John Sandford - Silken Prey

“Keep me up to date,” Lucas said.

Lucas called Quintana: “It’ll be late—I’ll probably come get you around nine or ten o’clock.”

Lucas needed something to eat. He called Weather to find out what the food situation was, and was told that the housekeeper was making her patented mac & cheese & pepperoni. “I’ll be there,” he said.

He was pulling his jacket on when Virgil Flowers called: “I was talking to Barney and he didn’t know what you were up to, but he said you might use my help. I’m down in Shakopee. I can either go home, or head your way.”

“My house,” Lucas said. “Helen’s making her mac and cheese and pepperoni.”

“What happened to that vegetarian thing you guys were doing?”

“Ah, that only lasted a month or two. Besides, pepperoni isn’t meat—it’s cheese made by pigs,” Lucas said. “Anyway, we’ll be going out later. I’ll tell you about it when you get there.”

He called Weather and told her that Flowers was coming to dinner, and she said, “We got plenty.”

Which was true: the mac and cheese and pepperoni usually went on for the best part of a week.

• • •

LUCAS GOT HOME, changed into jeans, a wool vest over a white dress shirt, and an Italian cotton sport coat, blue-black in color that would be excellent, he thought, for nighttime shoot-outs. It hadn’t yet been tested for that. When he got back downstairs, Flowers had come in, wearing a barn coat, jeans, and carrying a felt cowboy hat. His high-heeled cowboy boots made him an inch taller than Lucas.

“There better not be a fuckin’ horse in my driveway,” Lucas said.

A bit later, Lucas took a call from the BCA tech, who said they were set with Verizon, and they could give him a real-time location as soon as Lucas called the other phone, which, as it happened, also used Verizon. There’d been no calls on the phone for two days; the last call had been to Quintana’s number.

They all ate together at a long oblong dinner table, Flowers and Letty happily gabbing away—Flowers, a part-time writer with a developing reputation, had done a biographical piece about Letty that had been published in Vanity Fair , with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. They were all now dear friends, Annie and Letty and Virgie.

Leibovitz had taken a bunch of pictures of Lucas, too, but the magazine had used only one. Lucas thought it made him look like a midwestern prairie preacher from the nineteenth century. As for the friendship, he thought Letty and Virgie were getting a little too dear. The issue came up before dinner, and Weather told him he was losing it if he thought Flowers had untoward ideas about Letty.

“When it comes to being around women, I wouldn’t trust that guy further than I could spit a Norwegian rat,” Lucas had grumbled.

“Why? Because he reminds you so much of your younger self?” she’d asked.

“Maybe,” Lucas had said. “But not that much younger.”

“He’s not interested in Letty,” Weather had declared.

“Okay,” Lucas said. “How about in you?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she’d said, ostentatiously checking her hair in the mirror.

• • •

AFTER DINNER, Lucas and Virgil went to Lucas’s study, with Letty perching on a side chair, and Lucas briefed him about the situation. “Basically,” Flowers summed up, “we’ve got nothing, but if their phone’s GPS says that they’re in a certain spot, you think that’s good enough for a search and seizure.”

“I know it is, because there’s been another case just like it,” Lucas said. “It was in LA, but the federal court refused to order the evidence set aside.”

“And so this could prove that these two highly trained killers were involved with the porn, and we know for sure that they’ve got guns.”

“Uh-huh.”

Virgil thought about that and said, “Okay.”

They’d sat down to eat at seven, had finished with the food and talk at eight, and at eight-thirty, sitting in the den, Lucas took a call from Jenkins. “This is going to wind up sooner than I thought,” Jenkins said. “She finished talking, the TV is pulling out, now she’s going around mixing with the kids, but that’s not going to last long, once the TV is gone. I think we’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, and then it’s an hour back to her place.”

He said to Flowers, “Let’s go. Excuse me—I meant, ‘Saddle up.’”

“Yeah,” Virgil said, getting his hat.

“Don’t let him push you around,” Letty told Virgil. “That hat looks good on you. Not everybody could pull it off, but you can.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Flowers said, and he and Lucas were out the door.

They took Flowers’s truck, and as they backed out of the driveway, Lucas noticed that Flowers was smiling.

“What’s the shit-eating grin about?” Lucas asked.

“Ah, I love pimping you about Letty. And Weather, for that matter.”

“I don’t mind, as long as you keep your hands off Helen and that mac and cheese and pepperoni,” Lucas said.

• • •

JENKINS CALLED TO SAY that Taryn Grant’s caravan consisted of three cars. The first carried what appeared to be three lower-ranking campaign people, one of whom was probably the media liaison. The second car was a big American SUV, and carried Grant, a short, heavyset woman, and one of the bodyguards; from Lucas’s description, he thought it was probably Carver. The third car carried the other bodyguard, Dannon, and a thin woman who was apparently also security.

“Alice Green, ex–Secret Service,” Lucas said. “Where are you guys?”

“Shrake is out front, I’m a quarter mile back, with four cars between us.”

“Stay in touch,” Lucas said. “Let me know for sure when they hit 494.”

Quintana lived in Golden Valley, a first-ring suburb west of Minneapolis. He was standing on his front porch when Lucas and Virgil arrived. He got in the backseat, and Lucas introduced Flowers. Quintana said, “I appreciate the chance.”

“Like I said, it’s up to Minneapolis what they do about this,” Lucas said. “But you kinda blew it, Ray.”

“I know that,” Quintana said. “But tell me you don’t do a little off-the-record relationship stuff. I thought Tubbs might be something for me: a guy to know.”

“I understand that,” Lucas said. “I don’t buy all that other stuff.”

“Ahhh . . .” Quintana shut up and looked out the side window.

After a couple minutes of silence, Virgil said to Lucas, “At least we know he’s not lying to us now.”

“How’s that?” Lucas asked.

“His lips aren’t moving.”

Quintana began laughing in the backseat, and then Lucas and Virgil started.

• • •

THEY PULLED INTO a mostly empty strip mall parking lot a mile from Grant’s house. The streets were good between the mall and her house, and they could be there in a couple of minutes. They talked about Tubbs and Roman, but not about Quintana’s problem.

“I wish that motherfucker Tubbs wasn’t dead,” Quintana said. “Then I could kill him myself.”

Lucas asked Flowers how his most recent romance had been going.

“I think it’s gone,” Flowers said. “We’re apparently friends, now.”

“That’s not necessarily the kiss of death,” Quintana said from the backseat, and they talked about that for a while.

Jenkins called when the caravan got off I-94 and headed south on I-494, and then when it got off I-494 and headed west. Lucas called the tech and said, “I’m making the call.”

And at that moment, as he hung up on the tech and prepared to call the unknown phone, another call from Jenkins came in. “Man, we got a problem. We got a problem.”

“What?”

“I got a cop car on my ass, and so does Shrake. The caravan has pulled over ahead of us. Shit! They made us. I gotta talk to this cop.”