Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10

by John Sandford

  “Come on in,” he said to Sandy. He looked at Elmore and nodded, and Elmore looked away.

  The house had one couch, a broken-down wreck in the living room. Martin had pulled the cushions off and thrown them on the floor, and LaChaise was lying on them, his head propped up with a pillow. Martin had covered him with a blanket, and LaChaise grinned at Sandy when she came in.

  “How bad?” she asked.

  “Not too bad,” LaChaise said. “It’s more like . . . it’s gotta be cleaned up.”

  “Let me see,” Sandy said. “I need a light.”

  They peeled the blanket off and LaChaise rolled onto his side. The pain had subsided somewhat, and he lifted his arm so she could see more clearly. At the same time, Butters took the shade off a table lamp, and held it like a torch over LaChaise.

  Sandy looked at the wound for a moment. An open gash, at the back, became a bluish streak where the bullet had gone beneath the skin. A small round exit wound showed four inches below his nipple and over to the side. A trailing gash showed some rib meat. Sandy looked up at LaChaise. “You gotta go to a hospital,” she said.

  “Can’t do that. You gotta fix it.”

  She looked at it again. In fact, she could fix it. “It’ll hurt,” she said.

  “Atta girl,” LaChaise said, and to Butters: “Told you so.”

  “I believed you,” Butters said.

  “What happened?” she asked. “How’d you get shot?”

  “Argument over traveling money,” LaChaise said. “The guy owed me . . .”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No, I didn’t kill him,” LaChaise said, smiling faintly. “Now, you want to fix me? This hurts like hell.”

  “You lying sonofabitch,” Sandy said evenly. “You killed some cops’ families. I oughta . . .”

  Before she could finish, Martin backhanded her. His hand was like a leg of beef, and knocked her flat. For a second, she didn’t know what had happened, and then dazed, ears ringing, heard LaChaise say, “Whoa, whoa . . .” Behind him, Elmore: “Goddamnit . . .”

  She rolled, tried to sit up, and Martin was there, his face inches from hers: “Stop the bullshit. You fix him or I’ll cut you into fuckin’ fish bait.” Across the room, Butters was smiling at Elmore, half expecting him to make a move, but Elmore swallowed and shut up.

  Sandy got back to her feet, turned away from Martin without a word and said to LaChaise, “I brought you some pills. You should take a few before we start.”

  LaChaise looked at her, then at Martin, and grinned at Martin: “I wouldn’t turn your back on her,” he said.

  LACHAISE TOOK THE pills with a swallow of water, and looked past Sandy at Elmore. “El, I hate to say this, but you better get back. I was recognized, and the cops’ll probably be coming by again.”

  “I thought it’d be best if Sandy come back tonight,” Elmore said.

  “She’s staying,” Martin said bluntly. “Overnight, anyway. Until Dick’s okay.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to tell the cops if they come?” Elmore demanded. “They’ll want to know where she is.”

  “Tell ’em she went out to the store, then call us on my cell phone. She can be back in an hour,” LaChaise said.

  “Sandy . . .” Elmore couldn’t say it, but she knew what he was thinking.

  “Come on, El, let’s get my stuff out of the truck,” Sandy said. She nodded at LaChaise. “I’ll get my stuff and kiss El good-bye.”

  “I’ll help,” Butters said.

  “You can stand on the porch,” said Sandy.

  Outside, at the truck, Elmore whispered, “I’m sorry about that in there. I was gonna say something . . .” He scuffled at the snow with the toe of his boot. “We gotta get out.”

  “I know.” She looked back at the house, at Butters standing there on the dark porch. “But I’ve got to get clear. If they killed cops’ families, then they’re dead men. I’ll be back home tomorrow, and we’ll figure something out.”

  “Sandy . . .” He stepped up to her, maybe to kiss her. She moved just an inch sideways and pecked him on the cheek.

  “You go on; I’ll be okay. Just wait ’til I get there, before you call John.”

  He didn’t want to go, but he couldn’t stay. He shifted his feet, looked up at the sky, shook his head, then started the low moaning that she’d seen earlier: he was weeping again.

  “El, El, hold on,” she said. “Come on, El . . .”

  “Ah, Jesus,” he said.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

  As Elmore was starting the truck, Sandy walked back toward the house; Butters suddenly dropped off the porch and hurried past her, waving at Elmore. Elmore rolled down the driver’s-side window and Butters came up, leaned close to Elmore, grinned and said, “You call the cops, we’ll cut off her head.”

  THE BULLET HAD simply slipped beneath the skin and back out again, but the wound had to be opened and cleaned. Sandy cut through the skin, carefully, with a razor blade. Fresh blood trickled into the gash, but as soon as she had the entire pathway open, she flushed it with saline, then soaked a sterile gauze pad with more saline and dabbed it clean. At the bottom of the wound, there was a flash of white. Rib bone.

  “Just touched a rib,” she said to Martin.

  “I see,” he said, peering into the hole. He was interested in bullet wounds.

  After a final wash, she repaired the razor cut with a long series of rolling stitches with black nylon thread, then painted the area around the wound with antiseptic. LaChaise wiggled a few times, but kept his mouth shut.

  When she’d finished the stitching, Sandy’s hands were red with blood. She went to the kitchen, washed, then returned to LaChaise and put a heavy bandage over the wound. She fixed the bandage in place with round-the-chest wraps of gauze, and then tape.

  At the end of it, LaChaise sat up.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t move,” she said.

  He was feeling the pills, and smiled weakly and said, “Shit, I been hurt worse than this by sissies.”

  “That’s the codeine. You’re gonna hurt later on,” Sandy said.

  “I can live with it,” he said. He got shakily to his feet and looked down at the bandaging job. “Jesus, good job. Really good job. You’re a little honey,” he said.

  DEL AND LUCAS were on the way out of the building when Sloan caught up: “I’m coming,” he said. “Keep you out of trouble.”

  All the way out to the laundromat, they argued about the shootings, and the response. Del said the season was open.

  “Wouldn’t be murder,” Del said stubbornly. “I wouldn’t just shoot them cold.”

  “. . . and the thing is,” Lucas continued, “you’d take all of us down with you. We’d all go out to Stillwater together. Nobody’d believe it was just you.”

  An unwanted grin popped up on Del’s face: “Hell, we know half the guys out there. Be like old home week.”

  Sloan said, “Lucas is right. I don’t even think you should be riding with us. If you pop somebody now, after Cheryl, the media’d crucify us, and the grand jury’d be on us like a hot sweat: the politics would kill us.”

  “Well, who in the hell’s side is everybody on?” Del asked. “What about Cheryl?”

  “Don’t ask that question,” Lucas said. “The answer’ll piss you off.”

  They were in Lucas’s Explorer, Lucas driving, beating through the desolate streets to the near south side. Lights showed on the laundromat’s second floor. Below them, behind the storefront windows of the laundromat, five women, all of them black, folded clothes, read magazines or sat and stared at the dirty pink plaster walls.

  Lucas stopped in a bus zone on the corner, twenty yards up the street from the windows. “When I talked to Lonnie, he said if you go up the main stairway, you get to the top and there’s a bunch of junk, cardboard boxes and stuff, all piled up. You can’t get through to the door, not in a hurry, anyway,” Del said, peering up at the second-story windows. “There’s a bac
k stairs that comes down inside the garage. But the garage door’s locked, and you can’t get through that.”

  “So you go up the stairs and make a lot of noise—kick the boxes out of the way, bang away on the door,” Sloan said to Del. “We’ll wait out back. If he opens up the front door, you call us; and if he runs, we’ll be the net.”

  “All right,” Del said, “but I think we might be barking up the wrong tree. I can’t see Harp having anything to do with a bunch of . . .” He stopped in midsentence, pointed through the windshield. “Hey—look there.”

  A woman was walking toward them, half skating on the slippery sidewalk, holding what appeared to be a small white bakery sack. She passed under a streetlight and then into the brighter lights from the laundromat window.

  “That’s Jas Smith, Daymon’s old lady,” Del said.

  Lucas said, “Let’s take her. Maybe she’ll invite us up.”

  “Yeah.” Del and Sloan hopped out of the right side, while Lucas walked around the nose of the truck, converging on Jasmine. She was wearing a brimmed hat, and her head was down against the snow: she didn’t see them coming until they were on top of her.

  Then she jumped, and put her hand across her heart: “Goddamn, Capslock, give me some warning.”

  “Sorry . . .”

  “If I was carrying a little piece or something, I might of shot you outa self-defense, popping out like that.”

  She looked at Lucas and Sloan, worried, and Del said, “This is Chief Davenport and Detective Sloan. We got something we need to talk to Daymon about. Not bust him; just talk.”

  “Whyn’t you call him up?”

  “Because we didn’t want him hanging up on us,” Sloan said pleasantly. “You hear about all those cops’ husbands and wives getting shot today?”

  “Everybody heard,” she said.

  “My wife was one of them,” Del said. “She’s in the hospital now, and she’s hurting. We want you to know how serious this is—so why don’t you just open up the garage and we’ll go on up and talk to Daymon.”

  She looked from Del to Sloan to Lucas, and said, “He’d kick my ass if I done that. I mean, he’d kick me so bad.”

  Del looked at Lucas and nodded: he would.

  “What happened to your hand?” Lucas asked. Jasmine wasn’t carrying a bakery sack; her hand was professionally wrapped in a huge white bandage.

  She looked down at it, and her lip trembled: “Paper cutter,” she said. “Cut my finger right off.” She started to blubber. “It was just layin’ there, and I knew it was off, and then the blood squirted out . . .”

  Lucas said, “Jeez, that’s too bad. Look, Daymon must have an unlisted number, right? Of course he does.”

  He nodded, and she nodded. He took a cellular phone out of his pocket.

  “So why don’t you dial him up, and tell him we’re down here by the garage, and then he can go brush his teeth or whatever, and we can go on up.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, after a moment.

  HARP LET THEM up, unhappy about it. The apartment smelled of marijuana, but nothing fresh, just old curtain-and-rug contacts, enough to get you started if you’d gone to college in the sixties. Harp was waiting for them in the kitchen, his butt against the edge of the table, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked at Jasmine as if she were at fault, and she said, “Honey, they snatched me right off the street, they knew you was up here . . .”

  Del said, “That’s right, Day; we were coming up, one way or another.”

  “What you want?” Harp grunted.

  “You heard about the killings?”

  “Didn’t do it,” Harp said.

  Lucas felt a tingle: Harp was a little too tough. “We know you didn’t do it personally, but we think you might have a connection,” Lucas said. “Two of the people involved met down in your laundromat. We have a witness. We want to know why these two white assholes would come halfway across the country to meet in Daymon Harp’s laundromat.”

  “You think I’d help them peckerwoods?” Harp asked indignantly. “I been inside with those motherfuckers. Daymon Harp ain’t helping them no way, no place, no time.”

  “How’d you know they were peckerwoods?” Sloan asked. “We didn’t say they were peckerwoods.”

  “They all over the TV,” Harp said. “They’re Seeds, right? I know all about it—you can’t get nothin’ but TV news. They canceled Star Trek.”

  “Who’s your cop friend?” Lucas asked.

  Harp’s eyelid flickered, a quick twitch. “What kind of bullshit you talkin’?”

  They pushed him for twenty minutes, but he wouldn’t move. He knew nothing, saw nothing, had heard nothing. On the way out the door, Lucas said to Jasmine, “Take care of the hand.”

  OUTSIDE, THEY HURRIED along to the truck, blown by the breeze. Sloan said, “I don’t know what he knows, but I think he’s got a corner on something.”

  “I’ll talk to Narcotics. We’ll shut him down,” Lucas said. He looked back up at the apartment lights. “Twenty-four hours, maybe he’ll be ready.”

  Del shook his head: “He can’t talk. Too many dead people, now. If he’s got a connection, he’ll do everything he can to bury it.” He looked back at the apartment: “I’ll bet you anything he books it.”

  LACHAISE HAD CALLED Stadic with the number of his new cell phone: Stadic had been in the office, and he scribbled it down, stuck the paper in his wallet.

  Two hours later, the shit hit the fan. He tried calling the number, but there was no answer. Then he was swept up in the chaos of the response, and eventually found himself wearing a doorman’s uniform, working the door at the hotel where the families were hidden. No time to call . . .

  At ten o’clock the night of the attacks, the bank time and temperature sign down the block said -2°. Stadic traded his doorman’s uniform for street clothes and hurried down the street to his car. The ferocity of the attacks had stunned him. Near panic, he’d spent the evening pacing in and out of the Sandhurst, wondering whether he should run for it. He had almost enough money . . .

  But he realized, with a little thought, that it was too late. Cops’ families had been attacked. That was worse than killing the cops themselves. If anyone found out that he’d been involved, there’d be no place to hide. If he were to be saved now, salvation would come in one form: the death of LaChaise and all of his friends. Which wasn’t impossible . . .

  He sat in his car, took out his cellular phone, punched in his home number. Two calls on the answering machine. The first was Daymon Harp, who said two words: “Call me.” The second call was nothing.

  Stadic erased the tape, hung up, found LaChaise’s number in his wallet and punched it in. The phone was answered on the first ring.

  “Hello?” A man’s voice, a southerner.

  “Let me speak to Dick,” Stadic said.

  LaChaise came on a second later: “What?”

  “You’re fucked now. You can’t walk a block without bumping into a cop.”

  “We can handle it. What we need is their location. We heard on the radio they were all being moved.”

  “They’re at the Sandhurst Hotel in Minneapolis,” Stadic said. “They’re sequestered in interior rooms. There are cops all through the place. Snipers on the roof. The streets are being dug up outside, so you can’t get a car close.”

  After a moment of silence, LaChaise said, “We’ll think of something.”

  “No, you won’t. There’s no way in. And who got shot? One of you is hit, they found blood down Capslock’s sidewalk.”

  “I got scratched,” LaChaise said. “It’s nothing. We need to know more about this hotel.”

  “There’s no way in,” Stadic said. “But there are some people outside you might be interested in—and I don’t think there’s a watch on them.”

  “Who’s that?” LaChaise asked.

  “You know Davenport?” Stadic asked. He looked down the street at the hotel. Another cop paraded the lobby, behind the glass doors, in the doorma
n’s uniform. Stadic was due back in the uniform in the morning. “He runs the group that shot your women.”

  “We know Davenport. He’s on the list,” LaChaise said.

  “He’s got a daughter that almost nobody knows about, because he never married the mother,” said Stadic. “She’s not on any insurance forms.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Down on Minnehaha Creek—that’s in south Minneapolis. I got the address and phone number.”

  “Let me get a pencil . . .” LaChaise was back in a minute, and scribbled down the address. “Why’re you doing this?” LaChaise asked.

  “ ’Cause I want you to finish and get out of here. You got three of them. You get Davenport’s daughter, we set something up on Franklin, and you’re outa here.”

  LaChaise said nothing, but Stadic could hear the hum of the open line. Then LaChaise said, “Sounds like bullshit.”

  “Listen, I just want you to get the fuck out of here,” Stadic said. Then, “I gotta go. I’ll call you about Franklin.”

  Stadic hung up, and dialed Harp’s unlisted number. Harp picked it up on the first ring.

  “What?” Stadic asked.

  “Cops were here. Capslock and Davenport and another guy. Somebody saw you and LaChaise in the laundromat. They think I know something about LaChaise.”

  “Just hang on,” Stadic said.

  “I don’t know, man. I’m thinking about taking a vacation.”

  Stadic thought a minute, then said, “Listen, how much trouble would it cause the business, if you were gone for a week?”

  “Not much,” Harp said. “I make a couple of big deliveries, we’d be all right. You think I should walk?”

  “Yeah,” Stadic said. “Go somewhere they wouldn’t expect. Not Las Vegas. Not Miami.”

  “Puerto Rico?”

  “That’d be the place,” Stadic said. “They’d never think of it.”

  “Great pussy. No pussy like Puerto Rico pussy,” Harp said.

  “Forget the pussy. Just get your ass down there so Davenport can’t get right on top of you. Take Jas.”