Джон Сэндфорд - Ocean Prey [calibre]

Ahead, Curry leaped sideways and out of sight and Lucas pulled his weapon in case Curry was going for one, but one second later, as he charged into the kitchen, he found Curry trying to get out a back door, rattling a heavy deadbolt lock, and Lucas shouted, “Stop! Stop!”

Curry looked wildly back into the muzzle of Lucas’s gun and put up his hands. “Okay. Okay!”

Devlin, in the front room, was shouting, “Show me your hands, your hands . . .”

A screeching sound ripped through the house and Lucas waved his gun at Curry and shouted, “Keep your hands up . . . Keep them up and get in the living room, get in the living room!”

There was another screeching sound and a woman shouted, “Get away from her, get away from Mom.”

As Lucas pushed Curry down the short hallway to the living room, a bird—he thought a chicken, large and white with a flash of yellow, but flying—dove straight at his head. He flinched, turned, the bird flapped around the kitchen and came back on a second pass, and Lucas pushed Curry harder into the living room and found Devlin pointing his weapon at the two women, the younger one standing in front of the older one, and Devlin shouted at Lucas, “Gun! The old lady’s got a gun in the couch!”

The bird hit Lucas on the back of the head, and he felt a claw scrape across his scalp. Lucas pushed Curry hard between the shoulder blades farther into the living room and the bird ricocheted around the room, brushing both the younger woman and Devlin’s shoulders before going after the old man in the wheelchair, who swung a cane at the bird and called, “Get away, get away, you shitass.”

Devlin shoved the younger woman into the lap of the man in the wheelchair and snatched the old lady by her blouse off the couch; a gun skittered out of her hidden left hand and fell on the floor. Lucas kicked it like a soccer ball down the hallway to the kitchen. As he turned back, he realized for the first time that a dog was barking at them, crazy, excited, and maybe panicked barking, and he looked down and saw a dachshund dancing around Curry’s feet.

“Everybody shut up!” Lucas shouted. “Somebody get the goddamned bird.”

The younger woman shouted, “Stay away from my bird! You motherfucker, stay away . . .”

The bird came after Lucas again and he swatted at it with his gun, smacked it hard, two or three small feathers flying. The bird crashed into a wall and fell flapping to the floor, and the woman came at Lucas with her fingernails. She had to pass Devlin, who stuck out a foot, tripped her, and she went down in a pile, landing on the dog, which squealed and ran under a chair.

In a moment of stunned silence, Lucas said, loudly, but not shouting, “You’re all under arrest. Everybody except the old guy.” He pointed at the elderly man, who shrugged.

Curry said, “We want a lawyer.”

“You’ve got one coming,” Lucas said. “Right now, you’ve got the chance to commit several more felonies. You want to do it, it’s up to you. If you don’t want to do that, sit down.”

The younger woman crawled to the couch, used it to push herself up. She began to cry and the older woman patted her vaguely on the back and stuck her hand down between the couch cushions behind her.

Lucas moved quickly to stand over her, his pistol next to her nose. “Is that another gun?”

She said, “It’s my Kleenex pack.” She dug deeper, and came up with a Kleenex purse pack and began excavating a tissue.

The bird was up, but not flying; it walked around the room with an occasional, questioning squawk, avoiding Lucas. Lucas asked the younger woman, “Could you put the chicken somewhere? With the dog? Stick them in a bedroom?”

She was still crying and gathered up the bird and said to the dog, “Come on, Noodles.” The dog wandered after her, and Lucas followed her down the hall and watched as she put the bird in a bedroom with the dog. He pointed her back to the couch, and Curry asked, “What’s this all about?”

“It’s about a life sentence,” Devlin said. “Without parole. And this lady? This your mother?”

Curry glanced at the old lady and said, “Mother-in-law.”

“It’s about her going for a gun, which is aggravated assault on a federal officer which is about six to eight years, minimum. And this lady”—he pointed at the younger woman—“went after a federal marshal with her fingernails. That’s assault, that’s a couple of years.”

Lucas ran his fingers through his hair, across his burning scalp, came away with blood. “As for that fuckin’ chicken, I’m gonna wring its neck . . .”

“That’s a very valuable sulphur cockatoo,” the younger woman said. She sat on the couch next to the old woman. “That’s no kind of chicken.”

“What the fuck do you want?” Curry asked.

Devlin looked at Lucas, who shrugged and said, “Sansone. We want Sansone. We’ve got a lawyer coming to explain all of that to you, your options.”

“I want an attorney,” Curry said. “I’m not answering any questions, I want a lawyer, I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Lucas: “Really? You already unload all that heroin?”

Curry opened his mouth to answer, then slammed it shut, and the younger woman sobbed, “Oh, no.”

“We’re not going to ask any questions. Not without you saying okay,” Lucas said. “What we’re going to do is, you’re going to listen to a lawyer talk. Then, you’re all four going to the Manhattan federal lockup. If you’re not interested in talking to us, we’ll hold you for seventy-two hours and then we’ll give you any lawyer you want or call in a federal public defender.”

“If I talk to you, Sansone will have me killed,” Curry said.

“Sansone will be in prison and you won’t be,” Lucas said. “You and your family will be in witness protection. Nobody in witness protection has ever been killed.”

Devlin asked Lucas, “You want to call Orish?”

Lucas called, told her what had happened, and she said, “Good. Expect company in three or four minutes. They’re close.”

Lucas passed the word to Devlin, then went into the kitchen, got a kitchen chair, brought it back to the living room and told Curry to sit. He did. Five minutes later, the doorbell rang, and Devlin let three women inside, all in dresses and high heels, all carrying tote bags with brightly colored designs.

One of them, a tall, fortyish woman with salt-and-pepper hair, gunmetal rimmed glasses, skinny like a runner, said to Lucas, “I’m Ann Wright with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We need to speak privately for a moment.”

“In the kitchen.”

One of the other women said, “Jill and I need a place to change. We’re not doing this in heels.”

Devlin pointed down the hall toward the bedrooms, but said, “Don’t go through the door on the left. There’s a chicken in there that already attacked Davenport and drew some blood.”

“Fuckin’ cockatoo,” said the old man.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

Lucas and Ann Wright went into the kitchen and shut the door behind them. Wright took a black spiral notebook and a pen out of her bag, opened it on the kitchen counter and said, “All right. We’ll begin the search as soon as Jill and Ivy change clothes. Tell me what happened here. Was there any resistance?”

Lucas filled her in on the entry, the old lady with the gun, the younger woman with the fingernails. Wright wrote it down in what appeared to be excellent shorthand.

“But she didn’t actually get to you? With her nails?”

“No, she fell on her dachshund.”

“Dachshund,” she said, and made a note. “Then . . .”

“There was this bird . . .” Lucas stepped to the kitchen counter and ripped a paper towel off a roll hung next to the sink, wiped through his hair and showed her the spots of blood. He told her about the attack.