John Sandford - Phantom prey

Lucas identified himself and said, “We need to ask you some questions about one of your employees.”

“Welp”-it sounded like welp- “won’t be the first time. Come on in. Is this about Jerry?”

“Why do you ask?” Del said. “He’s been sort of spooky the last couple days. I’ve kinda wondered if he’s been up to something,” Odd said. He was wearing an oil- stained flight suit, and took a pack of Marlboros out of a leg pocket and shook out a cigarette.

“Like what?” Del asked. Odd settled behind a beat- up wooden desk, with a sign on it that said Odd Angstrom, pointed at a couple of plastic chairs, and said, “Well, you know, ever since he got out, we’ve wondered if he might go back to his old ways. Made some good money-heh, heh. EBay’s the world’s best fence, huh? No more ten- cents- on- the- dollar.”

Linda had left her desk and came in and leaned on the doorjamb. “That goddamned Jerry. He’s never going straight. Good worker, but he doesn’t see himself getting along on forty thousand a year, if you know what I mean.”

Del and Lucas looked from Odd to Linda, and then Lucas said, “We’re not here about Jerry.”

Now Odd and Linda looked at each other, and Odd hacked once, a smoker’s laugh, and said, “I guess we coulda gone all day without mentioning Jerry,” and Linda cackled and said, “Got that right.”

Odd said, “So who’s it about?"

"You gotta guy named Ricky Davis?” Odd frowned. “Ricky, huh? What’d he do?"

"We don’t know if he did anything. We’re just looking around based on some lab work. Do you have any record of what he might have been doing-his calls-last December?”

Linda nodded. “Sure. What date?” Lucas gave her the date, and she went back to her desk, and all three men stepped out to watch. She pounded on an old Dell computer, brought up a spreadsheet, rolled it for a couple of minutes, then put her finger on a greasy screen and said, “Yeah, he was working. Had three calls… let me see. Yeah, he came on at three o’clock, left at eleven. He was the only guy on that afternoon, sort of tangled up in the Christmas holidays. Must’ve been snowing-he had two ditch calls and one tow.”

“Can you tell which truck he was using?"

"Yup.” She touched the screen again and said, “He’s usually in Two… yup, he was in Two."

"Could we take a look at Two?"

"Ain’t gonna be anything left from December,” Odd said. “Like to take a look anyway,” Lucas said.

Odd led them back to the garage and pointed. Two was a black 2001 Ford 550 diesel with a dual winch on the back. They walked around it, and Lucas stuck his hand over the side and dragged his fingers across the bed, held them up in front of his face, rubbed his fingers. All the oil you could want. The winch lines were shiny, but gritty: there would be, Lucas thought, metal filings in the oil.

“What do you think?” Del asked. “I think I gotta find a place to wash my hands; and we should call Dakota County, get their lab people up here,” Lucas said. “Not gonna take the truck, are they?” Odd asked. “If they have to, you’d be compensated,” Lucas said. Odd brightened: “Welp, that’d be a benefit. What’d that boy do, anyway?” Del asked, “So what’s Jerry’s last name?”

Lucas washed his hands; and while they waited for the Dakota County crew, they got Linda and Odd around Linda’s desk, and cross examined them on Ricky Davis. “Used to work on towboats, down on the river, got tired of that, and decided to start a farm. He and his girlfriend are raising emus.”

“Emus-like the bird."

"Yup. Ricky says that they got no cholesterol and no fat, and he’s gonna sell them to high- rent restaurants in the Cities. They got a batch of chicks last fall, and they’re gonna start harvesting them…”

“That means ‘chop their heads off,’” Linda said. “… around next Christmas."

"Where’s the farm?” Lucas asked. “Down south of here, somewhere, what’s the town?” Odd scratched his head. Linda said, “Wanamingo-it’s by Zumbrota.”

Lucas got on his phone, called Carol, had her look at a map and figure out what county Wanamingo was in. She came back a minute later and said, “Goodhue. The county seat is at Red Wing.”

“Get me the number for the county recorder, will you?"

"Let me get on the Net.” Another minute, and she said, “Here it is…” and read out the number. As he dialed it, he asked Linda, “Any idea what Ricky’s full legal name is? Is it Richard or Ricky, his middle initial?” She poked her computer a couple of times and said, “Richard William Davis, 01-07-75.”

Lucas got a clerk in the recorder’s office, identified himself, and asked her to check the computer for any deeds, mortgages, or liens listed to Richard William Davis in the past year.

She was back almost instantly: “We have a deed recorded and a mortgage satisfaction on November twenty- one, forty- two thousand dollars for apparently… let me figure this out… forty acres out in Cherry Grove township.”

“Is that near Wanamingo?"

"It is. Let me see… four, five miles?”

The Dakota County crime-scene guys arrived a couple of minutes later, and Lucas and Del and Odd walked them out to Two. “You know what you’re looking for?” Lucas asked.

“Yes.” The older of the two guys looked into the truck bed. “We’re gonna find it, too-whether or not it’s exactly right, we’ll have to see.”

“I understand there were some oak leaf bits stuck in the plastic sheet,” Lucas said.

“That’s right,” the older one said. “We’ll look for them. What we’ll do, we’ll seal up the bed as best we can, then take it back to the garage and sample everything.”

“How long before you know?"

"Lot to sample,” he said. “Let’s say… a preliminary read by tomorrow, something definitive in a week or so?"

"I’ll give a preliminary read right now,” the shorter guy said. “Given what we found in the sheet, you couldn’t even think of a better possibility than this truck. We had a mix of engine oil and transmission fluid and brake fluid and… shit, we should have thought of wreckers.”

“Good enough for me,” Lucas said. To Del: “Wanna go talk to Ricky?”

“What’d that boy do, anyway?” Odd asked.

They were only fifteen minutes from Lucas’s place, so they went back into town, and Lucas dropped the Porsche and Del left his state Chevy in the street, and they took Lucas’s truck. They got lost cutting across country, and didn’t make the Davis farm until late afternoon.

The farm was not on what Lucas would have identified as farmland: it was a forty- acre hump of scraggly, sapling- infested meadow with a big wire cage in the middle of it, backed on one side by the foundation of an old barn. The barn foundation was tented with plastic; the pen itself was full of five- or six- foot- tall birds that Lucas would have called ostriches. A trailer, missing its wheels, sat on blocks to the right of the driveway, opposite the barn and bird pen, and a Dodge pickup was nosed in to the trailer.

They pulled into the driveway and parked fifty feet down the hump from the trailer; as they did, Ricky Davis stepped out of the trailer and peered at them. Lucas slipped his gun out of its waist holder and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Watch yourself-that’s the motherfucker who shot me.”

“You sure?"

" Ninety- four- point- six percent.”

Davis was watching them, a frown on his face. When Lucas stepped out, with Del on the other side, his face dropped, and then he looked both ways, up and down the hill, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky…” but Davis had thrown himself into his truck.

“Shit,” Lucas said, and pulled the.45. Davis fired up the truck and hit the gas, backing straight toward them, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky,” and pointed the pistol, and Del, who was exposed, ran around behind Lucas’s truck, and Davis accelerated, backward, past them, down the hill, all the way to the gravel road, across the gravel road, into the ditch on the other side.