Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(5)

He leaned back in his desk chair, staring at the ceiling.

This was it.

He was going in.





CHAPTER

TWO



Lucas Davenport took a waking breath and rolled over to look at the nightstand clock: 6:55. He dimly remembered setting the alarm for seven o’clock, so he had five minutes. If he turned it off, he might sleep for three hours, so he didn’t.

Weather, his wife, was still asleep beside him, which meant that it was the weekend, the only days she slept in. He rolled away from her toward the clock side of the bed, winced from the dull ache in his chest and settled in for the last four minutes, eyes half open, looking up at the ceiling. Trying to nail the exact day of the week: Sunday? Sunday.

On Sunday, he had to get on an airplane. Everything was coming into focus.

Lucas had been shot the previous spring. With September half gone, he was still feeling after-effects; which, he supposed, was better than the alternative. He was working hard to get back in shape, running, lifting, punching a heavy bag. Everybody said how good he looked.

When he checked himself in the mirror, though, in his own eyes he looked gray, and too thin. Not wiry, but something over toward emaciated. His cheekbones had been blunt, and were now knife-edged; the crow’s feet at his eyes were like cuts; his watch was too loose at his wrist. He’d lost chunks of the hockey defenseman muscle he’d carried since college and getting it back, at his age, two years past fifty, was tough.

He wanted the weight. The morning scale said he was at 192, and for a cop who enjoyed the occasional fight, two hundred pounds was a good starting point.

Now something was happening in Washington, DC. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good, and at the moment he wasn’t in top form. Or maybe, his wife suggested, his body was fine, but his brain was still screwed up.



* * *



—

LUCAS HAD BEEN barbequing steaks in his backyard the night before for a couple of cop friends and their wives, when Elmer Henderson had called. Henderson was a U.S. senator from Minnesota, a former governor, a onetime vice-presidential candidate (he lost), and one of the richest men in the state.

Henderson had a ten-thousand-square-foot cabin on his own private six-hundred-acre lake, staff of six, up in the Northwoods, when he needed something simpler and more primitive than his life in the Twin Cities and Washington, DC. He had a dozen plaid shirts and numerous pairs of carefully ironed and faded jeans for the cabin life, along with several pairs of buffalo-hide loafers. Lucas had once spent a weekend at the cabin and he’d peeked in Henderson’s main closet—because he was a cop, and therefore somewhat curious, or snoopy, take your pick. Henderson’s Jockey shorts, Lucas believed, after a surreptitious inspection, were both ironed and starched.

Henderson also had a smaller, more discreet cabin in Wisconsin, which he called “The Hideout,” where he and the other Big Cigars from the Twin Cities cut their political deals. Lucas had been there, as well . . . cutting a deal.



* * *



—

LUCAS WAS RICH HIMSELF, but not rich like the people who’d inherited wealth. He didn’t assume its presence, because he’d made his money during a time when he wasn’t working as a cop. He’d been run out of the Minneapolis Police Department after he’d beaten a pimp who’d church-keyed one of his sources. The beating had neither cured the pimp of his inclinations, nor the woman of her facial scars, but had made a point that had resonated on Minneapolis streets, at least for a while.

While he was in college, and later, working as a cop, he’d had a sideline as a developer of role-playing games. None of them got as big as Dungeons & Dragons, but they’d sold well enough to buy him a used Porsche 911.

Then computers came along and the in-person role-playing games began to die. That occurred as he was being pushed out of the Minneapolis Police Department. With the new 9-1-1 systems then coming online, it occurred to him that American police departments could use role-playing games for their 9-1-1 systems, giving their personnel practice in responding to emergencies before they had to handle the real thing.

He wrote the simulations, found a college computer freak who could do the programming, and the resulting Davenport Simulations, which he’d sold at exactly the right time, had made him wealthy.

But not rich like Henderson.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t say, but perhaps should have, “The very rich are different than you and me.” And as Ernest Hemingway didn’t say, but probably would have liked to have said, “Yes, they have more money.”

If the exchange had actually occurred, Lucas thought, Fitzgerald would have had the better of it. In his experience, many of the very rich never really touched the sides or the bottom of the world, of life, but were cocooned from it, even when they wound up dead with needles in their arms.

Henderson was a prime example of the privileges of inherited wealth. Still, he and Lucas were friends on some level, and Henderson had twice been in a position to give Lucas something that he wanted but couldn’t get on his own: the authority to hunt.

After Lucas lost his job with Minneapolis, and after he made his money, he’d gotten, with Henderson’s support, a political appointment as an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and a new badge. When the time ran out on that appointment, Henderson and another U.S. senator, Porter Smalls, had ushered him into a job as a deputy U.S. Marshal.