-take, he said quickly, “Just kidding. Hang on, there. That fuckin’ Loren.”
26
DEL WAS STABILIZED in Armstrong and then flown back to the Cities, where he was met by Weather, by Rose Marie, and by the governor himself.
Lucas stayed behind for a hard two days after Singleton was shot. They brought Margery Singleton in, a bird-like woman shocked by what they were saying. “It can’t be my boy; it can’t be my boy,” she said. “He’s dead? You say he’s dead?” The sheriff eventually patted her on the back, thanked her for the phone call, and sent her on her way.
They debriefed Ruth Lewis, who was accompanied by an influential Minneapolis attorney who did the heavy lifting for the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The drug runs weren’t mentioned, but she told them what she “suspected” about the car theft ring.
All of Calb’s employees were interviewed, except for three who’d departed for parts unknown. All of those interviewed professed to have been mystified by the number of Toyotas they’d been painting. They’d all heard that it was a deal with some insurance company to fix slightly flawed new Toyotas.
Letty was interviewed and sent down to the Cities wit
h the older woman from the church. She was scheduled for more work on her hand.
THE FBI CREW found first Tammy Sorrell’s grave, led there by the Christmas wrap at the edge of the dump cut, and then, later the same day, Annie Burke’s.
Lucas turned the details over to the crew from Bemidji, and on the third day, left Custer County. An Alberta Clipper was coming through, and he stayed close to the front all the way down, driving through the feathery snow, listening to the FM stations come and go.
HE ARRIVED HOME to find his wife putting her coat on.
“Going to Subway. I thought I’d be back before you got here,” Weather said, after kissing him hello.
“I can go if you want,” Lucas offered.
“No, I’ll go. Back in fifteen.”
“Talk to Del today?”
“Yes. Went over, talked to him, looked at the films. I’m no orthopod, but I think what you heard is right,” Weather said. “The break’s a bad one—some of the bone got blown back into his calf. Twenty years ago, before they got so good with bone grafts, he’d be stuck with a pretty bad limp. Now, it’ll be a while before he’s out jogging, but I don’t think he’ll limp.”
“Cheryl’s pissed at me,” Lucas said. “That happens. The wife always gets a little pissed at the partner when somebody gets hit.”
“You feel bad about it?”
“Some,” Lucas said. “But I don’t know what else I could have done. We thought he was in there killing them.”
The phone rang, Weather picked it up, listened, said, “Yes, just a second.” She covered the mouthpiece with her hand, said, “It’s Sheriff Anderson from Armstrong,” and, “I’m going to Subway.”
THE KID WAS in bed, the housekeeper was in her apartment. Lucas went up and took a quick shower, and got back downstairs just as Weather arrived with the sandwiches. They sat at the kitchen table, eating them and splitting a bag of potato chips. “I thought things would go easier, with the new job,” Weather said. “I think Cheryl thought so, too. Del’s been in some scrapes, but nothing bad since that deal with the pinking shears.”
“That was more . . . grotesque . . . than really bad,” Lucas said. “I mean, it wasn’t like he couldn’t work for months and months.”
“SO WHAT’D THIS Anderson character have to say? The sheriff?”
“About what?”
“About the autopsy, for one thing. You said they were going to do them today.”
“Singleton had eight bullet holes in him. Two were mine, two were Zahn’s, and four were Letty’s, from two different guns. She said she shot him, and she had—he had a hole in his chest, but somehow he got the slug out.”
“Jeez.”
“Yeah. The two little girls were killed with injections. They’re not sure what the agent was, but when I heard that, it kind of weirded me out. I don’t know what to think about that.” He frowned, contemplated his sandwich, and added, “Katina and Martha West were killed with the same gun used on the Sorrells, but it wasn’t Singleton’s service revolver. He probably ditched it somewhere. His mother said he had another, smaller gun, which sounds right. But the injections . . . that kind of worried me. Doesn’t sound like Singleton.
“But then, the sheriff tore apart Singleton’s place—actually, it was the guys from Bemidji and a couple of deputies—and they found a load of cash in the basement. More of the kidnapping money. A lot of it’s missing, but they probably just spent it. If the Burke guy wants, he could probably bring an action against the Calb estate and the Cash estate and get some of the money back from the sales of their houses, and so on. I don’t know if it’ll come to much, now—the Cash house, anyway. With Calb out of business, I think Broderick’s probably gonna sink back into the prairie.”
“Huh.” Weather took an unladylike bite out of her sandwich.
“DID YOU SEE Letty today?” Lucas asked.
“Yes,” Weather said, talking with her mouth full. “They took the cast off to have a look, put another one back on. They think that they might do some revisions next week. She’s going to be a hurting little kid for a while.”
“Huh. She was pretty unhappy when I talked to her last night,” Lucas said. He half-grinned. “Anderson took her new gun away from her, for one thing. I don’t think she’s gonna get it back.”
“She’s gotta be traumatized,” Weather said. “Her mother might not have meant to do it, but that little girl has been abused. That’s what it amounts to. Taking care of a drunk when you’re twelve years old? And she’s done it for years. She was the adult in the family. And then she’s shot and shoots back, and her mother’s killed . . . It’s amazing that she hasn’t gone catatonic.”
“Yeah . . . ” They chewed for a moment, then Lucas said, “Anderson said that Ruth Lewis took off. He’s trying to find her, but the older lady up there, at the church, said Ruth crossed into Canada, something to do with her network. Said she’d be back in a few days. Sheriff said he checked, and the border people have a record of her crossing this morning. So . . . I suspect she’s rearranging things. They’ll be bringing the dope across somewhere else.”
“Hope she pulls it off,” Weather said. “She seemed like she was trying to do the right thing.”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I’m not smart enough to figure out all the what-ifs.”
THEN LUCAS SAT tapping his fingers on the table for a minute, inspecting an olive that had squirted out of his sandwich, and finally, Weather said, “What?”
He put the sandwich down and made his face sincere, like when he wanted to do something that Weather might not like. “You think, uh, Letty might be able to move in with us for a while? Until things get figured out?”
Weather ripped open the nearly empty sack of potato chips, and dumped the last four chips on the table. She took two of them. “I wondered if you were going to ask. I think we could, though I would predict some trouble. She’s tough, she’s gonna do what she wants to do, and she doesn’t mind giving you a hard time.”
“Which reminds of us who?” Lucas asked.
Weather was puzzled. “Who?”
“Jesus Christ, Weather, you just described yourself perfectly.” He took one of the remaining chips.
“I did not.” She was amazed. “I’m the most flexible person I know.”
“Aw, man . . . ” He gave up. “But you think we can do that?”
“I think we could. I like her a lot,” Weather said. “We’ve got plenty of room. Even if we have another child, the two little ones could sleep together until Letty went off to college . . . ”
“Another . . . hmm.”
“I’m not pregnant, dummy,” she said. “I’m just talking theory, at this point.”
Lucas looked at the table. “You gonna eat that chip?”
THAT SAME NIGHT, Margery Singleton was surprised to find her back door open when she got home. She always locked it. Or almost always—though, it being a small town, she sometimes forgot.
She pushed inside, trying to recapture the feeling of the morning. Hadn’t she gotten the key stuck in the door that morning? Or was it yesterday?
She pushed the door closed, flipped the light, took a step into the kitchen and stopped. A woman was sitting at the table and Margery took a step back. “Who the hell are you?” Then she saw the pile of money on the table. “That’s my money, there.”
Ruth Lewis picked up Loren Singleton’s .380.
“You killed my sister, Mom. And you killed those little girls with needle injections. And God only knows who else. Something has to be done about that.” She was pointing the pistol at Margery’s chest.
The pistol, which Ruth had picked up at the church, had been surprisingly simple to work. She’d done a little practice before she’d sent another one of the sisters across the border with her driver’s license. Ruth would cross herself later that night, with that sister’s ID. A simple-enough alibi—she’d learned to think like a criminal.
“Well, you can’t just shoot me,” Margery said. She was thin
king ahead two squares, like she had with Loren. Loren had been dead and gone before he’d left her house that night, and she’d known it. But Loren was screwed up in the head, and if the cops had gotten a handle on him, he would’ve spilled all the beans. And when they found the little girls at the dump, and found those needle pricks . . . who would have thought they could do that, after all this time?
“You can’t just shoot me,” Margery was saying. If she could get close enough to the table . . .
Ruth said, “I don’t see why not.”
She flinched with the blast, deafeningly loud in the small room. But she showed that cold, wintery smile when Margery Singleton went down.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Hidden Prey
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Copyright © 2004 by John Sandford
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Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 135
