Gathering Prey (31 page)

“We look for a quiet block,” Pilate said. “They’ll be moving slow on the city streets, right out in the open in that little car.”

•   •   •

LETTY TOOK THEM
out to I-35 and back toward home, easing onto I-94, then speeding up, slashing through the traffic. Lucas said nothing, because she’d learned from him, and he was enjoying the ride. They got off at Cretin and she took the left at the top of the ramp, got caught by a red light at Marshall.

Letty asked, “Do you think I’m paranoid?”

“You mean, like you’re starting to think I might cut off your Amex?”

She looked at him with cool, serious eyes. “No. Would you believe me if I said I think we’re being followed, by two people in an old car?”

Lucas smiled and said, “Yeah, I’d believe you.” He looked straight ahead, then glanced into the right wing mirror. “Which one is it?”

“That old red car, like a station wagon. It’s about six cars back in the left lane. I kind of noticed it when we were coming out of the parking lot. I thought I saw somebody inside, but they like ducked. When we were going down Maryland, I saw them turning behind us. Then we got to I-35, and they got behind us there, too, but stayed back, and they followed us to I-94. When I sped up, they did, too—but they still stayed back. Now they’re still behind us.”

“Goddamnit, it could be them,” Lucas said. “I’ve been shooting off my mouth on TV about what assholes they are, and they’re crazy. I even told them where we’d be today, when I talked to Jennifer and Annie last night. They couldn’t get out of the UP going south, so if they did get out, going west . . . they could be here.”

“Now what?” Letty asked.

“Let me think,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

A MINUTE LATER,
he said, “Okay, here’s the deal. Don’t let them catch us. Keep going straight south, all the way to Ford Parkway, then hook over to Cleveland, go all the way down to Highway 5, then over to the Mall of America.”

“Why the mall?”

“Because it’s full of cops,” Lucas said. “And the Bloomington chief is a friend of mine and he can have things set up by the time we get there. And it’s a logical destination.”

•   •   •

LUCAS GOT THROUGH
to the chief on the chief’s personal cell phone, explained the situation. “Here’s what I want to do. You know when you get off 494 onto Cedar, then you slide over and go up and then down that ramp that curves over in front of Nordstrom’s?”

“Yeah. Lindau Lane.”

“That’s it. With all those roads going through there, Lindau is like a concrete chute. If there’s shooting, it shouldn’t be a problem. We won’t kill any bystanders. If you have a couple cars down around the bend, where it turns by Nordstrom’s, he won’t be able to see them until he’s right at the roadblock. And there’s no way out of the chute.”

“I get the concept,” the chief said. “We’ll put a couple of unmarked cars north of 494, and they’ll fall in behind them, so when he comes around the corner, we’ll have him boxed.”

“Gonna need some guys who are willing to shoot,” Lucas said. “If these assholes think they’re gonna die, they’ll try to take us with them.”

“Keep your phone open: I’ll be calling you,” the chief said.

Letty said to Lucas, “Still back four or five cars.”

“Try not to clip a light and leave them behind.”

•   •   •

“WHERE IN THE HELL
are they going?” Pilate asked.

“Don’t know. I almost lost her on the freeway. She drives like she’s in L.A., and this piece of shit drives likes it’s still back in Michigan,” Kristen said.

They got down to Highway 5, followed Lucas and Letty past the airport where it merged with I-494, and then Pilate saw a sign for the mall. “They’re going to that Mall of America. Man, that’s great. We follow them right to their parking space, slow down, I nail the guy, and we go. So many cars out there, so many people, so much noise, we’ll be lost in five seconds.”

“Ah . . . I don’t know, man, I don’t know.”

Then they could see the mall south of the highway. Pilate said, “Doesn’t look that big. The malls in L.A. are twice as big.”

•   •   •

LUCAS SAID,
“Easy now.”

“I really love this shit,” Letty said.

“Letty, goddamnit . . .”

“Well?”

“Okay, okay.”

“There’s the off-ramp,” she said.

•   •   •

IT ALMOST WORKED.

The red Taurus—Lucas had picked it out in the wing mirror—followed them right off I-494 and then down and up again on the Lindau Lane chute. Lucas saw two boring unmarked sedans jostle through traffic and get in behind the Taurus. Cop cars. The Taurus kept coming.

Lucas said, “We’ve got them boxed. Speed up, fast now, hit it and stay right.”

Letty dropped two gears and floored it and the Porsche virtually leapt down the chute.

“Don’t scrape the fenders! Jesus, don’t scrape the fuckin’ fenders.”

The car’s soft fat tires were squealing their hearts out when Letty went around the curve to the left, and ahead saw four squad cars on the ramp, with a small gap on the right side, big enough for her to get through. She’d gained two hundred yards on the Taurus, and it was now out of sight behind the curve. Letty didn’t slow down as they approached the gap and a couple of Bloomington cops on foot, who had apparently expected her to
ease
through it, jumped back.

Lucas said, “Jesus, Jesus,” as the concrete wall flew past a foot from his nose. Through the gap, Letty hit the brakes, hard. Lucas surged forward in his safety belt, and when they were stopped, he looked at her and opened his mouth but nothing came out, and she smiled and said, “Not a scratch.”

He popped his safety belt and jumped out. “Stay down.”

As soon as Letty had gone through the gap, one of the waiting Bloomington cop cars moved into it.

That’s when the glitch developed.

•   •   •

THE PORSCHE SUDDENLY
leapt away from them. Kristen screamed, “What is . . . What are they doing, did they see us?”

“I don’t know, I don’t—”

Kristen had accelerated, in a futile attempt to keep up, and when she came around the turn, she had barely enough time to stop before hitting the cop cars that were blocking the road. An ugly yellow car was right on her tail, and she yelled, “Cops behind us.”

As they screeched to a stop, the car fishtailed a little, and Pilate popped the door and disappeared. Where did he go? She didn’t know. She got out of the car and held up her hands, heard cops shouting at her, and she stood still, but twisted her neck around looking for Pilate. He had vanished.

Then she saw Davenport running away from her, down the ramp, a gun in his hand, and a few cops trailing, running hard.

•   •   •

PILATE KNEW
IT WAS OVER:
the cops were going to kill him. Before the car had even stopped, he was out, and he took three steps to the concrete railing and looked down. Fifteen feet? He slipped over the railing, hung for a minute, then let go, landing on the grass below.

Something popped and pain surged through one foot, and he felt like his asshole had kept going when his body stopped. He ran under the ramp for a few seconds, but couldn’t stay there, and he darted across a narrow street, between two oncoming cars and into a bunch of small trees and headed for Nordstrom’s door.

He kept thinking,
Gonna make it, gonna make it, gonna make it . . .

He was wearing the blue suit, with the .45 in his pocket, and he took the gun out as he ran. He’d jacked a shell into the chamber when they were tracking Davenport. He came up to Nordstrom’s, expecting to be hit between the shoulder blades at any minute, realized that the cops couldn’t shoot because of the crowd ahead of him: crowds were his friends, now. Off to his left, he got a glimpse of somebody coming after him, and realized that Davenport was only a hundred feet away.

Pilate blew into Nordstrom’s at a dead run, past a big bearded guy in a Green Bay jersey, knocked a kid down, then another one, like bowling pins, almost went down himself, and somebody yelled, “Hey,” and he went straight on ahead, clothes, shoes, purses, and cosmetics. He could see the exit to the mall proper, and he glanced back, and Davenport had closed the gap. He didn’t have time to turn and shoot, so he lifted the gun straight up and fired into the ceiling.

Shoppers shrieked and scattered in all directions, which helped a little, but not enough. He risked another look back and Davenport was even closer, and he had a gun.

Then he was out of the store, looking for any kind of help he could get.

•   •   •

WHEN PILATE FIRED
into the ceiling and the crowd exploded into the aisles, Lucas was probably only fifty feet behind. He couldn’t shoot because of all the people milling around him, and in the shooting lanes behind Pilate. Even if he hit Pilate in the middle of the back, the slug could go on through and clip a bystander.

Pilate went straight out the store exit into the mall, then bent to the right around the escalators. Lucas went wider right, to make sure he wouldn’t be ambushed.

He wasn’t. Pilate had gone straight ahead and vaulted the counter at the Caribou Coffee, where he had a heavy young woman by her blond hair, his pistol aimed more or less at her face.

Lucas came around the escalator and Pilate screamed, “Get away from me! I want a—”

Lucas never found out what he wanted. A getaway car? An airplane to North Korea? A spaceship?

He never found out because the young woman picked up the large soy macchiato that she’d been steaming, and flipped it over her shoulder into Pilate’s eyes.

Pilate screamed and pulled away from her and in that sliver of opportunity, Lucas shot him through the bridge of his nose.

Then the screaming
really
got started.

L
ucas’s previous experience with the media was dwarfed by the response the cops got on the mall shooting, partly because one of the local TV stations initially referred to the shooting as an “apparent terrorist attack.” Later, they pulled back to apparent “domestic terrorism attack” and finally to “a shooting.”

An extremely attractive PR woman for Nordstrom’s dashed around from one media group to the next, chanting, “The shooting was in the mall. It was not in Nordstrom’s. The shooting was in the mall, it was not . . .”

The shooting, of course, became known as the Nordstrom Shoot-Out.

The egg laid by Henry Sands dwarfed all previous eggs by an order of magnitude. “A shoot-out at Nordstrom’s? And it was planned?”

Informed of Sands’s reaction, the Bloomington chief, who thought the matter had been handled rather well, given the freakishly successful parachute jump by Pilate, said, “I think Director Sands should check his head.” That was enough of a non sequitur that somebody at the press conference inevitably asked, “Why?” The chief said, “Because right now, it’s where the sun don’t shine.”

The chief pointed out that one crazed killer was captured alive and another was killed after a courageous action by a brave, quick-thinking coffee clerk, and no bystanders were hurt. Who was Sands to denigrate that, from an office in St. Paul?

Caribou Coffee gave the clerk a one-hundred-dollar gift card. When word got out, they upped it to a thousand.

The shooting took place a little after noon, and Lucas and Letty pulled into their driveway at six o’clock. Weather came to the door and stood on the porch with her arms crossed. “Hmm,” Letty said.

“Reamed” was the appropriate description of what happened next, Lucas and Letty agreed later.

When the reaming slowed, Weather gave Lucas a letter from the BCA, delivered by special messenger. Inside, Lucas found a letter saying that the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was considering the bringing of disciplinary charges against Lucas and his attendance was required at a meeting the following Tuesday at 10 a.m. The letter said that it would be “appropriate” for Lucas to seek legal counsel. It was signed by Sands.

“What are you going to do?” Weather asked him.

“Don’t know.”

•   •   •

THE NEXT MORNING,
Lucas drove a few blocks across the neighborhood to Willie’s American Guitars, and after a long consultation, wrote a check for a little more than ten thousand dollars for a vintage Les Paul guitar. It wasn’t the most expensive one, but neither was it the cheapest. He at first quailed at the price, but then thought, the Faygo-throwing fat guy may have saved Letty’s life. He had the store ship the guitar, which they would do as soon as the check cleared.

Laurent called on a cell phone, on speaker, with the rest of the reserve deputies standing around, and asked him for a blow-by-blow description of the Nordstrom shooting. Lucas gave it to them, and Frisell said, “Man . . . I wish I’d been there.”

“We all do,” Laurent said.

•   •   •

LUCAS GAVE LAURENT
the license plate numbers on the red Taurus and the Sault Ste. Marie police tracked it to the old lady’s house. They found her at the bottom of the stairs.

When Laurent called Lucas back to tell him, he said, “The only thing about the whole fight that really mystifies me is those two naked people. Why the hell did they do that?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Maybe they thought they could be decoys and that Coon guy would take out all of us. But really, I don’t know. Remember, they were crazy.”

“Still bothers me,” Laurent said. “Another thing. The congressman from up here says he’s retiring so there’ll be an open seat next year. A Democratic Party guy got in touch, wondering if I might be interested. The funny thing is, a guy from the Republican Party got in touch with Peters . . .”

“I got no advice on that, but I’ll be interested in what you decide,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure you’re enough of an asshole.”

“Maybe I could learn it,” Laurent said.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s a skill you’re born with. Or not.”

•   •   •

LAURENT CALLED AGAIN
late that afternoon to say that Laine, in consultation with her state-appointed attorneys, had told the state cops about the murder of Michelle. Her body was located the next morning by a state road crew.

•   •   •

THE GOVERNOR’S
chief weasel called and said, “Hold for the governor.”

Lucas held and Elmer Henderson came on. “There’s a rumor going around that Henry’s going to try to fire your ass. Conduct unbecoming a BCA agent, insubordination, blah, blah, blah.”

“Well, I’ve been advised to seek legal counsel,” Lucas said.

“You want me to fire him instead?” Henderson asked. “He could resign on Monday.”

Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “I appreciate the thought and the agency would be better off, but don’t do that. Everybody would know what happened, and when you start running for the vice presidency, the Republicans will look for every single thing they can get on you. An accusation of blatant meddling wouldn’t help.”

“We could crush that in a couple of minutes,” Henderson said.

“You might not have a couple of minutes to spare, when the ‘Henderson Hoagie’ thing gets out there.”

“What! What! Lucas, where did you hear that phrase?”

“Governor, every sentient being in Minnesota’s heard it. They admire you for it. Whether it’ll play, in, say, Colorado or Oregon, I don’t know.”

Lucas heard Henderson ask the weasel, “Is that true? That everybody in Minnesota knows?”

The weasel said, “Yes.”

The “Henderson Hoagie” referred to the governor’s fondness for three- and four-ways with nubile young Seven Sisters coeds while he was a student at Harvard. Supposedly, ketchup was involved.

Henderson came back. “Well . . . whatever happens with Sands, come talk to me afterwards.”

•   •   •

AT THE END
of the week, an FBI friend called to tell Lucas that the feds had been through both the fingerprint and DNA databanks and had found no matches at all for Pilate. He’d had two driver’s licenses in his wallet, both from California, one for a Robert D. Johnson and another for a William S. Smith. Both were apparently obtained by fraud. Nobody had any idea who he really was. And a cop from North Dakota called and said he’d encountered the Pilate group at a restaurant, and had taken down the license plate numbers of every one of their cars. By the time he found out that somebody might have needed them, the fight was over.

On Sunday morning, at breakfast, Weather asked him for the fifth or sixth time, “You know what you’re gonna do?”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah.”

“I got a box in the garage,” she said.

“How’d you know I’d need a box?”

•   •   •

THAT AFTERNOON,
he climbed the steps to the BCA. Not many people were around, but an agent leaving the building stopped on the stairs, looked at him with the box, and said, “Don’t do it, man.”

Lucas shook his hand and said, “Thanks for the thought.”

He’d been in his particular office for seven years, but he had never been much for stuffing it with personal items. He started packing what was there, and a couple more investigators came to the office door, the female agent carrying another box. She said, “Let us help you with that.”

“Okay.”

They cleaned the place out in fifteen minutes, then Lucas got a piece of official stationery, wrote: “Dear Henry. I quit. On a personal note, go fuck yourself.”

He put his ID inside the envelope, wrote Sands’s name on the outside, and slid it under Sands’s office door.

The male agent said, “Succinct. Succinct is always good in interoffice communications.”

The agents walked out to his Porsche with the two boxes and the female agent said, “I’ll never forget the night up in the swamp . . .” And she went on for a while, about a dark night with Lucas and his gang of agents when she killed a man. Lucas peeled off his sport coat and his shoulder holster, dropped the coat and gun on the passenger seat. The woman agent finally ran down, they all shook hands, and Lucas got out of there before things turned maudlin. He’d still have to call Del, Jenkins, Shrake, Flowers, and a few others. He’d do that in the evening.

When he got home, he ran the garage door up and Letty came through from the kitchen. Watched him get out of the car, and asked, “You’re retired now? You’re gonna go sit in a goddamn rowboat for the next thirty years?”

“Don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he said.

“You gotta do something.”

He grinned at his worried blue-eyed child. “I’ll find something. And I promise you this: it won’t involve a goddamn rowboat.”

“Good,” she said. She picked up the .45 off the passenger seat. “Then you’re gonna need this.”

Lucas took the gun.