Field of Prey

19

All during dinner, with Letty chattering away, more and more excited about going out to California, and Sam fretting about it and Gabrielle throwing mashed squash at him, and all during that, and the subsequent cleanup, Weather would catch Lucas’s eyes with a little smile, and Lucas knew precisely what that meant, and it was fine with him.

They’d go to bed a little early, he’d be a little tired, and instead of staying up to read, he’d just tell everybody that he (yawn) really needed some sleep.

As he passed Weather in the kitchen, he muttered, “Brace yourself, Bridget.”

“I got all the bracing you can handle, big guy.”

They both laughed because it was so stupid.

At nine o’clock, still bouncing off each other a bit, with Letty in the second hour of a phone call with her best friend, who was also going off to school, Lucas and Weather both drifted away to their computers to answer any late e-mails before they actually got it on. Lucas had nothing interesting, dropped the lid on his laptop, and climbed the stairs to stick his head into Weather’s office, when his phone rang.

He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the screen as he stopped in Weather’s doorway. “Duty officer,” he told her.

“Oh, God. Maybe they caught him,” she said.

“If they did, they won’t need me,” Lucas said. He answered: “Davenport.”

“Lucas, this is Bob Rogers. Man, the ATF is telling us that Del and one of their officers was shot down in Texas.”

“What!” He groped for a chair and sat down, bent over the phone.

Weather: “What? What happened?”

Lucas turned away, put a finger in his off-ear: “How bad?”

“They can’t tell us. They’re both being taken to a hospital in El Paso. The ATF guy I talked to said that there was a big shoot-out, some old people with machine guns. There’s some kind of firefight going on right now. Or was. This all went down an hour ago.”

“What about Cheryl? Has anybody notified her?” Lucas asked.

“Oh my God,” Weather said.

“We’re on the way,” Rogers said. “That’s the first thing we got going. We think somebody ought to get down there, and he’s your guy, and you’re old friends, we thought. .”

“I’m going,” Lucas said. “Give me ten minutes to get back to you. I’m going.”

He hung up, white-faced, and stared at Weather, who said, “Who? It’s not Del?”

“Yeah. He’s been shot. He’s in an ambulance going to El Paso, we don’t know the condition,” Lucas said. “I gotta go. I gotta find out how to get down there, probably aren’t any flights at night-”

“Lucas, you’re rich,” Weather said. “Rent a jet.”

Lucas looked at her and then down at his phone, thumbed through his contact list, and pushed a number that, under normal circumstances, he only called a couple of times a year.

The governor answered: “You got the Black Hole guy.”

“No. Do you still have that jet?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah?”

“I need it to go to El Paso. Right now. I’ll write you a check for whatever it is.”

“What happened, Lucas?”

“Del Capslock-you met him a couple times,” Lucas said. “You said he looked like he fell out of a boxcar.”

“I remember.”

“He was on an ATF job down by El Paso, involving some gunrunners from here in St. Paul. He’s been shot, we don’t know his condition. He’s my guy. . my friend.”

“All right. My plane isn’t actually here. It’s part of a co-op flight program. But some plane will be here,” the governor said. “You get started to Holman Field, I’ll call the FBO, and I’ll call you back and tell you where to go. You can write the check later.”

“I’m gonna call his wife, Del’s wife, see if she wants to ride along. She will,” Lucas said.

“That’s fine. My plane seats sixteen, you’ll get something similar. Go.”

“Thanks, man.”

Lucas hung up AND SAID, “We’re set. I’m going.”

Weather took his arm and said, “I can’t go, the kids. . But you should take Letty. Letty to take care of Cheryl. . no matter what’s happened.”

Lucas thought for a second, then went to the door and shouted, “Letty!”

She was downstairs and shouted back, “What? I’m on the phone.”

Lucas: “Del’s been shot. We’re going to El Paso. Pack some clothes. You got five minutes.”

After one second of silence, Letty yelled, “How hot’s it gonna be?”

They were out the door in seven minutes, Letty driving Lucas’s SUV, Lucas on the phone in the passenger seat.

Cheryl said, “Of course I’m going. That goddamned fool, I told him this was going to happen, running around like a kid playing guns after, after, after. .” And she began to sob.

Lucas said, “You’re gonna need some hot-weather stuff, some blouses and shorts and jeans. Just throw them in a bag. We’ll be there in four or five minutes. We’ll buy more clothes in El Paso, if we need them.”

“I’m doing that now. . ” She began sobbing again.

Lucas said, “We’re coming, hang on, we’re coming. .” He hung up and said to Letty, “Slow down, you’re gonna kill us,” and, “You got the AmEx card I gave you?”

“Are you kidding me? It’s practically glued to my body.”

“Good. You gotta take care of Cheryl. Anything she needs, put it on the card. Anything.”

Cheryl was a middle-aged nurse who looked as though a hurricane had been blowing through her hair, and whose eyes were red and swollen from crying. She threw a carry-on-sized suitcase in the back of the truck and asked, “Have you heard anything more?”

“Nothing, what about you?”

“He was alive when they got him to the hospital, but the ATF guy is dead,” Cheryl said. “Del’s shot bad, Lucas, he’s shot bad. .”

“One goddamned place in the world that they’ll know about gunshot wounds, it’s gonna be El Paso,” Lucas said. “If they got him there alive, he’ll make it.”

“Oh, God. .”

The Governor called and gave them directions to the fixed-based operator. “There’s a guy named Jeff there, he’s putting together a flight plan. There were two pilots on stand-by, both from Washington County, they’re on the way, and supposedly, they’re both sober.”

They got to the FBO, found the plane in a pool of bright light outside a white-painted hangar. Jeff was inside a small office, and he said, “Hello,” without a smile, and added, “The governor says you’ve got a serious situation.”

“We do,” Lucas said. “How soon can we get going?”

“The plane’s prepped and ready to go. When. .” A door banged open at the end of a hallway, and two men came through, pulling nylon bags. “. . the pilots get here, and here they are. They’re the best we got.”

The plane WAS BIG, white and shiny with comfortable seats and a bathroom twice as large as those on commercial airliners. Twenty minutes after the pilots arrived, the jet powered off the runway and they were gone in the dark.

A moment after they took off, Lucas’s cell phone rang. The governor again:

“Are you in the air?”

“Just left.”

“Del’s at the University Medical Center of El Paso. It’s a Level 1 trauma center, so that’s where you’d want him. They’re operating on him now. Our information is that he was hit three times, two of the wounds, you know, serious but not life-threatening, but the third one, the third one was bad. That’s all I could get. There’ll be a limo waiting for you at the FBO in El Paso.”

“Governor, I can’t tell you-”

“Yeah, don’t. You guys are about half of my entertainment. I’d hate to lose one of you.”

The copilot came back as Lucas was ending the call, to fill him in on the flight plan, and said, “You can use your cell phone, but I gotta tell you, we’re not going to cross any big metro areas going down there. You might get good links when we’re crossing the freeways, but reception is going to be spotty. If you need to make any calls, you better make them now.”

The flight took a little less than four hours, Letty and Cheryl sitting across a narrow aisle from each other, talking quietly. Cheryl broke down twice, sobbing, and she told Letty that as a nurse, she’d seen a lot of gunshot wounds, and that none of them were good. “They just tear you up. They tear your insides to pieces. Oh, God, I hope his spine. . I hope. .”

Lucas looked out the window at nothing. The shooters, as far as he could tell, were the same old folks that he and Del had joked about since the investigation had begun. Old, doddering, seventy-plus senior citizens. They’d been laughing about the possibility that they were involved in wife-swapping orgies, about getting their false teeth mixed up in their various glasses in that four-way twist-up, laughing.

Laughing, because the suspects were old and wrinkled. They’d overlooked the relevant facts. They were old, but they weren’t feeble. They were gunrunners and coke dealers, working with some of the most vicious people in North America. There was more to them than age, and he and Del hadn’t paid proper attention to that.

At some point, one of the pilots said, “We’re about a third of the way down there, folks. Glen and I grabbed a bunch of sandwiches at a Jimmy John’s, and there’s some water and Pepsi.”

They all ate subs and drank Pepsi, and then Lucas got another call, this one from an ATF agent named Miguel Colson.

“We’ve been talking with your governor, and he asked us to call you directly, to fill you in with what we know.”

“Appreciate it,” Lucas said.

“We were all over these old guys. We watched them unload two bundles of rifles the day before yesterday, and we were covering those. We’ve got those nailed down. We’d also heard that all the rest were going out in one batch, with the payment in cocaine, so we decided that instead of an early bust, we’d go for the big one. Del agreed.”

“He would,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. The meet was out north of El Paso, up in New Mexico. We had precise information on the location, from our bugs, and got out there early. We were all set up, six guys on the ground, eight more trailing in vehicles. Del and Carl were on the ground, on foot, down an arroyo that ran through the meeting site-this was really out in the sticks. Anyway, the buyers showed up, these were a couple of unknowns, but the sellers knew them pretty well, it was all first-name stuff.

“The buyers were driving a Land Rover, so they were prosperous. Anglos. They pulled in, we were monitoring, and there was some talk, and the buyers were looking at the guns, and the sellers were checking the cocaine, and then they were all, ‘See you next time.’ We pulled the trigger, we were all over them, SWAT gear, helmets, lights, everything, and the old motherfuckers in the RV ran for it. I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. They left the buyers standing there with their dicks in their hands, and took off down this arroyo, and Del and Carl showed themselves and these guys opened up with M-16s, full auto, mostly missing everything because the RV was falling apart, smashing down that riverbed, but they hit Del and Carl, Del and Carl were right there-”

Lucas cut him off: “How bad’s Del?”

“He’s pretty bad, man. Took one in the guts. He was hit in the arm and leg, not so bad. Carl’s dead. Carl’s gone.” Colson sounded frantic with grief and anger. “We had them both down at Thomason in like fifteen minutes, didn’t wait for the ambulance to get there, threw them in a truck and took off.”

“We heard an ambulance,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. We met up eight or ten miles south down the road, transferred them. . I think Del would have died if we’d waited. Carl did, Carl’s gone, man.”

“What happened to the shooters?” Lucas asked.

“They’re dead. All of them. We think we hit two of them right after they opened up, just hosing down the RV, but they got a ways down that arroyo, don’t know where they were trying to get to, but they went over this ledge-like thing and got hung up, and then kept grinding away until the tires caught fire. Then we think one of the old guys went through the RV and shot two of the old people, who were wounded, then shot his wife, and then ate his gun.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, he wasn’t there,” Colson said.

“So what do you think? We’re in the air, with Del’s wife.”

After a moment, Colson said, “The docs here are supposed to be really good. I don’t know. Fifty-fifty? I don’t know.”

“We’re coming,” Lucas said.

After a long silence, Colson said, “They were old people.”

They flew into El Paso International, and the limo was waiting, just as the governor said it would be. The pilots would check in to a local motel, and said they’d be available as long as they were needed, and as long as Lucas would pay them. He said, “No problem,” and got in the car.

“Please, please don’t let him be dead,” Cheryl said, as they rolled across town. “Don’t let him be crippled.”

Lucas had been in far too many emergency rooms in his life, and a couple of times, the emergency was him. He’d gotten to dislike the odor of the places, like the back rooms of a butcher shop, with an overlay of alcohol.

Two big guys were standing inside the door and Lucas read them as federal. When Lucas, Letty, and Cheryl came in, they turned suddenly, like they might need their guns, and Lucas said, “Minnesota-Del’s wife, I’m Davenport, with the BCA.”

One of the guys was Colson. He was as tall as Lucas and thicker, with brown hair worn longer than most cops’, and a tight bristly mustache; he looked like a Texas rancher on a TV show. He shook Lucas’s hand and introduced the other man, John Sanchez, also ATF.

With the introductions done, Colson stepped up to Cheryl and put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Del’s gonna make it. You gotta believe that.”

“Where is he?” She’d been alternately calm and frantic during the plane ride, and in the car, but now, in the familiar zone of a hospital, she pulled it together.

“He’s still in the OR, but one of the docs came out a while ago and said they’re closing him up.”

“Let’s go. . Where’s the surgical waiting area?”

“This way. .”

They waited for nearly an hour, sitting around looking at old magazines, with Colson and Sanchez filling Lucas in on the firefight. They’d both been there, in vehicles.

“I’ll tell you,” Sanchez said, at the end, “what Carl and Del did looks stupid, not that I wouldn’t have done the same thing. There was no reason to shoot anyone. There was no way to get away, no point in running. They more or less showed themselves to flag these old people down, you know, let them know that running wasn’t an option. Carl was hit in the head, and was gone. Del got sprayed from the other side of the RV, down lower. He was lucky because he was wearing a vest with heavy plates, we insisted on that. The plates stopped three rounds that would have killed him for sure, but his arms and legs weren’t protected, and when he tried to stop them he had his hand over his head and that apparently pulled the vest up. The slug that did the most damage clipped the bottom edge of the vest, punched through the nylon and into his lower stomach.”

Colson looked at his watch: “Carl’s wife, Jennie, is coming up from San Antonio by car. There were no commercial planes and it looked like a private deal would take a long time to set up, so we called the state guys and she’s on her way with a bunch of state troopers doing a relay. It’s usually a seven-hour ride, but the troopers say they’ll have her here in five. It’s been five now.”

“Mmm, where is he? Carl?” Lucas asked.

“He’s here. They’ve got a temporary morgue in the hospital,” Colson said. “The medical examiner’s right around the corner.”

“I’d just as soon not be here when Jennie shows up,” Sanchez said. “But I got no choice.”

Lucas prompted them for the rest of the firefight:

After the people in the RV opened up with the full-auto weaponry, the ATF guys opened up on the RV, and the four people inside were all eventually killed, one way or another, but Del and Carl Lanning were already down.

Colson and Sanchez kept going back and forth about what had happened and how it had happened and why, and Lucas finally said, “You didn’t do anything wrong: this shit just happens. Just like a couple patrol cops get a call about a possible store robbery, and they roll on it, and it turns out to be three ex-army guys with M-16s, when they were expecting a gangbanger with a piece-of-shit.22.”

They both said, “Yeah, yeah,” and went right back to who, what, why, and how.

Lucas knew exactly why they did that, because he’d done the same thing.

At four-thirty, Sanchez got a call, listened for a second, then said to Colson, “Jennie’s here.” They left. Cheryl said, “This is so awful. I feel like I oughta go down and say something, but I can’t, because my man’s still alive, and she’d be thinking, Why’s her man still alive, and mine’s dead? I don’t think I could handle that very well.”

Letty patted her on the arm: “Maybe later. Maybe we’ll see her after we talk to Del.”

At five o’clock in the morning, a tall, solemn surgeon came out of the OR and walked down toward them, still in his operating gown, with a small splash of blood at just about the belly button, and said, “I could use a cigarette.”

Everybody was standing, and he looked at them and said, “He’s closed up, he’s breathing, he’s got no more leaks that we can see, and he’s got blood. There are numerous possibilities on the downside: stroke and blood clots, but the slug didn’t hit much bone, so we’re better off there, not a lot of fat punched into the bloodstream. He lost a chunk of his liver, but he’s got most of it left.”

“He’s going to make it,” Lucas said.

The doc said, “I can’t make that promise, but he’s seventy-thirty. Two-to-one he makes it. He’s in good shape, and that helps. They got him here in a hurry, and that not only saved his life up front, but makes the recovery that much more likely.”

Cheryl, whose hands were clenched in front of her, began sobbing, and Colson said, “This is his wife.”

The surgeon tipped his head and then said, “I’m sorry. I would have been more diplomatic if I’d known. I was told his wife was in Minnesota.”

She said, “That’s fine. I’m a surgical nurse, I listen to docs all day. But I just, I just, I just. .”

Lucas gave her a squeeze. “Don’t worry, they got it covered. They got it covered.”

Lucas willed himself to believe. An hour after they talked to the doctor, they briefly saw Del as he was wheeled unconscious to the Critical Care Unit. He would not be awake until mid-morning, they were told; they should get some sleep.

Lucas got them rooms at a Hyatt near the airport. The limo had gone, so they took a cab over. Cheryl nearly fell asleep in the cab: some of the stress backing off. They checked in, Lucas said good night to the two women, and they all crashed.