Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  “Los Angeles.”

  “No, I mean, where on your body?”

  Lucas tapped his chest: “Right here. .223 full metal jacket, thank God. A hollow point, I’d of been dead.”

  “Kind of dumb, using a full metal jacket,” the deputy said, holding the door into the sheriff’s department.

  “I’m told they were using them in case they had to fight cops with bulletproof vests,” Lucas said, over his shoulder. “FMJs are the redneck equivalent of armor-piercing bullets.”

  “Didn’t think of that,” the deputy said. “Bet it hurt.”

  “It did.”

  * * *

  —

  THE SHERIFF WAS A BEANPOLE, a tall, slender, friendly man, thick glasses giving a yellow cast to his blue eyes. His name was Preston Uwell and he was eating an egg-salad sandwich at his desk. He pointed at a visitor’s chair and said, “Tell me all about it.”

  Lucas told him most of it, and Uwell said, “We all knew that Sawyer Loan was a bad one. He grew up here, went to school here, I’m told he was an evil little bastard when he was twelve years old. He was one of those boys who believed that power came out of the barrel of a gun and proved it on some cats. When we heard about Chattanooga, everybody who knew him said, ‘Yup.’ Though I gotta say, they must have a mean species of liquor store clerk down in Tennessee.”

  Lucas nodded. “I myself would pick a different state if I was going to hold up a liquor store. Maybe . . . Oregon.”

  “You got that right,” Uwell said. “So you’re here to see Tabby Calvin?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got her address.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you Lucas, Sawyer was a bad one, but Tabby’s probably worse. Had a kid, she was beating that girl when the girl was two years old, finally put her in the hospital, like to die. Tabby got sent down the road to the women’s prison for two years, where she refined her mean streak. The girl was taken away and put in a foster home, probably the first real home she ever had. Tabby never even asked to see her again. If you’re going to talk to her, I’ll send a deputy or two along.”

  “Does she work in town?” Lucas asked.

  “She seems to have a private source of income,” Uwell said, with a thin, skeptical grin. “She spends some money, got a nice truck, but as far as anyone knows, she doesn’t do a lick of work. Not family money, either—her parents live over by Cumberland, don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”

  “Okay. Well, if you could give me a guy or two, only should take ten or fifteen minutes, unless she downloads everything she knows about these guys.”

  “Controlled Burn, huh? Nice. Can’t say I ever heard of them, though.”

  “They don’t advertise much,” Lucas said. “At least, not in the circles we travel in.”

  * * *

  —

  THE SHERIFF SENT an investigator named Larry McCoy and a patrol deputy, Eric Cousins, to show Lucas to Tabitha Calvin’s place, which they said was a mobile home, one of a dozen or so mobile homes on a Goochland side street. Lucas followed the two cop cars out of the parking lot, over a couple of blocks, and down a shallow hill where the mobile homes were lined up, not unlike, he thought, a bunch of cartridges in a clip.

  McCoy pulled his car up at the next place down from Calvin’s home, and Cousins pulled up in front of it, next to a white Ford F-150 with oversized wheels. Lucas was last in line, but couldn’t park at the house up from Calvin’s because a truck was already there, so he stopped a couple of homes farther back, parked, and walked down to Calvin’s.

  Cousins was already out of his car, McCoy was walking up as Lucas got there, and the door at Calvin’s mobile home popped open and a tall, rawboned woman with a face like a chunk of granite stuck her head out and shouted, “You get out of here. I’m not talking to your kind.”

  McCoy said, “Hey, Tabby, we got a U.S. Marshal here who needs to chat with you about some friends of Sawyer. You need to talk to him.”

  “Fuck you, you’re the same fuckers who shot Sawyer. Get the fuck out of here.”

  Lucas called, “We only want to talk. We understand there was a group called Controlled Burn that Sawyer . . .”

  “Fuck you!” She slammed the door.

  There was an open window near the door, and Lucas called, “It’d be a lot easier to just come out and talk, Tabby. We’re not here to arrest you, we just . . .”

  * * *

  —

  BOOM! SHOTGUN!

  Lucas didn’t know who she was shooting at, but glass sprayed over the yard and he and McCoy and Cousins scattered, down behind cars, and the door of the trailer kicked open and Calvin barreled out, a pump shotgun in her hand pointing at the sky.

  Lucas had his Walther out, but he was down on his hands and knees behind a neighbor’s car when Calvin triggered another shot, this time straight up into the sky, and Lucas heard a pistol shot that smacked off the windshield of Calvin’s truck and she screamed, “Larry, you asshole,” and she pumped and fired another shot, leveled this time, and then she was in her truck, cranking it, and was off, straight down the street.

  McCoy and Cousins were both up and unhurt, and shouting at each other. Lucas was closest to the patrolman’s car and Cousins popped the passenger side door and Lucas piled inside, and Cousins hit the siren and began shouting into his radio as they spun out of the parking area, McCoy a few yards in front of them.

  The street looked like it was a dead end, but actually was a loop, and they followed the white Ford up to the main street and then left. They went through town at sixty, then eighty, then a hundred miles an hour, Lucas registering a bank, a school, a church, a residential subdivision, and then they were out in the countryside, flying low.

  When Cousins, crouched over the steering wheel, had stopped shouting into his radio, Lucas asked, “Where’s she going?”

  “Beats me,” he shouted, amped from the chase. “There’s nothing out here but trees.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MILES OUT OF TOWN, close behind Calvin’s Ford, they saw another light bar flashing well up ahead, but coming toward them. “That’s Roy,” Cousins said.

  Instead of slowing, Calvin sped up and Lucas feared that she was going to take the approaching cop head-on, a crazy suicide run, but then a side road broke to their right, and she hammered on the brakes and slewed sideways into the new road, straightened out, and headed up the hill.

  They all followed, with a third cop car now behind Cousins, McCoy still right behind the Ford, and they went up the hill and around a couple of curves and then the Ford braked suddenly, turned, rolled down through the roadside ditch and up onto what looked like a timber road and Cousins said, “Oh, shit,” as McCoy followed.

  The cop car was no damn good on the rough track, banging around like a marble in a pinball machine and the Ford was getting away. Two hundred yards back into the woods, though, the track ended in a circle and the Ford skidded to a stop and Calvin was out and running into the woods, the shotgun still in her hand.

  The three Goochland cops gathered behind the Ford, and McCoy said, “We gotta keep her in sight.”

  They could still see her, fifty yards away, crashing through the undergrowth. To the cop who’d just joined them, he said, “Roy, you stay here and coordinate. Get the guys up here, see if Bill King is on the road, get him in here and any other troopers that might be around. Let’s go.”

  “She’s fired three times,” Lucas said, as they jogged toward the tree line. “Unless she took some extra shells, she’s probably only got two left.”

  “So one of us will get out alive,” McCoy said.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS, MCCOY, AND COUSINS went after Calvin, spreading out behind her, twenty-five yards apart, like a net, so she’d have to keep moving forward and couldn’t reverse field and get around them. There was nothing su
btle about either the runner or the chase: they were crashing through waist-high brush, clambering over rotting logs, occasionally falling. They saw Calvin fall into a deeper hole, where a tree’s root ball had pulled out in a storm, but she was back up with the shotgun.

  Another fifty yards and they were closing on her, and she pointed the shotgun back over her shoulder without looking and pulled the trigger, and the shot went into the overhead, knocking leaves down around them. McCoy shouted, “That’s four,” and as he did, she fired another shot over her shoulder and Cousins shouted, “Five!”

  Up ahead, Calvin threw the shotgun away and bulled through a patch of red berries. Lucas was in the center and stepped in an animal hole just inside the berry patch and fell down, the brambles scratching at his face and hands. He was up and running again, pain lancing down into his foot.

  They were narrowing the net as they got close to her and a dead branch tore at Lucas’s sport coat, and then Calvin stumbled and fell. Lucas was right on top of her when she got back to her feet and she turned and had a two-inch-thick rotten dead branch in her hand and whipped it across his eyes and it broke but he went down again and then McCoy and Cousins were all over Calvin.

  She was a big woman and fought them, cursing, with flailing fists, and Cousins gave her a solid punch in the cheekbone and when she went down, Lucas scrambled to his feet and dropped one knee on her head as the other two cops bent her arms behind her and put on the cuffs.

  McCoy bent close and said, “We gotcha, Tabby. Now you can either walk out of here, or we’ll drag your ass back through that berry patch.”

  “You motherfuckers,” she sputtered.

  McCoy looked at Lucas: “What happened to you? Your face is bleeding.”

  “She hit me with a branch.” Lucas put a hand to one eye; his cheekbone was throbbing from the impact.

  McCoy and Cousins hauled Calvin to her feet, and she spat at Cousins, who dodged, then leaned into her and said, “You do that again, I’ll bite your fuckin’ nose off.”

  They marched her out of the trees to the cars and called off other incoming cops, and Cousins drove her back to the sheriff’s office. Lucas rode back to the Cadillac with McCoy, got cleaned up in a restroom at the sheriff’s department. He’d have a black eye where he’d been hit with the branch and had bloody scratches across his face and neck. He patted the scratches with paper towels until all but two stopped oozing, and the sheriff, Uwell, came in with a first aid kit that had Band-Aids.

  “Your jacket’s ripped,” the sheriff said, as he handed the kit to Lucas. “Not gonna fix that.”

  “This was supposed to be easy,” Lucas said. He smeared some disinfectant ointment on the bleeding scratches and stuck on the Band-Aids.

  He looked at his jacket—a four-inch rip across the fabric behind one pocket. The sheriff was right: it wasn’t fixable. His shoes were okay, but his left ankle hurt; he sat on a toilet to check it and thought it might be swollen.

  “We’ll get you some ice for that,” the sheriff said.

  “Wonder what the hell that was all about? What was she doing?” Lucas asked.

  “She panicked. We got a guy down at her trailer, turns out she had about a thousand yellow pill bottles sitting on her kitchen table and she was packaging up a few pounds of oxycodone tabs,” Uwell said. “Biggest dope bust we had here in a while.”

  “Ah. Where is she?”

  “Gotta a couple of our gals with her, getting her cleaned up. We’re waiting for her lawyer to show up.”

  “Everybody else okay?”

  “Everybody’s scratched up from that briar patch, and McCoy banged up his bad knee again, but that happens about once a month. In return, we got ourselves a nice combat shotgun and a truck, unless the federal court takes it away from us.”

  “I don’t think they will,” Lucas said. “Cops getting shot at, high-speed chase, big drug bust—that doesn’t seem like an excessive fine to me.”

  “And the county could use the truck,” Uwell said. “She won’t need it. She’s going back to the women’s prison. Lucky for us, it’s just down the road, nice and convenient.”

  * * *

  —

  CALVIN’S LAWYER WAS AT LUNCH in some other town and Lucas hung around, dabbing at his face, rotating a series of Blue Ice packs on his ankle, until she showed up at two o’clock. An earnest young bespectacled woman, she spent twenty minutes reading the reports by McCoy and Cousins on what had happened before and during the chase, and questioned Lucas about his involvement, then spent a half hour with Calvin.

  When she came out of the interview room, she said, “We’re not going to talk to anyone right now, except the marshal. Marshal, my client is willing to cooperate to a certain extent, but we will expect you to testify at trial, if there is a trial, about our willingness to cooperate.”

  Lucas agreed that he could do that, within the Marshals Service guidelines, and they discussed those for a moment, then Lucas and the lawyer went into the interview room and Lucas said to Calvin, “All I wanted to do this morning was to have a chat. We could have done that on your porch in fifteen minutes.”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you say that?” Calvin snarled. Then she started to cry and said, “They gonna take my truck.”

  “Didn’t have a chance to talk to you—and when you started shooting, you know . . .”

  Calvin wiped the tears off her face and asked, “What do you want?”

  “I want to know about Sawyer and about this group, Controlled Burn.”

  “Ah, that’s just some guys Sawyer knows. There ain’t nothing to it.”

  “I’m interested in their political beliefs—”

  That made Calvin laugh, a bark-like sound that she cut off after a single bark: “Politics? I mean, they’re . . . I mean, they don’t even vote, far as I know. Sawyer doesn’t, nor me neither. Voting’s just another fuckin’ scam. Don’t never do no good.”

  “But they, the Controlled Burn guys, they don’t like the government, right?” Lucas asked.

  “Who does?” Calvin asked. “Nothing to do about it, though. I mean, Dick Willey got busted for fightin’ that judge over in Lynchburg and I guess some things got said at the trial about the government pissing on people like us and Controlled Burn gonna get them, but nobody really thought it amounted to anything. I mean, some people came to Dick’s trial and they made some speeches outside the courthouse, but it all frittered away. Dick’s up to Marion now.”

  “You don’t think the members, these people in Controlled Burn—”

  “Controlled Burn is a bunch of guys that know each other,” Calvin said. “Half of them couldn’t tell you who the president is. After Dick Willey got busted, you know, there was talk about going up against the government, but it was all a lot of horseshit. Those guys get all shot up holding up a fuckin’ liquor store. How are they gonna overthrow the government? They may be dumb, most of them, but they know that much.”

  They talked for a while longer, but Lucas eventually believed her: Controlled Burn was a group of holdup men who knew one another through a variety of different prisons, and whose anti-government stance derived from a single “fight” with a federal judge.

  When he was done talking with Calvin, he stepped outside the interview room, thanked Calvin’s attorney and gave her a card, and then went to his iPad and looked up the Dick Willey–judge fight.

  Turned out that Willey had been convicted of an assault on a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier, who, Willey said, had been delivering more than mail to Willey’s girlfriend. Out on bail while awaiting sentencing, he had ambushed and nearly beaten to death the federal judge who presided over his trial.

  The news stories covering the subsequent trial and conviction, for assaulting the judge, were unclear about how the second trial attracted protests, although it appeared that the judge may have had an undisclosed blood relationship with the lette
r carrier. The protesters were Willey’s relatives and a few friends.

  Nothing there, Lucas thought. A bunch of criminals in a prison-linked gang got their name in the papers for assault on a judge, but it appeared the assault was based on a personal grievance, not on politics.

  Lucas had a black eye, cuts on his face and hands, a sprained ankle, a torn Canali sport coat, all bundled up in a waste of time. When he limped into the Watergate lobby a little before seven o’clock, black eye, scratches, sprained ankle, and ripped jacket, he found Deputy Marshals Bob Matees and Rae Givens checking through the front desk, Bob carrying a gear bag, which Lucas knew was full of guns and other pieces of miscellaneous gear that the two marshals had found useful from time to time.

  Lucas gave Rae a hug as Bob gawked at him: “What the hell happened to you? You look like you fell out of an ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down.”

  “Something like that,” Lucas said. “That’s about what I did. Thanks for caring.”

  “And it left him a little cranky,” Rae said to Bob.

  Bob was a wide man, but not tall; as a senior at the University of Oklahoma, he’d finished third in the heavyweight class of the NCAA wrestling national championships. He was looking exceptionally well dressed, to Lucas’s eye, possibly because he’d consulted Lucas on the clothing purchases. Lucas reached out and tapped his tie and said, “I’m proud of you.”

  Rae was tall, at six feet, a black woman with close-cropped hair, dressed in dark gray slacks and a dark gray long-sleeved blouse, with bits of gold jewelry here and there. Though slender, she had muscles like steel cables and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. Bob said she could reliably bench press over two hundred. She had a fondness for full-auto M4 rifles, although she wasn’t allowed to carry one as often as she wished.

  “I am a little cranky,” Lucas admitted. “Right now, all I want to do is get upstairs and stand in a shower for twenty minutes and get some ice on my ankle. I’ve got nothing for you tonight, but tomorrow we’re going to run over to Delaware. You get a Service truck?”