John Sandford: Night Prey

And then she knew.

She stepped back, the shock climbing up through her chest, the adrenaline pouring into her bloodstream. Without thinking, she brought the back of her hand to her face, to her nose, and smelled the nicotine and the other…

The what?

Saliva.

"No." She screamed it, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

She convulsively wiped her hand on the robe, wiped it again, wiped her sleeve across her forehead, which felt as if it were crawling with ants. Then she stopped, looked up, expecting to see him-to see him materializing from the kitchen, from a closet, or even, like a golem, from the carpet or the wooden floors. She twisted this way, then that, and backed frantically toward the kitchen, groping for the telephone.

Screaming as she went.

Screaming.

Lucas Davenport held the badge case out the driver's-side window. The pimply-faced suburban cop lifted the yellow plastic crime-scene tape and waved him through the line. He rolled the Porsche past the fire trucks, bumped over a flattened canvas hose, and stopped on a charred patch of dirt that a few hours earlier had been a lawn. A couple of firemen, drinking coffee, turned to check out the car.

The phone beeped as he climbed out, and he bent down to pull it off the visor. When he stood up, the stink from the fire hit him: the burned plaster, insulation, paint, and old rotting wood.

"Yeah? Davenport."

Lucas was a tall man with heavy shoulders, dark-complected, square-faced, with the beginnings of crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. His dark hair was just touched with gray; his eyes were a startling blue. A thin white scar crossed his forehead and right eye socket, and trailed down to the corner of his mouth. He looked like a veteran athlete, a catcher or a hockey defenseman, recently retired.

A newer pink scar showed just above the knot of his necktie.

"This is Sloan. Dispatch said you were at the fire." Sloan sounded hoarse, as though he had a cold.

"Just got here," Lucas said, looking at the burned-out Quonset.

"Wait for me. I'm coming over."

"What's going on?"

"We've got another problem," Sloan said. "I'll talk to you when I get there."

Lucas hung the phone back on the visor, slammed the door, and turned to the burned-out building. The warehouse had been a big light-green World War II Quonset hut, mostly galvanized steel. The fire had been so hot that the steel sheets had twisted, buckled, and folded back on themselves, like giant metallic tacos.

With pork.

Lucas touched his throat, the pink scar where the child had shot him just before she had been chopped to pieces by the M-16. That case had started with a fire, with the same stink, with the same charred-pork smell that he now caught drifting from the torched-out hulk. Pork-not-pork.

He touched the scar again and started toward the blackened tangle of fallen struts. A cop was dead inside the tangle, the first call had said, his hands trussed behind his back. Then Del had called in, said the cop was one of his contacts. Lucas had better come out, although the scene was outside the Minneapolis jurisdiction. The suburban cops were walking around with grim one-of-us looks on their face. Enough cops had died around Lucas that he no longer made much distinction between them and civilians, as long as they weren't friends of his.

Del was stepping gingerly through the charred interior. He was unshaven, as usual, and wore a charcoal-gray sweatshirt over jeans and cowboy boots. He saw Lucas and waved him inside. "He was already dead," Del said. "Before the fire got to him."

Lucas nodded. "How?"

"They wired his wrists and shot him in the teeth, looks like three, four shots in the fuckin' teeth from all we can tell in that goddamned nightmare," Del said, unconsciously dry-washing his hands. "He saw it coming."

"Yeah, Jesus, man, I'm sorry," Lucas said. The dead cop was a Hennepin County deputy. Earlier in the year, he'd spent a month with Del, trying to learn the streets. He and Del had almost become friends.

"I warned him about the teeth: no goddamned street people got those great big white HMO teeth," Del said, sticking a cigarette into his face. Del's teeth were yellowed pegs. "I told him to pick some other front. Anything would have been better. He coulda been a car-parts salesman or a bartender, or anything. He had to be a fuckin' street guy."

"Yeah… so what'd you want?"

"Got a match?" Del asked.

"You wanted a match?"

Del grinned past the unlit cigarette and said, "C'mon inside. Look at something."

Lucas followed him through the warehouse, down a narrow pathway through holes in half-burned partitions, past stacks of charred wooden pallets. Toward the back, he could see the black plastic sheet where the body was, and the stench of burned pork grew sharper. Del took him to a fallen plasterboard interior wall, where the remnants of a narrow wooden box held three small-diameter pipes, each about five feet long.

"Are these what I think they are?" Del asked.

Lucas squatted next to the box, picked up one of the pipes, looked at the screw-threading at one end, tipped up the other end, and looked inside at the rifling. "Yeah, they are-if you think they're fifty-cal replacement barrels." He dropped the barrel back on the others, duckwalked a couple of feet to another flattened box, picked up a piece of machinery. "This is a lock," he said. "Bolt-action single-shot fifty-cal. Broken. Looks like a stress-line crack, bad piece of steel… What was in this place?"

"A machine shop, supposedly."

"Yeah, a machine shop," Lucas said. "They were turning out these locks, I bet. Gettin' the barrels from somewhere else-you wouldn't normally see them on single-shots, they're too heavy. We ought to have the identification guys look at them, see if we can figure out where they came from, and who got them at this end." He dropped the broken lock on the floor, stood up, and tipped his head toward the body. "What was this guy into?"

"The Seeds, is what his friends say."

Lucas, exasperated, shook his head. "All we need is those assholes hanging around."

"They're getting into politics," Del said. "Want to kill themselves some black folks."

"Yeah. You want to look into this?"

"That's why I got you out here," Del said, nodding. "You see the guns, you smell the pork, how can you say no?"

"All right. But you check with me every fuckin' fifteen minutes," Lucas said, tapping him on the chest. "I want to know everything you're doing. Every name you find, every face you see. Any sign of trouble, you back away and talk to me. They're dumb motherfuckers, but they'll kill you."

Del nodded, said, "You're sure you don't have a match?"

"I'm serious, Del," Lucas said. "You fuck me around, I'll put your ass back in a uniform. You'll be directing traffic outside a parking ramp. Your old lady's knocked up and I don't wanna be raising your kid."

"I really need a fuckin' match," Del said.

The Seeds: the Hayseed Mafia, the Bad Seed M.C. Fifty or sixty stickup men, car thieves, smugglers, truck hijackers, Harley freaks, mostly out of northwest Wisconsin, related by blood or marriage or simply shared jail cells. Straw-haired baby-faced country assholes: have guns, will travel. And they were lately infected by a virulent germ of apocalyptic anti-black weirdness, and were suspected of killing a minor black hood outside a pool hall in Minneapolis.

"Why would they have the fifty-cals?" Del asked.

"Maybe they're building a Waco up in the woods."

"The thought crossed my mind," Del said.

When they got back outside, a Minneapolis squad was shifting through the lines of fire trucks, local cop cars, and sheriff's vehicles. The squad stopped almost on their feet, and Sloan climbed out, bent over to the driver, a uniformed sergeant, and said, "Keep the change."