John Sandford - Stolen Prey

“Easter egg with a Mac-10,” Lucas said. “Hope nobody gets killed.”

Shaffer pulled his feet down. “Well, yeah…”

“I wonder if this Stan had anything to do with setting up the fake Bois Brule account? Seems to me that there are going to be a lot of claims on Sunnie. Maybe it’d be better not to get too enthusiastic about Stan’s reward offer.”

Shaffer rubbed his chin. “You could be right.”

“We’re still going with the press conference tomorrow? Ten o’clock?” Lucas asked.

“Still scheduled,” Shaffer said.

“My daughter Letty works part-time as an intern at Channel Three,” Lucas said. “She said Ralph Richter is coming over. He’s going to do his media-asshole thing on us. Don’t worry about it, and don’t let him get under your skin. That’s just his gig, you know? Playing the tough guy.”

Shaffer suddenly looked worried again.

His job there done, and not feeling at all guilty, Lucas went back to his own office.

Loose ends: He called Virgil Flowers.

“What’s taking so long?” he asked.

“I gotta tell you,” Virgil said. “I think I’ve got them spotted. I’m talking to Richie. He’s got a deputy with a big fucking pair of binoculars and a radio, hiding out in an oat field, watching the farm. We think your robbers work out of the place, but there’re ten other people out there. Something’s up. Could be a big meth operation. We’re tracking people coming out of there, running their plates, all kinds of different places, Missouri, Colorado, lot of drug busts. Richie’s all excited. When we know something, I’ll call you.”

“I want to be there when you take my two,” Lucas said.

“I’ll call you. I gotta say, we don’t know how horse shit ties into meth, but we’re researching it.”

While Lucas was calling around, Martinez and Tres lay low. Tres’s face wasn’t on television, so Martinez gave him two hundred dollars and a shopping list and sent him out for food. When he came back, he said that a Xerox picture of her was on a bulletin board at the supermarket.

“They have put out a reward,” Martinez said. She felt a little like a fool for confiding in a child. “One hundred thousand dollars for anyone who finds us.”

“So, we hide. I one time, with Dos, hid for ten days in an attic, fifty degrees every day, we could smell our skin cooking up there, it’s so hot. Better than getting shot, you know?”

One way or another, she thought, they had a good chance of making it across the border. If she could make it to El Paso, she could make the last mile. The problem was that Davenport had told everybody that she had the gold … and that Big Voice had heard about it.

“You have the gold safe?” Big Voice asked.

“No. We don’t have any gold at all,” she’d said. She explained Davenport, how he was trying to keep her nailed down.

“Very clever,” Big Voice said. Then, with disappointment plain in his big voice, he said, “You have no gold at all?”

And in that, she sensed doubt.

The next time he talked to her, he mentioned that the “powers” had heard that she had the gold and had been upset when they heard that she denied it.

“We have never seen the gold. I can let you talk to Tres-”

“Tres is a child,” the Big Voice said. “You could hide the gold from him.”

“If I had the gold, I would not come back to you,” she said. “If I had the gold, I would disappear. But I am coming back to you.”

“That is a point in your favor,” the Big Voice said. “When will you come?”

The “POWERS” wanted the gold. They weren’t sure about her. They were looking for somebody to blame for its loss.

This would not, she thought, end well for her.

She saw the tape again, of Davenport talking about the gold.

It was his fault, she thought.

He was squeezing her, squeezing her. Squeezing her to death.

While Lucas called around, and Martinez watched the television, Sanderson was in her car, doing her frantic escape-and-evasion routine, worried that she was being tracked. Eventually, she decided that if anyone was following her, they were just too smart for her, and she drove around to a half dozen Walmart and Target stores, where she bought small flattened cardboard shipping boxes and packaging tape. Scared to death of fingerprints and DNA, she bought two extra boxes at each store, and touched only the top and bottom boxes in the stack.

Once she had them to her car, she separated the boxes with the fingerprints from the boxes without, and put the boxes with prints in the front seat. She also bought a bottle of Windex and some kitchen gloves.

An hour after she left the last of the stores, she was back at the farm. She made sure she was alone, then she drove through the gate, closed it behind her, and bounced across the field to the spot where she’d buried the gold. She parked thirty feet away from it, not wanting to make new car tracks through the weeds that might lead somebody to the burial spot.

Digging up the gold was a bit less hot and sweaty than putting it in the ground, but not much. Then, when the gold was uncovered, she had to pull it out of the hole and run it back to the car, eight hundred-plus pounds of heavy metal. She was frightened that she might be seen, and so did it as fast as she could, laboring like a ditchdigger with a short deadline. When she was done, she was more angry than scared, and breathing hard: all of this work, and all of this blood, and they were taking it away from her.

She deserved this gold. Now the cops would get it.

Well: most of it.

Some of it, she carefully rewrapped and left at the bottom of the hole. She filled the hole again, replaced the chunks of sod and weed, and spent a half hour cleaning up the area around it. When she was done, it looked better than it had the first time. She got in the car, bounced back across the field, out through the gate, which she carefully closed, and down the dusty road toward the Cities. She still had work to do at the office.

Lucas called Flowers: “Anything yet?”

“Won’t be today. But Richie says they’re doing drugs, one way or another. So probably tomorrow afternoon. Next day at the latest. Your two guys, the guys who robbed you, are probably named Duane Bird and Bernice Waters. Both have a long trail, but all minor stuff, not counting these robberies. Bernice stole sixteen thousand dollars from the Full Bible Church of Darby five years ago, and spent some time out at the women’s prison…. That’s about as big as they’ve gotten.”

“All right. Keep talking to me,” Lucas said.

Lucas went home, and Weather, who always got home earlier, said, “Cast is coming off.”

“Which is good,” Lucas said. “Which is about time.”

“For such a big lug, you’re such a baby,” she said. “You got anything else tomorrow?”

He told her about the press conference, and about Virgil’s investigation, and she said, “So you’re going to have to get up early.”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Maybe we ought to go to bed early. We could get this week’s sex out of the way.”

“I’ll have to look at my calendar again, and maybe have an extra glass of milk,” he said, “but it’s a possibility.”

He barely thought about Martinez, except to wonder where she might be. Still in the Cities? In Missouri or Oklahoma? Back in Mexico already?

Whatever. He no longer much cared-she was Shaffer’s Easter egg.

Lucas’s eyes popped open at six o’clock, when he felt Weather stirring around. She said, quietly, “The alarm is set for eight.”

“See you tonight,” he said. He tried to go back to sleep, dozed for a while, but at seven he got up; there was too much going on for sleep. He cleaned up, dressed for the press conference in a blue suit and a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, saw the Martinez photo again on the morning news, and a promo for the ten-o’clock news conference. Letty was kicking around in the kitchen getting some cereal when he got downstairs, and he chatted with her about Channel Three and asked her about a kid named Tom who’d been hanging around the driveway, and was told that he was just a friend.