John Sandford - Broken Prey

Fatefully, when one of the researchers was looking into the “Leo Grant” personnel file, a direct call was made to the hospital. The research request was leaked inside the hospital, and apparently reached “Roy Rogers’s ” ears, who concluded correctly that he had been identified. He rushed from the hospital, back to his apartment, where the confrontation with Millie Lincoln and Mihovil took place, and the race to the hospital began.

One question posed by Ignace and left out of the story when Lucas couldn’t answer it was “Why did O’Donnell take all of his money out of the bank the day he disappeared?”

Lucas shook his head. “We don’t know. We may never know.”

Ignace identified Lucas variously as a BCA official, an investigator, a state law-enforcement officer, a researcher, a source close to the investigation, a source who asked not to be identified, and a highly placed state official.

Because he actually named Rose Marie Roux, Carlton Aspen, the commissioner of the Department of Human Services, and Jerald Wald, the Senate majority leader, Ignace felt safe in saying that his sources included “police officers, state officials, legislators, and people directly involved in the firefight at St. John’s.”

On the evening that he finished the story, Ignace spent several hours on the Internet, checking apartment prices in Manhattan.

Rose Marie, on reading the story the next morning, was pleased. “It might not be the truth, but it’s one truth, and best of all, its ours ,” she said. She added, with some satisfaction, “The goddamn DHS is fucked.”

The morning after he talked to Ignace, Lucas woke up, expecting to get out of the hospital, to find an exhausted and angry Weather sitting next to his bed.

“Wait’ll I get you home,” she said. Her eyes drifted toward a nurse.

“Where’s everybody else?” Lucas said.

“They’re still back in London. I didn’t have time to get everybody here. Lucas, we gotta talk. I’m your wife. You don’t get shot and don’t tell me about it. .” Tears started down her face.

The nurse said, “Maybe I better take off for a while. .”

Lucas went home that day. His eye was blacker than it had ever been, but his nose was more or less straight. His arm was immobilized from shoulder to wrist. Two quarter-inch metal rods went straight through his skin from an outer brace: they would be there for a few days, and then another minor operation would take them out.

An orthopedic surgeon was checking out the brace when Weather came back from the bathroom. The doc recognized her and they chatted for a few seconds, and then Weather, with a certain tone in her voice, said to Lucas, “You see these rods going into your arm?”

Lucas looked down and said, “Yeah?”

“That’s what orthopods call ‘sutures.’ ”

The morning after that, he and Weather were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, reading Ignace’s story. Now that Lucas was ambulatory and she could see that his life wasn’t in danger, she was talking about getting back to the kids.

“Go ahead,” Lucas kept saying, “I’m really okay.”

His arm felt like a truck was sitting on it, and his face felt like somebody had driven a nail through his eye. He smiled and suppressed a wince.

“I feel like I’d be ditching you,” she said.

“No, no. . I’m gonna be busier than hell.”

She started giving him more trouble about lying to her-although the night before, she’d settled most of his sexual problems, and any that he might have developed over the coming six or eight weeks.

Then the phone rang, and he snatched it up to get away from her eyes. Beloit, the doc from St. John’s, said, “I’ve got to talk with you. Privately. Secretly. May I come up?”

Beloit came up, and she and Weather sniffed each other’s credentials for a few minutes, then Weather went away and Beloit perched on a chair in the den and said, “I think I know why Sam withdrew money from the bank the day he disappeared.”

“I’d be interested,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to hear it from me. I don’t want to testify. I’d lose my job and so would other people. But I need to get it off my chest. .”

“So, we’ll call you a confidential source,” Lucas said. “If there’s no way to prove it, we’ll just pretend nobody said anything.”

She looked at him for a minute, then away, and finally her eyes came back: “We sort of had a social group in the hospital. The longhairs. We occasionally smoked a little dope.”

Ah. So that was it. He knew then what she was going to say but let her say it.

“Leo had the connection,” she said. “He knew the guy who brought it in from Canada. When the guy was coming by, he’d call Leo, but Leo didn’t have much money. So Sam would front the money, and he and Leo would go pick up a can of the stuff-it usually came in one of those big tobacco cans. Sam would parcel it around to the people in our group. We’d pay him our share, and he’d put the money back. He wasn’t making money on the deal, he was just. . facilitating.”

“So Leo could have told him the guy was coming through. .”

“And it was time. We’d been low, or out, for a while,” she said. “People had started asking when the guy from Canada was coming.”

“Okay. Would you happen to know the Canadian guy’s name?”

“Um, Manny,” Beloit said, with a tentative smile. “They used to call him Manny Sunshine.”

Lucas smiled. “It’s always Somebody Sunshine.”

“You can get this out, without my name?” she asked.

“I’ll have our dope guys look into Manny. If we can find him, we’ll have a talk. We don’t really want to bust a bunch of potheads. But it would be nice if we could explain the money withdrawal.”

“Please, please, keep my name out of it.”

“I will.” He liked her, even if she was a doper. He remembered seeing her kneeling over the woman in the cage, saving a life, as the shooting was going on around her.

“Do you think we’ll ever find Sam?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We shouldn’t have found Charlie Pope, but we did. So. . I don’t know.”

Three days after Lucas’s truth appeared in the Star-Tribune , DHS officials, seeing how the wind was blowing, decided to preempt any chance of higher-level hangings by doing a few of their own. Cale and four other administrators were put on administrative leave from the hospital. The word was, they’d never be back, and there might be more heads to roll.

Lucas, Jenkins, Shrake, Sloan, and the wildlife officer were given citations by their various departments, a signal that the departments had decided they were clean.

The legislature scheduled hearings, and a group of Mankato residents demanded that a monument be built, with the names of the victims inscribed on it, in a plaza, or perhaps a new park. Rose Marie, reading the story, said to Lucas, “You know, it never occurred to me.”

“What?”

“That somebody might make a buck on this,” she said, as she turned the page.

A week after the shootings, Sloan was gone. He had a lot of accumulated vacation, which he took as a lead-in to actual retirement. His vacation check also helped on the down payment on the bar; he assumed ten years of a fifteen-year mortgage, renamed the place Shooters, and, his wife told Lucas, “The first person he hired is nineteen years old and has tits out to here.”

Lucas said, “Huh. He’s smarter than I thought.”

Weather came back from London with the kids and the housekeeper. The orthopod took the steel rods out of Lucas’s arm but left two titanium screws, which would be permanent. The arm ached, and the cast drove him crazy. He found he could scratch his arm with an ingeniously bent clothes hanger.