Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  He was afraid to take that attitude in a park campground, where somebody might be watching or listening—he was not a man of the North Woods, but more of a city guy. Who was to know what might be back in all those trees?

  Occasionally, at night, in a motel, after a particularly vigorous round of sex and assault, his eyes would pop open and he’d worry that Linda might wake up, while he was asleep, and stick a knife in his chest. If he got too worried, he’d wake her up and slap her around some more and maybe stick her again. ’Cause that was what he did.

  They traveled like that, across Wisconsin, and then into the UP, and then to the Gathering, on its first full day.

  He’d just parked, and gotten out of the car, when Davenport drifted by, paying no attention to him.

  “There’s that big cop from Minnesota,” Linda said, from the passenger seat.

  “Yeah. Gonna have something to tell Pilate tonight.”

  Lucas shouldered through the crowd, trying not to look like a cop, but couldn’t help it. People glanced at him and gave way, sometimes with tiny smiles—I know what you are. They weren’t hostile, but they were wary.

  Lucas wasn’t by nature particularly patient, except when he was working: there was a rhythm to surveillance, and when he was on the street full-time, he’d occasionally spent whole days and nights watching a person or a house or a business.

  In addition to a psychological patience, he’d found, the biggest assets in surveillance were an interest in faces, a decent novel, and a strong bladder. Not a big intellectual, he’d nevertheless spent an entire summer reading an English translation of Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu while knitting together the web of a major crack gang that spread over the Twin Cities. He couldn’t read French, but the book had made him want to learn the language; he’d just never had time.

  Now he ambled through the crowd, not in any particular hurry: he knew now that Pilate was coming, just a matter of time. The part-time deputies, Barnes, the Subway owner, and Bennett, the postmaster, were watching the two guys who’d been with Melody Walker.

  Lucas spotted Randy, the fat man, still riding in the back of the John Deere Gator, still throwing out bottles of Faygo, and went that way. As he came up, the fat man shook his head. “Not a thing.”

  Lucas hadn’t had much time to talk to him, but now he did: “What’s up with you?” he asked. “What do you do for a living? You can’t spend all your time passing out bottles of pop.” He quickly amended that to “I mean, bottles of soda,” remembering that he was now on the soda side of the soda/pop linguistic border.

  Randy shook his head. “No, no. I manage a self-storage place down in Ann Arbor. Not much to do, you know. Keep the college kids from trying to live in the place, make sure nobody’s running a meth lab. That’s about it. ’Course, the pay’s for shit. Sleep a lot. Play a little music.”

  “Yeah? What do you play?” Lucas asked.

  “Guitar.”

  “Guitar? Tell you what: I owe you big for helping Letty. I’m serious. I owe you bigger than you know. How about I buy you a guitar? Something you don’t have.”

  The fat man looked at him for a long moment, then said, “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “No. I’m not. You got a guitar that you want?”

  “About fifty of them. You could get a Mexican version of a Gibson Les Paul for a few hundred bucks. Do that, I’d drive over to your house, wherever it is, and kiss you on the lips.”

  “That wouldn’t be necessary,” Lucas said, suppressing a shudder. He took a card out of his pocket and handed it to him. “Write your name and address on it, and the name of the guitar. I’ll drop-ship it to you.”

  “How does a cop afford—”

  “I have some money of my own,” Lucas began. His phone rang and he said, “I gotta take this,” and stepped away, into the privacy of a crowd that didn’t care who he was talking to.

  Laurent: “We have a problem. I talked to the sheriff over in Sawyer County about all those John Doe warrants and told him we had a name to fill in—Melody Walker. Ten minutes later I got a call from an assistant county prosecutor, whatever they call them over there. A punk. I told him we were offering breaks to the first people we picked up, if they weren’t directly involved in the killings, because we need to know the names and other information. He said they won’t recognize any kind of a deal we make with anybody.”

  “Goddamnit. What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him our interview video might get accidentally erased because I don’t know how to run the cameras so good, and then he’d have a known killer he’d have to let go, for lack of evidence, and everybody in Sawyer County would know it, because I’d tell everybody, and I’d tell everybody that it was his fault,” Laurent said. “He said we’d better not do that, or he’d put all our asses in jail. I told him to go fuck himself, and he said, ‘Hey, fuck you, too, you hick motherfucker.’”

  “So as professional law-enforcement exchanges go, this wouldn’t be in the top five,” Lucas said. “Or even the top ten.”

  “No. He wound up telling me he’d get back to us after he talked to his boss,” Laurent said. “Actually, he’s going to get back to you, because I don’t know the ins and outs of this cross-border stuff. I gave him your phone number.”

  “When’s he calling back?” Lucas asked. “We gotta know what we can do.”

  “Didn’t say. He sorta hung up on me.”

  “Okay. Listen, it’s gonna be dark in a couple of hours,” Lucas said. “We need to pick up those two guys, Melody’s friends, if they don’t, uh, you know, contact anyone from Pilate’s group before dark.”

  “All right. I could call this Wisconsin asshole and give him a deadline, I suppose.”

  “Let’s not annoy them. Let’s wait an hour, and if they haven’t called, then I’ll call, and kiss a little lawyer ass.”

  “Okay. Better you than me.”

  “Yeah. I’m used to it,” Lucas said.

  He rang off and went back to Randy, who handed him back his card, with a name and address, and said, “One thing to keep in your mind: Mexican. If you order a straight-up made-in-USA Les Paul, you’ll wind up filling your pants when you get the bill.”

  Lucas grinned and said, “That wouldn’t be an entirely new experience for me. I almost did last week, with Letty.”

  The fat man nodded and said, “Say, you want a Faygo?”

  “No, thanks. I had one last week.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CRUISED FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES, then took a call from Barnes, the Subway owner. “We got one male and one female subject approaching the two men under surveillance. They know each other. The two unsubs are both in Juggalo masks. Jim’s watching from the other side.”

  “Call Laurent.”

  “Already did, he’s moving up, but said to tell you he’ll stay far enough back that they won’t see him.”

  “Good. Call Frisell, Peters, and Bennett, tell them to get in a big outer circle so they can track the new people if they walk away.”

  “Do that,” Barnes said, and he was gone.

  Lucas made his way through the thickening crowd, thinking, Unsubs? Unknown subjects? Did everybody watch TV? Like the Minnesota deputy, with her vics? It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun probably wasn’t more than thirty degrees above the horizon, and the shadows were getting long. If they were going to move before dark, it’d have to be soon.

  He saw Laurent in the crowd, who was as tall as Lucas, and so could look over the heads of most people. Lucas moved up to him and asked, “What do you think?”

  “They definitely know each other, and pretty well. They walked up and the guys on the ground started talking with them, passed up a joint without being asked.”

  Lucas watched for a moment: the new ones included a heavy woman in a black catsuit, with a painted cat face, and a husky man in a black T-shirt and jeans, with a painted skull mask.

  “Melody Walker said the guys did most of
the killing. If these two people peel off from the first two, we should grab them. Separate them, brace the woman. If she’s as willing to talk as Melody, we’ll be a hell of a lot solider.”

  “All right. I’ll call everybody and tell them what’s up.”

  Lucas’s phone rang again. He looked at it, and recognized the Hayward area code. “Your lawyer friend is calling back.”

  “Tell him to go fuck himself again,” Laurent said.

  • • •

  LUCAS ANSWERED, identifying himself, and a voice on the other end said, “Mark Hasselhoff, I’m the county attorney. I just talked to Rick—”

  “I don’t know Rick,” Lucas said.

  “He’s the guy your sheriff talked to, and I told the young man that we might be better off to defer to the law enforcement agencies on the ground. We will recognize any reasonable bargains you make lesser offenders, although we’ll have to leave it to a judge if there’s a problem in deciding who qualifies.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Lucas said. “We’ve got one in custody, we’re watching four more, and we believe all of them were involved either actively or passively in the murder of the dope dealer and of Skye—Shirley Bellows—there in Hayward.”

  “Good work, then. You’ll have to tell me sometime why a Minnesota guy was running things here, and now over in Michigan,” Hasselhoff said. “Anyway, I will call you back in one minute and will leave a more official-sounding approval of your actions on your voice mail, and will do the same with Sheriff Laurent, if you would tell him that.”

  “I will. And hey: thanks, Mark.”

  “I’ll leave a message,” Hasselhoff said.

  • • •

  LAURENT FINISHED HIS CALLS, and said, “We’re set,” and Lucas told him about Hasselhoff. Laurent said, “Hmm. Too cooperative. Makes me suspicious.”

  “Let’s not look a gift—”

  “They’re moving,” Laurent said.

  Lucas had been looking at Laurent, and now he turned back to the group on the blanket. The two people dressed as Juggalos were moving away, straight through the crowd toward the parking lot.

  “Call your guys. If they’re going to their car, we’ll take them there,” Lucas said. “Tell Bennett and Barnes to stay with the two guys on the blanket, everybody close on their car, if that’s where they’re going, but stay back. I’ll make the first move.”

  Most of the cars were parked nose-in to a line of chalk, like the stripe on a football field, or on a second line of chalk fifteen yards behind the first one; a few were backed into the line. Lucas took the odds and cut behind the black-clad couple so that he’d be coming in from the driver’s side of the car.

  Laurent stayed out to his left, covering the passenger side. As they walked along, the couple were picking up speed, not quite to a jog, and were looking around, as if expecting to see someone they didn’t want to see. It never occurred to Lucas that it might be him.

  He could see the back of Frisell’s head, well ahead of them, already at the line of cars. The teacher didn’t stop, but kept going, never looked around. Good move. Peters was well out to one side, vectoring toward the car lot, where the couple would hit it. Sellers, the hardware store guy, was on the other side, closing in. They had the two targets surrounded.

  Lucas began moving faster: he wanted to be close when they got to the car, wherever it was. As they came up to the parking area, they looked around, then zigged to the right. That left Laurent and Peters out of it, for the moment, and Sellers a bit too close. On the far side of the lot, Lucas saw Frisell on the other side of the second line of cars, looking back. He saw the couple make the turn, and matched it.

  The two cut through the first line of cars to the second, and Lucas saw that they were heading toward a beat-up Subaru. He was going through the first line of cars, just as they got to it. They didn’t unlock it, they simply split up, left and right, for the passenger side and driver’s side doors, and popped the unlocked doors.

  As the man turned to get in his seat, Lucas was clearing the first line of cars and the man saw him coming. Their eyes locked for a second and Lucas thought later that he may have thought, Oh, shit. He was both too close and not close enough: the red zone.

  The man ducked down and a second later stood up again, Lucas now only three or four yards away, one hand on his gun, drawing it, and he heard Frisell shout, “Gun!” and the man’s arm came up over the car door with a gun; he flinched at Frisell’s shouted warning, but the hand kept coming up with the muzzle closing on Lucas when Lucas saw Frisell in the background with a pistol in his hand already leveled in line with both the gunman and Lucas, and Lucas thought later that he may have thought, again, Oh, shit, and dropped to the ground. The first of Frisell’s bullets sliced overhead even as he hung in the air on the way down.

  Most of it had to be reconstructed later, but Frisell fired seven shots: one of his bullets hit the outer edge of the lower lip of a twenty-eight-year-old cigarette salesman from Mt. Pleasant, and another went through the brim of a cowboy hat on a nineteen-year-old stock boy at an Abercrombie & Fitch at the Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights. One went through the back of Raleigh’s head, and came out just above his eye, another hit him in the back, ricocheted off his spine, exited under an arm, entered his triceps, exited again, and wound up a half inch into the car’s dashboard. Where the other three went, nobody would ever know.

  Lucas was sprawled on the ground with his arms stretched in front of him, the .45 out too late but now ready to go, and the shooting was done. Laurent was off to one side screaming at the woman to put her hands in the air—she did—and Lucas got to his knees and then to his feet and ran toward the car and looked over the door. Raleigh had crumbled there, faceup.

  The hole above his eye suggested that no ambulance would be needed; at least not for him. Frisell walked up, his .40 Smith pointed straight up in the air, looking past Lucas, and he said, “They kept telling me, ‘Watch the background, watch the background.’ I forgot, I just forgot.”

  Lucas looked back over his shoulder. The crowd was running in every possible direction, although most of them were running away from where Lucas was standing. In the middle of the field, a man was sitting on the ground and a woman was pushing what looked like a white T-shirt into his face.

  Lucas said to Frisell, “Eject the round from the chamber—don’t lose it—and give your gun and the round to Rome. I’ll be right back.”

  He jogged across the field to where the man was sitting on the ground, pushed his way through the growing circle of Juggalos around him, squatted and said, “I’m a police officer.”

  “I think he’s shot,” the woman said. What Lucas had thought was a T-shirt was actually a roll of toilet paper.

  Lucas said, “Let me see.”

  The man nodded, wordlessly, and took the roll away from his face.

  “Not bad,” Lucas said. “But you need some stitches. We will get you there right now. Do you have somebody to ride with you, or follow us?”

  “Me,” the woman said. She was absolutely calm. “I’m with him. I knew something like this would happen. I told him before we came. I said, ‘Andy, we’ll get in trouble.’ He said, ‘No we won’t, it’s just a goof.’ So, here we are, and sure enough, he gets shot . . .”

  She was babbling. Lucas got on the phone and called Laurent, who said, “We got the girl. The guy’s dead.”

  “I saw that,” Lucas said. “We’ve got a guy here who might have been nicked by one of the shots. He’ll need a ride up to Sault.”

  “I’ll get a squad over there. One minute.” He was gone.

  Lucas said to the man and woman, “A cop car will be here in one minute. He’ll ride you up to Sault Ste. Marie, and bring you back, if you don’t need to stay overnight.”

  “What happened? Who was shooting?” the woman asked.

  “You’ll read about it,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  HE JOGGED BACK toward the shooting scene, where a crowd had gathered
in a circle around the dead man’s car. As he ran, he saw a squad car headed for the wounded man. When Lucas came up, Laurent asked, “How bad?

  “Guy was nicked in the lip,” Lucas said. “If it had been a quarter inch the other way, it would have missed.”

  “Of course, if it had been a quarter inch the other way, he might have lost his jaw.”

  “Gee, you’re just like Father Christmas,” Lucas said. “Call Bennett and Barnes. I hope the hell they stayed with the other two, ’cause they’re likely to take off.”

  While Laurent did that, Lucas glanced at the woman, who was now sitting on the front passenger seat of the car, and then walked over to Frisell, who tried to explain. “They kept telling us, ‘Watch the background,’ and I, shoot, I completely—”

  “Man, you saved my life,” Lucas said. “He was ten feet from me when you fired and I was late with my gun. He would have shot me for sure, might have killed me.”

  “He knew you,” Frisell said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know why.” Lucas looked at him closely. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Frisell said.

  “A lot of guys sort of lose their shit after a shooting.”

  Frisell shrugged: “Maybe I would, if I’d killed somebody innocent, or a bystander.”

  Sellers and Peters were there, and they both slapped Frisell on the back, and Sellers said, “Good shooting, dude.”

  “Okay. Frisell, keep an eye on the woman,” Lucas said. “Get her out of the car, pat her down, sit her on the ground if you have to. I’d hate to have her pull another piece out from under the car seat. Sellers, Peters, keep the crowd off us.”

  They all did that, and Lucas took another quick look at the guy on the ground, and his gun—a chromed .38 revolver. That would have done the trick, Lucas thought, if he’d gotten a shot off.

  Laurent came over and said, “Bennett and Barnes are on the job. They said the two guys are still there, they’re standing up and looking over here, but they haven’t left. Neither one has made a phone call.”