RANDY WHITCOMB, strapped into the back of the van, with Juliet Briar at the wheel, Ranch sitting in a fog layer in the passenger seat, rolled past Lucas Davenport’s house every few minutes, until they saw the girl getting out of a private car. She waved at the driver and headed up the driveway to Davenport’s house. She was a rangy blond teenager, dressed conservatively in dark slacks, a white blouse, and sandals.
“Maybe a babysitter,” Ranch said.
“She’s got a key,” Briar pointed out. “They don’t give keys to babysitters.”
“Then it’s gotta be his daughter,” Whitcomb said. “Too young for him to be fuckin’. Daughter’d be good.”
“Never done anything to us,” Juliet said, doubtfully.
“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.
2
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 rangefinder, 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.”
“Then I’d be worried, if I were Dan Jacobs,” she said.
“Yeah . . . The ATF guys are out looking for him, and probably the Secret Service,” Lucas said. “They want me to call our Wisconsin contacts, and people around the metro, see if we can spot him. I’ll make some calls tonight, get some deputies looking around.”
“Good luck with that,” she said. The longer they’d lived together, the more skeptical she’d become of the concept of sharp-eyed cops picking the bad guys out of a crowd. She’d moved toward Lucas’s view, as regarded cops and robbers: it was all chaos, accident, stupidity, insanity, and coincidence.
He’d cited as evidence the case of the doper who’d gotten out of Stillwater prison on Wednesday, who’d promptly gotten drunk with his release money, had fallen asleep at midnight in a filling station parking lot, had woken at three o’clock in the morning, out of money, only to spot the Coke machine right there, with a brick sitting next to it, had smashed open the machine with the brick, and was still scooping up the coins when the cops arrived. On Friday, he was back in Stillwater for the remaining three years of his original term.
Yowza.
They crossed the St. Croix River into Minnesota, and twenty-five minutes later, were home. There were lights all over the house, and from the garage, they could hear Letty, their ward, shrieking with laughter. Inside, they found Letty and Sam playing a kind of volleyball using a sponge batted over a string.
Sam quit the moment he saw Weather and Lucas, and Letty called, “Quitter,” which he understood, and he said, “No-no-no-no,” one of his few dozen words, and ran to Weather.
Perfect, Lucas thought. Just perfect. The kid was obviously brilliant, as well as athletically gifted, and probably the best-looking toddler in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. And Letty was growing up into something interesting. Her mother had been murdered in a case broken by Lucas; and he’d been so taken with the child that he’d brought her home to Weather.
Now she was growing up, and Lucas and Weather were back in court, with her consent, to formally adopt her, to make her Letty Davenport. She feigned nonchalance, but once or twice a week, she’d ask, “So, how’s things with the court?”
LUCAS BROUGHT IN a fabric cooler full of beer with a slab of wall-eye fillets—the only cooler he’d found that would fit in the Porsche—and Weather’s overnight case. He gave Letty a hug, Sam a head-rub, got a piece of blueberry pie from Ellen, and went off to the den and brought up the computer.
The file on Justice Shafer was sitting in the e-mail at his office, at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He pulled it out, opened it, and read it as he ate the pie.
Shafer was one of the border-states bad boys who looked like an antique photo of Cole Younger or Jesse James: hair like straw, freckles, pale eyes, bones in his face; like he hadn’t had enough to eat as a kid, like he’d never had baby fat. In the photograph, he was standing next to the back of a pickup truck, a pump .22 in his hands, a pile of dead squirrels on the tailgate. His tongue was tucked in one corner of his mouth, the tip protruding, and it made him look both stupid and crazy, the kind of guy who couldn’t keep his tongue out of the cold.
His file was full of the small detail that spelled trouble: never made it out of high school; juvenile record for theft; failed the psychological tests for both the marines and the army. Might have robbed a couple of gas stations, but hadn’t gotten caught at it. Hung out with the Clan, a mid-continent neo-Nazi motorcycle club that mostly got in fights with other neo-Nazi groups and Chicano gangs.
All right. Lucas did some editing on the file, then called the duty man at the BCA and told him to circulate the file to sheriffs’ departments in Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
Kicked back, and thought about the Republican convention.
In the months leading up to the main event, the nomination of John McCain for the presidency, he’d argued that the Twin Cities weren’t prepared to deal with it. He’d made the argument hard enough, and loud enough—he had excellent contacts with the local TV stations and the two major newspapers—that the local agencies finally got some intelligence work under way, and contracted with police agencies around the country to bring in more cops. In doing that, he’d made himself unpopular enough that he’d been disinvited from the party.
Well, what the hell. He didn’t want to go anyway.
Glanced at his watch, called a pal in the Ramsey County sheriff’s office. “Surprised you’re home,” he said, when the guy came up. “I thought you’d be out violating the rights of the protesters.”
“I would be, but my kid’s leaving for Madison this weekend. I’m packing a trailer,” the guy said.
“Not bad,” Lucas said. “I always liked that place. When I was at the U, we’d go down there and try to get laid.”
“Glad to hear that, since it’s my daughter I’m taking down,” the guy said.
Oops. “Mmm. Anyway, you got things under control?”
“I think so. We’re going out tomorrow night, hit some of the assholes,” the guy said. “Preempt them. They think they’re hiding in Minneapolis, but we’ve got a couple of guys with them.”
“Ah, jeez . . .”
“You’re welcome to come along and watch.”
Lucas was tempted, but it would be a bit humiliating, standing there, rubbernecking, while the other guys got the action. “Ah, you know. I pissed off too many people. But . . . glad to know you got it covered.”
They talked a few more minutes, then he went out and hung with Letty and Sam, and started an Alan Furst novel, and eventually went to bed and slept the sleep of the righteous.
FRIDAY MORNING, another gorgeous day, driving north up Cretin Avenue.
Anti-Semites were milling around the corner at Summit Avenue, with signs about Palestine; on up to I-94, then blowing the doors off the chain of Camrys and Priuses as he merged into traffic. Made him smile, made him feel happy, as though there were possibilities in the world. He hustled across town, up I-35E, off on Maryland, down the road to the headquarters of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension . . . past the filling station where a madwoman once tried to shoot him to death.
He parked in the BCA lot and walked up to his office, peeling off his jacket to show the .45 he carried under his armpit. Pulled off the shoulder rig, stuck the whole apparatus in a file cabinet. His secretary, Carol, trailed him into his office.
“You’ve got a call, sounds like it might be important,” she said.
“The security committee? I got that . . .”
Carol looked at a piece of paper. “From New York. You know a woman named Lily Rothenburg? Says she’s a captain with the NYPD?”
“Absolutely,” Lucas said.
“She wants you to give her a call,” Carol said. “She says it’s semi-urgent.”
“Ring her up and transfer it in,” Lucas said. “Dig up a phone number for Dan Coates over in Wisconsin—it’s the Special Assignments Bureau in their Justice Department. I need to talk to him right after Lily.”
“Gotcha.” She hesitated in the doorway. “One more thing. You got a nut call: the guy says, ‘Is this Davenport’s office?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘Tell that motherfucker that I’m coming for him.’”
Lucas laughed: “Did he say who it was?”
> “There was a caller ID. Do you know an Achmed Mansoor?”
Lucas shook his head. “Nope. Did he say anything about Allah?”
“No . . . and this guy sounded like an American. Ghetto accent. I did a reverse directory and came up with a Middle Eastern sandwich shop in Dinkytown.”
“Gimme the address: I’ll look into it.”
DEL CAPSLOCK had come through the door while they were talking, and said to Carol, “You sweet thing.”
Carol, feigning propriety: “How’s the pregnant wife?”
“She’s fine. She’s great,” Del said. “She looks like a goddamn rosebud. Doc says she’s starting to dilate, but she’s still a while out. She’s got me running around like a Shriner parade.”
Lucas asked, “Do they still have those?”
“They must, somewhere,” Del said. “They still got Shriners.” He eased into one of the visitors’ chairs and put his boots on Lucas’s desktop. “So what’s this about a sandwich shop in Dinkytown?”
Carol explained and Del said, “I’ll go over and have a chat with the guy.”
“I’m not doing much,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but you go walking in the door, maybe he pulls out a shotgun and kills you,” Del said. “Me, he doesn’t know from Adam.”
“As far as you know.”
“Whatever.” Del yawned then added, “I never heard of a cop getting killed by somebody who called ahead.”
“Probably happened somewhere,” Lucas said.
“Everything’s happened somewhere.”
DEL WAS A battered man in his late forties, in jeans and a Pennzoil T-shirt with grease spots on it, rough-side-out Red Wing work boots, and an old, unfashionable nylon fanny pack, worn in front. He had a cell-phone-sized digital camera hung on a string around his neck and a .38 revolver in the fanny pack. He’d been working the streets around the convention center.
“So what’s happening?” Lucas asked.
“Ah, you know: kids and old people. There are some assholes out there, but most of them are hobbyists. They seem like my mom . . . you know, old. They’ve got these recycled chants from the sixties. ‘Hey, hey, John McCain, how many children have you slain?’ Like that.”