Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  The killer was there, three feet away, and he pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger . . . and nothing happened.

  He said, almost conversationally, “Shit.”

  Trey went after him with the knife. She didn’t like to fight, but she wasn’t bad at it. Not for a woman her size. She knew to shout, too. She screamed, “I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ face off, motherfucker . . .” and she was right at him, slashing at him, and he put up his gun arm to fend her off and she slashed his arm, and he screamed and backed away from her, and she went for his face.

  He looked around, backed away, then said, “I’ll come and get you.” He turned and half ran, half walked, into the dark, back toward the lights of Garfield Avenue.

  A minute passed, then another. Trey could hear her own heart beating, hear her breath, harsh, grating as she gasped for air. A car started, out in the wasteland between Garfield and the docks, and she saw the taillights, tall and vertical, with smaller lights below, a scarlet exclamation point.

  SHE LOOKED AROUND: she was only a hundred feet from the dock. Her flight had gone almost nowhere, with all the falls on the rough ground. Still trying to catch her breath, her body trembling with the adrenaline, she made her way slowly back to the dock. The knife was slippery in her grasp, and she thought it must be blood: she pushed the blade back into its groove with the heel of her hand, dropped the knife in her pocket, wiped her hands on her pants.

  At the edge of the dock pad, she squatted in the weeds, looking around. No sign of anybody living, just the body stretched on the concrete. After a moment, scared, but powerfully tempted, she moved out of the weeds and then stole toward the body like a hungry cat looking for something to eat.

  “Are you okay?” she called out loud. Stupid. The man in the leather coat was dead. She knew he was dead. She saw him killed. He lay unmoving, like a six-foot paperweight, like a leather-jacketed anvil, spread legged on the concrete.

  She squatted next to him, groped under his hip for a wallet. There was a thickness there, but no wallet. Next she went into his jacket; and found a wallet, took it, shoved it into the briefcase that lay by the man’s hand. She looked around again, stepped away toward the safety of the surrounding darkness, and felt again, in her mind, the sensation of thickness at the man’s waist.

  Looked around; a nervous cat.

  Stole back, knelt again, fumbled at the dead man’s belt buckle, uncinched it, unzipped his pants, felt . . . there. Another strap, elastic. She pulled it through her hands. She couldn’t see it, but she could visualize it—she’d once had a belt like this of her own, given to her by her father for a postcollege trip to Italy. She found another buckle, freed it, and pulled hard. The man was heavy, but the money belt was made of slippery nylon, and she felt it coming free . . .

  Got it. She was surprised by the weight of it. Couldn’t be money, must be papers of some kind. The ship was Russian . . .

  She moved away, carrying the belt and briefcase, slipping back into the dark. She was forty yards from the body when she heard somebody call from the top of the elevator: Hey. HEY! An American voice, not a Russian. She kept moving, faster now, deeper into the dark, choking back the panic.

  HER SPOT WAS in an abandoned shed off Garfield, six hundred yards from the grain terminal, across the street from the Goodwill store. The shed’s door and windows were heavily boarded. Two months earlier, she’d walked around the place, interested, but unsure of how she could get in without attracting the cops.

  Then she’d seen the loose concrete blocks in the foundation on the back side of the building. She’d levered the blocks out, pulled herself beneath the shed, and found herself looking at the underside of a board floor. She’d gone back out, scouted the tracks until she found a convenient length of re-rod, and had come back and pried and pounded on the floor boards until she’d gotten inside.

  Inside was perfect: empty, dry, and safe. Everything but a phone. The place smelled of creosote, like old railroad ties or phone poles, but she no longer noticed it.

  NOW SHE PULLED her blocks out and crawled under the shed, up and inside. She had a pack, and inside the pack, an REI candle lantern. She lit it with a book match, then opened the wallet.

  Holy shit. She fumbled the bills out, looked at them in wonder: tens, twenties, more than a dozen fifties. She counted: nine hundred and sixty dollars. She was rich.

  She pried at other parts of the wallet, but it was full of cards in Russian, and a few photos, small color snaps of a dark-haired woman who looked like she came from a different time, from the fifties or sixties. But then, she thought, maybe that was what Russian women looked like.

  And the money belt: papers of some kind, she thought.

  She unzipped it and turned it, and thin bricks of cash began falling out. Holy shit. Holy shit. Hundreds. They were all hundreds, still in bank wrappers. She snapped the wrapper off one brick, and counted the bills in the pale yellow light of the candle. Fifty. She counted the bricks: ten. She had fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.

  She sat motionless for a moment. People would be coming. They’d want the money. But no fuckin’ way. Finders keepers. Her jaw tightened: the money was hers.

  Trey looked around at her snug little spot, suddenly unattractive in the flickering candlelight. She’d been happy enough here, but now she had things to do, places to go. This place was history. Somebody might have seen her, the cops might be coming . . .

  But she could handle all that, if she had a few minutes. She was a lawyer, for Christ’s sake; she’d lived with criminals, and she’d worked with cops. She knew what to do. She was cleaning frantically when, far away, a siren started.

  Please God: Just a few minutes . . . just do this one thing for me.

  2

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON, a workday off, thunderstorms rumbling to the southwest, the lawn already cut, the soft, pleasant odor of freshly mown grass and gasoline and clean sweat lying on his T-shirt . . .

  Lucas Davenport sprawled on the couch, at peace, his head propped on a foam pillow, a Leinie’s on the coffee table. Letty West, his twelve-year-old ward, was canoeing with a school group; his nine-month-old son slept quietly in his crib at the top of the stairs; the housekeeper was out shopping.

  He was alone, and he was doing something he did only secretly, with guilty pleasure—he was watching TV golf, his mind floating like a hummingbird in the dim space between sleep and the British golf-announcer’s hushed voice. This was the kind of quiet, private place where one might feel comfortable giving one’s nuts a thorough scratch.

  HE WAS DOING that when his wife drove through the garage door: WHANG!

  The impact jammed the house like an earthquake.

  The initial WHANG was followed a half second later by the screech of tearing metal, a second, smaller impact, and a sudden, short-lived silence. Into the short-lived silence, Lucas said, aloud, the heels of his hands pressed into his eye sockets, “Jesus God, don’t let it have landed on the fuckin’ Porsche.”

  In the next half second, the kid started screaming from his crib upstairs, the phone began to ring, and all the pleasurable ambience, the golf, the odor of the grass and gasoline, vanished like a pickpocket in a subway station.

  Given the sequence—the whang, the impact, the ripping noise, and the second impact, Lucas knew that his wife had just driven through the garage door, when the garage door was not entirely open. A few weeks earlier, he’d told her, “You keep coming in the driveway like that, you’re gonna run into the garage door.”

  She sniffed: “I’ve got the reflexes of a surgeon.” That was true, because she was one.

  “Combined with the driving skills of an anteater,” Lucas said. “You’re gonna hit the garage door and rip it off the ceiling.”

  “Excuse me?” she said. “Why don’t you worry about something real, like weapons of mass destruction?”

  AS THE KID continued screaming and the phone continued ringing, Lucas launched himself from the couch and ran barefoot through th
e kitchen, ignoring both kid and phone, down the hallway to the garage access door. He burst into the garage and found his wife’s Honda Prelude beneath the overhead door, which had come off the rails and dropped straight down onto her car. The Porsche, in the next stall, appeared to be untouched.

  Inside the Honda, Weather was on her hands and knees, hands on the passenger seat, knees on the driver’s seat, ass impolitely up in the air. The driver’s-side car door was pinned by the wreckage of the overhead garage door, and she was trying to get out the passenger side. Lucas stepped around the green John Deere riding mower and pulled open the door. “Are you okay?”

  Weather rarely cried. She considered crying an insult to the feminine mystique. But her lip trembled: “The door went up too slow.”

  Lucas had been married only a short time, but his history with women had been intense. He knew exactly what to say. He said, “Maybe there’s a brownout or something, and there wasn’t enough power. I was afraid you’d decapitated yourself. That you were hurt.”

  This, instead of screaming, “THAT’S BECAUSE YOU DROVE INTO THE DRIVEWAY AT FIFTY MILES AN HOUR, YOU FUCKIN’ MORON.”

  WEATHER CRAWLED OVER the stick shift and out the passenger side. The phone stopped ringing and she turned her head toward the house, her eyes narrowing: “What’s wrong with Sam?” They could hear the kid crying through the open door to the kitchen.

  “The noise scared him. The whole house jumped when you hit the door,” Lucas said. “He’d been sleeping fine.”

  A neighbor, a chubby balding man in cargo shorts and a golf shirt, came wandering up the driveway. He carried a brown paper grocery bag with a head of lettuce poking out the top, and a querulous look. “Jeez, hit the garage door, huh?”

  “The door went up too slow,” Weather said. “The garage-door opener didn’t work right.”

  The neighbor nodded, and his eyes took on a duplicitous glaze: “Sometimes the drive chain slips. You gotta watch out for it,” he said. He’d been married for three decades. Then, to Lucas, “When I saw the door come down, I was afraid it’d landed on the Porsche.”

  “Oh, boy.” Lucas looked at the deep green 911 S4 crouched in the next space. “Never crossed my mind until now.”

  The neighbor said to Weather, “Thank God you’re okay,” his eyes involuntarily drifting back to the Porsche.

  “Thank God,” Lucas agreed.

  THE COLLISION TOOK an hour to straighten out. One of Lucas’s older friends, a narrow man named Sloan, came over to help. The Honda, they agreed, was probably totaled: every piece of sheet metal on the car had at least one ugly gash, dent, or nasty scratch. The garage-door rail guides had punched holes in the roof and hood.

  The State Farm adjuster told them where to have the Prelude taken for an assessment. “Thank God it wasn’t the nine-eleven,” she said. The garage-door company, the original contractors, couldn’t send anyone out until Monday, but promised to fix the door before Monday evening. “Happens all the time,” the garage-door guy said. “Usually you’re backing up, but the door doesn’t get clear.”

  “Wasn’t me, it was my wife,” Lucas said.

  “Always is,” the garage-door guy said.

  THE PORSCHE WAS eased out into the driveway, clear of the wreckage. Lucas brought tools up from the basement, along with a jack. He and Sloan jacked the door up off the Honda, pushed the car out of the garage, and took the damaged door the rest of the way down.

  “I hope you didn’t blame Weather,” Sloan said.

  “I know the rules,” Lucas said.

  “It was just a car and a door,” Sloan said. “You got insurance up to your neck.”

  “She missed the Porsche by a foot,” Lucas said.

  Sloan winced: “Jesus.”

  WHEN THEY WERE done clearing the wreckage, they went inside for beer, and a subdued Weather, the baby on her shoulder, told Lucas, “There was a message on the phone. Rose Marie wants you to call back right away.”

  “Hmm.” Rose Marie Roux was the commissioner of Public Safety, and Lucas’s boss. The baby peered at him, and sucked at his thumb knuckle. He had Lucas’s blue eyes, and lived in a cloud of odor, equal parts milk-burp, leaky diaper, and Johnson’s baby powder. “Maybe it’s something.”

  Weather said, “Something about a dead Russian in Duluth.”

  “That happened a couple of weeks ago,” Lucas said. “The guy shot in the grain elevator?”

  “Better than in the heart,” Weather said. She considered herself a syntactical enforcer.

  “Probably a spy,” Sloan said, tipping his bottle toward Lucas. “You’re probably going into espionage.”

  Lucas called Rose Marie. Behind him, he heard Weather say, “I don’t know what happened. I hit the garage door opener, but it just didn’t open fast enough.”

  “The chain slips sometimes,” Sloan said. “Or maybe you had a temporary brownout.”

  “That’s what Gene said, from next door. The chain thing. I thought he was patronizing me.”

  “No way,” Sloan said. “That shit happens all the time. People call nine-one-one . . .”

  “Really?”

  ROSE MARIE ANSWERED her private cell phone: “Lucas? You know that dead Russian in Duluth?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “He’s a spy.”

  A moment of silence. Then, “How’d you know?”

  LUCAS DAVENPORT WAS a tall, tough, rangy man, dark complected, blue eyed, and tanned with the summer. A few white scars were distributed around the tan—an old bullet wound in the throat, and trailing through an eyebrow and down one cheek, what looked like a romantic knife slash from the docks of Marseilles, but was actually a cut from a fishing-leader snap-back. And there were others, the hide punctures of a rambunctious life.

  Lucas ran the Office of Regional Research at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, after years of working intelligence and homicide in Minneapolis. His brief was to look at interesting and, usually, but not always, violent crimes, and to “fix shit” for the governor. He’d done well at it, in the six months he’d been in the job.

  The horizon was not without clouds. He was forty-six and worried that he was too old to have an infant son, with a wife who was probably plotting another pregnancy; too inexperienced and not hard-nosed enough to handle his ward, Letty, who was fast becoming a teenager; that he was too rigid to relax into what was a late first marriage. As a cop, he still loved the hunt, but suspected that twenty-five years of contact with violent death and brutal criminals was beginning to corrode something essential inside him; the cynicism was rising like water in the basement. He’d seen it in other cops, always laughing at the wrong time, always skeptical about good deeds, suspicious of generosity. And as a longtime athlete, he could feel the years wearing on him: he’d lost a step.

  Maybe, he thought, he should do something else. The trouble was, he couldn’t figure out what that might be. Weather suggested that he go back to school, but he couldn’t think what he might study, nor, from what he’d seen of educational bureaucracy, was he sure that he could put up with the bullshit.

  He didn’t have to work. At the height of the Internet boom, in the late nineties, he’d sold a small simulations software company for more money than he would ever need. He’d sold out because he wasn’t a businessman, and the idea of beginning another business didn’t interest him.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t sit on his ass. He wasn’t made that way, and neither was Weather. If ever they had marital problems, he thought, it wouldn’t be over the usual problems of sex or money, it’d be over work. They both worked all the time. He wasn’t sure that either of them could stop.

  So: he was hung up and they were talking about it.

  At least he had a spy to think about.

  LUCAS AND WEATHER and Letty and Sam, with Ellen Jansen, the housekeeper, lived on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul, more or less halfway between the downtown areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul. From the master bedroom, on the second floor, Lucas could see the
steel-colored surface of the Mississippi in the gorge that separated the house from Minneapolis.

  The house was new. Lucas had worked out the design with an architect, had torn down his old house, and put up the new one. They all called it the Big New House.

  After his brief chat with Rose Marie, Lucas went up to the bedroom, changed out of his T-shirt and athletic shorts into jeans, a golf shirt and loafers, and a light wool-knit sportcoat to cover the .45 clipped to his belt. From his house to downtown St. Paul was fifteen minutes; the Department of Public Safety was located in a converted department store. A half hour after he spoke to Rose Marie on the telephone, he was walking down the hall to her office, trying to scrub a spot of garage-door guide-rail grease from his thumb.

  HER RECEPTIONIST SAID, “I hear Weather ran through the garage door.”

  “Yeah. Door fell on her car.”

  “You gonna sue?”

  “Sue who?”

  The receptionist shrugged: “Gotta be somebody.” She touched an intercom button. “Lucas is here.”

  ROSE MARIE ROUX was an old friend and boss; she and Lucas went back twenty years, in a couple of different jobs. She’d been the Minneapolis chief of police when a shift in administration impelled her into the state job. She’d convinced Lucas to move with her.

  Rose Marie smoked too much and was known to take a drink and use coarse language; she despised exercise and guns. She was working with an assistant on a PowerPoint presentation for a legislative committee when Lucas stuck his head in.

  “Come on in,” she said. To her assistant: “I’ve got to talk to Lucas. Why don’t you redo the pies on the rif and the restruck and I’ll call you. Fifteen minutes.”

  Lucas dropped into a visitor’s chair as the assistant gathered up his papers and left. “What the hell is a pie and a restruck?” Everybody in the department knew what a rif was—a reduction in force. Five percent across the board, the result of one of the occasional budget crises that struck between tax increases.