John Sandford - Silken Prey

“He could be dead,” Lucas said.

“That would take balls the size of the Goodyear blimp,” Del said.

“I might have put Carver in the shit,” Lucas said. “I was trying to drive a wedge between them, but what if he said something, or made some kind of threat, and they decided they needed to get rid of him immediately? What if he tried to blackmail them? What if he gave them a deadline?”

“Then . . .” Del said.

Lucas said, “Let’s go back to my car.”

“You’re going after them?”

“We’re both going,” Lucas said. “We don’t need to track Green. But if Dannon killed Carver, he’s going to dump him. We need to be there—we need everybody to be there.”

“I could drive,” Del said.

“They’re too far ahead of us,” Lucas said. “I need to drive.”

“Goddamnit. I hate it when you drive,” Del said. “I get so puckered up that I’ve got to pull my asshole back out with a nut pick.”

“Thanks for the image,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 26

They left Del’s car in the garage and took off in Lucas’s Lexus, lights and siren, Lucas turning the corner and busting the red light and then off through traffic to I-94, Del braced against collision, hanging on to his seat-belt strap with one hand, the other hand braced against the dashboard.

“Ask them where Dannon is at,” Lucas said, as they rolled onto the interstate.

Del got on the handset, and Shrake came back with a mileage marker and Del said, “They’ve got seventeen miles on us.”

“But they’re going fifty-five and we’re going ninety-five.” Lucas did some math in his head and said, “We’ll be catching up two-thirds of a mile every minute, so we’ll catch them in more or less twenty-five minutes. That’s not fast enough.”

He dropped the hammer and the big Lexus groaned as it edged past a hundred miles an hour, then to a hundred and five.

“How do you do that?” Del asked.

“Do what?”

“That math?”

“The same way you would have done it, if you’d had nuns beating fractions into your head in third, fourth, and fifth grades,” Lucas said.

“How fast will it take us to catch them at a hundred and five?”

“Uh, about . . . five-sixths of a mile every minute . . . we’re about sixteen miles behind them now . . . you take sixteen divided by five and multiplied by six . . . about nineteen and one-fifth minutes . . . more or less.”

“How do you know it’s five-sixths of a mile every minute?”

“Because sixty miles an hour is a mile a minute. We’re going fifty miles an hour faster than they are, and that’s five-sixths of sixty . . . so we catch up five-sixths of a mile every minute.”

“Well, hell, even I could do that.”

“Yeah, if you knew how.”

• • •

JENKINS CALLED. “There’s one guy in the truck. I came up fast with my high lights on and illuminated the truck, then passed him in a hurry, like I was an asshole. There’s only one guy in the truck.”

Lucas took the handset from Del: “Get as far out in front of him as you have to, to lose his headlights. Then find a side road and dodge off on it, until he passes. Then get behind again. Where in the hell are Jane and Sarah?”

“Jane is a mile behind Shrake, and I’m right behind her,” Bradley said. “I’m going to start falling back in case she has to pass Dannon.”

Shrake said, “I’m gonna have to pass in the next couple of minutes. I’m coming up on him.”

Stack: “I’ll tell you what—he’s not going to Taryn Grant’s place. Not unless he’s taking the way-scenic route.”

• • •

THAT’S THE WAY IT went for sixteen minutes. At four minutes, Shrake had to pass. He also reported one person at the wheel, and that he was sure it was Dannon. Stack moved up until she was running a half-mile behind Dannon, and Jenkins, coming off a side road, fell in behind Stack and ahead of Bradley. Bradley passed him, so that Jenkins could hang back longer. By then they were well up I-94, running parallel to the Mississippi River.

At sixteen minutes, Jenkins called to say that he could see Lucas’s flashers. Lucas turned off the lights and eased off the gas. They passed Monticello, the city lights spreading off to the right, toward the Mississippi, and then plunged back into the dark. Five minutes later, he came up behind Jenkins and dropped his speed to fifty-five. They ran like that for another fifteen minutes, and as Stack was coming up on Dannon, she called and said, “I think he’s getting off at the exit. . . . He’s getting off. I’m going straight.”

Lucas: “Jenkins, pull off and kill your lights. Sarah, keep going behind Jane, turn around as soon as you can.”

As Jenkins moved to the shoulder, Lucas pulled over behind him, then fished an iPad out of the seat pocket behind Del.

Jenkins, looking at the GPS tracker, called: “He’s gone right, he’s headed down toward the river.”

Lucas thought, Perfect graveyard. He called back, “Wait one,” brought the iPad up, went to Google Earth, got a satellite view of the area and said, “There’s no bridge down there. It’s not a dead end, just a bunch of back roads.”

Jenkins: “Let’s go to the top of the overpass.”

“Go,” Lucas said, and they waited until a couple of cars passed, then ran dark to the overpass and up the exit ramp, and pulled off at the top. In the distance, probably a mile away, they could still see Dannon’s taillights. He seemed to be moving slowly, tentatively. Lucas went back to Google Earth, pulled up a measuring stick. He hopped out of the Lexus and carried the iPad to Jenkins’s car, and stood by the driver’s-side window.

“He’s about one-point-two miles in,” Jenkins said, looking at the monitor for the GPS bug.

Lucas enlarged the satellite view, then stretched the measuring tape down the map. There was nothing on the map at 1.2 miles, but at 1.4, there was a minor track going off to the left, probably gravel or dirt, along the river.

They watched the monitor and the iPad, and at 1.4, the taillights disappeared, but they could see the faint streak of headlights, now running parallel to both the highway and the river. Two-tenths of a mile down the side road, Dannon stopped. Below them, on the highway, Shrake did an illegal U-turn across the interstate median, and came up the ramp; a minute later, he was followed by both Bradley and Stack.

When they were up, they got out of their cars and gathered around Lucas, who said, “We’re going to head down to that intersection. About one-point-four miles. No lights. When we’re there, we’ll go in on foot. He’s about two-tenths of a mile in, probably three or four hundred yards. I want Sarah and Jane to stay with the cars.”

“I want to go in,” Stack said.

And Bradley: “I do, too.”

“I don’t have time to argue,” Lucas said. “The fact is, we’ll be on foot, and you don’t have the shoes for it. If he sees us coming, he could come busting out of there in that truck, and we’ll be in trouble. We need somebody in the cars who can take him, if it comes to that. Jenkins, Shrake, Del, and I have all done this before, and we’ve all been in gunfights. You two haven’t. So, you stay with the cars. End of story. Let’s load up and go.”

• • •

THE TWO WOMEN WEREN’T happy about it, but they did it.

Jenkins had a pair of night-vision goggles, and the most experience with them. He’d lead. All six of the cops had LED flashlights, big 135-Lumen Streamlights. They all loaded up and started down the side road, running dark, except for taillights, following Jenkins.

The countryside was densely wooded, with breaks for the occasional farmstead and backwoods house; and with the clouds, black as a coal mine. Lucas could barely see the road in front of him, and took it slowly, at twenty miles an hour, watching Jenkins’s taillights, feeling for the right edge of the tarmac with his tires.