Broken Prey

12

Rochester was a good-sized city, built around a colony of doctors and wealthy patients, and probably had the highest per-capita income of any big city in the state. The money showed up in the government center, a modern red-brick, concrete, and glass building that sat on the Zumbro River a couple of blocks from the Mayo Clinic.

Twenty-nine sheriffs and police chiefs, or their alternates, along with a half dozen highway patrolmen, game wardens, and parole officers, got together in the boardroom, where the city council and county board met. Of the thirty-five, thirty were middle-aged men, most a little too heavy and going gray. The other five were women, all five tightly coifed and suited.

Lucas had talked to the Rochester chief about Bird; he would make arrangements for a formal statement. Then Lucas started the pitch to the gathered cops: “We know he’s down here someplace. You’ve all seen this morning’s Star-Tribune-he’s going to do it again. He’s probably already picked out somebody, and he’s stalking her. Or him. We’re looking for another guy from St. John’s named Mike West. We’re trying to keep this under our hats. .”

They had questions, but Lucas had few answers: “Honest to God, we really don’t know what he’s doing, or how he’s hiding. There’s been a parole-violation bulletin out on him for a month, and we’ve got nothing. He’s buried himself someplace. We need to pry him out of his hole.”

He told them about the white Olds. They all made a note. One guy held up a hand: “A new white Olds. . they stopped building Oldsmobiles. .”

“I know.”

“We should be able to track every one of them,” the guy suggested.

“We’re doing that,” Lucas said. “The woman who gave us that information is elderly, really elderly, and we’re not absolutely sure of its quality.”

“You’re not sure how he’s armed?”

“No, but he says he is, he says he got some guns, and we believe him,” Lucas said. “Rice was in pretty good shape. We don’t think Pope would have taken him bare-handed. The medical examiner says all of the damage to Rice’s body was inflicted either with the whip or a blade. He didn’t show any signs of being beaten, or having been in a struggle before he was tied up. So there was probably a gun. If one of your guys even gets a whiff of Pope, he better be wearing a vest.”

“Pretty goodamn hot out in the countryside right now,” one of the cops said.

“Better hot than dead,” somebody else said.

Another hand: “Where’d he get the guns?”

“Same place he got the Olds,” Lucas said. “We don’t know.”

“We know he was in Rochester last night?”

“Three blocks from here,” Lucas said. He gestured out the window at his back. “Right across the river.”

And it went on for a while.

When they broke up, Sloan came over and said, “I’m feeling like shit, man. Bobby Anderson from Scott County’s here. He said he’d give me a ride back home, if you’re gonna go see Marcia Pope.”

Lucas nodded: “You look bad. I can’t believe the Marcia Pope thing is going anywhere, anyway. The Austin cops already talked to her twice.”

Sloan took off, and Lucas, back in the truck, headed south toward the Iowa border, and the city of Austin.

Marcia Pope lived in a shingle-sided cottage on a tree-shaded street on the edge of Austin, in a subdivision built by meatpackers. The house was technically white, but probably hadn’t been painted in forty years; the siding was grooved with dirt and mold, the ragged grass had only been fitfully mown, the narrow sidewalk leading to the front door was cracked and twisted.

Lucas pulled into the gravel patch that served as a driveway, and as he got out of the car, saw the curtains twitch. Until that moment, it hadn’t really occurred to him that Charlie Pope might be inside. Could Charlie be stupid enough to hide out at his mother’s? And here was Lucas going to the front door, no protective vest, his pistol tucked in a spot that might be a half second too slow, his mind working on other errands.

He slowed, scratched his face, miming a man who’d forgotten something, went back to the truck, pulled his gun out, and tucked it into his side pants pocket. The front sight had been smoothed to prevent hangups, and he kept the hammer and trigger assembly hanging out so his hand would fall on them.

Which wouldn’t do him a lot of good, he thought, as he started back up the sidewalk, if Charlie was waiting behind the door with a shotgun stoked with double-ought buckshot. . He saw the curtain twitch again and thought, Why would he wait until I got to the door?

Good thought. But nothing happened on the way up, and at the door he stepped to one side and rang the bell. A few seconds passed, and he rang it again; then the door jerked open an inch or two, and a woman asked, “Whattaya want?”

He felt like a Fuller Brush salesman, but put on his official cop voice: “Mrs. Marcia Pope?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m Lucas Davenport with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held up his ID with his left hand. “We’re looking for your son, Charlie. Is he here?”

“No, he’s not here. I haven’t seen him in more’n a month. I don’t know where he is. I’ve already talked to the Austin police.”

All he could see was one eye, a hank of steel gray hair, and the end of a short, pointed nose. “I need to interview you. Open up.”

“You got a warrant?” The door opened two more inches, the better to argue.

“No, but I could get one. Then we’d come back, put handcuffs on you so all the neighbors could enjoy themselves, and take you to police headquarters to talk.”

Silence, three seconds, five seconds. “You’re not going to take me if I talk to you now?”

“Not if you tell me the truth,” Lucas said. “Charlie’s not here?”

The door opened wide enough that he could see her. She was a small, hatchet-faced woman wearing black slacks and a blue blouse that looked like a uniform from a chain restaurant. “I ain’t seen that boy since the Fourth of July. He came down on the bus to see the fireworks. He always loved them.”

Lucas nodded: “Can I come in?”

“The house is a mess,” she said reluctantly. “I’ve been working all the time. .”

But she backed up and he stepped inside.

She had a TV, a beat-up couch, a green La-Z-Boy, and a couple of end tables in the living room. Everything was stacked with magazines and tabloid newspapers; even more paper was stacked against the walls; decades of Us and People. The room smelled of fried meat and Heinz 57 Sauce.

Pope seemed to be looking for a place for Lucas to sit, but he said, “Never mind, I’m okay. .” He eased toward the kitchen: more magazines, but no sound, or feel, or anything that indicated another person around. They stood facing each other and Lucas pushed her for names of friends, anything that might point to where Pope had gone.

“He had to have friends from high school. .”

“He wasn’t in high school that long. There was one boy, in grade school, but he drownded.”

In the end, it seemed that she’d hardly known her child. When he was twelve, she said, he started skipping school. She didn’t know where he spent his days; he simply went somewhere and hid. The school authorities hunted him down at the end of every summer, but as soon as his enrollment was counted for the state aid, they let him go. He was a pain in the ass, and always had been.

The high point of his teen years had come when he’d crashed his bike, hitting his head on a curb.

“They thought he was gonna die, but he didn’t; goddamn brains almost squirted out his ear,” his mother said.

In eleventh grade, Charlie Pope stopped pretending. He quit school, got a job at a McDonald’s, was fired. “Never washed his hands after the bathroom, they said.” He did some more time at a Burger King, was fired again, and then did whatever kind of pickup work he could get, lived however he could, Marcia said.

“His old man took off thirty years ago. Nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing. He was a worthless piece of shit anyhow, but I didn’t know that when I took up with him,” Marcia said. “I was just a girl.”

“So there’s nobody-nobody ever talked to Charlie.”

She looked away from him for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. Then, “You know, there was them brothers from over by Hill. He was talking about them on the Fourth, maybe they’d have a summer job for him. He didn’t like hauling garbage. . What was their name? I can’t think. .”

“What about them?”

“They’re farmers. They got these big gardens, Charlie says. They live in the country somewhere by Hill, they sell tomatoes and corn and cukes and stuff down on the highway somewhere,” she said. “One of them vegetable stands. They use to hire Charlie to work in the gardens. . you know, pickin’ shit and pulling weeds and they had one of those machines, like a lawnmower, but it plows. .”

“A tiller?”

“That’s it. They taught him how to run it and he’d help with the gardens. He did that for a couple of summers. He liked it.”

A little tingle: “This was where? By Hill? That’s a town?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. Hill.”

“You don’t know their names?”

“No. . I mean I used to. I seen one of the boys, once, he had one of those things on his face and neck, a raspberry thing, I think they call them? Or a strawberry thing? One of those like birthmarks, great big one on the side of his face. .”

“A port-wine mark?”

She snapped her fingers: “That’s it. A port-wine stain. Right on the side of his face.”

He pushed her, but that was all she had. He left a card with her and said, “I need to tell you two things,” he said. He crowded her a little, let her feel the authority. “If Charlie gets in touch, you call us. He’s dangerous, and he’s dangerous to you. He’s completely run off the rails this time. You understand?”

“Yup. I’ll call you, don’t you worry.” But her eyes slid away from his.

He got right back in her face. “You better, or you’ll go inside with him, Mrs. Pope. You wouldn’t like the women’s prison. We’re talking the worst kind of murder, now, and if you help him, you’ll be an accomplice. So you call.”

“I will.” She looked at the card this time.

“Second, you don’t talk to anybody about what you told me,” Lucas said. “I need to go look up these garden guys, and we don’t want anybody to know we’re coming. So you just keep your mouth shut, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m not fooling, Mrs. Pope. You mess with us on this, we’ll put your ass in jail.”

Lucas found Hill in his Minnesota atlas; more a crossroads than a town. The map showed two streets where a creek crossed a county road; the place might have a bar, maybe a gas pump. Still in Mower County, northwest of Austin. The sheriff had been at the meeting that morning. .

Lucas headed east out of town, on his cell phone as he drove. The sheriff was still in his car somewhere, and the Mower County dispatcher wouldn’t give Lucas his phone number. “Then give him mine, call him and tell him to call me back,” Lucas said.

Larry Ball got back five minutes later. Lucas could hear noise in the background, music and voices. The Rochester Mall?

“I just talked to Marcia Pope,” Lucas told him. “There are a couple of guys just outside of Austin who hired Charlie Pope to work their gardens. They’re truck gardeners, out by a place called Hill. You know a couple of brothers, one’s got a port-wine mark on his face?”

“Huh. Yeah, I sorta know the guy. Don’t know his name, but I talked to him once when I was campaigning. He was working at a roadside stand, mmm, I think where I-Ninety crosses Highway Sixteen near Dexter.”

“Dexter. I saw that on my map.”

“Yeah, listen, I’ll tell you who’d know, is Bob Youngie,” Ball said. “He’s one of my deputies. He’s working, I’ll call him, and have him call you right back.”

Lucas could see the interstate up ahead. He was fairly sure he should go east but wasn’t positive, so he pulled off to the side of the road, waiting. Youngie called a minute later. He had a gravelly voice, a whisky voice, and sounded like an older guy. “You’re looking for the Martin brothers, Gerald and Jerome,” he said, when Lucas answered the cell-phone call. “You going out there now?”

“Yeah. I’m just coming up on Ninety-four.”

“You want to go east, to Exit One Ninety-three. I’m in my car now, I’m a little closer, so you’ll see me when you come off. I’m calling another car, he’ll be a couple minutes behind you. He’s just leaving town.”

“The Martins. . they’re trouble?”

“No, I couldn’t say that,” Youngie said. “They stay to themselves, they don’t like having people on their land. They’ve run some hunters off, and we’ve had to warn them about carrying guns when they do it. And they got dogs. I think it’s best if a couple of us came along.”

“The sheriff told you what we’re doing?” Lucas asked.

“Yup. That’s another reason.”

“Glad to have you,” Lucas said.

Youngie was as tall as Lucas, maybe sixty, gray haired with a Marlboro-man mustache. He was leaning on the front fender of his car, smoking a cigarette, when Lucas came off the interstate and pulled in behind him.

“Nice truck,” he said, when Lucas got out. Youngie had cool blue eyes like Lucas’s own, and they seemed slightly amused.

“I got it for the Magic Fingers seats,” Lucas said, looking back at the blue Lexus. “Keeps you company on the long hauls.”

Youngie glanced at the truck, biting just for a second, then back at Lucas, amused again. “You gonna catch Charlie?”

“Yeah. Or else kill him.”

“I heard that about you,” Youngie said. “The or-else part.”

“Just the job I had,” Lucas said.

“I hear you.” Youngie put out his hand and Lucas shook. Youngie’s hand was like a wood file. “Here come the kids. .”

Another sheriff’s car was coming off the interstate. Lucas could see two cops inside. “The kids?”

“They got three, four years between them,” Youngie said. “I’ll have them come in last.”

“You really think. .?”

“If we ain’t ready, why’re we going out there at all?”

“That’s a point,” Lucas said.

Youngie briefed the two young cops on the visit to the Martin farm. He would lead the way in, Lucas would follow, and the kids would come in and block and watch. “If there’s trouble, you call in first, help us later,” Youngie told them.

One of the kids, who was trying to hide premature baldness by shaving his head, hitched up his pistol: “We’re cool,” he said.

The Martin place was an aging farmhouse that sat foursquare at the top of a hill. A gravel driveway, badly humped in the middle, led up the hill to the side of the house and then behind it. Halfway up the driveway, a barn emerged from the umbra of the house.

The house was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century structure of two stories, gray shingles on the top, with twin dormers over a front porch. The porch had space for a swing, but no swing. The house, barn, and lawn were on a quarter section, a hundred and sixty acres, a square a half mile on a side.

To the left of the house was a cornfield; to the right, at the bottom of the hill, was an untended apple orchard, with knee-deep weeds growing up around a few dozen old apple trees, all crabbed over like aging crones. Farther up the hill, beyond the apple orchard and to the right of the drive, was a fallow field, deep in weeds. It had, in the not-too-distant past, been cultivated; Lucas could see the tangled yellow dead vines in what was once a squash or pumpkin patch.

Lucas pushed the Lexus up through the cloud of dust thrown up by Youngie’s car. As they topped the hill, coming up to the space between the house and the barn, Youngie suddenly juked left.

Lucas went right and hit the brake and saw what Youngie had seen a half second sooner: three men had burst from the barn and were running toward the cornfield. A second later, a fourth man ran out of the farmhouse, headed down the hill, then slanted toward the cornfield like the others. One of the first three was oversized, and not fast.

Pope, Lucas thought, and then he was out of the car and running.

“Was that Pope?” Youngie shouted. He had his hand on his pistol.

“I think so,” Lucas yelled back. “Get some help in here.”

He was fifty yards from the cornfield and could see cornstalks rippling in front of the running men. Youngie was shouting something at him, but he kept going, trying to sort it out as he ran. The big guy had gone right, and Lucas plunged into the field after him.

And was blinded.

Though the tops of the cornstalks were only a few inches higher than his eyes, the field might as well have been a rain forest. He stopped, listened, ran after the thrashing sound to his right. The other two men, he thought, had gone straight in, but Pope had been curling away, as though he had a destination in mind, as though he weren’t simply trying to hide.

Lucas had his gun out now, jacked a shell into the chamber, locked the safety down: cocked and locked and a quick click from action. Farmhouses had guns, so Pope might have one. He couldn’t see, the corn leaves were whipping him in the face; and it was hot in the field, stifling, and the leaves were sharp edged, cutting at him. What the hell had Youngie yelled? He knew what it was, but. .

Meth lab.

That’s what he’d said; and Lucas remembered the smell now, the sharp tang that might have been hog urine but wasn’t. The Martins were making methamphetamine, which would probably explain their preference for privacy. .

Stopped: listened. Heard nothing. Pope might also have stopped, trying to pick out Lucas running after him. Lucas squatted, listening for footfalls, peering down the rows at knee-high level. He’d been in cornfield chases a couple of times, once as a uniformed cop, doing just what Youngie had the kids doing now, blocking, and once as a detective. You couldn’t see anything at eye level; too many leaves, but there was a cleared space from waist level on down, especially when the farmer used a weed suppressant.

Lucas crawled across rows, looking down them; and then heard the sound of a man running away, still farther to the right. Lucas ran in that direction, then jumped, got above the level of the corn for just a half second, jumped again, saw what he thought was movement, and went that way. .

And was hit in the face.

The blow came without any warning and pitched him across two rows of corn and down on his stomach. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but the other guy was right there, and Lucas got the impression of size and red socks and heavy boots and thought one thing:

hold on to the gun, hold on to the gun.

He rolled, unsure of whether he’d been shot or punched, his face on fire, blood on his hands, and he saw legs and felt another blow on his thigh. He was losing it, he thought, and he dropped the safety on the.45 and pulled the trigger, blindly, hoping to freeze the other man just for a second, just long enough to get a break.

And it worked; the other man lurched away with the explosion and Lucas caught sight of his lower body ten feet away, turned, and screamed, “I’ll fuckin’ kill you, stop. .”

The other man ran and Lucas rolled and fired a second shot, at knee level, missed, but the other man suddenly stopped and shouted, “I quit. I quit. Don’t shoot.”

Lucas was on his feet now, blood streaming out of his nose and onto his shirt and suit; pain surged through his face and down his neck.

“Get the fuck over here,” he told the big man. “Get the fuck over here and get down on your fuckin’ knees, get down on your fuckin’ knees. .”

And he heard Youngie, some distance away. “Davenport, Davenport. .”

“Over here, over here. .”

The other man was down on his knees, his back toward Lucas, his hands webbed behind his head. He’d done this before.

“Look at me, Charlie,” Lucas said.

“Look at you, who?” the other man said. He was overweight and blockheaded and going bald and thick through the shoulders and arms, like a bench-press freak. He turned just his head. “Who the fuck is Charlie?”

Lucas, still bleeding, held the man as he heard Youngie thrashing up through the field. “This way,” he shouted.

Youngie pushed through the corn, pistol pointed at the sky, looked wide-eyed at Lucas and the kneeling man. “What happened? You shot?”

“Naw, he hit me in the nose. Goddamn it, it hurts. It’s busted. Could you put some cuffs on this asshole? I’m leaking all over my suit.”

They got the big guy on his feet and his hands cuffed, and Lucas put the.45 away, the stock all sticky with his blood. The guy’s wallet was chained to his belt, and Youngie jerked it off the chain, flipped it open, looked at the driver’s license. “Bobby Clanton, Albert Lea.”

“I want a lawyer,” Clanton said.

“Fuck you,” said Lucas. He shoved Clanton in the direction of the barn. “Walk.” To emphasize the order, he kicked Clanton in the ass, and Clanton stumbled and almost went down.

“You need a doctor,” Youngie said to Lucas.

“Yeah, yeah. They’re gonna push a goddamn stick up my nose and that’s gonna hurt worse than it does now. .” He kicked Clanton in the ass again.

Youngie had sent the two young cops after the fourth man, and had called in a half dozen more on-duty deputies. “We’ll get more in here as soon as I can find the people,” he said. ‘I’m hoping the other two will hunker down in that field long enough that we can get some guys spotting the roads. If they get out of the field, they’ll be hard to track. They can be five miles away in an hour, if they can run.”

“Where’s the lab? You said meth lab?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, I could smell it, but I didn’t look. The barn, I think. We’ve had a rash of them.”

“Manufacture of a controlled substance, resisting arrest, assault on a cop. I bet we can get Bobby fifteen years in Stillwater, if he doesn’t have any priors. If he’s got priors, then, whoops, I guess it’s gonna be bye-bye,” Lucas said. He kicked Clanton in the ass a third time.

Clanton staggered, caught himself, looked at Youngie, “You always torture your suspects?”

“Fuck you,” Youngie said, but when Clanton was turned back toward the barn, he looked at Lucas and shook his head: no more ass kicking. Lucas nodded, touched the side of his nose. Everything felt solid, but there was an arcing pain when he pushed left to right, familiar from his hockey and uniform days. Maybe not busted, but cracked. He was still bleeding, bubbling blood, spitting, wiping his chin.

When they got back to the farmyard, they put Clanton facedown on a patch of grass and then Youngie said, “Got another one.” Down the hill, the two young cops were marching the fourth man out of the cornfield. Then another sheriff’s car, leaving a plume of gravel dust behind it, turned in at the drive and Youngie said, “Keep an eye on Bobby; I’ll put these guys on the road.”

Lucas sat on the grass next to Clanton and tipped his head back, sniffing against the leaking blood. “You better talk to us, Bobby,” he said. Blood trickled into his mouth and he spit again. Clanton didn’t reply.

Lucas dabbed at his face with his knuckles, trying to keep the blood off his suit. “You better talk, Bobby, because you are in some serious shit. Look at me. You’re gonna be as old as I am when you get out of Stillwater. You’re gonna spend your young life in a cell the size of a fucking Volkswagen. You need me to go to court and tell them you cooperated.”

Nothing.

Lucas: “You think you’re tough. Maybe you are. I give you that. But you’re stupid, too. Think how long it’s been since last summer, everything you’ve done since then. Think about being locked up for fifteen times that long. Think about being locked up forever, if we put you with Charlie Pope.”

Clanton twitched. Lucas turned his head down just for a second, snorted blood, but saw that Clanton had started to cry. “Better talk, Bobby.”

Youngie came back with a big gauze first-aid pad and said, “Here. You’re still bleeding.” Lucas took it as another cop car pulled into the yard. “We’ll start pushing the field as soon as we have enough people.”

Lucas said, “Ah,” through the pad.

The two young cops arrived with the fourth man and put him on the grass a few yards from Clanton. “You shot?” one of them asked Lucas.

“Nuh-uh,” Lucas said. The fire in his face was transforming itself into a first-class headache.

“Got punched in the face by the fat guy,” Youngie said. He looked down at the fourth man. “Who’s this asshole?”

“Sandy Martin, cousin to one of the Martin brothers. Says he doesn’t know anything about a meth lab, he just came up to check the farmhouse.”

“Must be why he ran when he saw us coming,” Youngie said.

“Goddamn this hurts,” Lucas said.

The two cops from the new car came over and one asked Lucas, “You shot?”

Youngie and three of the other cops cleared the barn. Lucas and the youngest of the deputies sat on the lawn next to the captives. “Take it easy in there,” Lucas said, as the cops went in with drawn guns.

They were back out in ten minutes. Youngie, positively cheerful, said, so Clanton and Martin could hear him, “My, my, my. That’s the biggest and best meth lab I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a few. Bobby, Sandy, if I were you guys, I would do anything I could to cut down the time, because right now, you’re gonna do a stretch in Stillwater and then the feds are gonna want to talk to you.”

“I want a fuckin’ lawyer,” Clanton said.

“I didn’t do anything, I was just here to check the property,” Martin wailed.

“Not giving us any help at all, are they?” Youngie said to Lucas. “I mean, we put them with Charlie Pope, that’d be a murder charge to go with the drugs.”

Silence, then “Who the fuck is Charlie Pope?” Clanton asked. His face was still wet with tears. “This asshole”-he jerked his head at Lucas-“called me Charlie. Who the fuck is he?”

“You don’t read the newspaper or watch TV?” Lucas said. “The guy who raped and killed a girl and then raped and killed a guy and killed the guy’s little boy? That guy?”

Clanton was baffled. “That guy? What does that guy got to do with us?”

“We know Charlie hung out here,” Lucas said. His whole face hurt when he talked. “His mom says so.”

Clanton arched his back to get his head up out of the dirt. “Not since we been here. Maybe he worked with the Martins, but I don’t know no Charlie Pope.”

Lucas turned his head to Sandy Martin. “Is that right? He hung with you guys?”

“I can’t believe this,” Martin said. “I was just stopping off before I went fishing.”

“The guys who ran. . we believe one of them was Charlie Pope,” Youngie said. “Look, we’re gonna get them. All that plastic in the barn, all that is perfect for fingerprints. We got clothes and a couple of trucks. So tell us. . what’s their names? If one of them isn’t Charlie Pope. .”

“Ah, fuck you,” Clanton said. He snorted once, then said something else.

“What?”

“Sean McCollum and Mike Benton, that’s who that is,” he said. “You’ll get all their stuff anyway. Isn’t no Charlie Pope.”

“Where are the Martins?” Lucas asked.

“Alaska, I guess,” Clanton said. “They rented us this place, and they went to Alaska. They aren’t coming back until November.”

“How long you been here?” Youngie asked.

“Since March,” Clanton said. Then, “I want a fuckin’ lawyer. I ain’t sayin’ no more, but there wasn’t no fuckin’ Charlie here.”

Lucas turned back to Sandy Martin: “Is that right? The brothers are up in Alaska?”

“I can’t prove it, but they said they were going there,” Martin said. “They bought a new truck for the trip.”

“And you never met Charlie Pope.”

After a moment of silence, Martin said, “Look, I’m just watching the house, okay?”

Not a denial. Lucas looked at Youngie, who raised his eyebrows. “Sandy, this is a murder charge we’re talking about here,” Lucas said. “You give Charlie Pope one ounce of cover, man, you’re right in it with him.”

Another moment of silence, then, “He was up here. A month ago.”

“A month ago. With Bobby here?”

“Yeah.” Martin looked uncomfortable.

“You’re fuckin’ lyin’,” Clanton said. He was angry, turning to face down Martin.

“You were talking,” Martin said to him.

“You’re full of shit, you little asshole,” Clanton shouted. “They’re gonna find out. .”

“He was here,” Martin insisted. “He was that guy who walked up the hill, he had that bag of doughnuts. .”

Lucas was looking at Clanton’s face as he absorbed what Martin had said. His expression shifted from anger to confusion and then to disbelief. He said, “That retard? The retard with the smiley T-shirt?”

“That’s him,” Martin said.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Clanton said, lifting his head to look at Lucas. And, “We ran that asshole off. He wanted to pick beans or some shit. We told him we didn’t have no fuckin’ beans, and to go the fuck away.”

Clanton told the story, and it was short: Pope had been at the farmhouse for ten minutes, having hitchhiked out from Austin. When he found out there weren’t any beans, he walked back down the hill with his bag of doughnuts.

“What’s this about the doughnuts?” Youngie asked.

“It was like he thought he might be camping out, and he needed food, so he bought doughnuts,” Martin said.

Clanton said, “He’s a fuckin’ retard. He can’t be the guy who did all that shit. He walks around in a smiley shirt with a bag of doughnuts, for Christ’s sake.”

Lucas pressed the pad to his face and said, “Jesus.”

The Deputies cleared the farmhouse and found a hundred and fifty gallons of agricultural precursor in the kitchen-so much for Sandy Martin’s tale of checking the house. With cops all over the place, and no real information about Pope, Lucas decided to head back home. He washed his face in the farmhouse kitchen sink, got a new first-aid pad from Youngie, and climbed into his truck.

“You oughta stop at the hospital,” Youngie said.

“I’m only an hour and a half from home.”

“There’s gonna be a report, the gunshots. .”

“You can do most of it. I’ll either send you an affidavit or come down and talk to your county attorney, whatever you want. . Now I just want to go home,” Lucas said.

Youngie grinned: “Man, you look like shit.”

“One of your guys already told me,” Lucas said. He started the truck. “Thanks for the reminder.”

The day wasn’t quite done. He could feel his nose swelling, and blood still dribbled from one nostril. He stopped at a convenience store, paid five dollars for a bag of ice and some Ziploc bags to hold it, showed his ID to a gawking counter girl so she wouldn’t call the cops, put a Ziploc bag on his face, and wheeled onto I-35.

Clanton, Lucas thought, had called Pope a retard. That was after a ten-minute acquaintance, if Clanton was to be believed. And Lucas believed him, on that much, anyway. Then he thought, What if Pope was really this sophisticated Cary Grant kind of guy who for years. . He almost smiled to himself, but when he started to smile, pain arced down through his face.

That was Charlie Pope’s fault, too.

He saw the highway patrol car when he topped a hill. He went for the brake but knew it was too late: he could feel the radar waves passing through his nose. He was doing eighty-eight, and when the lights came up behind him, he pulled over. The patrol car idled in behind him, the patrolman calling in the Lexus’s tag number. When the patrolman got out of his car, Lucas hung his ID out the window.

“Lucas Davenport, BCA,” Lucas called back to him.

The cop stepped closer, looked at Lucas’s shirt, soaked with blood: “What the hell happened to you?”

“I busted a meth lab with the Mower County sheriff ’s guys about an hour ago. One of the dopers knocked me on my ass and broke my nose. You can call the Sheriff’s Department, if you want to check.”

The cop took Lucas’s ID, looked at it, handed it back. “You know how fast you were going back there?”

“Yeah, yeah. Man, I’m just trying to get home,” Lucas said. “I’m really messed up.”

“Jeez, you’re gonna have a shiner, Davenport,” the patrolman said with great sincerity. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you,” Lucas said. “That makes it fuckin’ unanimous.”