Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(107)

His iPhone was tracking him, through the GPS app, and thirty-five minutes after he started away from the car, he thought he was about opposite the Coil house and turned into the woods to his left, walking into a nightmare.

He began by tangling with a barbed-wire fence at the edge of the field. He managed to clamber over it, though he ripped the shirt and probably the pants; he thought he was clear, but the binocular strap caught on the fence, twisted and yanked at his Adam’s apple.

More cursing, ineffectual because it had to be so quiet. Once in the woods, the tree branches slapped him in the face, until he was forced to walk with his arms up in front of him, fending off the low-hanging branches. Inching forward, he took another half hour to travel what he thought was perhaps two hundred yards, falling twice, stumbling all the time, like an over-the-edge drunk, barely managing to keep the rifle’s muzzle out of the dirt.

The GPS hadn’t let him down. When he got to the edge of the woods, he found he’d overshot the Coil house, but not by much. Staying back in the trees, but with some light now, from the house, he worked back to the high point where he could see down the driveway to the front door.

Three cars were parked in the driveway—one of the cop cars was gone, as well as a Lexus SUV, probably a friend. A couple of lights still burned in the house, but it felt as though it were asleep.

He backed away, got as deep into the woods as he could, while keeping the front door in sight. He found a tree trunk, down in a swale, and sat down and leaned into it; the tree smelled of sap, of turpentine. As he settled, he could feel the night quiet settling on him, the stillness that comes just before first light.

He put the binoculars in his lap, and waited.

Very slowly, the morning’s light began to seep through the trees.



* * *



—

DUNN FOUND HIS WAY through Tifton. He got turned around once, but as he was unable to use his cell phone’s navigation apps, he was driving a route he’d sketched on a piece of paper. He was a surveyor, though, so the map was a good one, if the streets turned out to be confusing.

The truck was a rattletrap: he’d need to get another one soon. Half a tank of gas, that’d get him a couple of hundred miles. The thing smelled of ten years of bad food and frequent farting, plus a bit of wet dog. He’d never let a truck go like this one had . . .

He found the Coil house after that minute’s confusion, cruised it, not slow, but right at the speed limit. He didn’t need to get stopped. There were lights on, three cars in the driveway. He continued on down the road to the intersection, took the left turn, waited a few minutes, then drove back past the house. Maybe slowed a bit, to look. Took the next right.

First light had come and gone, giving way to the dawn. Still an hour or so to sunrise, but landscape and building details were beginning to crystallize across the countryside.



* * *



—

LUCAS SPOTTED THE RATTLETRAP pickup rolling down the road past the Coils’ house. There hadn’t been much traffic, and what there was, he’d scanned with the binoculars. Light was bad, and he hadn’t been able to see much, but when the rattletrap went by, with weak yellow headlights that seemed to jiggle in their brackets, he caught a glimpse of an angular white face turned toward the Coils’ place.

And he thought, “Wait!”

Could have been him. Could have been Dunn. He watched the truck as it continued on down the road, then took the first left—the same turn Lucas had taken when he’d cruised the house the night before. Five minutes later, he saw headlights turn from that intersection back toward the Coil house, weak yellow lights that seemed to jiggle as they came on.

If that was Dunn, and if he was intent on a house invasion, he’d pull into the driveway and hit the door.

Lucas crouched, moved closer to the road, settled into a spot where the door was right there, where he could cover any approach to it. The truck came on, and Lucas put the binoculars on it again. Angular white face turned toward the Coil house . . .

And he thought, “That’s him.”



* * *



—

THE ROAD WENT ALL THE WAY back to Carpenter, a half mile away, but the truck didn’t. The truck turned left at the first intersection and Lucas loped back through the woods, now well lit by the growing daylight. He stopped just inside the tree line, and watched as the truck took another left, on the road that ran parallel to the woods and to the Coils’ road. The fields were flat and unobstructed, and he watched as the truck slowed and then pulled onto the shoulder, perhaps a hundred yards farther down from the Coil house.

Dunn.

There was no longer a question in Lucas’s mind.

If Dunn came straight across the field, to the trees, he’d be a hundred and twenty yards away from Lucas’s spot. Lucas stepped carefully farther back into the woods, then turned and jogged through the trees to the point where he thought Dunn would enter them. After a moment, he slowed, and turned back toward the fence line that marked the edge of the field and looked toward the truck.

A man had gotten out and was crossing the roadside ditch into the field. Lucas put the binoculars on him, now in good light. Dunn’s face was crisp: pale, harsh, alert. He was carrying a rifle.

Lucas pulled back into the woods, began moving toward Dunn’s probable entry point. The other man was still three hundred yards away, Lucas only fifty or so from his ambush spot. He took it more slowly. If Dunn spotted him, there’d be a gunfight, which he really didn’t need, having been on the losing end of one of those only six months earlier.