Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(48)

McCoy and Cousins hauled Calvin to her feet, and she spat at Cousins, who dodged, then leaned into her and said, “You do that again, I’ll bite your fuckin’ nose off.”

They marched her out of the trees to the cars and called off other incoming cops, and Cousins drove her back to the sheriff’s office. Lucas rode back to the Cadillac with McCoy, got cleaned up in a restroom at the sheriff’s department. He’d have a black eye where he’d been hit with the branch and had bloody scratches across his face and neck. He patted the scratches with paper towels until all but two stopped oozing, and the sheriff, Uwell, came in with a first aid kit that had Band-Aids.

“Your jacket’s ripped,” the sheriff said, as he handed the kit to Lucas. “Not gonna fix that.”

“This was supposed to be easy,” Lucas said. He smeared some disinfectant ointment on the bleeding scratches and stuck on the Band-Aids.

He looked at his jacket—a four-inch rip across the fabric behind one pocket. The sheriff was right: it wasn’t fixable. His shoes were okay, but his left ankle hurt; he sat on a toilet to check it and thought it might be swollen.

“We’ll get you some ice for that,” the sheriff said.

“Wonder what the hell that was all about? What was she doing?” Lucas asked.

“She panicked. We got a guy down at her trailer, turns out she had about a thousand yellow pill bottles sitting on her kitchen table and she was packaging up a few pounds of oxycodone tabs,” Uwell said. “Biggest dope bust we had here in a while.”

“Ah. Where is she?”

“Gotta a couple of our gals with her, getting her cleaned up. We’re waiting for her lawyer to show up.”

“Everybody else okay?”

“Everybody’s scratched up from that briar patch, and McCoy banged up his bad knee again, but that happens about once a month. In return, we got ourselves a nice combat shotgun and a truck, unless the federal court takes it away from us.”

“I don’t think they will,” Lucas said. “Cops getting shot at, high-speed chase, big drug bust—that doesn’t seem like an excessive fine to me.”

“And the county could use the truck,” Uwell said. “She won’t need it. She’s going back to the women’s prison. Lucky for us, it’s just down the road, nice and convenient.”



* * *



—

CALVIN’S LAWYER WAS AT LUNCH in some other town and Lucas hung around, dabbing at his face, rotating a series of Blue Ice packs on his ankle, until she showed up at two o’clock. An earnest young bespectacled woman, she spent twenty minutes reading the reports by McCoy and Cousins on what had happened before and during the chase, and questioned Lucas about his involvement, then spent a half hour with Calvin.

When she came out of the interview room, she said, “We’re not going to talk to anyone right now, except the marshal. Marshal, my client is willing to cooperate to a certain extent, but we will expect you to testify at trial, if there is a trial, about our willingness to cooperate.”

Lucas agreed that he could do that, within the Marshals Service guidelines, and they discussed those for a moment, then Lucas and the lawyer went into the interview room and Lucas said to Calvin, “All I wanted to do this morning was to have a chat. We could have done that on your porch in fifteen minutes.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you say that?” Calvin snarled. Then she started to cry and said, “They gonna take my truck.”

“Didn’t have a chance to talk to you—and when you started shooting, you know . . .”

Calvin wiped the tears off her face and asked, “What do you want?”

“I want to know about Sawyer and about this group, Controlled Burn.”

“Ah, that’s just some guys Sawyer knows. There ain’t nothing to it.”

“I’m interested in their political beliefs—”

That made Calvin laugh, a bark-like sound that she cut off after a single bark: “Politics? I mean, they’re . . . I mean, they don’t even vote, far as I know. Sawyer doesn’t, nor me neither. Voting’s just another fuckin’ scam. Don’t never do no good.”

“But they, the Controlled Burn guys, they don’t like the government, right?” Lucas asked.

“Who does?” Calvin asked. “Nothing to do about it, though. I mean, Dick Willey got busted for fightin’ that judge over in Lynchburg and I guess some things got said at the trial about the government pissing on people like us and Controlled Burn gonna get them, but nobody really thought it amounted to anything. I mean, some people came to Dick’s trial and they made some speeches outside the courthouse, but it all frittered away. Dick’s up to Marion now.”

“You don’t think the members, these people in Controlled Burn—”

“Controlled Burn is a bunch of guys that know each other,” Calvin said. “Half of them couldn’t tell you who the president is. After Dick Willey got busted, you know, there was talk about going up against the government, but it was all a lot of horseshit. Those guys get all shot up holding up a fuckin’ liquor store. How are they gonna overthrow the government? They may be dumb, most of them, but they know that much.”

They talked for a while longer, but Lucas eventually believed her: Controlled Burn was a group of holdup men who knew one another through a variety of different prisons, and whose anti-government stance derived from a single “fight” with a federal judge.