John Sandford - Field of Prey

He worried it, worked it. . called the duty officer: “Could you get the DMV to try to run all dark pickup trucks against owners in Holbein and Zumbrota?”

“They’re trying to write a program right now that’ll do that, but they’re not getting it done very quick,” the duty officer said. “The whole data thing is complicated, and has all kinds of protections, and all the programming is outdated. . it’s all fucked up.”

“Who got them to do that?”

“Jon did-couple days ago. They’re still thrashing around.”

Lucas rang off, took one of the gray pills from his shirt pocket, swallowed it with a sip of warm Diet Coke. Looked down at the supermarket. The killer could be down there right now. They’d all know him, they’d be chatting with him, but they wouldn’t know. .

A light went on.

Of course they’d know him. They didn’t know he was the killer, but they’d probably see him every day.

Sonofabitch. He took his phone out, his soul touched by despair, because he knew what he’d find: he’d deleted the photos of Sprick sent to him by Mattsson when he was talking to the candy-shop woman. He’d deleted them for no good reason, except that he always cleaned up his phone; simply a habit.

Sprick. He fired the truck up, hit the flashers, and took off. Sprick was eight miles away, more or less. Six minutes. He didn’t know how much time he had left, but with the orange sun sliding down in the western sky, he felt there wasn’t much, not much at all.

The killer would get rid of Mattsson’s body after dark, he thought, when he’d feel safest, when he could drive around, find a safe spot out in the countryside. He had no time.

Lucas was traveling a bit over a hundred miles an hour when he left town, and never slowed down, except once, to sixty, when he overtook a John Deere tractor using two-thirds of the road, four miles out of Zumbrota.

He was chanting out loud: “Be there, be there.”

He had to slow down going through Zumbrota, but got to Sprick’s house a little more than eight minutes after he left Holbein. Lights in the window. He parked, the flashers still blinking out into the evening, ran up the sidewalk. Sprick’s curtains were pulled, but Lucas saw movement at one of the windows, and banged on the door with his fists.

Sprick opened the door and peeked out. “What now?”

“I gotta take your picture. I got no time, but I need to take your picture,” Lucas said.

Sprick was wearing a gray army-style T-shirt, which was fine. Lucas put him against an eggshell-white wall, gave Sprick a ten-second explanation of what he was doing, and used his cell phone to snap a half dozen close-ups.

“Thank you,” he said, after checking them. He ran back toward the car, and Sprick called, “Good luck. Get him!”

Ten minutes more, and Lucas rolled down the hill to the Holbein supermarket again. He hustled across the parking lot and into the store. A cashier was waiting on a woman in the single open checkout lane, and Lucas hurried over and asked, “Where’s the manager?”

“What?” She looked at him, sweating, rushed, his hair messed up, like she expected him to produce a gun and a mask.

“The manager! The manager!” he said. “I’m a cop, I need the manager! Right now! Right now!”

The cashier picked up a phone and said, “Manager to checkout. We need a price check on Vlasic Kosher Dills.”

Lucas said, “What?”

The cashier said, “You said you needed him right now. That’ll get him right now.” She turned and looked toward the distant bakery counter, where a heavyset short man in a pink shirt had turned the corner and was half-running toward them. “Here he comes.”

“The pickle thing was a code?” Lucas asked, taking a corner of a half-second to be amused.

“Just like in a hospital,” she said. “It means ‘emergency.’”

“That’s neat,” said the woman checking out.

The manager hustled up and asked, “What’s the problem?”

Lucas had his ID out: “I need you to get all your people, all the ones who interact with your customers. I need them. . over there.” He pointed toward the beer lane. “Right now. You gotta get them in a hurry. Please.”

“What’s-”

“Just get them,” Lucas said.

The manager got them, and got a shelf-stocker to stand in the checkout lane to apologize to any shoppers for a short delay. With a half dozen store employees gathered around, Lucas said, “This is really important. I’m going to show you a photograph. Just for one second. I don’t want you to look for differences, or why it couldn’t be who you think it is: I just want a name of who it might be. Who you think it is with a quick look.”

He looked around at the group: “Everybody understand?”

They all nodded.

LUCAS TURNED ON the cell phone and picked a photo, the one in which Sprick looked most stolid, most unremarkable.

He turned the phone around in his hand, then said, “Here it comes.” He swung it in a slow arc, in front of their faces, giving each person perhaps a second to look at it.

Nobody said anything for two or three seconds, then the manager said, “Uh, yeah, that’s R-A. That’s Roger Axel.”

“Who’s he?” Lucas asked.

The rest of them were nodding, and the cashier said, “I see him every day. He runs the hardware store.”

She pointed out the window, and up the hill. Lucas could see the hardware store sign. He’d been sitting in the parking lot, looking at it. Just as Shaffer would have been, if he’d been in his truck, eating a donut. Then maybe he had an idea, about where you’d make keys, and maybe he dribbled a little jelly into his notebook. .

The manager said, “You don’t think he’s. .” but he was talking at Lucas’s back.

Roy, the clerk, called R-A just to see how he was doing.

“I was doing just fine until you called. Woke me up out of a sound sleep,” R-A lied.

“Sorry, R-A. When you didn’t come back up here after lunch, we thought it might be more serious than it looked.”

“Naw, I’m okay. Tired. Been sleeping most of the day. Probably won’t sleep tonight because of it. I’ve been thinking of running up north, go fishing for a few days. If I can’t get to sleep tonight, I might just jump in the truck and head out. If I don’t show up tomorrow, you boys do the usual. Call me anytime.”

“We can do that,” Roy said. “Take as much time as you want.”

R-A hung up and went to look at himself in the mirror again. The bitch had really cut him up. He had five fiery red scratches down his face; nothing that he would have gotten when the tool rack fell on him. They looked exactly like what they were. He had to get rid of Mattsson, and he had to do it that night. Then he had to get his fishing gear together, and get out of town.

Not that it was a total loss, he thought. He’d relive that fight for as long as he lived, and the aftermath. Best sex of his life.

He opened the cabinet, got out the tube of antibiotic ointment, and smeared it down the scratches. He’d planned to go up to the store as soon as the late guy closed it, and get his rope. He couldn’t do that, now, because sure as God made little green apples, he’d run into somebody on the street. He needed to wait until after dark.

Then he’d go down, fuck her one last time, and finish it with the rope. The thought of the rope got him excited.

“Coming to an end now,” Horn said, from behind him. R-A could see him in the mirror. “Gonna be seeing you in hell, right soon.”

“I’m getting out of here,” R-A said.

“Too late for that,” Horn said. “Your goddamned dick has done you in. Not that it probably made any difference in the long run. They would have gotten you anyway.”