John Sandford - Field of Prey

“We’ll get him.”

“Listen. One thing. I know you don’t believe Kaylee about seeing Sprick in the ditch-”

“I do think she saw something ,” Lucas said.

“Well, I’ve got a digital photo of Sprick right here-I’m at my desk. If I sent it to your cell phone, could you run it by this Cindy woman? I know you don’t believe-”

“I’m going right past the store on my way out of town,” Lucas said. “Send it to me.”

“You’ll have it in ten seconds,” she said.

When Lucas got back to the store, Cindy Tucker was waiting on an elderly woman stuck like Buridan’s ass between two piles of chocolates, one with pecans, and the other with almonds. The woman kept glancing at Lucas, feeling his impatience, then made a forced choice of the almond ones. As they were being loaded onto a candy scale, she seemed to be reevaluating the choice, her eyes drifting back to the pecans.

“Tell you what,” Cindy whispered to her. “I’ll throw in a free pecan, so you can think what they might have been like to have a whole bunch of them.”

The elderly woman brightened at the deal, got her white paper sack, and waddled out the door.

Lucas looked after her, and when she was gone, said, “One more thing. The sheriff’s investigator out of Red Wing was looking at a particular guy. She sent along a picture. I wonder if you could take a look?”

He brought the photo up on his cell phone. Cindy took the phone, looked at the photo, a wrinkle creasing her forehead, and she looked up at Lucas with her mouth in an “O” shape. After a few seconds, she sputtered, “Oh my God! I’ve seen this guy. He comes in here two or three times a year. I mean, not regular, but I recognize him. I don’t know what he does. .”

She looked back at the photo again. “I think.”

“You think? On a scale of one to ten, how sure are you?” Lucas asked.

She studied the photo and then said, “Seven. Or eight. Not nine.”

“How big is he? How does he dress? Has he ever said what he does?” Lucas asked.

“He’s. . a little short. He wears just regular button shirts and jeans. Pretty sure about the jeans. He’s never said what he does. . mmm. . I got the feeling that he’s well off, but he also works with his hands. He’s got that building-contractor look. The time before last, when he came in, he was wearing this watch, and Mary Lynn told me it was either a real Rolex or a fake Rolex, but the watch said Rolex on it.”

“He was friendly with Mary Lynn?”

“Well, he was trying, but she didn’t like him. I remember her saying that he seemed a little queer to her. She didn’t mean gay. She meant queer the other way.” She was still studying the photo, and after another moment said, “Six.”

“Six?”

“Yeah. I think it’s him, but the longer I look at it. . the more I think it might not be. But at first. . jeez. .”

“All right. Listen, keep this under your hat,” Lucas said. “Don’t even tell your folks. For a couple of days, it’s important that you keep quiet.”

“Oh. . Oh my God,” she said, her hand at her mouth. “This might be the guy.”

R-A was in the parlor, where, in the olden days, visitors would be taken to chat. R-A had stripped out the furniture and put in beige accordion blinds for privacy, and moved in a weight bench and a few hundred pounds of bars and plates, plus speed and heavy bags.

In the morning, before he went to work, he’d go to the weights for half an hour, in a custom routine he’d created after several hours of Internet research. He’d end with a hard ten minutes of punching.

And a cigarette.

Get his lungs open, punching, and the nicotine hit like a pack of razor blades.

“You need to work out harder,” Horn said. He was in his wheelchair at the entrance to the parlor, watching. “Need to do something about that gut. When the cops come for you, they’re gonna put you in prison forever. The big black boys in there are gonna look at your fat white ass, and if you ain’t ready to defend yourself, they’re gonna wear you out.”

“Fuck you,” R-A said. “How am I gonna get out of this?”

“You gotta go proactive,” Horn said.

R-A mocked him: “Proactive? What’s a shitkicker like you doing with five-dollar words?” He sat down on the end of a weight bench, dangling a forty-pound dumbbell from each hand. He stood-finishing a squat-curled the dumbbells, thrust them overhead, uncurled them, and sat down slowly. When he was solid on the bench, he did it again.

“Shut up,” Horn said, showing some teeth, glittering and crooked like fresh-water pearls behind his dry lips. “I’ve been thinking about this. You want to take this Mattsson? How about this? You know that old typewriter up in your mom’s closet?”

“Yeah?”

“You go up there and write you a note. The note says, ‘It’s hardly worth killing women anymore, when all that’s on the other side is a bunch of dumb flatfeet. No fun in fooling you. You couldn’t find your own pussy with two hands and a flashlight.’”

“That’s gonna impress her,” R-A said.

“Get her attention, for sure,” Horn said. “Then you say, ‘You can’t even figure out who’s down that Black Hole, and I didn’t even try to hide who it was. You want some names? There’s Shawna Rivers from New Prague, I took her off four years ago, her skull’s down there. Then there’s Melissa Scott, she was eight years ago, and she was a fun little thing. I turned that girl every way but loose, and I still get a big ol’ boner just thinking about it. She was begging for more by the time I got tired of her and choked her out. Here you were on the TV whining about twenty skulls-you haven’t even figured out the pits in Alexandria and Eau Claire. I’ve been doing this for a long time, honey. I’d be embarrassed if it were only twenty, after all the work I’ve put into it.’”

R-A dropped back onto the weight bench. “Okay. That will get her attention. Why do I want to do that?”

“Let me finish. Tomorrow, you tell the boys at the store that you’ve got to run up to the Cities. You run right through the Cities to Sauk Centre and mail that letter. Don’t go licking any stamps or any envelope glue, or they’ll get you on that DNA. When she gets that letter, she’ll be someone. You could tell when you saw her on the TV that she wants to be someone. So she’ll be waiting to talk to you. You tease her, and tease her. . We get her turned around, get her on TV, get her running around like a rat, sooner or later, we’ll figure out a way to pull her in, and take her.”

“Take her in Sauk Centre?”

“No, dumbass. You mail the letter from Sauk Centre to pull the attention up that way. They’ll still be down here, some, but they’ve been down here for a month and they ain’t got shit. They’ll be worried because you mentioned Alexandria, and another pit, and Sauk Centre is the next place down the highway. They’re already panicked. If there’s more pits out there, and they don’t get you quick, they’ll all lose their jobs. You let them worry about that for a couple of days, then. .”

“This is gonna be nasty, isn’t it?” He grinned at Horn.

“Then you go up to Alexandria and take a nice little blond girl, and you choke her out, and you leave a note with her. From the same typewriter,” Horn said. “The note is in one hand, which is pointing out somewhere, and the note says, ‘The Alex pit is over that way. . but pretty far. When I take the next one, I’ll point to her, too. Maybe the lines will cross over close enough that you’ll find it. It’s not like the Black Hole, it’s something completely different. Good luck!’ See, the thing is, they do all that analysis shit, and they’ll see it’s the same typewriter. They’ll believe you, and the next thing you know, they’ll be marching through the streets of Alexandria.”