Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(49)

When he was done talking with Calvin, he stepped outside the interview room, thanked Calvin’s attorney and gave her a card, and then went to his iPad and looked up the Dick Willey–judge fight.

Turned out that Willey had been convicted of an assault on a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier, who, Willey said, had been delivering more than mail to Willey’s girlfriend. Out on bail while awaiting sentencing, he had ambushed and nearly beaten to death the federal judge who presided over his trial.

The news stories covering the subsequent trial and conviction, for assaulting the judge, were unclear about how the second trial attracted protests, although it appeared that the judge may have had an undisclosed blood relationship with the letter carrier. The protesters were Willey’s relatives and a few friends.

Nothing there, Lucas thought. A bunch of criminals in a prison-linked gang got their name in the papers for assault on a judge, but it appeared the assault was based on a personal grievance, not on politics.

Lucas had a black eye, cuts on his face and hands, a sprained ankle, a torn Canali sport coat, all bundled up in a waste of time. When he limped into the Watergate lobby a little before seven o’clock, black eye, scratches, sprained ankle, and ripped jacket, he found Deputy Marshals Bob Matees and Rae Givens checking through the front desk, Bob carrying a gear bag, which Lucas knew was full of guns and other pieces of miscellaneous gear that the two marshals had found useful from time to time.

Lucas gave Rae a hug as Bob gawked at him: “What the hell happened to you? You look like you fell out of an ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down.”

“Something like that,” Lucas said. “That’s about what I did. Thanks for caring.”

“And it left him a little cranky,” Rae said to Bob.

Bob was a wide man, but not tall; as a senior at the University of Oklahoma, he’d finished third in the heavyweight class of the NCAA wrestling national championships. He was looking exceptionally well dressed, to Lucas’s eye, possibly because he’d consulted Lucas on the clothing purchases. Lucas reached out and tapped his tie and said, “I’m proud of you.”

Rae was tall, at six feet, a black woman with close-cropped hair, dressed in dark gray slacks and a dark gray long-sleeved blouse, with bits of gold jewelry here and there. Though slender, she had muscles like steel cables and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. Bob said she could reliably bench press over two hundred. She had a fondness for full-auto M4 rifles, although she wasn’t allowed to carry one as often as she wished.

“I am a little cranky,” Lucas admitted. “Right now, all I want to do is get upstairs and stand in a shower for twenty minutes and get some ice on my ankle. I’ve got nothing for you tonight, but tomorrow we’re going to run over to Delaware. You get a Service truck?”

“We did,” Bob said. “A Tahoe, seventy-two thousand miles and it smells funny and the tranny sorta grinds, but, what the hell.”

“Why don’t we grab a bite in a half hour or so,” Rae suggested. “Talk about what we’re doing.”

Lucas nodded. “Sounds good.” As he walked away, he half turned, and said, “Good to see you guys. Glad to have you here.”

“Glad to be here,” Rae said.





CHAPTER

TEN



Lucas, Bob, and Rae got a snack in the hotel restaurant, caught up with one another. They talked for an hour; Rae wouldn’t discuss her recent heartbreak and Bob said that his relationship with a local gym teacher might be developing into something serious. “Girl is smart and nice-looking and she could throw a cow over a barbed-wire fence. I’m saying she’s in shape.”

“And cow-throwing is a much-needed skill set,” Rae said.

“You know what I’m saying,” Bob said.

“I know exactly where you’re coming from,” Rae said. To Lucas: “Andi’s got the best ass in Louisiana. That even includes my ass, which ain’t exactly chopped liver.”



* * *



—

AFTER EATING, they rendezvoused in Lucas’s room, so Lucas could lay out the problem. He told them about the initial threat and what he’d done so far, about his request that Charlie Lang and Stephen Gibson do some research for him, and how he’d gotten all beaten up that afternoon.

“That’s one lucky lady,” Rae said, when he finished. “Shootin’ at cops, and still alive. If I’d been there, I’d have killed her.”

“Yeah, I expect you would have,” Lucas said. “She might be the least of my problems here. I’m looking at six more groups. One of them is another prison-linked gang, and to tell the truth, after what Tabby Calvin said, this White Fist group might be the same deal as Controlled Burn. I mean, think about it: how many geniuses have you met in prison gangs?”

“Not many,” Bob said. “They mostly couldn’t figure out how to sign up for welfare, much less overthrow the government. That’s not exactly in their thought processes, most of them being complete dumbasses.”

“Exactly. Then, there’s this Forlorn Hope group,” Lucas said. “Whole different thing. I’m told that they like guns, they’re probably dangerous, and the scary thing is, they are definitely crazy. They’re pro-rape, for Christ’s sakes.”