John Sandford - Wicked Prey

Letty wandered into the kitchen, wrapped in a ratty blue terry-cloth robe, looking sleepy, rubbing one hand through her tangled blond hair. "Smells good," she said. "God, I need some caffeine."

Lucas grinned at her and said, "Long night?"

"I should have read it last month ' Is there any Coke?" She opened the refrigerator and peered inside. She'd been assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird over the summer, and to write a paper on it, and had let it go until the last minute.

"How much more do you have to read?" Weather asked.

"Eighty pages," she said, twisting the cap off a bottle of Coke. "But I've got to get over to the station. I'm getting a camera, I'm going to do a piece on the kids up at the Capitol. I mean, like, you know, people my age in politics."

Lucas dropped his eyelids and made a snoring sound, and Weather snapped: "Lucas!"

"Ah, he's right," Letty said. "Another thumb-sucker. But, I get the camera time. The kids at school freak out. Emily Grissom can't stand it. She thinks I'm sleeping with somebody over there."

"Ah, God," Weather said, outraged. "Letty, do you really have to do this stuff? You could be a surgeon, or-well, you probably wouldn't want to be a lawyer…"

Lucas stood up, kissed Weather on the forehead, and said, "Thanks," and "Counsel your daughter," and headed out the door.

As he went, he heard Letty ask, "Mom, could you give me a lift over to the station? I need to get there early…"

A Minneapolis cop named Rick Jones had caught the robberies. Lucas found him at the Dairy Delight, a downtown ice-cream stand modeled after a Dairy Queen, getting a chocolate-dipped vanilla cone. Jones was a tall, slender black man with a shaved head and a diamond earring. He not only thought he looked like a pro basketball player, but he actually did. He was wearing jeans, a loose gray army T-shirt, running shoes, and dark wraparound sunglasses.

"Lucas motherfucking Davenport," he said, as Lucas wandered up.

"That'd be mister motherfucking Davenport to the likes of you," Lucas said. He checked the menu behind the Dairy Delight window, ordered a small hot fudge softie from the girl behind the counter, and said to Jones, "I was just over at the office. They say you caught those robberies at the High Hat."

"Yeah. I said to myself, "RJ, there's something going on here that you don't know about." And guess what-here comes Davenport."

"Well, you're right about that," Lucas said. "I got my ass jerked out of bed by a guy who works for the governor. These folks were here for the convention…"

"That's what they told me," Jones said.

"… representing some big-time special interests. They get hit, they start making phone calls. I don't like it any better than you do, but they did get hit."

"They lied to me about it," Jones said. "I asked them how much was stolen, they said, you know, "hundreds of dollars." I was like, right-you're in a six-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suite, and they got your money clip."

Lucas didn't try to deny it. "Anyway…"

Jones was crunching through the chocolate, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and said, "So they sent you along to put a wrench on my nuts."

"No, they sent me along to look into the robberies on my own. I talked to Danny…" Danny Lake was the head of robbery-homicide, "… and he said I could sit in. The thing is…"

The counter girl passed Lucas his hot fudge and a plastic spoon, and Lucas paid and they ambled down the street. "… The thing is, it's possible that I got a line on these guys."

Jones's eyebrows went up. "How'd that happen?"

"An old friend called me from New York. Nothing to do with politics, she just called out of the blue," Lucas said. He outlined what Lily Rothenburg had passed along, and mentioned the Photoshopped mug shots.

"You got these pictures?" Jones asked.

"Got them, but I haven't printed them," Lucas said. "Everybody's working this weekend, so I can get that done right away. I wanted to check with you first, so, you know-I don't step on your feet."

"I'll tell you what, I don't mind too much, you looking over my shoulder," Jones said, serious now. "Maybe some other time, I'd mind. But right now-everybody's used up. If we're gonna run these around to the hotels and motels, it's gonna be you and me. Everybody else is working the Republicans."

"I could probably get one guy to help out," Lucas said. "I can e-mail you the jpegs, you can pass them out on this side of the river, I'll take the other side."

"It's something. You wanna talk to the victims?" Jones asked.

"Yeah-but I wanted to talk to you first," Lucas said.

"I knew something was up with them," Jones said. "You got any idea how much these assholes really took?"

"Nobody talks about money-but these guys, Brutus Cohn, whoever, they don't steal four hundred dollars and an engagement ring," Lucas said. "They know what they're doing."

"Fuckin' Republicans," Jones said.

"Yeah, well-I was told that these guys were in Denver last week," Lucas said.

"Way of the world, baby," Jones said.

Lucas wadded up the hot-fudge sundae cup and tossed it at a trash basket. Hit the rim and went in. "Brick," Jones said.

"Brick my ass," Lucas said. "With my skills, looks, intelligence, and speed, and your tennis shoes, we coulda been in the NBA."

Jones laughed and said, "Well, maybe. If you could jump more than four inches off the ground. You wanna walk over to Hennepin? We could talk to Wilson again, if he's awake."

"Let's go. And fuck a bunch of jumping. With my skills, you don't need to jump."

Hennepin General was a rabbit warren, but Jones seemed to know where he was going. Lucas tagged along, stopping only to squirt a handful of alcohol foam onto his palms, because he liked the feel of it. When they got to John Wilson's room, Jones knocked on the door panel and Wilson waved them in, and said into his telephone, "I gotta go-the cops are back ' Maybe, I haven't seen him yet. Conway called this morning ' yeah."

A woman was sitting in the corner of the private room, on a rolling chair. She was conventionally pretty, dark-haired, brown-eyed, probably-not-yet-thirty, but tired, and Lucas could see forty in the wrinkles on her face. She had a bad bruise, as deep as a port-wine stain, on her left cheek.

Lucas watched Wilson as he talked on the phone. He was a small man with a button nose and tidy bow lips, dressed in a hospital gown. He had double black eyes, an aluminum brace on his nose, held in place with tape, a scrape on one cheek that might have been made by the heel of a shoe, and a bandaged ear. A lunch tray sat on a pull-out table, with a piece of white-bread sandwich crust, and a cup of brown stuff which might have been pudding.

Jones, not wanting to interrupt the phone conversation, leaned to Lucas and nodded at the woman and said quietly, "Miz Johnson."

Wilson said, "Yeah, yeah. Get back to ya on that. Talk to ya, man," and hung up and looked at Jones and asked, "You get them?"

"Not yet." Jones turned a hand to Lucas and said, "This is Lucas Davenport, he's an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He's going to be working the case along with me."

Wilson said to Lucas, "You know Neil Mitford."

Lucas nodded: "Yeah."

"They told me you'd be coming along," Wilson said. "What do you think? Full-court press, or piss on the fire and go on home?"

"Well, we're going to push it," Lucas said.

"Lucas thinks we might have a line on the robbers," Jones said. "Not that we'll get back your four hundred dollars, but it'd be nice to get them off the street."

"You've got to get them off the street," the woman said. She hunched forward, her elbows on her thighs, her hands clasped, twisting. "They're animals."