Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(3)

Before getting out of his car, Stokes collected the pile of Diet Pepsi bottles and Hostess Fruit Pie boxes from the floor of the passenger side, crushed them against his chest so he’d only have to make one trip, and deposited them in the trash can outside the Chuck’s Wagon main door. Inside, in the dim light, he spotted Elias Dunn, sitting alone at the bar with a bottle of Budweiser, looking up at the Fox News program on the overhead TV.

“Hey, El,” he said, as he slid onto a stool two down from the other man. He didn’t sit right next to him because that’d seem a little queer.

Dunn looked over at him—was that a flash of disdain?—and said, “Stokes.”

Stokes looked around. There were ten other people in the place, he and Dunn at the short bar, a dozen tables and booths, served by one slow-moving waitress. Chuck’s Wagon smelled of microwave everything: barbeque, pasta, pizza, pot pies, anything that could be stored frozen and nuked.

Stokes and Dunn had met on a construction job. Dunn was a civil engineer, and had been leading a survey crew staking out the streets and drainage for a new subdivision over toward Gainesville. Stokes had been a shovel operator—the kind of shovel that had a wooden handle—and had peppered Dunn with questions about his thirteen-thousand-dollar surveyor’s total station.

Stokes, it seemed, was an enthusiastic rifleman and was fascinated by the total station, which was an optically-linked computer on a tripod. With a scope and a laser range finder, the instruments had replaced the old surveyor transits. They could tell you that you were, say, four hundred and twenty-four yards, two feet, nine and three-eighths inches from your target and could tell you exactly how much higher or lower you were than your target.

After talking for a few minutes out on the job site, Dunn had concluded that even if Stokes could pull a trigger, the operation of a total station was beyond his intellectual reach.



* * *



—

NOW STOKES WAVED at the bartender and said, “PBR,” and the bartender said, “No offense, Randy, but you got the cash?”

“I do,” Stokes said. He pulled a wad of sweaty one-dollar bills from his pocket and laid them on the bar, where they slowly uncurled. “That’s eighteen dollars right there.”

The bartender walked down the bar to get the beer, and Stokes said to Dunn, “I was over to my sister’s place last night and she’s got a computer and she showed me that, uh, computer place you were talking about. The one you wrote on the napkin.”

Dunn looked back over at him, ran his tongue across the front of his teeth a couple of times, and said, “So, did you read it?” He was vaguely surprised that Stokes hadn’t lost the napkin.

“One of the articles on it. I didn’t understand it all and then my sister shoved the napkin in the garbage, by mistake, and got ketchup and shit all over it. But she’d printed the article so I could read it in bed, and she said we could type part of it back in and search for it. We did that, but the computer went to a whole different place. The article was there, and a whole bunch of other articles, but the biggest thing was pictures of kids walking on the street. Seemed weird to me.”

Dunn, who’d only been about nine percent interested in anything Stokes might have to say, because Stokes was a dumbass, found his interest temporarily jacked up to thirty-five percent.

“A different website?”

“Yup. Called itself, uh . . . 19? No. 1919. With a whole bunch of articles. Including that one you gave me. And the pictures of kids.”

“Porn?”

“No, no, not porn, just kids walking along,” Stokes said. “Some were pretty little, some looked like they were maybe in high school.”

“With the article I sent you to?” Dunn asked.

“Yup.”

“You know what the website was?”

“Yup. My sister wrote it down.” Stokes reached in his hip pocket, found a wadded-up piece of computer paper, and spread it on the bar.

Stokes had spent some time in a previous visit to Chuck’s Wagon bending Dunn’s ear about his rights as a natural-born white man and a faithful follower of country music, as well as about how his custom-assembled .223 rifle could give you a half-minute of angle all day long.

Dunn had given him the URL of a skinhead site that combined the three—the white man stuff, country music, and guns, and where you could also buy a bumper sticker that riffed on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—Sounds Like Heaven to Me.”

Dunn didn’t recognize the name of the website that was written on the crumpled sheet of paper, in purple ink and a woman’s handwriting. In fact, there was no website name at all, only a jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols that looked like a super-secure password. He took the paper and said, “Thanks. I’ll look into it,” and when the bartender came back with the PBR, Dunn said, “I’ll get this one,” and pushed a ten-dollar bill across the bar.

Stokes said, “Well, thank you, big guy. That’s real nice. I’ll get the next one.”

Dunn tipped up his beer, finishing it, and said, “Actually, I have to get home. Got an early job.”

“Well, don’t fall in no holes,” Stokes said.

Dunn was an excellent civil engineer and didn’t fall in no holes and didn’t appreciate hole-falling humor. He nodded at Stokes, a tight nod—everything about him was tight, really tight, screwed-down tight, so fuckin’ tight he squeaked when he walked—and he marched out of the bar in his high-topped Doc Martens 1460s, and, from Stokes’s perspective, disappeared into the afternoon.