Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(55)

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THERE WAS ONLY ONE moment of tension over the weekend, but the tension wasn’t between the marshals and the subjects, but between the White Gazette’s publisher, Jackson Wheatley, and his wife, Constance.

The Wheatleys had apparently been fighting when the marshals arrived at their house in the suburban Maryland town of University Park. Constance Wheatley answered the knock on the door, a tall, dignified, fiftyish white-haired woman carrying a little too much weight. She looked at the badges, turned away from the door and screamed, “Okay, shithead, this is it! Now we got marshals breaking down our door. I want a divorce! I’m going to Nancy’s and I want a divorce. You’ll hear from my lawyer on Monday and I’m taking the Benz.”

Jackson Wheatley came steaming out of a hallway, a short, stocky red-faced man in a white shirt and green slacks, wearing white socks with sandals, who shouted, “You’re not taking any of my cars, you cunt! You try to take one of those cars and I’ll . . .”

He saw the marshals on the other side of the screen door and his voice trailed off, but then Constance came out of the kitchen, where she’d gone after turning away from the door, and she had a claw hammer in her hands. “What are you going to do, mister? What? Call me a cunt, I’ll stick this hammer so deep in your brains all the squirrels will get out.”

And she went after him with the hammer, Jackson Wheatley shouting at the marshals, “You’re witnesses, you’re witnesses,” and he ran around a sofa and then behind a leather easy chair and grabbed a hardbacked copy of Good Poems: American Places by Garrison Keillor, off a built-in bookshelf, and fumbled it open. A pistol fell on the floor and then Bob, Rae, and Lucas were all inside, and Jackson Wheatley stooped to pick up the diminutive gun and Bob kicked it and Lucas stepped behind Jackson Wheatley and scooped it up, while Rae faced off with Constance and said, “If you swing that hammer at me, you’ll get badly injured.”

Wheatley stopped with the hammer in the air and Rae said, “We might even shoot you.”

Wheatley pointed a finger at her husband and said, “That sonofabitch is keeping me here by force so he can satisfy his perverted appetites.”

Jackson shouted, “What? You haven’t fucked me in ten years! I called you a cunt? I apologize: I don’t think you got one.” He shouted at Lucas, “You saw that, she tried to kill me with a hammer . . .”

Bob held up a hand. “I have a solution for this. Everybody be quiet for one moment while I go outside. I promise, this will settle things down.”

He went out the door and Lucas, with the small gun in his hand, said to Jackson Wheatley, “This gun is a piece of junk. What century did it come from?”

“That was my father’s personal sidearm . . .”

“Your father was an animal,” Constance Wheatley shouted. “A criminal. Your mother should have cut his nuts off before they had you, but she didn’t have the brains to do it! Now you got the marshals coming to get you. Well, good riddance.” To Lucas: “Take this racist asshole away. Put him in prison!”

Bob came back: “Okay, folks, I called nine-one-one. The cops will be here in a couple of minutes, they’ll be talking to both of you.”

Constance Wheatley took a step back, then asked, “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything.” She dropped the hammer on the floor, as if they might not notice.

Lucas looked at the Keillor book. The center had been cut out, the edges of the pages glued together so the gun could be concealed in the hollowed-out portion. With the covers closed, it looked intact.

“That was a damned good book,” Lucas said. “Put together by one of my neighbors. You guys ruined it.”

“I thought it overreached itself,” Jackson Wheatley said.

The cops arrived three minutes later, and after a brief seminar on domestic violence, Lucas, Bob, and Rae went on their way.

“And another useless few hours dribble into history,” Rae said, as they got in the Tahoe.

“She looked so dignified when she opened the door,” Bob marveled.

“But they had a gun,” Lucas said. “Like everybody else.”





CHAPTER

ELEVEN



Dunn was at work with his crew before the sun poked over the horizon on Monday, hustled all morning, pushed the crew through lunch, and quit at one o’clock, a full day’s work done. By three he was at his cabin and by five o’clock had satisfied himself that one of Stokes’s rifles, a Colt LE6920 in .223 with a variable power scope, would do the job.

The smaller rifle was more comfortable to shoot than his .308, with a much crisper trigger, and also had a snap-down bipod as a shooting support. Altogether, he was significantly more accurate with it. By the end of the shooting session, he was keeping all of his shots on the twelve-by-eighteen-inch paper, many grouping around the bull. He kept in mind that he didn’t actually have to kill the kid, he only had to hit him or come close.

Stokes’s second rifle, also a .223, had a more radical, skeletonized look, but didn’t have a scope, and Dunn didn’t want to learn how to mount one, or take the time to do it.

When he finished with the shooting, he sat in the cabin and cleaned the rifle, scrubbing out the bore, putting a light coat of lubricant on the mechanical parts, then wiping those down. As he worked, he continually flashed on the plan, and on his place in history, even if that place, with good luck, turned out to be anonymous.