John Sandford - Stolen Prey

“That’s why we’ve got everybody here,” Lucas said. He nodded at the other two DEA agents. “They’re accountants. Let’s get them to count it.”

They were talking about that when Shaffer said to Lucas, “Hey: Cheryl’s been trying to get in touch with you. She said it’s urgent.”

Lucas borrowed Del’s phone, called his secretary, and she said, “Call Virgil an hour ago.”

Lucas called Flowers. Flowers shouted at him: “Hey.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m lying in a goddamn ditch. Look at that! Look at that!” Flowers was screaming now, but apparently not at Lucas.

“Look at what?” Lucas asked, raising his voice. In the background, he could hear a stuttering sound, which might have been some kind of strange Verizon static, but he was afraid it wasn’t.

“One of those sonsofbitches has a machine gun,” Flowers shouted. “Holy shit, he took that Chevy out. Hey! Hey! Get out of there! Get out of there!”

“What?” Lucas shouted into the phone. Everybody stopped messing with the gold and looked at him.

“They’re shooting at the TV chopper,” Flowers yelled. Lucas stepped across the room, bent and turned on the television. The over-the-air picture was a little hazy, showing some kind of reality show rerun, and he clicked around to Channel Three.

The aerial shot popped right up, a circling tracking of a big red barn, with a bunch of crumbling outbuildings behind it, and a white farmhouse to one side. Sheriff’s cars were stacked up in the driveway, and Lucas could see what looked like bodies along the driveway. Then one of the bodies moved, fast, across the driveway, and he realized that they were sheriff’s deputies, on the ground.

A runner burst out of the back of the barn, headed toward a woodlot that was embedded in a blue-green grain field-the oat field that Flowers had mentioned. The onboard reporter was shouting, “They’re shooting at us, Jim. Get out of here, they’re shooting at us, you dumb shit!”

Lucas yelled into the phone, “What the fuck is going on there?”

“We raided the place and ran into a hornet’s nest,” Flowers shouted back. There was a background explosion that sounded like a howitzer, and Lucas asked, “What was that? What the hell was that?” and Flowers, laughing, said, “Richie’s got himself a 50-cal. He’s blowing holes in the-Whoa, look at them, they’re like ants…. They don’t like that 50-cal.”

On the TV, Lucas could see a half dozen men break from the barn, running toward the back of the farm lot.

On the phone, he heard another howitzer blast, and an instant later, on TV, in full color, the red barn blew to bits in an enormous gaseous fireball that rose into a mushroom cloud.

Flowers: “Holy mother of God…”

Lucas shouted into the phone, “I’m coming.”

Del took him back to the Victory garage where Lucas recovered the Porsche and his cell phone. He got Flowers on his phone and said, “Keep calling me. What’s going on now?”

“We’re chasing them. They’ve stopped shooting, and we’ve got the farm, and now we’re chasing them down. Gonna take a while.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Computer says you’re an hour and fifteen minutes away, if the traffic’s not too bad,” Flowers said.

“Does the computer say how long it takes if you’re driving a Porsche with flashers?”

“Don’t kill anybody,” Flowers said. “See you in fifteen minutes.”

He actually took fifty minutes to get to the farm, following the nav system the whole way, busting a lot of stop signs, topping out at 115 miles an hour on clear blacktop; the barn wasn’t out in the sticks, he thought. He actually passed the sticks fifteen miles before he got there.

The place was a jumble of sheriff’s squads, highway patrol cars, ambulances, fire trucks, civilian vehicles, four-wheelers, and three circling helicopters and one light airplane. Lucas was still running with lights when a skeptical highway patrolman pointed him to the shoulder of the county road. Lucas hung his ID out the window, the patrolman said, “Slick ride,” and let him through.

He saw Flowers’s 4Runner parked on the freshly mown shoulder of the road and pulled up alongside it, all four wheels on the road, hoping that the SUV would cover the Porsche from any fresh outbreak of gunfire. Insurance companies don’t want to hear about bullet holes.

Flowers was up the driveway, talking to a sheriff’s deputy. He saw Lucas coming, said something to the deputy, and walked down to Lucas. Flowers was a tall man, as tall as Lucas, but slender, with long blond hair. He was wearing a cowboy hat, a pair of aviator sunglasses, a vintage Radiohead T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. He did not, as far as Lucas could see, have a gun.

He walked up and said, “We’re still missing about three of them.”

Lucas was looking past him at the farm. What had been the barn was now mostly a concrete slab, with what looked like the half-eaten stump of an enormous silver Oscar Mayer wiener sitting on the slab. The ground was littered with splintered barn siding and shingles, two of the outbuildings had collapsed, and the house was covered with fire foam. “It’s a fuckin’ war zone,” he said.

“Got pretty busy, there,” Flowers said. “See, what happened was, Richie has this 50-cal, and they were shooting at us with some small machine pistols. He let off a few shots to clear out their nostrils, and then, well, we didn’t know it, but there was an industrial-sized propane tank in there. That’s what the silver thing is. We think the second-to-last shot knocked a hole through it-that’s when everybody ran-and the propane came spewing out under heavy pressure, and then the next shot through probably hit the tank again, or some other metal, kicked out some sparks…”

“How many dead?” Lucas asked.

“Nobody, so far. Three shot, none critical, all dopers.”

“Meth?”

“No, no, that’s where the horse shit comes in,” Flowers said. “They were growing magic mushrooms. Industrial-scale magic mushrooms, on a substrate of horse shit and straw. They’d heat in the winter, cool in the summer, perfect growing temperatures all year long. There’s a big plastic tube stuck in the ground in back, an old sewer pipe they got somewhere. There’s probably a half-ton of mushrooms in there.”

“You’re sure they’re magic?” Lucas asked.

“Positive.” Flowers chuckled. “We’d really be up shit creek if they turned out to be, you know, button mushrooms. Or shiitakes.”

“How about my robbers?” Lucas asked.

“They weren’t here,” Flowers said. “But I was talking to one of the dopers, not a bad guy, for a doper, and he told me where they live, and where they were going this afternoon. They were supposed to bring a load of horse shit back this evening.”

“So…”

“I was waiting for you,” Flowers said. “Let’s go get them. Leave the Porsche here. We’ve got to come back this way anyway, we can drop them off with the sheriff.”

“Good. That way, the Porsche won’t smell like horse shit,” Lucas said.

As they walked down to Flowers’s truck, Lucas asked, “Where’re we going?”

“’Bout five or six miles down the road, to a gravel road called Jenks Trail. Half mile north, there’s a trailer sitting on the side with a dirt yard and a pit bull on a chain. That’s them. I pulled some stuff off the computer. There’s a file on the backseat.”

They got in the truck and Lucas reached over the seat and got the file, a stapled printout from the NCIC. He paged through it as Flowers pulled off the shoulder, and they loafed down the county road, over hill and dale, past the tall corn and rolling woods, the soybeans and alfalfa, kids looking over their shoulders as they pedaled along on their bikes.