John Sandford - Secret Prey

Sloan, who was sitting in Davenport’s swivel chair, said, "The guy’s hurting. We could… I don’t know. Go out with him. Keep him busy at night."

Del groaned. "Right. We get our wives, we go out to eat. We talk the same bullshit we talk at the office all day, because we can’t talk about Weather. Then we finish eating and go home with our old ladies. He goes home and sits in the dark with his dick in his hand."

"So what’re you saying?" Sloan demanded.

"What I’m saying is that he’s all alone, and that’s the fuckin’ problem…" Then Del lifted a finger to his lips and dropped his voice. "He’s coming."

Lucas stepped into the office a moment later, with the feeling he’d entered a sudden silence. He’d felt that a lot, lately.

Lucas was a tall man, hard-faced, broad-shouldered, showing the remnants of a summer tan. A thin line of a scar dropped through one eyebrow onto a cheek, like a piece of fishing line. Another scar slashed across his throat, where a friend had done a tracheotomy with a jackknife.

His hair was dark, touched by the first few flecks of gray, and his eyes were an unexpectedly intense blue. He was wearing a black silk sweatshirt showing the collar of a French-blue shirt beneath it, jeans, and a.45 in an inside the pants rig. He carried a leather jacket.

He nodded at Del, and to Sloan said, "Get out of my chair or I’ll kill you."

Sloan yawned, then eased out of the chair. "You get your jeans dry-cleaned?" he asked.

"What?" Lucas looked down at his jeans.

"They look so crisp," Sloan said. "They almost got a crease. When I wear jeans, I look like I’m gonna paint something."

"When you wear a tuxedo, you look like you’re gonna paint something," Del said.

"Mr. Fashion Plate speaking," Sloan said.

Del was already wearing his winter parka, olive drab with an East German army patch on one shoulder, an Eat More Muffin sweatshirt, fire-engine-red sneaks with holes over the joints of his big toes, through which were visible thin black dress socks-Del had bunion problems-and the oversized Calvin Kleins. "Fuck you," he said.

"So what’s happening?" Lucas asked, looking at Del. He circled behind the desk and dropped into the chair vacated by Sloan. He turned a yellow legal pad around, glanced at it, ripped off the top sheet and wadded the paper in his fist.

"We’re trying to figure how to snap you out of it," Del said bluntly.

Lucas looked up, then shrugged. "Nothing to do."

"Weather’s coming back," Sloan said. "She’s got too much sense to stay away."

Lucas shook his head. "She’s not coming back, and it doesn’t have anything to do with good sense."

"You guys are so fucked," Del said.

"You say ‘fuck’ way too much," Sloan said.

"Hey, fuck you, pal," Del said, joking, but with an edge in his voice.

Lucas cut it off: "Ready to go, Sloan?"

Sloan nodded. "Yeah."

Lucas looked at Del: "What’re you doing here?"

"Seeking guidance from my superiors," Del said. "I’ve got an opium ring with fifty-seven members spread all over Minneapolis and the western suburbs, especially the rich ones like Edina and Wayzata. One or two in St. Paul. Grow the stuff right here. Process it. Use it themselves-maybe sell a little."

Lucas frowned. "How solid?"

"Absolutely solid."

"So tell me." Lucas poked a finger at Del. "Wait a minute… you’re not telling me that fuckin’ Genesse is back? I thought he was gone for fifteen."

Del was shaking his head: "Nah."

"So…"

"It’s fifty-seven old ladies in the Mountbatten Garden Club," Del said. "I got the club list."

Sloan and Lucas looked at each other; then Sloan said, "What?"

And Lucas asked, "Where’d you get the list?"

"From an old lady," Del said. "There being nothing but old ladies in the club."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Lucas asked.

"When I went over to Hennepin to get my finger sewed up after the pinking shears thing, this doc told me he’d treated this old-lady junkie. She was coming down from the opium, but she thought she had the flu or something. It turns out they’ve been growing poppies for years. The whole club. They collect the heads at the end of the summer and make tea. Opium tea. A bunch of them are fairly well hooked, brewing up three or four times a day."

Lucas rubbed his forehead. "Del…"

"What?" Del looked at Sloan, defensively. "What? Should I ignore it?"

"I don’t know," Lucas said. "Where’re they getting the seeds?"

"Seed stores," Del said.

"Bullshit," Lucas said. "You can’t buy opium seeds from seed stores."

"I did," Del said. He dug in his parka pocket, pulled out a half-dozen seed packets. Lucas, no gardener, recognized the brand names and the envelopes.

"That’s not-"

"Yes, it is. They got fancy names, but I talked to a guy at the university, and brother…" He tossed them on Lucas’s desk. "… them’s opium poppies."

"Aw, man." Now Lucas was rubbing his face. Tired. Always tired now.

"The hell with the old ladies," Sloan said. "Let’s get out of here."

"I’ll talk to you later," Lucas said to Del. "In the meantime, find something dangerous to do, for Christ’s sake."

Lucas and Sloan took Lucas’s new Chevy Tahoe: Kresge’s body, they’d been told, was off-road.

"I’m not gonna push you about being fucked up," Sloan said. "Just let me know if there’s anything I can do."

"Yeah, I will," Lucas said.

"And you oughta think about medication…"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah…"

"Is… How’s Weather?"

"Still in therapy. She’s better without me, and gets worse when I’m around. And she’s making more friends that I’m cut off from. She’s putting together a new life and I’m out of it," Lucas said.

"Christ."

"When she moved out," Lucas said, "she left her dress in the closet. The green one, three thousand bucks. The wedding dress."

"Maybe it means she’s coming back."

"I don’t think so. I think she abandoned it." Much of the trip north was made in gloomy silence, through the remnants of the autumn’s glorious color change; but the end was coming, the dead season.

Jacob Krause, the Garfield County Sheriff, was squatting next to the body, talking to an assistant medical examiner, when he saw Lucas and Sloan walking down the ridge toward them. They were accompanied by a fat man in a blaze-orange hunting coat and a uniformed deputy with a German shepherd. The deputy pointed at Krause, and turned and went back toward the house.

"Is this him?" Krause asked.

The AME turned his head and said, "Yeah. Davenport’s the big guy. The guy in the tan coat is Sloan, he’s one of the heavyweights in Homicide. I don’t know the fat guy."

"He’s one of ours," the sheriff said. He had the mournful face of a blue-eyed bloodhound, and had a small brown mole, a beauty mark, on the right end of his upper lip. He sighed and added, "Unfortunately."

A few feet away, two crime scene guys were packing up a case of lab samples; up the hill, two funeral home assistants waited with a gurney. The body would be taken to Hennepin County for autopsy. Krause looked a last time at Kresge’s paper-white face, then stood up and headed back up the path. He took it slowly, watching as Davenport and Sloan and the fat man dropped down the trail like Holmes and Watson on a Sunday stroll with Oliver Hardy. When they got closer, Krause noticed that Davenport was wearing loafers with tassels, that his socks were a black and white diamond pattern, and that the loafers matched his leather jacket. He sighed again, the quick judgment adding to his general irritation.

"Hello. I’m Lucas Davenport…" Lucas stuck out his hand and the sheriff took it, a little surprised at the heft and hardness of it; and the sadness in Davenport’s eyes. "And Detective Sloan," the sheriff finished, shaking hands with Sloan. "I’m Jake Krause, the sheriff." He looked past them at the fat man. "I see you’ve met Arne."