Lucas Davenport Collection

by John Sandford

  Heather looked up and down the hall, as if checking for hidden cameras, then smiled and reached out with her forefinger, and scratched Del on the left tit, and said, “I hope you boys enjoyed the floor show.”

  She shut the door and Del laughed.

  Lucas looked at his watch and said, “Want to go over to the St. Clair and get a milk shake?”

  Mark mcguire called Lucas and asked for the quarter-million dollars to start the website, offering a thirty percent interest in the business. Everybody called lawyers, accountants, and consultants.

  DEL.

  The day after Lucas killed Alyssa Austin, Del showed up in Lucas’s doorway, knocked on the frame, stepped inside.

  “How you doing?”

  “Fine,” Lucas said. “How’s Cheryl?”

  “Found out what’s wrong with her,” Del said. He was a little stunned. “She’s pregnant.”

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  The Night Crew

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  KIDD NOVELS Easy Prey

  The Fool’s Run Chosen Prey

  The Empress File Mortal Prey

  The Devil’s Code Naked Prey

  The Hanged Man’s Song Hidden Prey

  Broken Prey

  VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS Dead Watch

  Dark of the Moon Invisible Prey

  Heat Lightning Phantom Prey

  PUTNAM

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by John Sandford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sandford, John.

  Wicked prey / John Sandford.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05079-8

  1. Davenport, Lucas (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Minnesota—Minneapolis—

  Fiction. 3. Minneapolis (Minn.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A516W

  813’.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Mom

  1

  RANDY WHITCOMB WAS A HUMAN STINKPOT, a red-haired cripple with a permanent cloud over his head; a gap-toothed, pock-faced, paraplegic crank freak, six weeks out of the Lino Lakes medium-security prison. He hurtled past the luggage carousels at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, pumping the wheels of his cheap non-motorized state-bought wheelchair, his coarse red hair a wild halo around his head.

  “Get out of the way, you little motherfucker,” he snarled at a blond child of three or four years. He zipped past the gawking mother and tired travelers and nearly across the elegant cordovan shoe tips of a tall bearded man. “Out of the way, fuckhead,” and he was through the door, the anger streaming behind him like coal smoke from a power plant.

  The bearded man with the elegant cordovan shoes, which came from a shop in Jermyn Street in London, leaned close to his companion, a dark-haired woman who wore blue jeans and a black blouse, running shoes, and cheap oversized sunglasses with unfashionable plastic rims. He said, quietly, in a cool Alabama accent, “If we see yon bugger again, remind me to crack his skinny handicapped neck.”

  The woman smiled and said, “Yon bugger? You were in England way too long.”

  Brutus Cohn, traveling under the passport name of John Lamb, tracked the wheelchair down the sidewalk. There was no humor in his cold blue eyes. “Aye, I was that,” he said. “But now I’m back.”

  Cohn and the woman, who called herself Rosie Cruz, walked underground to the short-term parking structure, trailing Cohn’s single piece of wheeled luggage. As they went out the door, the heat hit them like a hand in the face. Not as bad as Alabama heat, but dense, and sticky, smelling of burned transmission fluid, spoiled fruit, and bubble gum. Cruz pushed the trunk button on the remote key and the taillights blinked on a beige Toyota Camry.

  “Ugly car,” he said, as he lifted the suitcase into the trunk. Cohn disliked ugly cars, ugly clothes, ugly houses.

  “The best-selling car in America, in the least attention-getting color,” Cruz said. She was a good-looking woman of no particularly identifiable age, who’d taken care to make herself mousy. She wore no makeup, had done nothing with her hair.

  Cohn had once seen her in Dallas, where women dressed up, and she’d astonished him with her authentic Texas vibe: moderately big hair, modestly big lipstick, two-inch heels, stockings with seams down the back; her twice-great-grand-uncle might have died at the Alamo. Cruz, when working, dressed for invisibility. She fit in Dallas, she fit in Minnesota, she fit wherever they worked—she was wallpaper, she was background. She took the driver’s side, and he sat on the passenger side, fiddling with the seat controls to push it all the way back. At six-foot-six, he needed the legroom.

  “Give me your passport and documents,” Cruz said, when the air conditioning was going.

  He took a wallet out of his breast pocket and handed it over. Inside were a hundred pounds, fifty euros, fifty dollars, an American passport, a New York State driver’s license, two credit cards, a building security card with a magnetic strip, and a variety of wallet detritus.

  The whole lot, except for the passport and currency, had been taken
from the home of the real John Lamb by his building superintendent, who was a crook. Since the credit cards would never be used, no one would be the wiser. The passport had been more complicated, but not too—a stand-in had applied by mail, submitting a photograph of Cohn, and when it came to Lamb’s apartment, it had been stolen from the mailbox. As long as the real Lamb didn’t apply for another one, they were good.

  Cruz took out the currency and handed it back to Cohn, tucked the wallet under the car seat and handed over another one, thick with cash. “William Joseph Wakefield—Billy Joe. Everything’s real, except the picture on the driver’s license. Don’t use the credit cards unless it’s an emergency.”

  “Billy Joe.” Cohn thumbed through the cash. “Two thousand dollars. Three nights at a decent hotel.”

  “We’re not staying at a decent hotel,” Cruz said. She reached into the backseat, picked up a baseball cap with a Minnesota Twins logo, and said, “Put this on and pull it down over your eyes.”

  He did, and with his careful British suit, it made him look a bit foolish. She wouldn’t have given it to him without a reason, so he put it on, and asked, “Where’re we set up?”

  She backed carefully out of the parking space and turned for the exit. “At the HomTel in Hudson, Wisconsin, just across the state line from here. Thirty miles. Two hundred and twenty dollars a night, for two rooms for you, adjoining, which is twice as much as they’re worth, but with the convention in town, you get what you can. I’m upstairs and on the other side of the motel.”

  “Where’re the boys?”

  “Jesse’s across the street at the Windmill, Tate is at the Cross Motel, Jack is at a mom-and-pop called Wakefield Inn, all in Hudson. All within easy walking distance from the HomTel.” Multiple nearby rooms in different hotels made it easier to get together, and also easier to find an emergency hideout if the cops made one or another of them. They could be off the street in minutes, in a motel where they’d never been seen by the management.

  Standard operating procedure, worked out and talked over in prisons across the country. Cohn nodded and said, “Okay.”

  “I almost went home when you invited Jack back in,” Cruz said, threading her way through the concrete pillars of the parking ramp.

  “Better to have him inside the tent pissin’ out, than outside the tent pissin’ in,” Cohn said.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she said.

  “It means that when he gets picked up—and I do mean when, it’s only a matter of time—he’ll try to cut a deal,” Cohn said. “We’re one of the things he’s got. I need to talk to him.”

  “He’d cut a deal whatever we do.”

  “No. Not really. I’ve thought on that,” he said, in an accent that spoke of the deep southern part of Yorkshire. “There are circumstances in which he would not cut a deal, no matter what the coppers might have offered to him.”

  “You’ve got to lose that bullshit British syntax, right now,” Cruz said. “You’re Billy Joe Wakefield from Birmingham, Alabama. You need khakis and golf shirts.”

  “Give me two minutes listening to country music,” Cohn said. “That’ll get ’er done.”

  “Anyway, about Jack . . .”

  “Let it go,” he said. “I’ll take care of Jack.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Put your sunglasses on.”

  At seven o’clock, the sky was still bright. Cohn took a pair of wraparound sunglasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them on. At the pay booth, Cruz dropped the window and handed ten dollars to a Somali woman in a shawl. Cruz got the change from the ten, and a receipt, rolled the window back up, pulled away from the booth, and handed the receipt to Cohn.

  “Check it out,” she said.

  He looked at the receipt, said, “Huh. The tag number’s on it.”

  “There’s a scanning camera at the entrance,” Cruz said. “I’m wondering if it might digitize faces at the same time that it picks up the license plates—hook them together, then run them through a facial recognition program.”

  “Would that be a problem?”

  “Not as long as somebody doesn’t put your face in the car with your face in the FBI files,” she said. “That’s not a question with me, of course.”

  “Got the beard, now,” he said. “And the hat and glasses. I cut the beard off square to give my chin a different line. I was wondering about the baseball hat . . .”

  They rode along for a minute or two, as she got off the airport and headed into St. Paul, past the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Even in the middle of a big urban area, the river valleys had a wildness that reminded him of home in Alabama. In Britain, even the wild areas had a groomed look.

  “Jack, I can’t get him off my mind. I’m sorry . . .”

  “Never mind Jack.” He was looking out the window. “You almost went home, huh? That’d be . . . Zihuatanejo?”

  “Never been to Mexico in my life, Brute,” she said with a grin. “Give it up.”

  “With a name like Cruz, you gotta have been in Mexico.”

  Her eyes flicked to him. “Why would you think my name is Cruz?”

  He laughed and said, “Okay.” But she looked like a Cruz.

  She clicked on the radio, dialed around, found a country station. “Instead of worrying about where I’m from, see if you can get the Alabama accent going.”

  The first song up was Sawyer Brown singing “Some Girls Do,” and Cohn sang along with it, all the way to the end, and then shouted, “Jesus Christ, it’s good to be back in the States. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland can go fuck itself.”

  RANDY WHITCOMB, Juliet Briar, and a man whose real name might have been Dick, but who called himself Ranch, lived in a rotting wooden house on the east side of St. Paul, that sat above a large hole in the ground called Swede Hollow; once full of houses full of Swedes, the hole was now a neglected public park.

  Whitcomb was a pimp. He’d become a pimp as soon as he could, after his parents had thrown him out of the house twelve years earlier. He liked the idea of being a pimp, and he liked TV shows that featured pimps and pimp-wannabes and his finest dream was to own a Mercedes-Benz R-Class pimpmobile in emerald green. He enjoyed the infliction of pain, as long as he wasn’t the object of it.

  Briar was his only employee.

  She was a heavy young woman in a shapeless gray dress; her hair the sad tatters of a curly perm gone old. She sat half-crouched over the steering wheel of Whitcomb’s handicapped van, and alternately chirped brightly about the sights on the street, and sobbed, pressing her knuckles to her teeth, fearing for what was coming. What was coming, she thought, would be a whipping from Whitcomb, with his whipping stick.

  He’d broken the stick out of a lilac hedge a block from their house. A sucker, looking for light, the branch had grown long and leggy, an inch thick at the butt, tapering to an eighth of an inch at the tip. Whitcomb had stripped the bark off with a penknife; the switch sat, white and naked, spotted here and there with blood, in the corner of the room next to his La-Z-Boy chair.

  He’d beaten her with it three times over the summer, when her performance had sagged below his standards.

  He liked the work. He couldn’t stand up, so he made her drop on the floor like a dog, on her hands and knees, while he sat on his chair and whipped her with the switch. The thing was limber enough that it didn’t break bone—he wouldn’t have cared, except that broken bones would have kept her from waiting on him—but it did maul her skin. So she laughed and chirped and pointed and giggled and then sobbed, the fear rising in her throat as they got closer to the house.

  They couldn’t afford a van equipped for handicapped drivers, and Whitcomb hadn’t been trained on one anyway. They did get one with a hydraulic ramp, bought used and cheap through CurbCut, a St. Paul charity. At the house, Briar parked next to a wooden ramp built by Make a House a Home, and Whitcomb dropped the ramp and rolled out of the van, used the remote to retract the ramp and close the van door. He hadn�
��t spoken a word since the airport, but his breath was coming in fast chuffs.

  Whitcomb was getting himself excited, though, of course, nothing would come of it. He’d taken the bullet low in the spine, and he’d not have another erection in this life.

  Now he spoke: “Inside.”

  “The light’s on,” Briar said. She stopped. She was sure she’d turned the lights off as they left. “I turned them off.”

  She was stalling, Whitcomb thought. “Ranch must be up.”

  “Ranch is not up.”

  Stalling. The crazy bitch had got the flight wrong, and now a pharmaceutical salesman was wondering why he couldn’t find his sample case, and somebody else was wondering why a green nylon bag was going round and round on a baggage carousel somewhere else. Eventually they’d look in it, and find the sample case, and put two and two together, and the whole goddamn racket could come down around their ears. She was stalling.

  “In the house,” he said.

  “The light . . .”

  He shouted at her now: “Get in the fuckin’ house . . .”

  She turned and climbed the ramp, unlocked the door and pushed inside, holding the door for him, and he bumped over the doorjamb and turned toward the living room and accelerated. Moving too fast to turn back. And there were the Pollish twins, Dubuque and Moline, sitting on the couch, big bulky black men with cornrowed hair, drop-crotch jeans, and wife-beater shirts.

  Ranch was lying in a corner on a futon, facedown, mouth open, a white stain under his chin, breathing heavily.

  Moline had one of Whitcomb’s beers in one hand and a piece-of-shit .22 in the other. The twins were managers in the sexual entertainment industry, and were known around the St. Paul railroad tracks as Shit and Shinola, because stupid people found them hard to tell apart. The cops and the smarter street people knew that Dubuque had lost part of his left ear in a leveraged buyout on University Avenue. Moline pointed the gun at Whitcomb’s head and said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you in the motherfuckin’ head.”