Gathering Prey (30 page)

P
ilate and Kristen, nervous as cats all the way across the Upper Peninsula and then Wisconsin, relaxed a notch as they crossed a bay off Lake Superior on Highway 53 and rolled into Duluth, Minnesota, past long lines of boxcars. They were two states away from the manhunt and that much safer.

Pilate was driving and merged onto I-35 north and got off at Michigan Avenue. Kristen, looking out the window at the town, said, “There’s a used clothes store around here. I can smell it. We need some different clothes. We look too L.A. Like, not from here.”

“What we really need to do is see a news program, find out what’s going on,” Pilate said. “See if they found the old lady. If they find her, and we don’t know it and we’re driving this car, we’re toast.”

They drove around for a while, but didn’t find a used clothes store. As they were about to give up, Kristen pointed to two oddly dressed women in funny hats waiting to cross the street, and said, “Stop there—we’ll ask them.”

The women were Catholic nuns, and one said, “Why, yes. There’s a place about six blocks that way, called Round It Goes. It’s on the right, next to the bookstore. You can’t miss it.”

Being nuns, they didn’t say that it was an adult bookstore, but Round It Goes was right next to it. Fifteen minutes into the store, they found a blue suit that fit Pilate, with a light blue dress shirt and a striped necktie. His own shoes were acceptable, if a little too pointy.

Kristen found a short-sleeved brown dress that dropped an inch below her knees, and brown shoes with low, wide heels. She checked herself in the mirror and said, “I look like one of those nuns.”

“Which is about as far away from us as you could get,” Pilate said. “Nuns ain’t pretty, but nuns is good.”

On a rack next to the door, Pilate found a white straw hat with a narrow brim, put it on, and asked Kristen, “What do you think?”

She considered the hat, then said, “You look like somebody I know.”

He dropped his voice: “But not Pilate.”

“No, not Pilate.”

•   •   •

THE TOTAL BILL
came to thirty-six dollars, and they went to look for a TV. After two miscues—sports bars—they found a dark and nearly empty bar downtown, put on their sunglasses, went in, got beers served in a booth in the back, where they could see the second-string television. There was a ballgame on, but neither the bartender nor the other two patrons was looking at it, and Pilate asked the bartender if they could change stations to CNN or something like that.

“Sure.” He used a remote to change stations, then said to Pilate, “You remind me of someone. Are you a musician?”

“Play a little ukulele,” Pilate joked, as he headed back to the booth.

They didn’t have to order a second beer. CNN was in full disaster mode, with at least three reporters wandering around the UP. They seemed to be as astonished by the place as Pilate and the disciples had been.

At one point, Wolf Blitzer said, “One of the key actors in this North Woods clash, agent Lucas Davenport of Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, has been out of touch all day, as he drives back to Minnesota. We’re hoping to have an interview with him this evening. In the meantime, the search continues for the ringleaders of the Los Angeles murder and drug gang who . . .”

The identikit picture of Pilate came up, along with the photo of Kristen. The old lady hadn’t been found. After the summary, Blitzer tolled out the dead. Pilate was transfixed as a reporter read the roll: the disciples had essentially been wiped out, save for a few who were jumped by the cops at the Sault Ste. Marie Gathering, one who survived the Mellon shoot-out untouched, and one who was wounded at Mellon.

CNN had all their full names, most of which Pilate never knew.

“I’m amazed Laine was shot. If I’d thought any of them would have given up, it would have been her,” Kristen said.

“She’s still got time to fuck us,” Pilate said.

Kristen leaned forward and whispered, “The bartender keeps looking down here at us. I think we’re ringing a bell with him. Maybe from the pictures?”

Pilate leaned toward her: “Wonder if he’s called a cop?”

“I haven’t seen him on the phone,” she said.

“Let’s go. We’ve heard enough. Get out of here, get a motel down in the Twin Cities. We can watch the news tonight.”

She nodded and they pushed out of the booth. As they passed the bartender, he smiled broadly, snapped his fingers, and pointed at Pilate. “I got it. The ukulele tipped me off. Leon Redbone, right?”

Kristen kept walking, but Pilate put his finger to his lips and said, “Don’t tell.”

Then he was out the door. On the sidewalk, Kristen was biting into her arm so hard, that later, she found a little row of bruises where her pointed teeth cut into the skin.

“Shut up,” Pilate said.

She tried to talk, but nothing came out but a low gurgling laugh, until finally she gasped, “Leon . . . Redbone. Where’s your fuckin’ banjo, Leon?” She bit into her arm again as they walked back to the car.

That night, in a motel on the airport strip in south Minneapolis, they watched the interview with Davenport and his daughter, on Channel Three.

“That motherfucker,” Pilate said.
Coward? Only fights women? Ran out on his friends?
“He’s smearing me, he’s ruining my whole fucking reputation.”

Kristen said, “Keep your voice down, for Christ’s sakes. They can hear you three rooms down. And what difference does it make? You can never be you again . . . ever.”

“Fuckin’ coward? Fuckin’ coward?”

“Keep your voice down.” She’d seen him like this, when he’d pick up an insult and turn it into a cataclysm. That’s how they wound up killing Kitty Place: because another woman had insulted Pilate.

Late that night, three o’clock, Kristen woke up and heard Pilate rattling something. She turned her head and opened her eyes. He was pointing his .45 at the darkened television. He said, aloud, “Coward?” Pulled the trigger and the hammer fell with a metallic smack and he racked the slide again.

•   •   •

LETTY CAME DOWN
the stairs wearing dark slacks, low heels, and a dark blue silk blouse: dressed up to talk to the cops. Lucas looked at her and thought that she’d never work undercover as a cop, unless it was a very classy assignment. With her dark hair, she gave off a little too much of a private school vibe. Of course, if she focused on economics at Stanford, she could be a real undercover weapon if she investigated economic crime, where the criminals wore five-thousand-dollar suits.

She looked at Lucas and said, “You look like a rich cop.” Lucas was wearing a navy blue suit, English loafers, and a very pale blue shirt made in France.

“Why not a banker?”

“Bankers don’t have noses that are crooked from being broken or scars like yours. But cops do. I mean . . . look at Jenkins. Or Shrake.”

“Please,”
Lucas said. And, “You ready to go?”

“We need to stop at a Caribou for some iced coffee.”

“Not a problem.”

•   •   •

THE DAY WAS PERFECT:
low eighties, bluebird sky, the slightest touch of a breeze. If the Minnesota August lasted all year, nobody would live anywhere else. That hadn’t always been true, he told Letty, as they went out to the Porsche. There had been the whole era of the infamous St. Paul Smell, but that was gone now. Forever, he hoped, because it
had
been nasty.

They made it to the BCA in twenty-five minutes, with a stop at Caribou Coffee so that Letty could get a Cold Press iced coffee and a Diet Coke and scone for Lucas, and they dropped the top on the car and took their time.

Sands was waiting in an adjoining office, talking to an agent, but jumped up the instant he saw Lucas and Letty. “Lucas, we gotta talk.” He looked at Letty, recognized her, and said, “Your daughter can wait in your office.”

•   •   •

THE MINUTE THEY GOT
in his office, Sands turned around and poked a finger at Lucas, raised his voice and said, “What the hell have you been doing out there? You had responsibilities here, and instead, you go tearing around the countryside,
not even in Minnesota
, you get five cops shot and one of them killed.”

“Don’t shout at me, Henry,” Lucas said. He said it calmly enough, but Henry took a quick step backward.

“You don’t fuckin’ threaten me, Davenport. I’ve had enough of this shit, your goddamn gang operating however they want, that fuckin’ Flowers pisses off a state senator, who’s
still
calling me—”

“I didn’t threaten you, Henry. In fact, I’m in the process of reevaluating my position at the BCA. I don’t think I’m up high enough in the food chain to avoid the bullshit. I’m gonna talk to the governor about moving me up another step or two, so I can do some actual investigation, instead of sending my men out to blow moronic state senators.”

Sands put up both hands, said, “Okay. Okay. You talk to whoever you want. But the first thing you do is, you figure out how you’re going to pay for this little excursion to Michigan. What are you gonna do when we get sued by some—”

“I’ll pay for it,” Lucas said. “If we get sued and lose, I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay for my own mileage, my own hotels, won’t put in for any overtime. Henry, we wiped out a gang that butchered at least ten innocent people, and quite possibly more, including a crucifixion. You want me to go on television and tell people that Henry Sands disallowed my travel expenses for killing off a gang that slashed an actress to death and crucified a young boy from Texas? You want to be famous, I think I can manage it,” Lucas said.

“You’re threatening me again,” Sands said.

“I’d never threaten you,” Lucas said. “If I got to that point, I’d just bust your fuckin’ nose. In the meantime . . .” Lucas gave him the finger. “Fuck you.”

“Hey! Hey!”

Sands’s voice cut off when Lucas pulled the door shut.

•   •   •

LUCAS AND LETTY
gave their statements about the Wisconsin part of the investigation, sticking close to the statement they’d given the Sawyer County Sheriff’s Department. Lucas expanded into the conflict in the Upper Peninsula. Everybody called them depositions, but they weren’t really, because there was no swearing in, or an opposition attorney to monitor them. Real depositions would come later, if somebody decided to sue. Given the viciousness of Pilate and the disciples, Lucas thought that successful suits would be thin on the ground.

The statements took an hour and a half, then they shook hands all around, and Lucas and Letty stopped at Lucas’s office on the way out. Del was sitting there, reading a hippie newspaper, and when he saw them coming, he shook his head.

“I understand you got harsh with Henry.”

“I let it out a little,” Lucas agreed. “Why?”

“There’s a hot rumor going around that he’s going to bring you up on a bunch of charges, try to get you fired, or at least, suspended for, you know, months. Demoted, probably.”

Lucas smiled and said, “Well, as some great philosopher should have once said,
it is what it is
. Don’t worry about it, Del. Though you might want to keep your head down: avoid as much of the stink as possible.”

“Lucas, the whole group is talking about ways to back you up. We’re all with you—”

“Easy, man, I got this,” Lucas said.

Lucas got his briefcase and he and Letty headed out of the building. Crossing the parking lot, Letty said, “Del’s a good friend.”

“Yes, he is. So are Flowers and Jenkins and Shrake and Elle and Catrin and a half dozen other people. Some of them aren’t really friends, but they’re okay, like Shaffer—I didn’t like him, but he did a good job, and he didn’t like me, but he knew I held my end up, so we were fine with each other. Other people, like Sands, they’re a drag on the system. They’re our biggest problem: there are too many bureaucrats and all they worry about is sucking on the neck of whoever’s paying them. Just the way it goes.”

Two minutes later, they were out on Maryland Avenue, headed for I-35, neither one of them saying much, comfortable with not talking.

Letty was driving.

•   •   •

PILATE SAID,
“There they are.”

He was parked on Phalen Boulevard, looking slightly down into the BCA parking lot.

Kristen whimpered, “Let’s get out of here. Pilate, they’ll kill us.”

“Shut up. They’re not gonna kill us. We’ll get them away from here, out in the open, and
BOOM!
”

“Yeah,
BOOM!
”

Davenport and his daughter had gotten out of the slick-looking Porsche, and, leaving the top down, went inside the building.

“He said on TV he was just going to make a statement. Couldn’t take long. You’re driving, I got the gun,” Pilate said. “If we get down a quiet street where we could pull up beside them . . . All we need is five seconds to get away from the scene, and we’re gone.”

“This is so fuckin’ crazy. They’re going to kill us.”

“You think I’m a fuckin’ coward? You think I’m a fuckin’ coward, don’t you?”

It went on like that, back and forth, with growing silences between outbursts, and they waited, and waited some more, and it was almost two hours before Davenport and his kid came out of the building and got back in the Porsche, the girl in the driver’s seat.