Extreme Prey

by John Sandford

  “Oh, they’ll find you,” Lucas said. “Not that hard to find the local hospital, which is where you’ll be.”

  Leonard smiled at that, took it as regular prefight posturing, kicked at the chair again. Lucas pushed it back and said, “I don’t want to fight you, Dave. I’m going now. But—you think about what I said. If you change your mind about any of it, you send an e-mail to Governor Henderson’s campaign—”

  “Fuck you. I’m gonna kick your ass.”

  Leonard tried to clamber over the chair as Lucas stepped away and turned toward the door. The chair tipped and Leonard fell down, tangled up in the chair legs. Somebody in the bar laughed, the laughter suddenly cut off as Leonard got back to his feet and looked around. The bartender called, “You boys take it outside.”

  Leonard was coming for him, Lucas realized, and he said to the bartender, “You want to call the sheriff? This guy’s about to assault me in your place.”

  “Not my problem,” the bartender said.

  “Will be when I file a lawsuit against you,” Lucas said.

  Leonard said, “Fuck a lawsuit . . .”

  The bartender had a sudden change of heart: “Dave, don’t do it, goddamnit. I’m calling the sheriff . . .”

  “Yeah, and fuck you, Jim,” Leonard said.

  Lucas was backing toward the door when Leonard rushed him, fists held high. Lucas let him come. The common belief among brawlers was that you didn’t let anyone come down on you from the top, which was why they held their fists high. But real boxers didn’t.

  Lucas was two feet from the door when Leonard got to him. Lucas did a very quick side step and moved slightly forward, when Leonard was expecting him to go back. That took Leonard’s left fist out of the fight, and Lucas blocked Leonard’s awkward right-hand punch with his own right, and hooked a hard left into Leonard’s rib cage, leading with his knuckles, and felt Leonard shudder from the blow and simultaneously make a dog-like yip.

  The other two men had gotten out of Leonard’s booth, and Lucas backed toward them and said, “Stay out of it or I’ll break your legs,” and they stayed out of it while Leonard, his face red as a ripe apple, came after him again. Lucas sidestepped again, this time to his right, partially blocked Leonard’s left arm with his own left, took a skimming shot to his left cheekbone, and hooked a hard right into the other side of Leonard’s rib cage. Leonard yipped again, took several steps backward, crashed into a table, then dropped into a chair.

  “Busted my ribs,” he groaned. He bent over, head on his knees, holding his sides with his hands.

  “Tough shit.” Lucas touched his cheekbone, came away with spots of blood on his fingertips. The bartender said, “I called the deputies,” and Lucas nodded and walked around behind the bar and checked his face in the mirror. He’d have a bad bruise where he’d been hit, and Leonard’s knuckles had scraped a couple of shallow cuts across the bone.

  Lucas walked back around the bar and said to the bartender, “Gimme a Coke,” and to Leonard, “You sit right there until the cops get here.”

  “I need to get to a doctor,” Leonard moaned.

  “You get out of that chair, you’ll need two doctors,” Lucas said.

  —

  LUCAS SAT ON A STOOL and drank the Coke while Leonard groaned every time he took a breath. Five minutes later, a deputy walked in, looked around, and asked, “What happened?”

  “He beat me up,” Leonard said, jabbing a finger at Lucas.

  The deputy turned to Lucas and Lucas said, “I’m a former Minnesota cop working for Elmer Henderson’s presidential campaign. We’ve gotten some threatening letters . . .”

  He told the story and another deputy arrived, and the first one looked at Leonard and asked, “You have anything to do with those letters, Dave?”

  “Don’t know anything about any fuckin’ letters,” Leonard said. He had his arms pressing his ribs together, his fingers linked over his stomach.

  “Then why’d you jump me?” Lucas asked. “There was no reason for a fight, unless you were trying to intimidate me, trying to keep me from asking questions.”

  “’Cause I don’t fuckin’ like cops, that’s why. I don’t like guys in suits, either.”

  “That’s all true,” said the second deputy. He’d heard what sounded like a confession and asked Lucas, “What do you want to do about this? Looks like you took a hit, you’re bleeding.”

  “Up to you,” Lucas said. “You want me to file a complaint, I will, but I’m okay with calling it even, if Mr. Leonard will give me one honest answer.”

  The first deputy asked Leonard, “What do you think, Dave?”

  “What’s the question?” Leonard asked.

  “Did you know the man in the photo I showed you? Do you know a middle-aged lady with a son who has distinctive gray eyes?”

  “No. That’s nobody in Prairie Storm,” Leonard said. “I know them all, them’s that’s left.”

  —

  LEONARD’S FRIENDS said they’d take him to the hospital to get his ribs checked, and on the way out, Leonard said to Lucas, “I’d kick your ass if I wasn’t drunk.”

  Lucas said, “Of course you would.”

  The deputies hung around while Leonard was helped out to a friend’s pickup, and then as Lucas got the first aid kit out of his truck and smeared some Neosporin on his facial cuts.

  “What do you think about Leonard?” Lucas asked them, as he peered at his cheek in the truck’s wing mirror. “You think this Prairie Storm’s got people we should look at?”

  “Hell, as far as I know, there’re only about three members left and not one of them could organize a decent goat fuck,” said the older of the two deputies.

  They both knew the other members of Prairie Storm, they said, which was mostly a Cass County group. The members were all fairly old and mostly wrote letters to the editor. “Don’t think you’re gonna find an assassin here. Maybe some assholes, no assassins,” said the younger one.

  They said they’d ask around about a white-haired lady with a gray-eyed son, who’d been tied into Prairie Storm. “But I’ll tell you what you need—you need a better description.”

  Lucas remembered the photo on his phone and showed it to them. The younger one looked at it for a moment, then said, “You know who that looks like? Who was that guy, maybe . . . five years ago . . . grew all that weed in the Wilsons’ cornfield?”

  “Not him,” said the older guy. “That’s the guy who ran off with Bob Hake’s wife. They’re long gone to California and they ain’t coming back if they know what’s good for them.”

  “Oh, yeah. Boy, she was one hot kitty, huh?”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. He got out two business cards, wrote his phone number on the back of them, gave them to the deputies, said, “Call anytime, day or night,” and got back on the road.

  —

  LUCAS DIDN’T HAVE many feelings about the fight, one way or the other, because it hadn’t been much of a fight. Leonard wouldn’t want to cough or laugh for a few weeks, and Lucas would have a black eye. He’d had a number of them over the years; it was an occupational hazard you put up with.

  He hadn’t even gotten much of a shot of adrenaline; it’d been more a matter of taking care of business than a desperate struggle. Which was fine.

  —

  FROM ATLANTIC to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, was a drive of roughly three and a half hours, or three hours if you were behind the wheel of a turbo-charged 4.6-liter V8.

  Lucas drove back across the top of Des Moines, then southwest through Oskaloosa and Ottumwa, the towns from which the e-mails had been sent. He didn’t stop in either place, even to look around, because after he got out of the Des Moines traffic, he called Norman Clay, Michaela Bowden’s weasel, on the number that Mitford had given him. Clay told him that Bowden would be speaking until about three-thirty in Burlington, and Lucas could stop
by any time after three o’clock to talk.

  He’d get to Mount Pleasant a little after two, he thought, which gave him an hour to find and interview Joseph Likely, and then move on to Burlington to talk with Clay.

  —

  MORE BEANS AND CORN. Lots more.

  Lucas crossed the Skunk River into Mount Pleasant at two-thirty. He hadn’t had anything to eat except some peanut-butter crackers at a pee stop on I-80, but ignored a café, which made him feel virtuous, and went looking for Joseph Likely’s place. Mount Pleasant was an older town, where no two houses, standing side by side, seemed to come out of the same architectural style, with nineteenth-century Victorians up against pastel-colored postwar ramblers. Most of the houses had traditional flower gardens with marigolds and zinnias, and some with head-high sunflowers.

  Likely lived in one of the ramblers; he wasn’t home. A neighbor, a chunky, shirtless sunburned man, was lying in a canvas hammock, reading a battered copy of The Sun Also Rises, and he called, “If you’re looking for Joe, he got out of here early with his canoe up on his car roof. Probably out on the river. The Iowa River, not the Skunk.”

  Lucas ambled over. “You need a shirt,” he said.

  “Probably,” the neighbor said, looking at his chest. “I don’t mind toasting the shoulders, but it does hurt when your tits get singed. But I feel too good to get up and go inside. Say, you look like you ran into a door.”

  “Yeah, it’s embarrassing,” Lucas said. He touched his cheekbone and winced. “You know when Joe’s getting back?”

  “Usually about dark,” the neighbor said. “He tries to get off the river before the bugs get bad. You want me to tell him you were here?”

  “That’d be great,” Lucas said. He took the card case out of his jacket pocket and took out a card. Weather had gotten them for him and the card said nothing but “Lucas Davenport” on an expensive-looking cream-colored stock. He wrote his cell phone number on the back and said, “I’ll stop back again this evening. If he gets here earlier than that, tell him to give me a ring.”

  The man looked at the card, apparently puzzled by the lack of information on it, and asked, “Can I tell him what you want?”

  Lucas thought it over for a few seconds, then said, “Yes. Tell him I’m a political researcher.”

  “I’ll tell him,” the man said. Before Lucas could go, he asked, “Say, could you step inside that back door there? That’s the kitchen and the refrigerator is right there. Get me a beer. Get one for yourself, if you want. And there’s a shirt on the counter—toss me that.”

  Not a man who got nervous about strangers in his yard, Lucas thought, as he handed him the beer and T-shirt.

  —

  BEFORE LEAVING TOWN, Lucas had a few minutes, so he stopped one more time, at the Dairy Queen, got a chocolate-dipped vanilla cone, which didn’t do much for his virtue but a lot for his sense of well-being, found his way back to Highway 34, and headed southeast to Burlington.

  —

  BURLINGTON WAS A HARD-CORE Mississippi River town, the best kind, to Lucas’s mind. Bowden’s event was at the Burlington Municipal Auditorium, which was located on the banks of the Mississippi and looked quite a lot like Uncle Scrooge’s Money Bin, for those whose comic-book memories went back that far.

  After a quick phone call, he found Norman Clay sitting on the wall that wrapped around a fountain at the back corner of the building, eating a Popsicle and looking out at the river and one of the prettiest bridges to cross it. Clay was a fleshy, square-shouldered man about Lucas’s size and age, but blond, and tired-looking, and wearing a non-wrinkle blue knit suit, with a striped tie, the knot pulled open.

  He stood up when Lucas approached, held out his hand and said, “Davenport?” and sat back down. “What’s up?”

  “Did Neil tell you what I’m doing?”

  “Yeah, yeah. We’ve got solid security and I don’t know exactly what Henderson’s doing, hiring you,” Clay said. “We looked you up, by the way. You’re the cop who got tangled up with Taryn Grant.”

  “Yeah, that was me,” Lucas said.

  “And she’s now a respected senator from our very own party,” Clay said.

  “A psychopath, but don’t tell anybody I told you so,” Lucas said.

  “You don’t really have to tell me,” Clay said. “I met her a couple of times, around town, and I got that distinct impression.”

  “That doesn’t worry you?”

  “In D.C.? Hell, psychopaths are a dime a dozen inside the Beltway, and about a quarter a dozen outside,” Clay said. “Gotta be more than rich and crazy to raise an eyebrow in Washington.”

  Lucas sat down, looked out at the river. “I don’t often use the word, but she’s the bitch from hell,” he said. “Believe me, you don’t want to get on her wrong side. She could send somebody after you with a gun.”

  “That seems a little extreme,” Clay said.

  “She is a little extreme,” Lucas said.

  “I meant your statement, not the senator,” Clay said.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t know what I know. She’s a murderer,” Lucas said. After a few seconds of silence, he added, “Anyway, you know I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “Yes. Neil said that.”

  “I still have some pretty good resources,” Lucas said. “I ran those e-mails past the best psychologist I know, who has quite a lot of experience with criminal psychology, and she’s afraid that something serious may be happening here.”

  He told Clay about Elle Kruger’s opinion and about tracking the e-mail language to some radical political groups. He concluded with, “Since you put every single move Bowden is going to make on your website . . . she’s always easy to find.”

  “The thing is, we’re not going to go away,” Clay said. He walked over to the river and threw his Popsicle stick in, then came back. “After talking to Mitford, I kinda thought we should. Maybe spend a few extra days in New Hampshire and then the South, but Mike doesn’t want to hear it. She wants Iowa and she doesn’t want to be run off it.”

  “Tough to win an election if you’re dead,” Lucas said.

  “You’re right—but you have to understand, Mike has lived with this . . . with the vague threats and so on . . . for half her life. She’s been in and out of Iraq, in and out of Afghanistan. Nothing’s ever happened, so she doesn’t tend to give these threats much credence.”

  “Is your security going after the threat? Or is the security static?” Lucas asked.

  “Not going after it. We have to rely on the Iowa cops for that—we passed Henderson’s concerns along to their election security team. Haven’t heard much back,” Clay said.

  He stretched, yawned, and sat down again. A door must have opened on the side of the auditorium, because they heard a burst of cheering, which quickly faded. He said, “I’m not dumb. I’m worried. But Henderson told me you’re the best possible guy to be chasing down the threat. If there is one. So . . . God bless you. Mike ain’t going away.”

  “Ah, boy.”

  People began streaming out of the auditorium.

  “Had a good crowd,” Clay said, standing up. “How’s the governor doing? Hitting a lot of colleges?”

  “Up at the University of Iowa tonight and more of them tomorrow,” Lucas said.

  Clay flashed a grin. “Well, if you’re a lefty . . .”

  “. . . you hit a lot of colleges,” Lucas finished.

  Clay said, “C’mon. I’ll introduce you to God.”

  —

  MICHAELA BOWDEN was a tall woman, thin, ramrod-straight, brown hair with copper highlights, attractive in a front-office way. She was talking to a small group of fawning locals, called a couple of them by name. Lucas picked out a half-dozen security people, four men, two women, within twenty feet of her. Every one of them eye-clicked Lucas, maybe smelling a guy with a gun, though he wasn�
�t wearing one. When they saw Clay pulling him along, they looked elsewhere.

  Bowden was backing away from the group around her and one of the security women was edging between the locals and the candidate, separating them, and then Bowden said, “Well, I’m late for a riverboat . . .” and somebody said, “We got a riverboat right here, Mike,” and everybody laughed as though that were hilarious, and then Bowden was moving away toward the back of the auditorium with the security screen building both in front and behind her.

  Clay pulled Lucas along and as they were approaching the back door, he called, “Madam Secretary . . . I need you to meet this guy.”

  She stopped and turned and looked at Lucas and then Clay, did a quick price check on Lucas’s suit, and asked, “How do you do?”

  Before Lucas could answer, Clay said, “This is Lucas Davenport. He’s the former cop hired by Henderson to try to dig out those supposed threats. I wanted you to see him, so you’ll know who he is, if you see him again, in a crowd.”

  Bowden nodded at Lucas and showed a half-inch smile: “I understand you’re close to Taryn Grant.”

  Lucas smiled back. Bowden projected an effortless charisma and he had to resist the urge to tug at his forelock: “Not close enough. A little closer and she wouldn’t be in the Senate—she’d be in a different federal institution altogether.”

  “Interesting,” she said. And, “Good luck with your investigation. Are you seeing Elmer soon?”

  “Maybe tonight.”

  “Tell him I’m not leaving Iowa,” she said.

  She started to maneuver away, but Lucas said, “Ms. Bowden—I don’t know how well you really know the governor, but he’s a good guy. The last thing in the world he’d want is for you to get hurt. He wouldn’t pull anything like this threat thing to bullshit you out of the state. This is a serious matter.”

  Bowden took a longer look at him, and then said, “Okay. So it’s up to you to save my butt, Lucas. I’m not leaving.”

  —

  AS BOWDEN, her security force, advisers, and hangers-on streamed out to a line of Chevy Suburbans and a bus, Clay said to Lucas, “We’re running late. I don’t have time right now, but I’d like to introduce you to all our security people. What are the chances you could make it to Davenport this evening?”