John Sandford: Wicked Prey

" Davenport did this to me," Whitcomb said, whacking his inert legs. "Set it up. Started it all."

"The girl didn't'"

" Davenport set me up," Whitcomb said. He watched the girl disappear into the house. "I'm gonna get him back. No fun just shootin' him. I want to do him good, and I want him to know what I done, and who done it. Motherfucker."

"Motherfucker," Ranch said, and the word made him giggle, and then he couldn't stop giggling, even when Whitcomb started screaming, "Shut up, shut up, you fuckin' scrote." He didn't mention it, but he was also frightened of Davenport, who he thought was crazy They went back to the house, Ranch trying to suppress the urge to laugh, but cloudbursts of giggles broke through anyway.

Because Ranch was crazy.

Lucas Davenport rolled in his Porsche through the August countryside, green and tan, corn and beans, the blue oat fields falling in front of the John Deeres, weeping willows hanging over the banks of black-water ponds, yellow coneflowers climbing the sides of the road-cuts, Wisconsin farms with U-Pick signs hung out on the driveways, Dutch Belted cows and golden horses and red barns, Lucas's arms prickling from sunburn ' One of the finest summers of his life.

His wife, Weather, dozed beside him, despite the gravelly ride of the car. She'd tuned to a public radio station before she'd gone to sleep, and it was playing something by Mozart or one of those big guys, and the sound floated around them like the soundtrack in a chick flick.

Weather's nose was burned and would be peeling; so were her stomach and her thighs. Twenty minutes, she said, only twenty minutes, lying back in a two-piece bathing suit, on the front deck of Lucas's boat. She'd known better, but she'd done it anyway.

Twenty minutes was all it took. Lucas grinned at the thought of it: she was cooked. Because she was almost constitutionally unable to admit error, she wouldn't even be able to complain about it.

He idled through Hammond, up the hill past the golf course, down the hill past the high school, the small-town boys out on the football field, turning at the burble of the car's exhaust to look at the Porsche; and then on down County T to I-94, where he made the turn toward the Cities in the evening's dying light.

They'd spent two days at their lake cabin outside Hayward; hiding out. Two weeks before, one of Lucas's agents, Virgil Flowers, had arrested two Homeland Security officials for conspiracy to commit murder.

The shit hit the fan with all the expected velocity. The governor and his chief weasel were handling it-had asked for it. The arrest was as political as legal, although the big newspapers, the New York and L.a. and even the London Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, said the legal looked fairly strong. Of course, it was hard to tell whether the papers were serious, or just fucking with George Bush.

The governor was definitely fucking with George Bush, since the Republican National Convention was in town the next week.

In any case, Lucas took two days at the lake to avoid the growing siege of phone calls, while Virgil went fishing in northern Minnesota, and the governor continued to make the rounds of the Washington talk shows. They'd watched him on satellite and Weather had been delighted. She'd once had a favored pair of manicure scissors seized by the TSA, and as far as she was concerned, this was payback time.

Now Weather woke up and groaned and said, "Ah, God, where are we?"

"I-94. Six miles from the river," Lucas said.

"Mmm." She fumbled around for her purse, took out her BlackBerry and punched it up, stared at the screen for a moment, then put it back in her purse. "Nothing from anybody ' I can't believe you're listening to Chopin."

"Well, no phone calls means that everything's okay," Lucas said. Weather hadn't wanted to leave Sam, their son, though he was almost two, and they had a live-in housekeeper who was like a second mother to the kid. Still, she was anxious about it: she'd never been away from him for more than eight or ten hours, and wanted to get back.

"You feeling a little pink?" Lucas asked.

"What?"

"Sunburned?"

"Oh, not really," she said. "It's nothing."

He laughed and said, "Bullshit-you're toast."

She said, "Check your phone. See if Ellen called."

Ellen was the housekeeper. He fished out the phone, opened it, turned it on: three messages, all from the same guy. "Dan Jacobs," he said. "Nothing from Ellen."

"Too late to call him tonight," Weather said.

"He called three times ' last time was twenty minutes ago ' he'll be working twenty-four hours a day now."

He punched redial and waited. Jacobs ran the convention-security coordination committee for Minneapolis and St. Paul. A woman's voice, tired: "Jacobs committee, Sondra speaking."

"This is Lucas Davenport, returning a call from Dan."

"Just a minute, Lucas, I'll switch you in."

After a snatch of country and western music, Jacobs came up: "Lucas-we've got a problem. I'm going to send you a file on a man named Justice Shafer. We need to get our hands on him. I'd appreciate it if you could coordinate with your opposite number in Wisconsin."

"Who is he?"

"A nutcake. Sells copies of Rogue Warrior at gun shows ' you know Rogue Warrior?"

"Yeah, sort of." Guerrilla war fantasies set in a future America somehow taken over by Islamic revolutionaries, except for those parts run by the Jewish bankers. "Something more specific?"

"Well, we never heard of him, tell you the truth," Jacobs said. "Then some guy who goes to gun shows ran into him at a quarry over in Wisconsin, in Barron County, where he was sighting in a.50 cal. The guy talked to him and said Shafer got going on Jews and jihad and how the politicians were selling out America, you know ' and he had this.50 cal, and the guy who saw him said he was knocking over metal plates at seven hundred and forty-five yards."

"Unusual distance," Lucas said.

"Which has us worried. For one thing, Shafer lives in Oklahoma, and we've got no idea what he's doing up here. He's poor as a church mouse and he runs around in a rattrap Ford pickup-but he's got this shiny new rifle with a thousand-dollar scope and a Nikon range-finder, and he's shooting at this specific distance ' seven hundred and forty-five yards. Like he had the distance in mind. He's got an FBI file: he tried to join the marines and then the army, years ago, but they didn't want him, said he was a little shaky on his feet. He may have hooked up with some of the extremist white gangs-he's got a skinhead brother who did some time. The feds think he might have painted some swastikas on a synagogue in Norman, tipped over some Jewish tombstones ' Got "eighty-eight" tattooed on his chest. Like that."

"We'll get on it," Lucas said. "The file's on the way?"

"I'm pushing the button on it. ATF is working it, too, and the FBI'S interested, so you may be bumping into some of them."

"I'll warn everybody," Lucas said.

Lucas Davenport was a tall, tough, dark-haired man, heavily tanned at the end of the Minnesota summer. The tan emphasized his blue eyes, his hawkish nose, and his facial scars: a long thin one down through his eyebrow, like a piece of white fishing line, another circular one on his throat, with a vertical line through it, like the Greek letter phi-the remnants of a.22 wound, followed by the tracheotomy that kept him alive. The tracheotomy had been done by Weather, with a jackknife. "So?" Weather asked.

"Some redneck with a.50-caliber sniper rifle, up here from Oklahoma," Lucas said. "One of the eighty-eights. They're worried, but not too worried."

"What's an eighty-eight?"

"You know-H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, so eighty-eight is HH. Heil Hitler," Lucas said. "You got guys who get it tattooed on their scalps."