Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(105)

As he walked up to the door, a man opened it and peered out. “Who’re you?” he asked. A middle-sized dog stood behind him, which wasn’t ideal, but Dunn said, “Are you Clayton Delaney?”

He chose the name because the last thing he’d heard in his truck was the song, “I Remember the Day Clayton Delaney Died.”

The man said, “What?”

Dunn pulled his hand from his pocket, put his finger through the trigger guard and shot the man twice in the chest. The man fell inside. The dog leaped over him, coming for Dunn, but Dunn hit the dog on the side of the shoulder and then leaped past him, into the trailer, and slammed the door.

Nobody else there, nothing but the body. The man was sure-enough dead. The place stank of nicotine and bacon and potatoes, but the keys to the truck were right there, on the kitchen counter.

Dunn looked out the door, where the dog had retreated halfway across the dirt circle that marked the driveway turn-around, and then stood, whimpering, then growling. He didn’t want to shoot again, so he walked half-sideways past the dog to his truck, and moved it around behind the trailer.

He went back to the blue Ford, got inside, fired it up. Half a tank of gas, more than he’d need.

He left the trailer, with the dog standing outside, and headed south toward Tifton. A plan formulating, now. Getting the truck had been easy—you could get any number of trucks that way, he thought.

He wasn’t that far from the coast. Maybe get a job on a boat headed south; get into Mexico or Venezuela or one of those places.

Maybe.





CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE



Lucas had become a police detective at a time when he always kept quarters in his pocket, in case he had to make phone calls. From phone booths. After looking up people in a phone book, which hung inside the phone booth on a chain—the book was always missing a few critical Yellow Pages and almost always smelled like somebody had peed on it.

Now, there were no phone books and no booths in which to hang them, or in which you might take an emergency leak. Quarters were worth half as much as they had been.

But, he thought, a cell phone had its advantages. He got out of Hartsfield-Jackson in a Nissan Pathfinder, at five o’clock. Before he left Hertz, he used his phone to check Google for sporting goods stores in Macon and found a Bass Pro Shops store that was open until seven.

He opened his phone’s navigation app, asked, and was told that with current traffic conditions, he could be there a few minutes after six. The app’s voice—a woman’s—sounded impatient. If he wanted to get there before the store closed, he’d have to move. And he could move, at illegal speed, because his phone also had the Waze app, which warned of speed traps and patrolling cops.

The nav app was correct, almost to the minute, as was the Waze. He spent twenty minutes in the store, and emerged with a double-extra-large camo shirt and large-size pants. On an impulse, and because he’d always wanted a pair anyway, he bought a pair of Fujinon image-stabilized marine binoculars.

He could have made it to Tifton by eight, but, after a quick search on his phone, stopped at an outlying Burger King for a no-meat Impossible Whopper, fries, and a Diet Coke. The Whopper was okay, maybe a six on a scale of one to ten, but he was burping salt all the way to Tifton.



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LUCAS LANDED A SMALL SUITE at the Country Inn in Tifton, where he arrived at 8:30. After inspecting his room, he carried the rifle up the back stairs, took it out of its case and worked it, loading and unloading it: it worked smoothly and had been freshly cleaned. That done, he put it back in its case and hid it behind the bed, in case a motel employee came into his room while he was gone.

He pulled on his bulletproof vest with the yellow “U.S. Marshal” lettering on the back, and pulled the double-extra-large camo shirt over it. It was sloppy, but workable, if he rolled up the sleeves. The pants fit fine. He folded the new clothes and set them aside.

The binoculars came in their own hard case and he took them out, inserted the batteries, put on the neck strap, fiddled with them until he understood how they worked.

Next, he set up his iPad, went on the motel Wi-Fi to Google Earth and called up a satellite view of the Coil house, which was in an exurban area northwest of town. From the satellite, the countryside around Tifton looked like a giant yellow-and-green jigsaw, the yellow being irregularly-shaped farm fields, interspersed with forest land.

The Coil house, which appeared to be long and single-storied, was on a small lake or a large pond. In addition to the pond, the Coils had a good-sized swimming pool, glowing aqua-green in the satellite image, screened from the road by the house and what in the north might have been called a woodlot.

Lucas didn’t know what you’d call it in the south, but there were a lot of trees, which was both good and bad. Nobody would see him, but he might not see Dunn, either.

Had to think like Dunn. He peered down at the satellite view, thought that Dunn might be looking at the same thing. Where would he put himself? How would he kill Audrey Coil—or maybe all the Coils?

An ambush at the house seemed simplest; otherwise, how would Dunn know where she’d be? Maybe the Tifton high school? Was there a private school? Lucas didn’t know, but, he thought, neither would Dunn.

Would Dunn risk a straightforward house invasion, going in with a high-capacity gun in an effort to kill everybody? He might . . . but if he did, there would be no guarantee that Audrey would even be in the house. He’d want to see her, Lucas thought.