John Sandford - Stolen Prey

“Unless he’s chumping you, and we go running in there, and he says, ‘Aha, you were following me,” Lucas said. “No copper here, copper.”

“It’s bronze. Like I said, I’m eighty-three percent,” Del said. “The other seventeen percent is what you just said.”

They left Jenkins’s Crown Vic on the street and took the Jeep back into the tangle of streets and tracks that ran along the river, Del at the wheel. He eventually took them down a muddy dirt road, then off onto a branching track that ran down to the water. He parked and said, “We walk from here. Bring the camera. I got some glasses.”

They walked back to the dirt road, then farther along it, another hundred yards, then Del led the way through some low brushy trees to the top of a dirt levee that smelled like beached carp and dead clams. “Watch the snakes,” he said.

Lucas: “Really?”

“Yeah, I almost stepped on a great big fucker when I came up here. Bull snake, I think.”

“What do you know about snakes?” Jenkins asked. He was watching his ankles.

“Not much. Just garter, bull, and rattle. Wasn’t a rattlesnake, I don’t think, and too big to be a garter.”

“Yeah, well … I don’t fuck with snakes,” Lucas said, with a shudder.

“Neither do I,” Del said. “That thing scared the shit out of me.”

At the top of the levee, Lucas could see what Del called a junkyard, but was really a long raw-dirt clearing with five chunks of wrecked, rusting machinery of uncertain purpose, and a couple of abandoned cars and trucks, some of which looked like they’d been submerged by past floods. The shed sat in the middle of it: dull-silver corrugated steel, the same thing farmers once used to build silos, but this structure was probably a hundred and fifty feet long and sixty feet wide, in the domed shape of a Quonset hut.

There were two sliding doors, closed tight, but big enough to accommodate a light airplane; Lucas thought the building might have been designed as a hangar. Although the big doors were closed, tracks in the dirt outside suggested that trucks had been coming and going. A black Cadillac sedan and an older twin-cab Chevy pickup sat outside the only human-scale door on the building. There were four windows down the length of the building, but all looked dark and dirty.

“Now what?” Jenkins asked.

“We watch for a couple minutes, then we run like hell down there and find a window clean enough to see inside.”

“We’re not going to get shot, are we?” Jenkins asked.

“I don’t think so,” Del said. “You ready?”

The three of them ran like hell down the levee and across a hundred feet of open dirt driveway, trying to be quiet about it, past the doorway, to the side of the building and the first of the windows. Del peeked and whispered, “I can’t see a thing.”

“Next window.”

They couldn’t see anything in the other windows, either. All were encrusted with what looked like several decades of dirt. Around in the back, they found a rotten door, and when Jenkins gently tried the rusty knob, the knob pulled out in his hand. He knelt and looked in the knob hole, shook his head, and said, “Nothing.”

On the far side, they found a cracked window. “Don’t tell the court I did this,” Del said, and using a pocketknife, pried out a shard of dirty glass. He dropped it under the window and pressed his eyes to the hole, looked for a moment, then turned to Lucas and whispered, “Got them. I can see the truck. There’s a pile of stuff off to the side. It could be a cut-up statue. It’s too dark to see.”

Lucas looked, and saw the truck first, then close to the entrance door, a pile of what might have been junk, except that it looked too manufactured, somehow. Too regular for junk. He pulled back and turned his ear to the door and could hear distant voices.

“Still in there,” he whispered.

“We could wait at the front door, get them when they come out, see if they say enough that we can go in,” Del whispered back. “I’m not sure about crashing in without a warrant.”

“What if somebody comes?” Jenkins asked.

“Then we tap-dance,” Lucas said.

They walked quietly around to the front and waited, and six or seven minutes later, sure as God made little green apples, they heard a truck coming down the road. There was no time to run and hide, so Del and Jenkins propped their butts against the Cadillac’s bumper, and Lucas faced them, gesturing with one hand, as though they were arguing. Del said, “Don’t wave your hand around so much … it looks fake.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with it?” Lucas asked.

“Just cross your arms and take a step back and then turn around and look at the truck coming in,” Jenkins said. “You’re supposed to be curious.”

Lucas did that, and the truck pulled up. Del muttered, “Check the bumper sticker.” The bumper sticker said: “My other auto is a.45.” A middle-aged man, balding with gray hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail, got out of the truck and asked, “You the guys with Middleton?”

“Who’re you?” Del asked.

“I’m the guy with the copper,” the man said.

“Anderson’s the guy with the copper,” Del said. “We’ve been sitting here arguing … never mind. Whose copper is it?”

“Mine. C’mon, we’ll get it straight,” the guy said.

Jenkins nodded: “Thanks for the invite.”

An invitation was all they needed.

They followed ponytail inside. The sculpture was right there, on the floor, but in a thousand pieces: the first thing Lucas saw was a streamlined hand at the top of the pile. Anderson was talking to a guy in jeans and jean jacket, with dirty blond hair and black plastic-rimmed glasses like people wore in Europe. They walked up and Anderson looked at the ponytail guy, and then at the three cops, and asked, “Who’re these guys?”

Del held up a badge in one hand, a gun in the other, and said, “The BCA. You’re under arrest.”

“Shit,” said the guy with the glasses, and with no further ado, he began running, three feet, four feet, and then, as he would have passed Lucas, Lucas reached out with his fiberglass cast and swatted the guy on the nose, and he went down, his glasses, still intact, spinning away.

“Don’t do that,” Del said. “Next guy who runs, I’m gonna shoot him.”

“I gotta get a cast,” Jenkins said, impressed by the impact.

“I didn’t do nothing,” said the guy who’d led them inside. He looked at Anderson and said, “Tell them-I didn’t do nothing.”

Anderson shrugged and said, “It’s your copper.”

Del said, “Bronze.”

The guy on the floor moaned, “Man, that smarts. That really fuckin’ hurts.”

They sat all three of them down and read them their rights, and gave the glasses guy a bunch of paper shop towels to squeeze against his bloody nose. Jenkins wandered over to the pile of metal, peered at it for a moment, then pulled out a semi-sphere the size of a soccer ball and said, “Look, a tit.” To Anderson, “How could you do that?”

Anderson said, “With a Sawzall.”

Del called for help from South St. Paul, and five minutes later two squads were parked outside. The three would be booked into the Ramsey County Jail.

“Four million bucks,” Del said, looking at the scrap. “State Farm is gonna be really unhappy. They’re holding the policy on it.”

They were going through the rigmarole of handing the guys off to South St. Paul when Lucas’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen and saw that it was from an old friend, James T. Bone.

Bone was president of the third-largest bank in Minneapolis, after Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank. Lucas touched the answer button and said, “Hey, T-Bone. What’s up?”