Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(108)

In three minutes, he was set up behind an old, gnarled pine tree, looking out at the fence line. He could see Dunn coming—the other man was jogging now, the rifle carried in both hands, out in front of him. He was dressed all in gray. Work clothes, Lucas thought. He looked again with the binoculars: a clear image, chest to head.



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—

THE TREE LINE was farther away than Dunn had expected and he was out in the open longer than he’d hoped to be, feeling conspicuous, endangered. He’d found a reasonable spot for the truck, a pulloff over a culvert, that didn’t appear to be much used. He broke into a jog as he came to the fence, and thought, “Remember the fence.” It’d slow him on the way out. He crossed the fence with no trouble, moved a couple feet into the trees, and looked at his watch.

Ten after seven. Sun was about to come over the horizon and the fair-weather clouds glowed pink overhead.

He took another step and a man’s voice, clear, baritone, said, “Dunn! Stop there!”

Dunn thought, “Shit!” and brought up the muzzle of his rifle, pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He paused, then flipped the safety and tried again.

He never felt the impact from the incoming bullets. He simply dropped.



* * *



—

LUCAS WAITED UNTIL DUNN crossed the fence. This could play out a couple of ways, but would work best if Dunn fired a shot or two. Dunn looked up, as though admiring the pink clouds and Lucas put his rifle’s sights on Dunn’s chest, thirty yards away, and said, “Dunn! Stop there!”

Dunn brought up the muzzle of his rifle, pointing off to Lucas’s left, appeared to squeeze the trigger, but nothing happened. Lucas, in a tiny corner of his mind, thought, “Safety,” and Dunn apparently picked up the thought, flipped the safety and fired three rapid shots into the brush, well to Lucas’s left.

Lucas fired two quick shots into Dunn’s chest and Dunn sank to his knees and then fell over backwards, the rifle dropping to his side.

Lucas’s rifle had thrown two expended shells off to his right. He could see them, little pieces of gold on the forest floor. He picked them up, moved them to a different tree closer to Dunn’s line of fire. Then he pulled off his camo shirt, exposing the bulletproof marshal’s vest, quickly checked Dunn. He was dead, two coin-sized blood spots in the center of his chest.

That done, he moved quickly but carefully through the trees until he could see down the driveway to the Coil house. Two men were standing behind the cars in the driveway, both with rifles, scanning the trees.

Lucas shouted, “U.S. Marshal! U.S. Marshal! Got a man down. Coming out with my hands up. U.S. Marshal!”

One of the men shouted, “Come ahead. Hands in air.”

Lucas put the rifle down, walked out of the woods with his hands up, his badge case in one hand.

He was halfway up the driveway when Roberta Coil stuck her head out the door and blurted, “Davenport. What are you doing here?”





CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX



The ramifications of the Tifton shooting trailed out over months.

Most immediately, Roberta Coil vacillated between gratitude and condemnation. She was pleased that a threat to her daughter and possibly herself had been eliminated, but angry that Lucas hadn’t called in a battalion of FBI agents once he’d detected the problem. Audrey Coil didn’t have much to say about that, and her mother kept her firmly, if only temporarily, away from anything that looked like a camera or a reporter.



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—

THEN THERE WAS the usual bureaucratic chaos—a clusterfuck, in the unofficial nomenclature—involving the Tift County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, and two separate investigators from the Marshals Service’s Office of Professional Responsibility (one each from Internal Affairs and Discipline Management) concerned by the fact that Lucas had been involved in three shootings in the space of six months—one of them being Lucas’s own wounding in a Los Angeles firefight.

Lucas was interviewed by the Marshals Service investigators the day after the shooting, although their conclusions weren’t released for more than a month. One of the men called Lucas to say that the investigation had concluded that the two fatal criminal shootings had been righteous. As for Lucas’s wounding, they recommended that he undergo retraining in “cover and concealment,” which wasn’t going to happen if Lucas could avoid it.

“Yeah, probably wouldn’t help,” one of the investigators told him. “What you did was stupid and there ain’t no fixing that.”

“Thank you,” Lucas said.



* * *



—

SENATOR ELMER HENDERSON called three times, the first time the day after the shooting. “I’ve got Porter here in the office with me. Well done, my boy.”

“I hope the Office of Professional Responsibility agrees with you.”

“They will. We’ve had a number of colleagues calling over there, emphasizing the need for fair treatment of hardworking, risk-taking marshals. They’ve effectively signaled back that they get the point. You might even get a medal.”

“I’d like a medal,” Lucas said. “I could wear it to parties.”



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