John Sandford - Field of Prey

Davenport was involved in a similar incident in which two women were shot down outside a bank. .

Lucas said it aloud: “Ah, shit.”

The story ended with a protracted scene in which Emmanuel Kent hunkered down under his blankets and looked up at the stars, and visualized a better life for himself, after he’d gotten his justice. Frost concluded with a statement that “a number of prominent attorneys” were considering filing a suit against Woodbury and the BCA, on Kent’s behalf, for excessive violence.

Lucas tried to go back to sleep, but failed. He had decent relationships with most of the media, and earlier in his career, had had a child with a prominent female reporter for Channel Three, although they hadn’t married. He’d always been suspicious of television, because of the ways news got compressed to comic-strip chunks, but he’d been less suspicious of newspapers, because they seemed more professional; he hadn’t often felt deliberately victimized.

Janet Frost had deliberately screwed him. She attributed a few partial quotes to him, and he couldn’t really disavow them, because they were correct, as far as he remembered-they just weren’t in context. And she’d left out critical bits of information, such as the fact that the women shot down outside the bank, in the earlier case, had shot a man inside the bank and had killed another victim in Wisconsin.

At eight o’clock, groggy and annoyed, he got up, spent some time in the bathroom, looked at a suit and tie, then said, “Fuck it,” and put on jeans, a golf shirt, and a black sport coat.

Downstairs, Letty said, “I read the story. I mean, Wow. Not even Channel Six would do that to somebody. You think it has anything to do with the Black Hole thing?”

Lucas considered: “Maybe. It does feel like open season on the cops.”

“You talk to Ruffe about it?”

“He’s the guy who asked me to talk to her,” Lucas said.

“ That fucker.”

“Hey! Language!”

“Live with it,” she said.

Ruffe Ignace called precisely at nine o’clock: “I would have called earlier, but I know you don’t get up early.”

“Fuck you.”

“Man, I’m really sorry,” Ignace said.

“That makes me feel a lot better,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you something, Ruffe: she’s a loose cannon. Sooner or later, she’s gonna screw the paper. She said I was joking when I said Woodbury showed great restraint, but she didn’t put in the explanation. She didn’t tell people that we had good reason to track Kent, and she didn’t say that Candy and Georgie LaChaise murdered that poor sonofabitch in Rice Lake and shot another one here in the Cities-”

“I know, I know, I know. Listen, you’re pissed, and I don’t blame you,” Ruffe said. “I’m going to file a complaint with the ombudsman, so expect a call from him. In the meantime, I’m going to write a piece about how your guys are going to recover money from Bryan’s account down in the islands and how you’re hunting down the Black Hole guy now. Honest to God, Lucas.”

Lucas was quiet for a minute, then said, “Ruffe, I appreciate it.”

“It was a fuckin’ hatchet job,” Ruffe said. “I can’t stand it when people do that shit. I took this fuckin’ job because. . fuck it, never mind. They’ll put my piece on the front page tomorrow, or I’m gonna fuckin’ quit. And believe me, they don’t want me to fuckin’ quit.”

Ruffe slammed the phone down.

Letty was looking at Lucas and said, “He was screaming. I could hear it from here.”

Lucas grinned his coyote grin, the one that showed just a rim of white teeth: “Yeah. He’s almost a friend.”

Letty asked, “You’ve been running around in circles. What’re you going to do?”

Lucas said, “I don’t know. I’ve got an idea, but I don’t want to do it. It’s to look at the ADB, see who knows what.”

“What would any of the assholes know? The guy has to be a deep dark secret-because if he wasn’t, the word would have gotten around, and even the assholes would have ratted him out.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, but what else have I got?”

The ADB-The Assholes Database.

Lucas had taken two years to put it together, and was still working on it. It contained more than eleven hundred names, with addresses and phone numbers, of Minnesota assholes, along with several dozen more from Wisconsin and Iowa, and a couple from the Dakotas and Canada. Most came from the Twin Cities, but there were at least a few from every county in Minnesota.

A number of people knew about it, outside his own circle, but he was careful about sharing anything. The problem was, it wasn’t just a list of assholes, it was a list of people who’d deal with Lucas, but expected, with limitations, to get some payback, if they needed it.

Quite a few of them needed it. Payback came in the form of testimony to judges: even though this particular dickweed did, in fact, loot the local Walmart, he has been a reliable source for Minnesota law enforcement, so instead of three years, how about one year plus time served?

Lucas made a call before he left home, setting up a face-to-face talk. At noon, he was in Owatonna, talking to a guy named Toby in the back of Antoine’s bar and grill.

Toby dealt in illegal python skins and black-bear gallbladders and paws. He paid a dozen farmers across the state to run snake barns. The skins went to Europe. A dozen bow hunters in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin kept the gallbladders flowing; shooting bears is not a problem in parts of the North Woods. Toby once told Lucas that he could get $1,500 for a really good dried gallbladder-they’d sell for up to $3,000 in China-and handled four to five hundred a year, shipped by UPS to a Chinese connection in San Francisco.

He was staring into a glass of beer when Lucas came in. Lucas got a Coke at the bar and carried it back.

Toby wore an old Army ball cap and a short-sleeved camo shirt over jeans. He would have a pistol strapped to his ankle, Lucas knew. He was a short, thick-set man with a three-day beard and a watery blue walleye. When Lucas sat down, Toby leaned forward and asked, in a low voice, “What do you hear about Maxine?”

“She called me three weeks ago,” Lucas said. “I told her you were dealing out of Madison.”

Toby bobbed his head. “Madison. That’s good. Maybe she’ll kill a couple of fuckin’ hippies and the Madison cops will put her in prison.”

“Not gonna happen, Toby,” Lucas said. “There’s only one guy on her list right now, and she knows what you look like.”

Maxine Knowles was a radical animal-rights activist pledged to kill Toby. She’d been warned off, but she continued to look for him. She owned a Remington Mountain Rifle in.243, and was reportedly an excellent shot.

“Fuckin’ crackpot,” Toby said. Then, “What’s up?”

“It’s this Black Hole killer. We’re looking for a guy named Jack Horn.”

Toby nodded: “Seen it on TV.” He pointed his beer bottle at a TV in the corner. “They have been talking about it all morning. First thing up, every time.”

“People who knew him said he was a serious hunter,” Lucas said. “I wondered if he ever hunted with you.”

Toby shook his head: “Never worked with him. Heard about him, talking to guys this morning. Supposedly a pretty good shot, a reloader, used to go out to Wyoming two or three times a year, to shoot prairie dogs.”

“Right: So who would have shot with him, around Holbein? Or Zumbrota?” Lucas asked.

“Oh, boy: none of this gets back to me, right?”

“Right.”

Toby scratched his head. “Blair Tucker would be number one. He’s a well driller, got a place just outside of Holbein. He’s big on reloading and prairie dogs. Roger Axel would be another possibility, runs the hardware store in Holbein, though he’s mostly into head-hunting: you know, a one-of-everything guy. But he’s mostly into big game, so he might not have had much to do with Horn. Dan Weil is another one. Dan has a private two-thousand-yard range out of Holbein towards Red Wing. Horn used to shoot there.”