Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “Just binoculars so far,” I said. When people look at you with binoculars, or shoot your picture with a long lens, they unconsciously take a particular position that gives them away. A guy looking at you with binoculars, for example, will have his arms and hands in almost a perfect triangle, elbows out, fists meeting in front of his eyes. Photographers, on the other hand, scrunch their arms together as they support the camera and lens, and their faces are completely obscured by the camera body. When you see either one of them, you won’t mistake the positions for anything else.

  I got up, took LuEllen’s bag, made a little show of scrunching it up. She pulled her feet onto the park bench, while I strolled toward the trash basket. I dumped the bag, did a double take at something, then waved LuEllen over.

  She got up and strolled toward me. I was looking at her, and past her. The guy with the binoculars was gone. “We better hurry,” I told her when she came up. “He’s out of sight.”

  She nodded and we turned, walked a little way toward the edge of the park, and then I turned and walked backward with her, saying, “Yadda yadda yadda yadda,” so that I appeared to be talking with her, but still couldn’t pick up the guy with the binoculars. “Okay,” I said. “Time to move faster.”

  She nodded and we both started jogging down the diagonal sidewalk to the corner, the car a block farther on. At the cross street I looked back at the park, but didn’t see anything—and then Carp broke out of a little copse of trees a scant seventy yards away. He was running fast, for as big as he was, a pair of binoculars dangling from his neck, and he had a gun in one hand.

  “He’s coming,” I said. “It’s Carp and he’s got the gun.” LuEllen looked the same way and we broke into a hard run. Carp was about as close to us as we were to the car. He hip-checked a Cadillac in the street as we ran down the sidewalk toward the car, and I said, “We’re gonna slow down getting in and getting started.” I pulled the car keys out of my pants pocket and handed them to her. “You drive. If he opens up on us, I’ll slow him down.”

  She didn’t say anything: that would have been a waste of time. She was moving, breaking off the sidewalk to run between two parked cars, then up the street toward the driver’s side of our car. Carp broke around the corner deli when we were still twenty yards away from it. Then LuEllen was inside and I dragged open the passenger-side door, slipping the revolver out of my jacket pocket, and she shouted, “Get in,” and Carp, now forty yards away, slowed to a walk, brought his weapon up, and fired at me.

  I wasn’t aware of the slugs going by—you can actually hear them go by if you’re far enough from the blast of the gun, a whip-snap sound. That’s if you’re not preoccupied by something else, like shooting back. I was shooting back, carefully, taking my time, aiming everything into a tree next to him. I could see people far down the street, and while I didn’t think the .38 would reach that far, I didn’t want to kill some old lady or her dog.

  I fired four shots and suddenly he stopped shooting, looked at his gun, looked at me. I took a step toward him and he turned and ran back around the corner.

  I jumped in the car and said, “Go,” and LuEllen ripped out of the parking space and we were down the street, fast for the first hundred yards, down to the corner, then we were around the corner and away. As we went, I was looking out the rear window. He was gone.

  “You shot at him,” LuEllen said in her calmest voice, which she uses only when she’s intensely cranked.

  “Not exactly. I shot an elm tree to death. Can’t shoot him until we get the laptop. Sure as shit slowed him down, though.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Never touched me,” I said. “He fired every shot he had, I think. Six shots, probably. It’s not like doing Quake in your basement.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He was too far away,” I said. “Too freaked out. I was trying to be careful to hit the tree and I was shaking like a leaf.”

  “You’re still shaking like a leaf. You’re talking about a hundred miles an hour.” She started to laugh. “I don’t think anybody saw us. All those people sitting in the park, and when I looked back there was nobody down the street or on the street. I don’t think anybody saw us. And we were right in the middle of everything.”

  “Fuckin’ crazy,” I said. “If somebody saw him running with that gun . . . Wouldn’t have got a good look at us, anyway.”

  She laughed some more, started driving too fast and I had to slow her down. “What a rush,” she said. “What a rush.”

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  >>> WE DROVE A HALF-MILE or so, taking it easy, watching for anything that was moving fast. Three or four minutes out, I turned LuEllen around and we went back into the neighborhood, looking for the Corolla. We didn’t find it, nor did we see Carp again. Life went on around the park—there were no cops, no people standing around scratching their heads. We both turned toward a running body, but it was a kid, having a good time. We’d given a gunfight, and nobody came.

  “Let’s go to a zoo or something,” LuEllen said. She was manic, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks pink. “Let’s go on a hike. Let’s go for a run. Let’s do something. We gotta get out of that hotel room. I can’t think in there anymore.”

  “Maybe we could, uh . . .” I was struck by a thought.

  After a moment LuEllen said, “What?”

  I looked out the car window at a large woman in a poppy-orange blouse, leading, on a leash, a dog the size of a biscuit. “Just drive, don’t talk to me.”

  I kicked the seat back as far as it would go, put an arm over my eyes, and tried to work it out. Doing the numbers. Thinking about the tarot, about the King of Cups reversed. At some point LuEllen asked, “You all right?” I could feel the wheels bumping along the road, feel us rolling to a stop at a light—feel LuEllen looking at me.

  Five minutes, doing the numbers, and then LuEllen said, “C’mon, Kidd. What happened? You’re not having a stroke?”

  I exhaled, cranked the seat back upright, and looked out the window. We were at a little business intersection and I could see the Washington Monument ahead and off to the left, a white arrow against the blue sky. Nice day. “That motherfucker.”

  “Who?”

  “Carp is Lemon.”

  We sat halfway through a red light before she noticed. As we went through, she said, “Tell me.”

  “We get a note out of the blue—doesn’t have to be from Bobby, just has to be from somebody who knows Bobby is dead. Doesn’t demand contact, just allows us to make it on our terms, so that we feel safe. Guides us into Washington. John’s black and I’m white, and the two guys who went to his apartment . . .”

  “Black and white.”

  “And it was almost dark, and he was waiting for us, a black-and-white pair. He knew we’d be coming because he gave us the address, and he knew at that point that we weren’t from the government, because we’d responded to his e-mail. He knew we were Bobby’s pals because we told him so. He knew we’d check the address he gave us, to see if it was really Carp’s. We did. It’s the same technique he used to get Bobby. It’s like fly-fishing. You throw the fly out there, let it drift, wait for a strike.”

  “But he—”

  “Yeah. His big mistake—this must have really mind-fucked him—was that he didn’t know that there were two groups looking for him, that there were two black-and-white pairs. He must’ve thought that if two unknown people from Minnesota and wherever else got shot in a bad neighborhood, who could connect it to his apartment? But he kills a couple of government guys who were going to his apartment, so now . . .”

  “He’s screwed.”

  “Well. Maybe they can’t prove it. He was wearing that wig; he’ll have been reported as a blond.”

  She thought about it for a minute “And he didn’t know John was shot. . . .”

  “Right. He didn’t know that for sure. He was already running when he pulled the trigger. And if he slowed down when he realized he wasn’t being chased, a
nd circled back and looked at the car, he would have seen John walking out and getting in with the rest of us. And that’s where he got the tag number off the car.”

  “Then, after the miss at his apartment, after he sees in the paper that he got the wrong guys, he sets us up,” she finished. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “Ah, shit.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’d say it’s at least ten to one that Carp and Lemon are the same guy.”

  “We were chumps.”

  “That’s not the major problem. I mean, we’re not dead, anyway. The major problem is, he contacted me. By name. He knows who I am.”

  I was looking at her, and she turned her head and I saw something like fear in her eyes. “That’s . . . doesn’t get any worse than that.”

  “Not this side of being dead. But we’ve gotta get back online. I can check this.”

  >>> THE state of Minnesota allows anyone to check anyone else’s license plate, but requires you to identify yourself before the information is released. Your name is then put on the file, and the person whose plate you pulled is notified. That’s if you go in the front door. I never did, and I didn’t think Carp—Lemon—would be likely to go in the front door, either. But . . .

  “How can you tell?” LuEllen said, peering at the laptop screen as I went online and dialed into the DMV.

  “There’s a counter. You’d really have to tear up a system to beat it.” I got the plate database, checked my tag number. My name and address came up. The counter said the information had been accessed the night of the collision at Rachel Willowby’s apartment.

  “There it is,” I said. “He had to have seen the car at Rachel’s place. That’s the only way he could have known.” It was a queer feeling. I’d been so careful, for so long, so unbelievably, unhealthily careful, that to have somebody crack my cover was like having your house burglarized.

  “That fucker. He set us up.” A hint of admiration in her voice? She snapped her fingers as she remembered the tarot connection. “That was the tarot card. Remember? That was the—”

  “King of Cups, reversed. Yeah, that popped into my head back at the park. Coincidence jumps up and bites you on the ass.”

  “You been bit on the ass so many times you’re lucky to have an ass left,” she snorted. “When are you gonna believe? You’re some kind of fuckin’ gypsy spook or something.”

  “No. No.” I shook my head. “No, it’s just superstition. But it’s . . . interesting.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Maybe what he did to us,” I said slowly. “I gotta think about it. He doesn’t know that we know.”

  “What if he looks at your DMV records again and sees that somebody else has checked them. He’ll know it was you, and he’ll know why.”

  “We’re not dealing with a sure thing,” I said. “It’s all murky. Let’s go walk around the Mall and see if we can figure something out.”

  >>> WE FIGURED something out, all right. What we figured out took an hour of talk—argument—working over the problem of the DDC group, the existence of the laptop and what that might mean, and the fact that Carp had identified me.

  Our strategy unwound like this:

  LuEllen asked a simple question: “Why don’t we just call him up and make a deal? Find out what he wants? We know that he killed Bobby and we could give the FBI a trail that leads to him—Baird saw him, and so did Rachel. We’ve got a big stick.”

  “So does he. He knows who I am.”

  “Right. So you should be safe with each other’s information. We call him up, tell him we want to look at the laptop—nothing more, we just want to look at it, meet at some safe, open place and make sure there’s nothing on it that incriminates us. After that, we walk away.”

  There was an objection to that idea. I said, “You’re saying we let him get away with killing Bobby.”

  “Not because I want to.”

  “And if we go online and try to make a deal, we give away our edge,” I said. “We know Lemon is Carp, and he doesn’t know we know.”

  “So what? So we know his exact name and the type of car he has and even the license number, but there are about a billion people in Washington. How are we gonna find him in this mess?”

  I was still unhappy with the idea. “What if he doesn’t even know what he’s got on us? He might not know yet, given the size of Bobby’s files. He might be willing to make a deal now, then find out something big, and decide to go with it.”

  “With the murder rap hanging over him?”

  “That’s exactly it. Suppose he found out what we did with the Keyhole satellites. He could use the information to deal his way out of a murder charge. I know the government deals down murder charges. You see it in the papers, some killer disappears into the Witness Protection Program, and the next thing you know, he’s your Little League coach.”

  “Damnit.”

  “The goddamn laptop is a bomb,” I said. “We gotta get it.”

  >>> WE WORRIED about that for a while. “Look,” I said, “we gotta wonder why he came to Washington at all. To make a deal with somebody? To get his job back? He might still be hoping to do that, if nobody can prove he did the killings at the apartment. And shit, the way things run in Washington these days, not being proven guilty is considered the same as being proven innocent.”

  “Well, that’s what the letters in his laptop say—he’s trying to get back in with Krause.”

  “What if we went online and told Lemon that Senator Krause wants to make a deal with Carp. What if we throw that fly out on the water?”

  Once we got that going, other bits and pieces started falling into place, but it was all tentative, all guesswork, and all dangerous. LuEllen embroidered on the idea, and concluded, “It’s doable—but the whole idea depends on us spotting Carp first. And on where Krause lives. If he lives downtown in a big apartment complex, the Watergate or somewhere like that, it won’t work. Even if it’s in a house, he could have big-time security, with his job.”

  “We can figure out a way to finesse the security. And Krause’s been here for twenty years, he’s gotta have a house,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  >>> ONE of the keys to the hunt for Carp was the attack outside of Griggs’s apartment. We wondered, why there? How did he know about the park? The park had been a perfect spot for an ambush—small enough that he could watch the whole thing from one place, with good protective contour, good concealing foliage, busy enough that he wouldn’t be noticeable, quiet enough that he wouldn’t be shooting through a crowd.

  We went online to my pal in Montana, the government-files maven, and asked him to pull Carp’s tax returns and check the addresses. We had an answer in twenty minutes: Carp had lived for a year in a house not more than a two-minute walk from the park. And more background: he’d apparently moved into the apartment in the District only six months earlier. Before that, he’d lived in an apartment complex in south Arlington.

  We didn’t think he’d dare go back to his own apartment after killing the two government guys, so it was possible that he knew the people in the house he’d lived in, and bagged out there, or that he had a friend somewhere down in that apartment complex and was hiding there. Either would explain both the park meeting place and his invisibility.

  While my Montana friend was compiling the addresses, we did a quick check on Krause; he had a house in a northwestern suburb, as close as we could tell with our Washington map.

  “So it’s a possibility,” I said. “The whole setup we talked about.”

  “If we can spot Carp’s car . . .”

  >>> WE KNEW Carp was driving a red Corolla. We knew the license number. He knew our car, and the number. No problem: we went out to National and rented a couple of cars, one from Hertz, one from Avis on my Harry Olson Visa card and Wisconsin driver’s license. We still had the walkie-talkies from New Orleans.

  We started looking, driving separate cars, staying in touch with the walkie-talkies.
>
  >>> THE house in Ballston we crossed off immediately. The area seemed to be upgrading, and the house where Carp once lived was being rehabbed and was empty. Two carpenters were rebuilding the front porch, and you could look straight through the place. We headed down to south Arlington.

  Fairlington is a few hundred acres of low two- and three-story red-brick apartment buildings with white window trimmings in a faux-federal style, spread along narrow, quiet, two-lane streets overhung with oaks; a pleasant enough place for new families just getting started, and we saw a fair number of young mothers out pushing baby strollers.

  We thought Carp might be at the White Creek complex, a U-shaped building with four white pillars at the main entrance, and an asphalt parking lot in the front. I cruised the parking lot, which wouldn’t hold many more than a hundred cars, while LuEllen lingered up the block in another car. No Corolla.

  “You go around to the left, I’ll go right,” I told her.

  “Roger. Over and out.” She thought the walkies-talkies were fun.

  >>> IF WE didn’t find him in the first sweep through the complex, we’d agreed that we’d check a few more times—he might simply have gone out for lunch.

  But he wasn’t out.

  LuEllen found the car fifteen minutes after we started looking for it. The Motorola beeped, I picked it up and said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Got it.”

  >>> WE WENT out to a sandwich place in a shopping center on King Street, got chicken-salad sandwiches. “We could just stick the gun in his ear and threaten to pull the trigger if he doesn’t give us the laptop,” LuEllen said.

  “Two problems: we’d have to get close enough to him and we really might have to shoot him if we got that close. He’s got that gun. And what if he doesn’t have the laptop with him?”

  “We’d only try it if he had it with him.”

  “Too many windows looking out at us, too many mothers on the street.” I shook my head. “Let’s go the other way. Even if we miss, we’ll know where he’s staying.”