John Sandford - Wicked Prey

"I didn't know that," Barr said. "Anyway-there's that motel. In Bloomfield, or whatever it is."

"Yeah. Bloomington. Maybe I oughta get back."

Barr slurped up the last of his orange soda, looked at his watch, and said, "Let's go. You got a ticket?"

From Barr's car Lucas called Carol, who called Northwest and got the ticket fixed; and he called Del, who said he'd get Shrake and Jenkins and they'd meet him at the motel.

At the airport, an airport cop was waiting at the ticket counter and pushed him through security, and got him a ride to the gate. The cabin attendant said, "Man, you were pushing it," and Lucas said, "Glad to be going home, though."

They pulled the door shut behind him, and as he settled into his seat his cell rang: the cabin attendant said, "Sir, you'll have to turn off your phone. We're ready to roll."

Lucas looked at the cell screen, saw that the call was from Los Angeles. He said, "I'm a police officer working a murder case. This will only take a minute and it could be important."

She nodded, curious, and Lucas opened the phone and said, "Yeah?" and Barr said, "We found that Lexus."

"Ah, jeez, I'm on the plane."

"Don't worry about it," Barr said. "It was illegally parked on a nice quiet street up in Pasadena, Ninita Parkway. Nice green oak trees over the street, nice houses, nice cars. They noticed it when it exploded and burned right down to the wheels."

"Man…"

"Some kind of bomb, probably on a timer," Barr said. "If a kid had messed with that car, or if a cop had checked it out, they might have been barbecued. So: take care."

"You, too. You ever need anything out of the Cities, let me know."

The three and a half hours going back wasn't as bad as the three and a half hours going out, because, to his own surprise, Lucas dozed off in the quiet cabin. He had a window seat, and declined the meal; dropped back, the seat softened by a pillow from the flight attendant, and closed his eyes. When he woke up, the guy in the next seat, who was poking at a laptop, said, "Wish I could sleep like that."

Lucas yawned and said, "How long was I out?"

"Close to three hours. Sleeping like a baby. We're coming up on Sioux Falls."

Lucas looked out the window, and there it was, lights of the city twinkling in the distance, Minnesota ahead in the dark. He was on the ground in an hour, on his cell phone, walking down the concourse: Del said, about the motel, "It's pretty small and stinky. I don't know. It could be something."

"I'll be there in fifteen," Lucas said.

The Wayfarer Motel was a crappy place, a long two-story rectangle with car parking on three sides and a chain-link fence and I-494 on the fourth side. Access was through two sets of hallways on each floor, up two sets of stairways. No elevators. The halls smelled of beer and cigarette smoke and disinfectant, with outdoor carpet hard underfoot.

Lucas hooked up with Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, and they did a stroll around the place, two-and-two, saw nothing of special interest, and met at the office. Two clerks were working the counter: a straw-headed kid, pale and thin, with Grand Theft Auto eyes; and a soft round Indian woman with a dot on her forehead.

They knew cops when they saw them, and the straw man said, "What's up?" and Del rolled out the pictures of Cohn and the woman-of-many-names. The clerks studied them for a minute, then the Indian woman, who wore a name tag that said, "Jane," shook her head and said, "No. They are not here."

"You're sure," Lucas said.

"I work here twelve hours a day," she said. "They're not here. Not only are they not here, they've never been here, not in the last eight months and twelve days, since I got here."

So they talked about the phone calls, and Jane explained that the phone number was the main number. If somebody called that number, one of the clerks answered it, and then switched it to the room. There was no record of which room took which call.

"Nothing suspicious lately? Nothing out of the ordinary?" Del asked. "Nothing that caught your eye?"

Straw Man glanced at Jane, then said, "Curtis Ramp was here. Not with his wife."

Curtis Ramp was a Minnesota Vikings running back. Shrake said, "Jesus, I hope it wasn't before a game?"

Straw Man shook his head: "It was Wednesday. He paid cash. He didn't want us to know who he was."

"That doesn't help a lot," Lucas said.

"Sorry, dude."

"We may send a couple of guys over here to sit with you for a while, watch who comes and goes," Lucas said. "We'll call you."

"Call the manager," Jane said. "He'd have to set it up."

In Lucas's absence, a cold front had come through, and the night was now chilly: the first night of the northern autumn, which sometimes started in August. Out in the parking lot, they looked up at the rows of windows, and Lucas said, "Well, shoot. I thought it might be something."

"Still might be," Del said. "Oughta get somebody here early tomorrow morning, watch people when they're moving around. Run some license tags…"

Shrake and Jenkins had come together in Jenkins's Crown Vic, and they broke away, and Lucas and Del ambled down to the end of the parking lot to Lucas's Porsche, talking babies. Del was saying, "… dilating, but then she got stuck. The doc said if she doesn't go by the end of the week, she wants to do a C-section. I worried about it, but'" He realized he'd lost Lucas, who'd stopped, staring back at the lot: "What?"

"Look at that old rattrap pickup," Lucas said.

"Uh…"

"It's got Oklahoma plates."

Del said, "Ah, jeez." He went and looked, and came back. "This can't be right, man. This can't be right." Down the lot, they could see Jenkins unlocking the door of his car, and Del whistled at them, and Jenkins looked up, and Del waved them back.

Lucas said, "It's got an NRA sticker; it's got a Bushmaster sticker." Bushmaster sold M-15 variants.

"Can't be right," Del said. "What'd the connection be?"

"Don't know," Lucas said. He scratched his head, mystified.

"Jenkins had some of the guy's pictures in his car," Del said.

Jenkins and Shrake came up and looked at the truck, and Jenkins said, "There're only two possibilities. Either it's a terrific coincidence and no big deal, or something is a lot more fucked up than we know about."

"You got those pictures?" Lucas asked.

"Got one," Jenkins said.

"Let's go ask Jane," Lucas said. "She should know."

Jane said, "Two-fourteen. Been here almost a week."

Lucas said, "Let me get my gun. We'll take him right now."

Del was wearing jeans and a military-style olive drab shirt and yellow leather boots, and looked less like a cop than the rest of them, so they sent him ahead. He tiptoed up to Justice Shafer's hotel room and stood with his ear to the door for a minute, and heard both the television and then a clunk from somebody moving around, and he tiptoed back down the hall and said, "He's there."

Shrake said, "How do we want to do this?"

"These guys have been rapping on the hotel doors with keys so they sound like a maid or something," Lucas said. He took a quarter out of his pocket and held it up.

Del said, "There's a peephole. He'll see us."

Lucas looked back down the stairway where they'd clustered, and said, "Go get Jane."

Jane had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, and didn't want to do it, but the four of them were several times larger than she, and they grouped around her and looked down at her until she caved and said she would.

"All you have to do is knock; as soon as you hear him start to open the door, you move away," Shrake said. "What if he just shoots?"