Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(38)

They talked for a few more minutes, and John pushed Lucas into admitting that he thought that government was often overbearing and wasteful, and that maybe there were too many cops and soldiers and lawyers.

“See,” John said, “You’ve got some potential to think for yourself. Maybe already been doing it.”

Outside, the lawnmower shut down and Lucas said, “I guess I better run.”

“Guess you better.” Oxford pushed himself up from the chair and followed Lucas to the door. He said, “You’ll soon enough find out what you’ve done here and it really gets me down, as a personal thing. Really bums me out, as us old hippies used to say.”

Lucas stopped and turned: “What have I done?”

“You’ll find out.”





CHAPTER

EIGHT



Elias Dunn had been so shocked by his murder of Rachel and Randy Stokes that he called in sick the next day and the day after that and spent most of his time lying facedown on his bed with a killer headache crawling up the back of his head, a headache that neither Advil nor Aleve could touch.

He couldn’t eat, couldn’t hold anything down. He lived on tap water. It all had been too close, too personal, much more bloody than he’d expected. He hadn’t done it efficiently—he’d even shot himself.

That shot had traveled between his buttocks, cutting a shallow groove in each of them. He’d bled through his clothes and onto the car seat, but the seat was made of some kind of leather-like plastic and was easily cleaned.

The wounds were not easy to treat, because he couldn’t see them well. Even in his floor-to-ceiling dressing mirror, he had to bend over and peer at them between his legs, which was not only painful, but humiliating. He washed the two wounds with soap and water, then slathered them with disinfectant ointment, covered them with stickless gauze from a first aid kit, and then, because he didn’t have enough actual medical tape in the first aid kit, used duct tape to cover the layers of gauze.

The first night and the following day he couldn’t leave the house because he couldn’t drive with the headache. When he stood upright, or sat upright in his truck, clusters of bright blue specks flickered in front of his eyes like neon gnats. He called his survey crew, told them he was sick, told them he’d pay them full wages each day until he was back on the job, and he’d call them the night before they should come back to work.

The second night, he managed to get out to a Walgreens, where he bought a heavy-duty first aid kit including some disinfectant ointment that incorporated a painkiller. He rewashed and re-covered the wound, following instructions he found on the internet, and the pain eased a bit.

He woke on the next morning with a lingering ache at the back of his skull, but no gnats in front of his eyes. He crawled out of bed, nearly fell, staggered to the kitchen and ate a whole box of raisin bran with one-percent milk. He managed to keep that down and walked unsteadily to his computer and out to the Fauquier Now website, which covered Fauquier County and Warrenton. He poked around there, found nothing about any murders.

Nobody had found them yet?

He could hardly believe it, but that was apparently the case. He was tempted to search for the Stokeses by name, but decided that might be a security breach. He’d wait to hear.



* * *



—

HE SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER and went back to his bed and flopped facedown. He didn’t sleep—at least, he didn’t think he did—but when he went back to bed, it had been morning, and when he got up, it was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. The hours in between had been taken up with dreams not only of reruns of the shootings of Rachel and Randy Stokes, but also imagined videos of gunned-down children, police sirens, screaming politicians.

Eventually the reruns of the Stokeses’ shootings had faded and the imagined images of screaming politicians and urgent media coverage had come to the fore. When he got up, his bare feet hit the floor and he sat there for a moment, imagining CNN and Fox and MSNBC covering those future shootings.

He wasn’t a man given to a lot of self-analysis, but he recognized something he hadn’t felt before: he was now more important than he’d ever been, or ever imagined he’d be. He was now a man who could change the nation.

He walked up to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked bad, without a doubt, three days of whiskers, his hair in disarray, his face sallow, gaunt. He cleaned up, taped a piece of plastic bag over his buttocks to keep the water off, then stood in a hot shower for fifteen minutes. He needed to work out, or jog, but was afraid that either one would break open the wounds.

But the shower helped: he was better.

On the phone to the job foreman: “Bill? This is El . . .”

“Man, how you feeling?” Bill sounded like he actually cared.

“Better. Whatever it was put me on the toilet every ten minutes for three days, but I went out and ran this afternoon. No after-effects, far as I can tell. I think I got a bad salad. Not coughing or anything. Where’re we at?”

“You were running far enough ahead of us that we’re okay, but if you could work tomorrow, that’d be a good thing.”

“We’ll be there at dawn, we’ll work right down to dark and not charge you an extra nickel.”

“You’re a good man, El. I’ll see you out there.”