Lucas never found out what he wanted. A getaway car? An airplane to North Korea? A spaceship?
He never found out because the young woman picked up the large soy macchiato that she’d been steaming, and flipped it over her shoulder into Pilate’s eyes.
Pilate screamed and pulled away from her and in that sliver of opportunity, Lucas shot him through the bridge of his nose.
Then the screaming really got started.
Lucas’s previous experience with the media was dwarfed by the response the cops got on the mall shooting, partly because one of the local TV stations initially referred to the shooting as an “apparent terrorist attack.” Later, they pulled back to apparent “domestic terrorism attack” and finally to “a shooting.”
An extremely attractive PR woman for Nordstrom’s dashed around from one media group to the next, chanting, “The shooting was in the mall. It was not in Nordstrom’s. The shooting was in the mall, it was not . . .”
The shooting, of course, became known as the Nordstrom Shoot-Out.
The egg laid by Henry Sands dwarfed all previous eggs by an order of magnitude. “A shoot-out at Nordstrom’s? And it was planned?”
Informed of Sands’s reaction, the Bloomington chief, who thought the matter had been handled rather well, given the freakishly successful parachute jump by Pilate, said, “I think Director Sands should check his head.” That was enough of a non sequitur that somebody at the press conference inevitably asked, “Why?” The chief said, “Because right now, it’s where the sun don’t shine.”
The chief pointed out that one crazed killer was captured alive and another was killed after a courageous action by a brave, quick-thinking coffee clerk, and no bystanders were hurt. Who was Sands to denigrate that, from an office in St. Paul?
Caribou Coffee gave the clerk a one-hundred-dollar gift card. When word got out, they upped it to a thousand.
The shooting took place a little after noon, and Lucas and Letty pulled into their driveway at six o’clock. Weather came to the door and stood on the porch with her arms crossed. “Hmm,” Letty said.
“Reamed” was the appropriate description of what happened next, Lucas and Letty agreed later.
When the reaming slowed, Weather gave Lucas a letter from the BCA, delivered by special messenger. Inside, Lucas found a letter saying that the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was considering the bringing of disciplinary charges against Lucas and his attendance was required at a meeting the following Tuesday at 10 a.m. The letter said that it would be “appropriate” for Lucas to seek legal counsel. It was signed by Sands.
“What are you going to do?” Weather asked him.
“Don’t know.”
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, Lucas drove a few blocks across the neighborhood to Willie’s American Guitars, and after a long consultation, wrote a check for a little more than ten thousand dollars for a vintage Les Paul guitar. It wasn’t the most expensive one, but neither was it the cheapest. He at first quailed at the price, but then thought, the Faygo-throwing fat guy may have saved Letty’s life. He had the store ship the guitar, which they would do as soon as the check cleared.
Laurent called on a cell phone, on speaker, with the rest of the reserve deputies standing around, and asked him for a blow-by-blow description of the Nordstrom shooting. Lucas gave it to them, and Frisell said, “Man . . . I wish I’d been there.”
“We all do,” Laurent said.
• • •
LUCAS GAVE LAURENT the license plate numbers on the red Taurus and the Sault Ste. Marie police tracked it to the old lady’s house. They found her at the bottom of the stairs.
When Laurent called Lucas back to tell him, he said, “The only thing about the whole fight that really mystifies me is those two naked people. Why the hell did they do that?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Maybe they thought they could be decoys and that Coon guy would take out all of us. But really, I don’t know. Remember, they were crazy.”
“Still bothers me,” Laurent said. “Another thing. The congressman from up here says he’s retiring so there’ll be an open seat next year. A Democratic Party guy got in touch, wondering if I might be interested. The funny thing is, a guy from the Republican Party got in touch with Peters . . .”
“I got no advice on that, but I’ll be interested in what you decide,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure you’re enough of an asshole.”
“Maybe I could learn it,” Laurent said.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s a skill you’re born with. Or not.”
• • •
LAURENT CALLED AGAIN late that afternoon to say that Laine, in consultation with her state-appointed attorneys, had told the state cops about the murder of Michelle. Her body was located the next morning by a state road crew.
• • •
THE GOVERNOR’S chief weasel called and said, “Hold for the governor.”
Lucas held and Elmer Henderson came on. “There’s a rumor going around that Henry’s going to try to fire your ass. Conduct unbecoming a BCA agent, insubordination, blah, blah, blah.”
“Well, I’ve been advised to seek legal counsel,” Lucas said.
“You want me to fire him instead?” Henderson asked. “He could resign on Monday.”
Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “I appreciate the thought and the agency would be better off, but don’t do that. Everybody would know what happened, and when you start running for the vice presidency, the Republicans will look for every single thing they can get on you. An accusation of blatant meddling wouldn’t help.”
“We could crush that in a couple of minutes,” Henderson said.
“You might not have a couple of minutes to spare, when the ‘Henderson Hoagie’ thing gets out there.”
“What! What! Lucas, where did you hear that phrase?”
“Governor, every sentient being in Minnesota’s heard it. They admire you for it. Whether it’ll play, in, say, Colorado or Oregon, I don’t know.”
Lucas heard Henderson ask the weasel, “Is that true? That everybody in Minnesota knows?”
The weasel said, “Yes.”
The “Henderson Hoagie” referred to the governor’s fondness for three- and four-ways with nubile young Seven Sisters coeds while he was a student at Harvard. Supposedly, ketchup was involved.
Henderson came back. “Well . . . whatever happens with Sands, come talk to me afterwards.”
• • •
AT THE END of the week, an FBI friend called to tell Lucas that the feds had been through both the fingerprint and DNA databanks and had found no matches at all for Pilate. He’d had two driver’s licenses in his wallet, both from California, one for a Robert D. Johnson and another for a William S. Smith. Both were apparently obtained by fraud. Nobody had any idea who he really was. And a cop from North Dakota called and said he’d encountered the Pilate group at a restaurant, and had taken down the license plate numbers of every one of their cars. By the time he found out that somebody might have needed them, the fight was over.
On Sunday morning, at breakfast, Weather asked him for the fifth or sixth time, “You know what you’re gonna do?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah.”
“I got a box in the garage,” she said.
“How’d you know I’d need a box?”
• • •
THAT AFTERNOON, he climbed the steps to the BCA. Not many people were around, but an agent leaving the building stopped on the stairs, looked at him with the box, and said, “Don’t do it, man.”
Lucas shook his hand and said, “Thanks for the thought.”
He’d been in his particular office for seven years, but he had never been much for stuffing it with personal items. He started packing what was there, and a couple more investigators came to the office door, the female agent carrying another box. She said, “Let us help you with that.”
“Okay.”
They cleaned the place out in fifteen minutes,
then Lucas got a piece of official stationery, wrote: “Dear Henry. I quit. On a personal note, go fuck yourself.”
He put his ID inside the envelope, wrote Sands’s name on the outside, and slid it under Sands’s office door.
The male agent said, “Succinct. Succinct is always good in interoffice communications.”
The agents walked out to his Porsche with the two boxes and the female agent said, “I’ll never forget the night up in the swamp . . .” And she went on for a while, about a dark night with Lucas and his gang of agents when she killed a man. Lucas peeled off his sport coat and his shoulder holster, dropped the coat and gun on the passenger seat. The woman agent finally ran down, they all shook hands, and Lucas got out of there before things turned maudlin. He’d still have to call Del, Jenkins, Shrake, Flowers, and a few others. He’d do that in the evening.
When he got home, he ran the garage door up and Letty came through from the kitchen. Watched him get out of the car, and asked, “You’re retired now? You’re gonna go sit in a goddamn rowboat for the next thirty years?”
“Don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he said.
“You gotta do something.”
He grinned at his worried blue-eyed child. “I’ll find something. And I promise you this: it won’t involve a goddamn rowboat.”
“Good,” she said. She picked up the .45 off the passenger seat. “Then you’re gonna need this.”
Lucas took the gun.
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