John Sandford - Field of Prey

He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the screen as he stopped in Weather’s doorway. “Duty officer,” he told her.

“Oh, God. Maybe they caught him,” she said.

“If they did, they won’t need me,” Lucas said. He answered: “Davenport.”

“Lucas, this is Bob Rogers. Man, the ATF is telling us that Del and one of their officers was shot down in Texas.”

“What!” He groped for a chair and sat down, bent over the phone.

Weather: “What? What happened?”

Lucas turned away, put a finger in his off-ear: “How bad?”

“They can’t tell us. They’re both being taken to a hospital in El Paso. The ATF guy I talked to said that there was a big shoot-out, some old people with machine guns. There’s some kind of firefight going on right now. Or was. This all went down an hour ago.”

“What about Cheryl? Has anybody notified her?” Lucas asked.

“Oh my God,” Weather said.

“We’re on the way,” Rogers said. “That’s the first thing we got going. We think somebody ought to get down there, and he’s your guy, and you’re old friends, we thought. .”

“I’m going,” Lucas said. “Give me ten minutes to get back to you. I’m going.”

He hung up, white-faced, and stared at Weather, who said, “Who? It’s not Del?”

“Yeah. He’s been shot. He’s in an ambulance going to El Paso, we don’t know the condition,” Lucas said. “I gotta go. I gotta find out how to get down there, probably aren’t any flights at night-”

“Lucas, you’re rich,” Weather said. “Rent a jet.”

Lucas looked at her and then down at his phone, thumbed through his contact list, and pushed a number that, under normal circumstances, he only called a couple of times a year.

The governor answered: “You got the Black Hole guy.”

“No. Do you still have that jet?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah?”

“I need it to go to El Paso. Right now. I’ll write you a check for whatever it is.”

“What happened, Lucas?”

“Del Capslock-you met him a couple times,” Lucas said. “You said he looked like he fell out of a boxcar.”

“I remember.”

“He was on an ATF job down by El Paso, involving some gunrunners from here in St. Paul. He’s been shot, we don’t know his condition. He’s my guy. . my friend.”

“All right. My plane isn’t actually here. It’s part of a co-op flight program. But some plane will be here,” the governor said. “You get started to Holman Field, I’ll call the FBO, and I’ll call you back and tell you where to go. You can write the check later.”

“I’m gonna call his wife, Del’s wife, see if she wants to ride along. She will,” Lucas said.

“That’s fine. My plane seats sixteen, you’ll get something similar. Go.”

“Thanks, man.”

Lucas hung up AND SAID, “We’re set. I’m going.”

Weather took his arm and said, “I can’t go, the kids. . But you should take Letty. Letty to take care of Cheryl. . no matter what’s happened.”

Lucas thought for a second, then went to the door and shouted, “Letty!”

She was downstairs and shouted back, “What? I’m on the phone.”

Lucas: “Del’s been shot. We’re going to El Paso. Pack some clothes. You got five minutes.”

After one second of silence, Letty yelled, “How hot’s it gonna be?”

They were out the door in seven minutes, Letty driving Lucas’s SUV, Lucas on the phone in the passenger seat.

Cheryl said, “Of course I’m going. That goddamned fool, I told him this was going to happen, running around like a kid playing guns after, after, after. .” And she began to sob.

Lucas said, “You’re gonna need some hot-weather stuff, some blouses and shorts and jeans. Just throw them in a bag. We’ll be there in four or five minutes. We’ll buy more clothes in El Paso, if we need them.”

“I’m doing that now. . ” She began sobbing again.

Lucas said, “We’re coming, hang on, we’re coming. .” He hung up and said to Letty, “Slow down, you’re gonna kill us,” and, “You got the AmEx card I gave you?”

“Are you kidding me? It’s practically glued to my body.”

“Good. You gotta take care of Cheryl. Anything she needs, put it on the card. Anything.”

Cheryl was a middle-aged nurse who looked as though a hurricane had been blowing through her hair, and whose eyes were red and swollen from crying. She threw a carry-on-sized suitcase in the back of the truck and asked, “Have you heard anything more?”

“Nothing, what about you?”

“He was alive when they got him to the hospital, but the ATF guy is dead,” Cheryl said. “Del’s shot bad, Lucas, he’s shot bad. .”

“One goddamned place in the world that they’ll know about gunshot wounds, it’s gonna be El Paso,” Lucas said. “If they got him there alive, he’ll make it.”

“Oh, God. .”

The Governor called and gave them directions to the fixed-based operator. “There’s a guy named Jeff there, he’s putting together a flight plan. There were two pilots on stand-by, both from Washington County, they’re on the way, and supposedly, they’re both sober.”

They got to the FBO, found the plane in a pool of bright light outside a white-painted hangar. Jeff was inside a small office, and he said, “Hello,” without a smile, and added, “The governor says you’ve got a serious situation.”

“We do,” Lucas said. “How soon can we get going?”

“The plane’s prepped and ready to go. When. .” A door banged open at the end of a hallway, and two men came through, pulling nylon bags. “. . the pilots get here, and here they are. They’re the best we got.”

The plane WAS BIG, white and shiny with comfortable seats and a bathroom twice as large as those on commercial airliners. Twenty minutes after the pilots arrived, the jet powered off the runway and they were gone in the dark.

A moment after they took off, Lucas’s cell phone rang. The governor again:

“Are you in the air?”

“Just left.”

“Del’s at the University Medical Center of El Paso. It’s a Level 1 trauma center, so that’s where you’d want him. They’re operating on him now. Our information is that he was hit three times, two of the wounds, you know, serious but not life-threatening, but the third one, the third one was bad. That’s all I could get. There’ll be a limo waiting for you at the FBO in El Paso.”

“Governor, I can’t tell you-”

“Yeah, don’t. You guys are about half of my entertainment. I’d hate to lose one of you.”

The copilot came back as Lucas was ending the call, to fill him in on the flight plan, and said, “You can use your cell phone, but I gotta tell you, we’re not going to cross any big metro areas going down there. You might get good links when we’re crossing the freeways, but reception is going to be spotty. If you need to make any calls, you better make them now.”

The flight took a little less than four hours, Letty and Cheryl sitting across a narrow aisle from each other, talking quietly. Cheryl broke down twice, sobbing, and she told Letty that as a nurse, she’d seen a lot of gunshot wounds, and that none of them were good. “They just tear you up. They tear your insides to pieces. Oh, God, I hope his spine. . I hope. .”

Lucas looked out the window at nothing. The shooters, as far as he could tell, were the same old folks that he and Del had joked about since the investigation had begun. Old, doddering, seventy-plus senior citizens. They’d been laughing about the possibility that they were involved in wife-swapping orgies, about getting their false teeth mixed up in their various glasses in that four-way twist-up, laughing.

Laughing, because the suspects were old and wrinkled. They’d overlooked the relevant facts. They were old, but they weren’t feeble. They were gunrunners and coke dealers, working with some of the most vicious people in North America. There was more to them than age, and he and Del hadn’t paid proper attention to that.