Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(79)

Rae said, “Oh-boy oh-boy oh-boy oh-boyo. Gotta drive fast, Lucas. Faster, faster, if we want to be first.”



* * *



—

THEY DROVE UP I-95 with lights and siren and ignored a shortcut on state highways to stay on I-95 as long as possible, until they cut cross-country through the town of Manassas to I-66, out I-66 and off at the small town of The Plains and then back out in the country, down a narrow blacktopped road. As they went along, Jane Chase was on the phone, gathering information about the target house: “Stokes, not much on her,” she reported. “No criminal record. Nothing—not even a traffic ticket.”

“Fake name?” Rae wondered.

“Lot of docs on her,” Chase said. “Driver’s licenses going back fifteen years . . .”

“She bought that gun,” Lucas said. “She might be laying low, but she bought that gun.”



* * *



—

AND THEY GOT there first.

As they cruised the target, Rae said, “Tough-looking place.”

Bob: “Nothing moving.”

Chase: “Car in the back.”

Lucas: “If we stop down by the next house, we could circle around and come in through those trees.” The next house down had a large woodlot littered with rusted farm machinery, extending along the road toward the target. “Get within fifty yards anyway.”

Chase: “The SWAT squad is mobilizing and on the way.”

Bob: “I’m mobilizing.”

Rae: “We’re mo-bile, ag-ile, and hos-tile.”

Chase: “We should wait for the SWAT.”

Lucas: “Let’s go around and take a look before it gets dark. That can’t hurt.”

“Yeah, bullshit, it can hurt,” Bob said. “However, I fully support the idea.”



* * *



—

THE NEXT HOUSE down the road was like the Leaning Tower of The Plains, tall, narrow, paint-peeling clapboard, and leaning, with a dent in the roof line that promised big trouble, sooner rather than later.

Lucas pulled the truck into the driveway and continued to the end of the gravel, so they had the leaning tower between them and the target house. As they rolled to a stop, Rae said, “You know what this house smells like? Like tomato soup and peanut butter.”

“You got it,” Bob said.

“Why tomato soup and peanut butter?” Jane Chase asked.

Lucas pulled the latch on the Tahoe’s door and turned to her: “Because if you go into a Burger King, you can collect enough packets of ketchup to make tomato soup. Peanut butter because it gets you the most calories for a buck. And sometimes, you can get it free from the government.”



* * *



—

AS THEY GOT OUT, a white man came to the screen door wearing a formerly white T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and flip-flops. He was tall, radically thin, and unshaven. A dog moved up beside him, a pit bull, to look them over; the two of them collectively smelled like tomato soup with a whiff of dog shit from the yard. The dog looked better fed than the man. “He’p you?”

Lucas held up his badge. “We’re U.S. Marshals. We’re interested in the house up the road. Miz Stokes, is it?”

“Something’s wrong, ain’t there?”

Lucas frowned: “Wrong how?”

“Rachel’s always walking up and down the road, looking at stuff, every day, rain or shine. Haven’t seen her in the best part of a week. Randy’s car been sitting there for a week, hasn’t moved. We was gonna call the cops to check, but . . . we didn’t. Us’n and the cops . . . don’t get along.”

Rae said, “Oh, boy.”

Lucas: “Who’s Randy?”

“Her brother.”

A black woman came up behind the man, put her arm around his waist and said, “Rachel’s nice. Randy’s not. He don’t like black folks.”

Rae: “He’s not a shooter, is he?”

The woman asked, with a hint of skepticism, “You a marshal, too, black lady?”

Rae said, “Yes, me’n these two guys are marshals, this white lady is FBI.”

The man said, “Randy’s sure enough a shooter. That’s all he does, besides drink.”

“How about Rachel?” Chase asked. “We have her down for buying a gun, a rifle.”

The man said, “I don’t think she’d know which end of a gun is which. She probably bought it for Randy. Randy has some felonies. You know. Dope, mostly. Ran over somebody once, when he was drinking. He can’t buy his own guns. But he’s a shooter: give him half a chance, he’ll talk your ear off about it.”

Lucas asked, “If we walk up through those trees . . . how close can we get to the house?”

The man scratched his head, but the woman said, “If you go back there . . .” She pointed. “If you go back there and along that bob-wire fence, you come up behind that garage and they couldn’t see you from the house. If you stay on this side of the fence, you gonna have to walk through some blackberries, but there’s a hole in the fence, you go through that, and you can walk around them. Then the fence ends, but toward the garage.”

Bob said to Rae, “Load up,” and the two of them turned toward the truck.