Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10

by John Sandford

  “Ahhh . . .” He pushed himself up, and pain coursed through his left leg. He looked down, and saw blood pooling on the floor. Pushing with his right leg, he managed to flop across the driver’s seat and grab the radio with his good hand.

  “Help me,” he groaned.

  LESTER CAUGHT LUCAS just as he walked into the office.

  “Franklin’s down. Two minutes ago. They hit him at his house,” he shouted down the long marble hallway. “They’re taking him to Hennepin.”

  “On the way,” Lucas shouted back. “They’re bringing in Palin, talk to him . . .”

  Lucas ran through the snow to the medical center, down the street to the emergency entrance. No cops. A doctor was standing just inside the entrance, a couple of nurses were wrestling with a gurney.

  “I’m a cop,” Lucas said. “You got a . . .”

  “Yeah, you’re Davenport, I’ve seen you on TV. He’s on the way,” the doctor interrupted. “The paramedics got him, they’re working on him.”

  “How bad?”

  “He’s shot in the arm and the leg. Sounds bad enough, but not critical. They say he took four rounds right in the middle of his vest.”

  Lucas flashed back to the street where they’d stopped to pull on the vests, so they could charge in on simple old Arne Palin. How did LaChaise—it had to be LaChaise—know to wait for Franklin?

  Then he heard the sirens, and he and the doctor went out to meet the paramedics, and he stopped thinking about it.

  18

  LUCAS HURRIED THROUGH the crowd of media in the lobby, shaking his head, saying, “No, I’m sorry . . . the chief should be out in a minute, I’m really sorry I can’t say anything.”

  Outside, he hurried, slipping and sliding, back toward City Hall. His office was dark, and he went up to Homicide, where he found Sloan, Del and Sherrill.

  “How’s Franklin?” Sloan asked, standing up. They all were beginning to fade.

  “He’s in surgery, but it’s not critical,” Lucas said. “Somebody said he might have some peripheral nerve damage in his arm. I’m not sure, but I think that means he might have some patches of skin where he can’t feel anything.”

  “Could be worse,” Del said.

  “Where’s his wife?” Sloan asked.

  “She’s at the hospital,” Lucas said. “What happened with Palin?”

  “We’re keeping him around, in case you or the chief wants to talk to him. But it’s not him,” Sloan said.

  “Tell me,” Lucas said.

  “Have you heard the tapes?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if it’s him,” Sloan said, “he’s disguising his voice. But why is he disguising his voice, when he gives his squad number? And even if you figure it’s disguised, it sounds too much not-like him.”

  “Huh.” Lucas nodded. “What was he doing earlier on the tape?”

  “That’s the other thing,” Sherrill said. “I went down and listened to them, and he and Dobie Martinez cleared out a burglary report and then said they were going to stop for a cup of coffee, and they went off the air. Then ten minutes later, there’s the request on the Darling car . . . then ten minutes after that, they come back on the air again, ready to go back to work.”

  “Shit,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to Martinez?”

  “Yeah. He remembers clearing the burglary, then stopping at Barney’s. He says they were in there for fifteen or twenty minutes, that Arne never left him, and then they came back and started working again. He says they never called in any Wisconsin plates. So unless they’re working together, the identification was bullshit.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Lucas said. “But I’d like to hear the tapes.”

  “I’ve got a copy on cassette, I’ll get it,” Sherrill said.

  She stepped away, and Lucas said to Del, “Have you heard about Sell-More?”

  “No, I just got here.”

  “Stadic called just about the time Franklin got shot. He was on a call down south. Sell-More was lying in the street with a couple of bullet holes in his head.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Del said. “They used Sell-More to set up Palin.”

  “But I don’t understand why,” Lucas said. “It’s gotta be a cop, and he’s gotta know that it wouldn’t hold up.”

  They all looked at each other, and then Sloan said, “Maybe he ain’t the brightest.”

  “Bullshit. He’s been leading us around by the nose,” Lucas said. “Who’s working the scene down at Franklin’s?”

  “Some of Lester’s guys, I don’t know who—Christ, people are all over the place.”

  “I want to talk to whoever it is . . .”

  Lester came in, and they turned toward him, and a second later, Rose Marie Roux followed Lester through the door. She looked at Lucas and said, “Give me an idea.”

  Lucas said, “I got nothin’ that we aren’t already doing. He’s gotta be holed up with a friend.”

  “We’ve shaken down every biker in the fuckin’ city,” Lester said. “The question is, who was a good enough friend that they’d put up with this shit? Maybe he’s staying with . . . you know.”

  He didn’t say it, but he meant, “the cop.”

  Lucas shook his head and said, “My brain isn’t working right. I need to lie down for a while.” Then he said to Roux, “There is one thing. We should talk to Sandy Darling. She’s freaked out about lawyers, she thinks we’re gunning for her with the rest of them . . .”

  “So what do we say? Without giving her away?”

  Lucas rubbed his chin. “Suppose we say that we had a source who has been useful, but now is apparently afraid and has gone into hiding. We’re asking her to come back out, that we’ll protect her and offer her immunity.”

  “I don’t know about immunity,” Roux said doubtfully. “What if she’s deep into it, and she’s just playing an angle?”

  “All right, so we just say, ‘Protect her.’ I mean, there’s three ways we can get them: we can take them on the street, we can find the cop who’s pulling our dick or we can get Darling to give them up. We’re doing everything we can on the street, but we’re getting nowhere with the cop . . .”

  Roux nodded. “All right. I’ll put this out. They’re using everything we give them, so it’ll be on the air in ten minutes.”

  Sherrill walked up, carrying a tape recorder, and said, “Something else. What they’re doing—they’re not gonna back off. I think we’ve got to set up a combat team anywhere they might show. Everybody’s house. The hotel’s already covered. But maybe we should set up at the hospital to cover Franklin and Cheryl and whoever.”

  Sloan said, “And I don’t think anybody ought to be running around loose.” He looked at Lucas and said, “Weather and Jennifer. Somebody is feeding these guys everything . . .”

  Roux said, “Lucas, get those goddamn women under control, will you? Can you do that?”

  Lucas said, “I’ll talk to them.”

  SHERRILL PLAYED THE tape, and Lucas listened, eyes closed. The voice wasn’t right: too smooth, too high-pitched: faked. Whoever it was would have fooled the Dispatch people, because the unit number was right and the request was routine.

  “I think—I can’t swear to it—but I think that’s the guy who called me and warned me that Butters was cruising Jennifer and Sarah,” Lucas said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” Lucas said. “Because that fuckin’ LaChaise is blackmailing him, and he figures that if we take them alive, they’ll deal him. And they probably will. So he’s got to have them dead.”

  LUCAS HEADED OUT to TV3 in a city car, monitoring the radio, his cell phone in his pocket. This was like nothing he’d ever heard of: this was like a war. He didn’t have the usual intervals of quiet, when he could sit and think about patterns, and the way the opponents were working. Puzzle pieces were slipping past him; he could feel it. Maybe if he got some sleep . . .

  The TV3 lobby was locked. When he approached the glass doors, four men ranged behind
two reception desks waved him off. He stood next to the glass, held up his ID. One of the men, large, in a heavy, dark suit, crossed the lobby to the door. Lucas realized that he was wearing a vest and carried a pistol on his hip. The man looked at the ID, looked at him, then turned the knob on the lock.

  “I thought that was you,” the man said, looking over Lucas’s shoulder as Lucas came through.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Thomason Security,” the man said. “We’re on all the doors.”

  Lucas nodded. “Good.” Thomason was a heavy-duty security firm, used mostly for moving money at sports events and rock concerts, but also as a source of armed guards and bodyguards for celebrities. He asked for Jennifer.

  “We’ll call up,” the man said. Lucas waited, leaning on a countertop. As the man called, he noticed that the other guard on his side of the lobby had a Winchester Defender twelve-gauge at his feet. Even better.

  The first guard turned to Lucas and said, “Go on up. You know the way?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jennifer met him at the elevators: “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve decided that we’ve got to pull everybody in tight—back at the hotel,” Lucas said. “These guys are suicidal.”

  Jennifer shook her head: “I know, but you saw our security. There’s no way they can get at me. I’m as safe here as I’d be at the hotel. I’ve got to work; I’m on camera four hours a day. This is the biggest story of my life.”

  “Look, goddamnit, we know they were coming after you guys . . .”

  “That’s all taken care of. They can’t find out where the kids are, because nobody knows but you and me and Richard. And I’m safe in here,” she said. “I’m sorry, but we’ve figured the risks. I’m staying here.”

  He gave up. “All right. But I want to talk to Small. I want to make goddamn sure that you’ve got a tight communications link between here and City Hall, and the second something happens . . .”

  WEATHER WAS WORSE.

  When Lucas walked into the suite, Weather was talking with Sarah. When Lucas began the pitch, she picked Sarah up and held her on her lap.

  “Listen, Weather . . .” Sarah blocked Weather off, like some kind of psychic barricade. He couldn’t operate with Sarah looking at him with his own blue eyes; couldn’t sell. He couldn’t touch Weather, and he needed to touch her to convince her, he thought.

  “Lucas,” she said, exasperated, when he finished. “Nobody can find me at the hospital. Nobody. People who work there can’t find me, unless they have my schedule—and half the time they can’t find me then. I’ve got jobs lined up all week. I just can’t skip them because there are some lunatics running around out there.”

  “The problem is, you’re a lure,” Lucas said. “You could bring a hell of a lot of trouble down on the heads of everybody around you. And now we know they’ve got a cop feeding them information . . .”

  “Look,” she said. “Let’s do this. Let’s tell everybody— everybody, including the police—that I’m in the hotel. We can sneak me in at night, and I’ll go around and complain about being stuck there, so everybody knows I’m around. Then we’ll sneak me out in the morning, and nobody’ll know but the two of us.”

  “Somebody’ll know,” Lucas said.

  “Two or three people. You can use guys you’re sure of.”

  Lucas said, “How about if you were interviewed on TV tonight—ten minutes from now, a half hour—in the hotel? About what it’s like to be shut up here, and wait? So it’ll be on TV?”

  She nodded. “If that will keep me on the job,” she said.

  “I’ll call Jen and see if she can set it up,” Lucas said. He made a quick circle of the room, coming back to the pair of them, picked up Sarah and bounced her. “Want to see your mom?”

  “She’s breaking a major story,” Sarah said solemnly.

  “I think she could take a minute away to see her kid,” Lucas said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

  19

  LA CHAISE WAS MANIC: They’d shot the cop, he said, his face alight, as though he expected Sandy to have a celebration prepared.

  “What d’ya think about that, huh? What d’ya think?”

  Sandy, coldly furious, turned her face away until the chain came off, and then stalked up the stairs, into the back bedroom, the one they said was hers, and slammed the door in LaChaise’s face. She said not a word. She’d felt like a dog with the chain around her waist, and a mistreated dog at that.

  She lay on the stripped-off bed for half an hour, thinking about Elmore, thinking about horses, smelling the odd lingering body odors of strangers.

  Horses. She got up, went out to the living room. LaChaise and Martin were drinking, watching television. “I’ve got to call a guy, to make sure he’s feeding the stock,” she said.

  LaChaise shrugged. “Use the cell phone. It’s in my coat pocket. Don’t talk more’n a minute or so, in case there’s some way they can trace it. And call from out here, where we can hear you.”

  She nodded, went to his coat, dug around. She found the stack of photos, the photos of the cop, deep in one pocket. Ten of them, two men at a table, one black, one white. Which one was the cop?

  She listened for a minute, then took two of the photos, the two that showed each of the faces best, and slipped them into her jeans pocket. She put the rest back, found the telephone, and went out to the hallway where the men could hear her.

  Jack White. She knew the number, dialed in. Jack’s wife answered:

  “Sandy, where are you, we can’t believe . . .”

  “It’s not what anybody thinks,” she said. “I can’t talk—but you’ve got to tell Jack to take care of the stock.”

  “He’s already doing that, as soon as he heard about Elmore.”

  “Tell him he’ll get paid; I swear, as soon as I can get out of this,” Sandy said.

  “He’d do it anyway.”

  “Gotta go . . . and thanks. I won’t forget it.”

  She hung up and LaChaise said, “Still think you might get out of it, huh?”

  “I’ll put the phone back in your coat,” she said coldly. She did, and went back to the bedroom, flopped on the bed.

  Tried to think. Got up after a while and poked around the room: this was a guest bedroom, and had been used as storage. LaChaise had torn the place apart, looking for money, and found nothing of interest. She went to the window, lifted the blind and looked out. The snow had quit, and distant streetlights seemed to sparkle in the suddenly clear air. Must be an inch of snow, she thought. She leaned forward to peer at the ledge . . .

  And thought: Out the window.

  Bedsheets—but she didn’t have any bedsheets. The bed had been folded and pushed against the wall when they got there. She could get sheets, there were sheets in a closet down the hall, that’d be natural enough: but that goddamn Martin would think about the sheets and the window.

  She looked back out, then to her right. And the fire escape was there, one window down, at the end of the long hall. Ten feet, no more. The ledge was a foot wide . . . and snow-covered. The fall was twenty feet or more. Enough to kill her.

  Still. The snow could be brushed away . . .

  The window had a swivel lock, and she twisted it: after some resistance, it went. She tried the window. Didn’t budge. She looked closely at it, but it didn’t seem to be painted shut. She tried again, squatting to push up with stiff arms . . . and it gave, just an inch, but it’d go.

  She looked back at the door. This would be a bad time, with both of the men drinking, both of them awake. As she thought it, LaChaise screamed from the front room.

  “Motherfucker . . .”

  The police?

  Sandy pulled the window back down, locked it, pulled the shade and then quickly tiptoed to the door. Then she opened it and peered down the hall.

  “. . . can’t get it right,” LaChaise roared. “Why’d he wear a vest to go home . . .”

  The television brought the news that Franklin wasn�
�t dead—that he wasn’t even in particularly dangerous condition, that he’d been saved by a bulletproof vest.

  “What do I gotta do?” LaChaise shouted at Martin. “What the fuck do I gotta do?”

  “You did right,” Martin said. “You hit him four times in the chest, is what the news says.”

  But Martin’s efforts to calm him down only made LaChaise angrier. Already full of beer, he got Harp’s Johnnie Walker and started drinking it off, carrying a water tumbler full of ice cubes, pouring the whiskey over them, gulping it down like Coca-Cola. He paced as he drank, watching the television.

  A blond newscaster from TV3—“She’s the one we want to get,” Martin said, “Davenport’s woman”—reported that “Police are searching for an informant who provided critical information earlier this week, but who has disappeared. They ask that you call the department on the 911 line, as you did the last time, or any police line and ask for Chief Lucas Davenport. Police said they would offer the informant absolute protection from retaliation from Richard LaChaise or any of his accomplices.”

  “Yeah? How are you gonna do that?” LaChaise brayed at the screen. Then: “I’d like to fuck her,” and then: “Who could be talking to them? We don’t know anybody.”

  Sandy shrank back: she knew.

  “Probably whoever told them about the house we was in,” Martin said. “Ansel had to ask around, talking to a bunch of dopers. Somebody probably gave him up.”

  “Yeah . . . Goddamn, ol’ Ansel. I miss that sonofabitch.”

  LaChaise’s face crinkled, and Sandy thought he’d begun to weep. He turned abruptly, marched down the hall into Harp’s stereo room and began tearing the vinyl record albums out of their covers and smashing them, three and four at a time.

  Martin looked at Sandy, but showed no sign of disapproval—or approval, either. He showed nothing, she thought.

  To the sound of the breaking records, Sandy went back to the bedroom and shut the door. Martin was nuts, but he was controlled. But the booze had pushed LaChaise over the edge, and the very air of the apartment carried the smell and taste of insanity, of the expectation that something crazy was about to happen.