Wicked Prey (6 page)

“This is better,” Lucas said, peering through the camera’s viewfinder. “I’m looking pretty good here.”

“Your hair is way too combed,” Jackson said. “You gotta get some Brylcreem or something, get some hair spiked up. Wear jeans. And you gotta scuff them up—you’re way too neat.
Way
too neat. You gotta look like you slept in the jeans. Every time I see you in jeans . . . What do you do? Do you
dry-clean
your jeans?”

“No, I don’t dry-clean my jeans,” Lucas said.

“Then you iron them,” Jackson said.

“The housekeeper irons them, sometimes,” Lucas admitted.

“
Irons
your jeans?” He was appalled.

“Hey . . .”

“Sorry . . .”

“You’re sorta getting into this,” Lucas said.

“Well, you know, it’s interesting,” Jackson said. “Carol was right: you do sorta look like a conflict photographer. So: let me show you how to handle the camera. It’s like shooting on the range, very similar to a gun . . .”

Del called during the lecture, from the Middle East sandwich shop, and talking around a gyro, said, “They got a phone on the counter here, no long distance company, so they let anybody use it. They got no idea who called you, but they say they remembered one guy yelling into it, and Carol told me the guy who left the message was yelling, but this yelling guy was in a wheelchair.”

“That’s a relief,” Lucas said. He hung up and asked Jackson, “You got any lighter lenses? This lens is big as my dick.”

“You wish.”

3

JENKINS AND SHRAKE WERE CHIPPING golf balls at a cup in a corner of the atrium, using an old MacGregor eight iron that had been in the evidence room since sometime in the eighties. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, somebody had gotten tired of looking at it and had thrown it away, and Jenkins rescued it from a trash can.

When they hit the ball, it would go “chock,” and then “chink” if it hit the glass at all, or “tock” if it hit the wall’s baseboard.

Lucas watched for a minute, then said, “I need an assistant.”

Shrake, without looking up from the ball, said, “Take Jenkins. He’s a born assistant.” He chipped it and the ball clinked off the side of the glass.

“Take both of them,” said a dark-haired woman from the DNA lab. She was sitting at a table with a
New York Times
and an egg-salad sandwich. “That clinking sound is driving me crazy. It’s like water dripping on my forehead.”

Shrake said to Lucas, “I’ve got a date. If I go out with you, God only knows when we’ll get back. Jenkins ain’t doing shit.”

“Not entirely true,” Jenkins said.

Shrake said to Jenkins, “I’ll cancel your debt on this game, today’s game, if you go with him.”

Lucas asked Shrake, “You’re not still dating Shirley Knox?”

“Yeah, he is,” Jenkins said. “He’s in love.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes, Shrake, she’s in the Mafia,” Lucas said.

Shrake chipped again, but this time missed the cup entirely, and the ball tocked against the baseboard. “You made me jerk at the ball,” he said.

“Honest to God, it’s driving me nuts,” the woman said. “I can’t stand that sound.”

“She’s not in the Mafia,” Shrake said. “I asked her. She said no, she wasn’t, and I believe her.”

Lucas said to Jenkins, “He’s lost his grip. She’s in the fuckin’ Mafia.”

“His grip was never that good in the first place,” Jenkins said.

“Have you tried talking to him about it?” Lucas asked.

“I did. I says, ‘Shrake, the chick is in the Mafia,’ but then he says the woman could suck a golf ball through a water hose. So—how do I answer that?”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” the DNA woman said, “I heard that. Am I invisible or something?”

Jenkins turned to her and said, “Shut up.” Then to Shrake, “Cancel today’s debt and half of the rest and I’ll go with Davenport.”

“Done,” Shrake said, and Jenkins asked Lucas, “Where’re we going?”

“See some gun guys,” Lucas said.

“Thank God,” said the woman with the egg-salad sandwich.

THEY TOOK Jenkins’s new Ford CVPI, for which he’d had to get a special authorization from the head of the agency. “I can’t believe you bought another one of these things. It’s like riding in a Boston Whaler. You’d lose a drag race to a John Deere,” Lucas said.

“Not once I get this baby rolling,” Jenkins said, and, “You won’t see anybody doing moonshiner turns with one of those cheap-ass front-wheel drives. The tranny would be all over the street. This baby . . .” He patted the dashboard. “Which way we going?”

* * *

THE FIRST STOP was a shop on Arcade at East Seventh, a hole-in-the-wall with a hand-painted steel sign that said, “Terry’s Sports.” Inside the front window, behind a steel mesh screen, was a pump twelve-gauge shotgun with the butt cut down to a pistol grip.

“Seven-Eleven special,” Jenkins said, as they walked past it.

“I could never figure out why it’s a federal crime to saw the barrel off a shotgun, but it’s okay to cut off the butt,” Lucas said. “Same effect—you can carry it under your jacket.”

“Lawyers,” Jenkins said. “They make laws, they got no idea.”

* * *

THEY RATTLED THE DOOR and the owner buzzed them in; the shop smelled of cigarette smoke and gun-cleaning solvent. Terry was a nervous, dried-out man of fifty, the fingers of his right hand stained amber with nicotine. He nodded when they came in, recognized them as cops, and said, “Officers.”

“How much you want for the cop killer in the window?” Jenkins asked, getting the interview off on the right foot.

“Self-defense gun,” Terry said with a placating smile, showing teeth as yellow as his fingers. “Sell them mostly to women.”

“Right,” Lucas said. He took the photos of Justice Shafer and Brutus Cohn out of his pocket, unfolded them, with Cohn’s picture on top. “You seen this guy?”

Terry looked at the picture for a long five seconds, then shook his head. “Can’t say as I have.”

“How about this guy?” Lucas shuffled the papers, and put the Shafer head shot on top.

Terry looked at it for a couple of seconds, then an extra wrinkle appeared among the set on his forehead. “What’d he do?”

“Never mind that,” Jenkins said. “You seen him?”

“I did,” Terry admitted. “About a week ago. He was here maybe twenty minutes. I didn’t think he was gonna buy anything, and he didn’t.”

“Was he looking for anything in particular?” Lucas asked.

“He was looking for some .50-cal rounds in bronze,” Terry said. “I told him I could get it, good lathe-cut stuff. He asked how much, and I said, ‘Eighty bucks for ten rounds,’ and he said that was a little high. Then he looked at a Bushmaster M4, and went on his way. Haven’t seen him since.”

“Didn’t buy any ammo?” Lucas asked.

“Nope. Didn’t buy a thing,” Terry said.

Lucas said, “We’re local guys, and I gotta tell you, you’d be better off dealing with us if you’re not telling the truth. The Secret Service and the ATF are chasing all over looking for this guy. With the convention in town, I don’t have to tell you why. You don’t want to be the one who sold him some ammo and then get caught lying about it.”

“Didn’t sell him anything, with Jesus as my witness,” Terry said, holding up his right hand as though taking an oath. He looked satisfactorily worried.

Lucas nodded. “All right. Gonna have to talk to the ATF though, so you’ll probably be hearing from them. Maybe the Secret Service.”

“How much you want for the cop killer in the window?” Jenkins asked again.

“Six hundred dollars,” Terry said. “Lot of handwork in a self-defense gun. There
is
a police discount.”

* * *

OUT ON THE STREET, Jenkins said, “Ten percent. I’d almost be willing to do it, to get the piece off the streets, but the little cockroach would make another one.”

“First stop, and Justice Shafer is right there,” Lucas said. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“That happened to me one time,” Jenkins said. “One-stop shopping.”

“When did it happen to you?” Lucas asked.

“Well, it didn’t exactly happen to
me
, but it happened to a guy I knew,” Jenkins said.

“Never happened to me,” Lucas said.

Back in the car, he got on the phone to Dan Jacobs at the security committee. “I don’t want to yank your weenie when everybody else is, but I’ve got some news about your pal Justice Shafer.”

Lucas told him about Terry’s, and Jacobs said, “That’s pretty interesting. The Secret Service and the ATF are doing research on him, down in Oklahoma, and they’re getting worried. Some of these gang guys say Shafer’s never been accepted because he’s sort of a pussy—never proved himself.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I’ll call them with this. They’ll send a guy around to talk to . . . Terry?”

* * *

 

THEIR SECOND STOP was a two-man weapons outlet in a warehouse district in Eagan, south of the Twin Cities core, a concrete-block building filled with hunting knives, compound bows, crossbows, samurai and fantasy swords, a barrel half-full of Louisville Slugger baseball bats, a shelf of lead-weighted fish-whackers, and a rack of used guns; but mostly knives. To one side, a customer in camo cargo pants was methodically pounding a six-inch target with carbon-fiber arrows, on a four-lane archery range.

The two owners, who were brothers, named Jenkins—they agreed with Jenkins that they weren’t related—both checked the photographs, and swore they’d never seen either man. Lucas asked, “What’s the advantage of the crossbow over the compound bow?”

The customer, who was shooting a compound bow, said over his shoulder, “You don’t have to know nothing to shoot a crossbow.”

Jenkins asked one of the Jenkins brothers, “If I were to ask you where I could get a switchblade, you wouldn’t know, would you?”

The Jenkins brother looked puzzled: “Well, sure. Right here. What do you want?” He walked down the counter and tapped the top of a case. Inside, a half-dozen switchblades nestled on red velvet.

Jenkins was taken aback: “Switchblades are legal?”

“Well, sure, in Minnesota,” Jenkins said. “You can order them on the Internet.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jenkins said. “Is there a police discount?”

* * *

THE FOURTH AND FIFTH dealers hadn’t seen either Cohn or Shafer, but the sixth one, their last stop of the day, had seen Shafer. The dealer, Bob Harper, worked out of his house. “He said he’d heard of me down in Oklahoma, a boy named Dan Oaks outa Norman. He thought maybe I’d have some premium .50-cal, but I didn’t. Wouldn’t have sold it to him anyway.”

“Why not?” Lucas asked. He wrote “Dan Oaks” and “Norman” in his notebook.

Harper was a thin man gone old, but still hard, with shiny cheekbones and killer eyes, two dry wattles hanging under his chin. “’Cause I’m not stupid. Some skinhead from Oklahoma shows up on my doorstep looking for .50-cal, the week before the Republican convention? I don’t need
that
kind of publicity.”

* * *

IN THE CAR, Lucas called Jacobs again, gave him Harper’s name, and the name of the Oklahoma dealer. “I don’t know what Shafer’s doing, but he sure as hell isn’t hiding out,” Lucas said.

“Okay—hey, thanks for the time, Lucas. This has been a help. Could you keep spreading those photos around? We need to talk to this guy.”

“No problem.”

* * *

 

“ALL DONE?” Jenkins asked. He pushed the button on his new switchblade, and the blade jumped out and snapped into place.

“All done,” Lucas said. “You know, you’re gonna reach in your pocket for your cell phone and you’re gonna hit that button, and blade’s gonna jump out and cut your nuts off.”

“I’ll give it to Shrake,” Jenkins said. “If it cuts
his
nuts off, maybe he’ll stop dating Shirley.”

“We really ought to do something about that relationship,” Lucas said. “I mean, if he won’t give it up, maybe put a legal notice in the newspaper, so nobody could accuse us of covering it up.”

* * *

JENKINS DROPPED him at the office. Carol had gone home, and Lucas looked at all the paper that she’d printed out from New York, on Cohn, looked at Cohn’s picture for a while—this was a different personality than Justice Shafer; this was a serious guy—and then slipped it in a file and walked out to his car.

Great late summer day. He trolled once through St. Paul, looking at all the cops around, saw shoulder patches from Virginia and Illinois. Like a big storm coming in, he thought, everybody watchful and hoping for the best.

He got home, kissed Sam, kissed Letty, kissed Weather, got a banana from the housekeeper, and Weather asked, “Whatever happened to the assassin?”

He told her about his day, and she said, “Well, you’re done with that, anyway. One less thing to worry about.”

CRUZ AND COHN SPENT Saturday morning cruising the Lyman High Hat, a boutique hotel on Loring Park in Minneapolis, a place that featured forty-dollar cheeseburgers and fifty-dollar-a-glass house champagne.