Stolen Prey

21

Lucas backed away from the pile of boxes and said, “Okay, this could be big trouble. We need to get some guys here, we need Shaffer, we need an accountant. We need the DEA.”

“Gold,” Del said, with a gleam in his eye.

Ibriz said, “To find this, this is a gift from Allah.” He looked at Lucas and Del with anticipation.

“We need a lot of guys,” Lucas said. “We need witnesses.”

Ibriz groaned, but Lucas said, “Forget about it.”

THE PROBLEM WAS, Lucas thought, that if you found twenty-two million dollars’ worth of gold in a closet, and you were a cop, there were going to be questions about whether all of it made it back to headquarters. He wasn’t exactly sure what the price of gold was, but it was something around sixteen hundred dollars an ounce. Each plastic sleeve, of twenty coins, would be worth something like thirty-two thousand dollars. There appeared to be hundreds of sleeves.

Del made the call, while Ibriz went into mourning. They were ten minutes, normal driving, from the BCA building, and Lucas, without timing it, suspected that Shaffer and his team made it in six minutes. Shaffer burst into the office and cried, “You got it?”

Lucas pointed at the boxes, and handed the open one to Shaffer. Shaffer fumbled out a couple of the plastic tubes, and one popped open, and gold coins tumbled to the carpet. “My God, look at this. It’s gold,” Shaffer said. He started to laugh, uncontrollably, and everybody stood back and looked at him.

The DEA guys were next in. O’Brien looked at the boxes and shook his head. “You guys want to be careful,” he said. “You know what the assholes are going to say. That some of it stuck to your fingers.”

“That’s why we’ve got everybody here,” Lucas said. He nodded at the other two DEA agents. “They’re accountants. Let’s get them to count it.”

They were talking about that when Shaffer said to Lucas, “Hey: Cheryl’s been trying to get in touch with you. She said it’s urgent.”

Lucas borrowed Del’s phone, called his secretary, and she said, “Call Virgil an hour ago.”

LUCAS CALLED FLOWERS. Flowers shouted at him: “Hey.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m lying in a goddamn ditch. Look at that! Look at that!” Flowers was screaming now, but apparently not at Lucas.

“Look at what?” Lucas asked, raising his voice. In the background, he could hear a stuttering sound, which might have been some kind of strange Verizon static, but he was afraid it wasn’t.

“One of those sonsofbitches has a machine gun,” Flowers shouted. “Holy shit, he took that Chevy out. Hey! Hey! Get out of there! Get out of there!”

“What?” Lucas shouted into the phone. Everybody stopped messing with the gold and looked at him.

“They’re shooting at the TV chopper,” Flowers yelled. Lucas stepped across the room, bent and turned on the television. The over-the-air picture was a little hazy, showing some kind of reality show rerun, and he clicked around to Channel Three.

The aerial shot popped right up, a circling tracking of a big red barn, with a bunch of crumbling outbuildings behind it, and a white farmhouse to one side. Sheriff’s cars were stacked up in the driveway, and Lucas could see what looked like bodies along the driveway. Then one of the bodies moved, fast, across the driveway, and he realized that they were sheriff’s deputies, on the ground.

A runner burst out of the back of the barn, headed toward a woodlot that was embedded in a blue-green grain field—the oat field that Flowers had mentioned. The onboard reporter was shouting, “They’re shooting at us, Jim. Get out of here, they’re shooting at us, you dumb shit!”

Lucas yelled into the phone, “What the fuck is going on there?”

“We raided the place and ran into a hornet’s nest,” Flowers shouted back. There was a background explosion that sounded like a howitzer, and Lucas asked, “What was that? What the hell was that?” and Flowers, laughing, said, “Richie’s got himself a 50-cal. He’s blowing holes in the—Whoa, look at them, they’re like ants…. They don’t like that 50-cal.”

On the TV, Lucas could see a half dozen men break from the barn, running toward the back of the farm lot.

On the phone, he heard another howitzer blast, and an instant later, on TV, in full color, the red barn blew to bits in an enormous gaseous fireball that rose into a mushroom cloud.

Flowers: “Holy mother of God…”

Lucas shouted into the phone, “I’m coming.”

DEL TOOK him back to the Victory garage where Lucas recovered the Porsche and his cell phone. He got Flowers on his phone and said, “Keep calling me. What’s going on now?”

“We’re chasing them. They’ve stopped shooting, and we’ve got the farm, and now we’re chasing them down. Gonna take a while.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Computer says you’re an hour and fifteen minutes away, if the traffic’s not too bad,” Flowers said.

“Does the computer say how long it takes if you’re driving a Porsche with flashers?”

“Don’t kill anybody,” Flowers said. “See you in fifteen minutes.”

HE ACTUALLY took fifty minutes to get to the farm, following the nav system the whole way, busting a lot of stop signs, topping out at 115 miles an hour on clear blacktop; the barn wasn’t out in the sticks, he thought. He actually passed the sticks fifteen miles before he got there.

The place was a jumble of sheriff’s squads, highway patrol cars, ambulances, fire trucks, civilian vehicles, four-wheelers, and three circling helicopters and one light airplane. Lucas was still running with lights when a skeptical highway patrolman pointed him to the shoulder of the county road. Lucas hung his ID out the window, the patrolman said, “Slick ride,” and let him through.

He saw Flowers’s 4Runner parked on the freshly mown shoulder of the road and pulled up alongside it, all four wheels on the road, hoping that the SUV would cover the Porsche from any fresh outbreak of gunfire. Insurance companies don’t want to hear about bullet holes.

Flowers was up the driveway, talking to a sheriff’s deputy. He saw Lucas coming, said something to the deputy, and walked down to Lucas. Flowers was a tall man, as tall as Lucas, but slender, with long blond hair. He was wearing a cowboy hat, a pair of aviator sunglasses, a vintage Radiohead T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. He did not, as far as Lucas could see, have a gun.

He walked up and said, “We’re still missing about three of them.”

Lucas was looking past him at the farm. What had been the barn was now mostly a concrete slab, with what looked like the half-eaten stump of an enormous silver Oscar Mayer wiener sitting on the slab. The ground was littered with splintered barn siding and shingles, two of the outbuildings had collapsed, and the house was covered with fire foam. “It’s a fuckin’ war zone,” he said.

“Got pretty busy, there,” Flowers said. “See, what happened was, Richie has this 50-cal, and they were shooting at us with some small machine pistols. He let off a few shots to clear out their nostrils, and then, well, we didn’t know it, but there was an industrial-sized propane tank in there. That’s what the silver thing is. We think the second-to-last shot knocked a hole through it—that’s when everybody ran—and the propane came spewing out under heavy pressure, and then the next shot through probably hit the tank again, or some other metal, kicked out some sparks…”

“How many dead?” Lucas asked.

“Nobody, so far. Three shot, none critical, all dopers.”

“Meth?”

“No, no, that’s where the horse shit comes in,” Flowers said. “They were growing magic mushrooms. Industrial-scale magic mushrooms, on a substrate of horse shit and straw. They’d heat in the winter, cool in the summer, perfect growing temperatures all year long. There’s a big plastic tube stuck in the ground in back, an old sewer pipe they got somewhere. There’s probably a half-ton of mushrooms in there.”

“You’re sure they’re magic?” Lucas asked.

“Positive.” Flowers chuckled. “We’d really be up shit creek if they turned out to be, you know, button mushrooms. Or shiitakes.”

“How about my robbers?” Lucas asked.

“They weren’t here,” Flowers said. “But I was talking to one of the dopers, not a bad guy, for a doper, and he told me where they live, and where they were going this afternoon. They were supposed to bring a load of horse shit back this evening.”

“So…”

“I was waiting for you,” Flowers said. “Let’s go get them. Leave the Porsche here. We’ve got to come back this way anyway, we can drop them off with the sheriff.”

“Good. That way, the Porsche won’t smell like horse shit,” Lucas said.

AS THEY walked down to Flowers’s truck, Lucas asked, “Where’re we going?”

“’Bout five or six miles down the road, to a gravel road called Jenks Trail. Half mile north, there’s a trailer sitting on the side with a dirt yard and a pit bull on a chain. That’s them. I pulled some stuff off the computer. There’s a file on the backseat.”

They got in the truck and Lucas reached over the seat and got the file, a stapled printout from the NCIC. He paged through it as Flowers pulled off the shoulder, and they loafed down the county road, over hill and dale, past the tall corn and rolling woods, the soybeans and alfalfa, kids looking over their shoulders as they pedaled along on their bikes.

Duane Bird and Bernice Waters were the kind of minor dirtbags that made life a little tougher for everybody. They’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, burglarize any house or business they thought might be empty, get drunk and fight and drive, and choke down any drug they could get their hands on. They weren’t killers, not even much in the way of robbers, although what they’d done with Lucas counted as armed robbery.

Bird had once been convicted of stealing a hundred manhole covers from Rochester, a theft carried out in a single night. He sold the covers to a junkyard, for processing as scrap. The owner of the junkyard expressed amazement when he found out that the manhole covers had been stolen and immediately rolled over on Bird.

Waters was believed to be behind the theft of one hundred cartons of Tums from a semitrailer broken down in Park, Minnesota. Each carton contained 144 bottles of Tums tablets, each bottle containing 150 tablets, for a grand total of 2,160,000 assorted fruit Tums. Nobody knew what she’d done with them.

They’d both been convicted of shoplifting, with Target their favored retailer.

When he finished thumbing through it, Lucas tossed the file on the backseat, leaned back, and said, “Nice day.”

“When did you lose the cast?” Flowers asked.

“This morning. You know what the goddamned so-called doctor did?…”

WHEN THEY got to Jenks Trail, they decided to make a slow pass on the trailer, to check out the dog situation and see if anybody was around. Flowers cut his speed back to thirty-five or so, kicking up a long trail of gravel dust behind the 4Runner. They came up to the trailer, a twenty-year-old aluminum capsule painted turquoise and desert tan, set up on concrete blocks, in a bare lot carved out of a perfectly good cornfield. The dog was lying in the dirt yard, a white beast with jaws like a bear trap. The dog stood up to bark as they went by.

A pickup sat in front of the trailer, with its hood propped up. It looked as though it’d been propped up for a while.

“Do not want to fuck with that dog,” Lucas said, looking over his shoulder.

“Doesn’t look like the chain would reach the door,” Flowers said. “We could come up from the back, through the cornfield.”

“Wouldn’t be a surprise … and we know they’ve got that piece-of-shit pistol.”

“They never shot anybody,” Flowers said.

“Maybe come up behind the trailer, watch it for a while,” Lucas suggested.

THEY PARKED Flowers’s truck on a gravel road on the opposite side of the field, where it would be out of sight for most cars going down to the trailer. Lucas took off his suit coat, and Flowers pulled on a long-sleeved shirt so he wouldn’t get scratched by the corn leaves. At the last minute, Flowers went back to the truck, got a pistol out from under the front seat, already in a carry holster. He stuck it in his back beltline and said, “I’m good.”

They climbed a barbed-wire fence and submerged in the tall corn. Lucas would have been lost in a minute or two, but Flowers pulled out his cell phone, called up a compass app, and they followed the arrow across the field.

When they got close, they found they were a bit too far to the west, and so went back in, walked east two hundred feet, then climbed another fence and jogged up to the back of the trailer, a single-wide.

“Smell it?” Flowers asked, in a whisper.

Lucas nodded: a faint odor, like a mix of alcohol and ammonia, hung about the trailer. They’d been cooking meth inside. Lucas pressed his ear to the metal siding on the trailer and listened. Not a sound. Not a creak. “Nothing moving,” he said.

“That smell—we’ve got probable cause,” Flowers said.

“Let’s go. Let’s kick the door,” Lucas said.

They walked around the side and then the front, and the dog went nuts. His chain would have covered the rut up to the front door, but fell short of the concrete-block stoop. Lucas took his pistol out as Flowers, with cowboy boots, walked up to the door and simply kicked it open.

Lucas went through, with Flowers a couple steps behind: nobody home, but the place was saturated with the odor of the chemicals.

“Jesus, what a shithole,” Lucas said. Dirty clothes were stacked around the built-in couches, papers—bills and advertisements—were scattered over the tiny dinner table.

The dog was still going nuts.

“If we find them, we gotta do something about the mutt,” Lucas said.

“There’s a pit bull rescue place in the Cities. They’ll come down and get him.” Flowers shook his head. “A dog like that, you had to abuse it to make it that crazy. Once pits go nuts, sometimes you can’t get them back.”

They made a wide circle around the dog and hiked back to the truck, Lucas bitching about what the gravel was doing to his Italian shoes.

FLOWERS HAD addresses for two horse stables where Bird and Waters might be. He had Google maps for the locations, marked by the county agent. Bird and Waters were driving a rust-red 1994 Ford F-350.

They found them at the first farm, shoveling shit, no clue about the shoot-out they’d missed. The farmer walked Lucas and Flowers down to the main barn, explaining, “Most of the manure is taken out mechanically, but we’ve got to clean the last bit by hand.”

“That’s good information,” Lucas said. He stepped in something too soft, looked down at his shoes, winced.

The barn was empty, all the horses being out in a pasture. Flowers pointed them out, and said they were called Appaloosas, identifiable by their dappled asses.

“Then how come they’re not called Assaloosas?” Lucas asked. The farmer looked at him oddly, and they went around the barn.

The two robbers were working with coal shovels and brooms, dragging shovelfuls of horse shit off a manure pile and throwing it on the truck. They were dressed in overalls, a tall, tough woman and the skinny man; when the man looked at them, and tried to smile, Lucas realized he’d lost all his teeth.

Lucas recognized them instantly, and said to them, “Yup. You’re them.”

The woman said, “Who?”

“The two who took five hundred dollars off me up in St. Paul this spring and broke my wrist,” Lucas said. He held up his ID. “I’m a cop. You’re under arrest.”

The couple looked at each other for a moment, and the man’s shoulders slumped. The woman had a push broom in her hands and said, “Thank God,” and tossed the broom on a pile of lumpy manure.

The man said, “Fuck me. What’s gonna happen to my truck?”

“Probably sold for restitution,” Lucas said. “Okay. You have the right…”

AFTER THEY read them their rights, Lucas asked Waters, “Why’d you say, ‘Thank God’?”

“Because I’m still on parole,” she said. “They’ll send me back to Shakopee. That’s the best place I ever been. Warm dorms, nice beds, good food. I’d live there the rest of my life, if I could. I had a job in the cafeteria.”

Bird said, “Got good medical, too. Maybe I can get my teeth fixed.”

Lucas looked at them and said, “Well, shit.”

Flowers started laughing, clapped him on the back and said, “Revenge is sweet, huh?”

THE STABLE OWNER wanted the Ford out of his yard, and finally Flowers suggested that they let Bird drive the truck back to the farm, and from there, the sheriff’s deputies would take over. Bird agreed to do it, and Flowers tapped him on the chest and said, “If you go anywhere but the farm, we’ll bust your ass and pile some more time on you. You’re not running anywhere with that truck.”

Bird said, “Be lucky if we don’t run out of gas.”

They made it back to the farm, and the two were turned over to sheriff’s deputies. The sheriff came over and said, gleefully, “Boy oh boy, this is the biggest bust since old Marilyn Snow went off the rails and shot up the Hot Spot. I’m smelling like…” He sniffed and asked, “What smells like horse shit?”

Bird raised a hand.

THEY WERE at the farm when Letty called. She was screaming at him: “Dad, Dad, we’ve got a problem, Dad…”

Lucas listened for one moment and said, “I’m coming, honey, I’m coming, hold on….”

Lucas left Flowers and the sheriff without a word, sprinting in his ruined shoes across the farm lawn, down the driveway. A moment later the Porsche fishtailed past the driveway and they could hear it accelerate off into the distance, ripping through the gears.

“That don’t sound good,” said Richie, the sheriff.

“No. It doesn’t,” Flowers said.