Wicked Prey

Chapter 16

Del was wearing jeans and a military-style olive drab shirt and yellow leather boots, and looked less like a cop than the rest of them, so they sent him ahead. He tiptoed up to Justice Shafer's hotel room and stood with his ear to the door for a minute, and heard both the television and then a clunk from somebody moving around, and he tiptoed back down the hall and said, "He's there."

Shrake said, "How do we want to do this?"

"These guys have been rapping on the hotel doors with keys so they sound like a maid or something," Lucas said. He took a quarter out of his pocket and held it up.

Del said, "There's a peephole. He'll see us."

Lucas looked back down the stairway where they'd clustered, and said, "Go get Jane."

Jane had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, and didn't want to do it, but the four of them were several times larger than she, and they grouped around her and looked down at her until she caved and said she would.

"All you have to do is knock; as soon as you hear him start to open the door, you move away," Shrake said. "What if he just shoots?"

"For a knock on the door?" Jenkins asked.

"It's almost eleven o'clock," she pointed out.

"Nothing's perfect," Shrake said.

"If it turns out nothing's perfect, I'm the one who gets shot," she said.

"Maybe ' what if he had a package at the desk?" Jenkins suggested. "She calls him from the front desk, says, A woman just dropped a package for you…"

"Sounds like bullshit," Shrake said.

"To you, but if his file's right, this guy ain't no mental lighthouse," Jenkins said.

"I could go with that," Lucas said. To Del. "What do you think?"

"The big thing is, we don't want him coming out of there behind a machine gun," Del said. "We don't want to spook him."

"We could call in an entry team," Shrake said.

Del: "You pussy." And to Jane, "No offense."

"Let's call him from the desk," Lucas said.

Jenkins was right: Shafer was not the Wizard of Oz.

Del was positioned at the end of the hallway, opposite the stairs that led down to the lobby, listening on his cell phone as Jane made the call from the front desk, with Lucas and his cell standing next to her.

Upstairs, Shafer snatched up the phone and said, "Yeah?"

"Mr. Shafer, a woman has left a package for you at the front desk. You can pick it up at your convenience," Jane said. "I get off in an hour."

"Thanks. Be right down."

Jane hung up and Lucas said into his cell phone, to Del, "He's coming out."

Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins gathered at the bottom of the stairs, but in the cross-hall, out of sight from the stairs themselves. When Shafer unlocked his room door, Del started walking toward him, beer can in one hand, cell phone in the other. He said, "I'm on the way, darlin'."

Shafer glanced at him and turned away, headed down the hall, then down the stairs, Del moving fast now to catch up. At the very last second, as he stepped off the bottom stair, Shafer might have suspected that something was wrong. He turned and looked at Del, who was coming down on top of him in a linebacker's rush, and he flinched and then Jenkins kicked his legs out and Shrake landed on him.

Shafer started struggling and thrashing, but not too hard, grunting under the weight of Del and Shrake, because he knew cops when he saw them. He stopped thrashing after a few seconds and said, "What d'y want?" and Shrake put the cuffs on.

Lucas said to him, "Who're you gonna hit?"

"What are you talking about?" A little more thrashing against the cuffs.

"We know all about the.50-cal, Justice." Lucas squatted next to his head. "We found your little spot up on the hill. You gonna hit McCain? You gonna hit Palin? Who you gonna hit?"

"What hill? What?" His eyes were wild. "Hit McCain? Are you nuts?"

Lucas called Dan Jacobs at the security committee: "Listen, if you've got a couple of loose Secret Service guys rattling around, we nailed that Justice Shafer guy," Lucas said.

Jacobs shouted, "Lucas, goddamnit! That's great. That's wonderful. Where is he?"

"We're putting him in a car, taking him up to Ramsey County. Tell the Secret Service that they're welcome to sit in. Things might be a little more complicated than we thought. We've got a BCA crime-scene crew on the way to the motel where we grabbed him and we're staking the place out, looking for accomplices."

"Accomplices. What accomplices?" The joy was gone.

"Like I said," Lucas said, "it's complicated, and it's probably not good."

SIX Secret Service agents showed up to watch Del talk with Shafer. Lucas got the feeling that if there were an assassination plot against McCain, it wouldn't do a guy's career any harm to get in on the ground floor when it was broken up.

Del had brought the can of Budweiser with him, and it was sitting by his boot heel, unopened, where the video camera couldn't see it. Shafer was dressed like Del, in a khaki hunting shirt, jeans, and hunting boots, and was handcuffed to a metal table. He kept looking at the video camera in the corner, as though trying to see the crowd that gathered behind it.

One of the Secret Service guys, looking at the monitor, asked, "You sure about your interrogator?"

Lucas said, "Yes," and stopped.

Shrake, feeling a level of discomfort, added, "We're giving Shafer somebody he can get comfortable with. If we need somebody with a plutonium suit, we can put one of you guys in there. Later."

The Secret Service guy gave him a gentle poke to the gut with an elbow, and said, "You know I love you."

Del said, pushing a picture of the woman-of-many-names across the table at Shafer, "You're sure that's her?"

"That's her. That's her, and she's Bill Hefner's girlfriend. The anarchists are coming in, and they're gonna tear you guys a new butt-hole. When you come looking for help, our guys'll be there, ready to go. We're coming in from all over the country, we're the final backstop. Hefner is tight with you guys. He's on your committee."

Del rubbed his forehead and said, "I hate to tell you this, Justice, but Hefner isn't on a committee, he's in jail in Oregon, and he never heard of you, and he doesn't have a girlfriend, he's got a wife, and this lady…" He tapped the photograph. "This ain't her."

"He's in jail?" Shafer suspected a lie.

"He sold a couple of modified ArmaLites to an ATF guy and he's in fuckin' jail," Del said.

"That's fuckin' crazy," Shafer said.

"Tell us about scouting out that bluff over town," Del suggested. "We know you were up there, because we found a couple of shells. They're your shells, Justice. They've got your prints on them."

"You're framing me," Shafer said. "You're trying to get me."

One of the Secret Service agents asked Lucas, "You read him his rights?"

"More or less," Lucas said.

The agent nodded. Lucas got the impression that he didn't much care; prosecution wasn't his problem.

Del asked, pressing, "Then how'd they get up there? Answer me that."

"Somebody else put them there," Shafer said.

"Some other dude did it," Del said, the skepticism right out there. "The two-dude defense."

"It's the truth," Shafer said. Then, his eyes lifting, he said, "You answer me a question. Answer me this: How in the hell did I get wherever you said it was and let off a couple of rounds with that.50 cal and nobody noticed? You ever hear a.50-cal? How'd I do that?"

"Good question," one of the agents said. "How did he do that?"

Del said, "We don't know when you were up there. You might have done it two weeks ago, and somebody thought they were backfires. The highway's right down the hill."

"Good answer," said another one of the agents.

"A.50-cal don't sound like no fuckin' backfire," Shafer said.

"Good point," the Secret Service guy said.

"And look at me," Shafer continued. "You got me swearin' like the devil. I don't talk like that, and now you got me talkin' like you."

Lucas turned to the head Secret Service guy and said, "Did Jacobs tell you about our murder gang?"

"I heard something about it," the guy said.

"So I got a story for you," Lucas said. He looked through the window, where Del was retracing his steps in the interrogation. "Let's find a place to sit down."

The agents all sat around straddling backward chairs, and Lucas laid out the details of the assaults on the convention moneymen, and the cop shootings, which the local Secret Service guys already knew about. "So we know who these guys are, more or less, and what they're doing. One of them is dead. Their usual practice, at this point, would be to get out-maybe they haven't gotten everything they wanted, but in the past, they've always been cautious."

"But now they're going crazy," one of the agents said.

"That's right," Lucas said. "And we don't know why. We do know that one of them is talking to Shafer and his.50-cal, and from what we understand, the woman with the gang actually financed the gun. Not only financed it, but gave him the list of stores to check out. She told him that the store guys were all connected to this Hefner guy, that the store might be bugged, so he should show up, talk about buying some ammo, and then get out. Then the store guys supposedly would pass the word that Shafer was still on the case."

"What a dumb shit," one of the agents said.

Lucas threw his hands up: "That's what we all get. What a dumb shit. But these other people aren't dumb shits. Why are they dragging Shafer under our noses? I mean, I guess the big question is, what're they up to? Something about the convention? Why haven't they gotten out of town? We're wondering, are they pointing at McCain's big night? Is there something in that?"

The lead agent nodded, and turned to his men: "Okay, you've heard it. We need to talk to the presidential details, we need to beef up the protection even more than it is. We need to work out new travel routes-we need to find new angles on everything. I want the goddamn X Center sterile. Sterile. McCain's here in two days, Palin will be here…"

"It's not Palin," Lucas said. "They were in town, all set to go, before she was even picked. If it's anybody, it's McCain-but we might be missing something completely obvious. What worries me most is that we have some ideas about Cohn, but we really don't know him. What if it's political?"

"You mean ' what if they really make a run at McCain?"

"Yeah. Is that too weird?" Lucas asked.

"Nothing's too weird. You've got two dead cops." The agent brushed his hand through his neatly trimmed silver hair. "Man: this is serious. We need more guys. If they planned this out way ahead of time…"

Another agent said, "We got two days to figure it out."

Del gave up on the interrogation and gave one of the Secret Service guys a shot at it. "We can hold him, but there's not much-he had no idea about those.50-cal shells up on the hill. I got Nancy to run a quick comparo on the shells, and she says they came from the same gun, the extractor marks are right there. He says that when he was sighting the gun in, he always collected all his brass and keeps it in the back of the truck, in an army ammo can. I called Dick out at the motel, he looked in the can and says there were fourteen loose used shells, and Shafer says there should be twenty. He thinks this chick must have stolen them."

"Doesn't he keep his truck locked?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, but with somebody like Shafer, dealing with somebody like this what's-her-name…"

"Elena Diaz."

"Yeah. I mean, she got the key, somewhere along the way," Del said. "That's all we could come up with." "You're okay with that story?"

"Yup. Lucas-this kid is no planner. He's gonna wind up eating out of garbage cans, if he doesn't wind up facedown dead before that," Del said. "He's being set up. I keep thinking about that Kennedy assassination movie, Lee Harvey Oswald. Some people think he was set up."

"He wasn't; he did it."

"The point is, that idea could be floating around in some nut-cake's head," Del said. "Like Cohn's. Shoot McCain, shoot somebody, and blame Shafer. I mean, Justice is defenseless. He's a goof."

When Lucas got home, the house was asleep-Weather always went to bed early on nights before she was operating, and she operated on most days. The baby and the housekeeper went to bed almost as early. But as he turned in the drive, he saw a glow from under the blind in Letty's room. A night owl like Lucas, she was sneaking a read.

Lucas went inside, checked all the doors, took his shoes off before he tiptoed upstairs, left his shoes on his bedroom floor, listened to Weather's even breathing for a couple of seconds, then tiptoed down to Letty's door and tapped a couple of times.

"Yes. Come in," she said.

She was finishing To Kill a Mockingbird in the light of a bedside lamp. He asked, "You almost done?"

"Almost; but I can sleep in tomorrow. I'm going back downtown with Jen."

"Your mom says you're getting some serious airtime," Lucas said. "I wish I'd been here to see it."

"Ah-it's kid stuff. They won't let me get near the better stories," Letty said. "Too young."

"Just' be patient." He perched on the end of the bed. "Beverly called this morning, before I caught the plane. I was going to call and tell you, but I got really busy. Anyway, we're set for Monday."

"Monday."

"Yup. We go see the judge on Monday afternoon, three-thirty. The last decision you've got to make is what to do about your name. You can be Letty Jean West, or Letty Jean West Davenport, or Letty Jean Davenport, or Letty West Davenport-however you want to do it."

"Huh." She made a moue. "The thing is, I never knew my father, hardly. He wasn't really my father, he ditched us, but Mom kept his name. Her maiden name was Martin. I wonder if they'd go for Letty Jean Martin Davenport. Or Letty Martin Davenport. I'd like to, you know, keep my first mom a little bit."

"We can do that," Lucas said. "You gotta let me know by tomorrow night, exactly so they can fill out the paper. Then, we're done."

"That's…" She teared up a little and wiped her eyes with a corner of the sheet.

"You're still all right with it?" Lucas asked.

"I'm perfect with it," she said, with a choked-off laugh. "I can't wait."

Lucas patted her foot, under the light blanket, and said, "If I don't see you tomorrow before I leave, call me on my cell, let me know about the name."

"All right. Night, Dad."

When Lucas was out of the room, Letty dug her cell phone out from under her pillow, poked redial, and Briar picked up. "I'm back," Letty said. "So he gets out tomorrow-then what?"

"I don't know. He's really freaked out. Maybe it's the medicine they're giving him, it's something to stop blood clots in his legs. But it's making him crazy."

"Has he talked about my dad or me again?"

"Well' yeah, a couple of times. He was talking to Ranch, and they're going to try to do something, but Ranch is so crazy' I don't know. If you see the van coming, you should run."

"But you'll be driving it," Letty said. "He makes me…"

"But you don't have to," Letty said.

"You don't know…"

"All right. All right. Stay calm," Letty said. "I'll think of something."