Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(94)

She had a bookcase-like rack behind her, pulled a plastic box off one of the shelves, opened it, and took out a hand-sized black pistol. “Sig 938. Shoots nines. I gotta say, it’s not the most pleasant gun to shoot, you wouldn’t want to go around plinking with it, but it’s accurate and it’ll flat kick ass. Magazines will hold six rounds and you get two mags with the gun. But here’s the best part.”

She walked down the table, picked up what looked like a leather triangle, and brought it back. “This here’s a Sticky holster. The outside is sticky fabric, but the inside is super-slick cloth.” She slipped the gun into the thin holster, and said, “Here. Put it in your jeans pocket.”

Dunn did, and the gun disappeared. He took a few steps around the table, and the gun was invisible, even with his tight jeans.

“Now,” she said, “Pull the gun.”

He stuck his hand in his pocket, and the gun slipped out with no felt friction at all. “Man, that’s slick,” he said. He looked at the gun. “How much?”

“This particular model retails for six hundred dollars new . . .”

“But it’s not new . . .”

She took $475 cash. Dunn suspected that what the IRS didn’t know about the transaction, wouldn’t hurt anyone except the IRS.



* * *



—

DUNN WENT OUT TO HIS CAR, put the rifle on the floor of the backseat, out of sight, took the Sig out of its case, thumbed six rounds into one of the mags, slapped it into the pistol, put the pistol in the Sticky holster, put the holster in his pocket and used the wristband to get back into the show.

He was armed and he liked the feeling. Realistically, though, he had everything he needed. He watched some guy throwing hatchets at a wooden stump, sat in on a video about threats to gun-owners’ rights, and listened to a man give a talk and show a video on low-light shooting and night-vision scopes. The particular scope he was touting sold for $4,199.99, and Dunn decided he could do without it, though the technology was interesting.

He left the show after the night-vision movie and drove over to the business district.



* * *



—

MERKIN, WEST VIRGINIA, was not a pretty town, or a rich one, but it was an old place, and interesting in its own way, every kind of house from colonial to ranch, red-brick buildings on the single commercial street, kids throwing footballs in side yards, girls ambling aimlessly along the sidewalks, enjoying the warm afternoon sun and the new color in the autumn leaves.

Dunn found a café, a slow-moving place with greasy, salty, good-tasting hamburgers and fries, and decent banana cream pie, and lingered further over a second cup of coffee, thinking about the rifle in the car, and a second shot. And the pressure in his pocket, the new carry gun.

Time slipped away and it was late afternoon when he started back to Warrenton. He crossed the Virginia line at twilight, on Highway 33 west of Rawley Springs, not moving especially fast on the two-lane road, when two deer bolted from the forest at the side of the road.

He hit them both, the lead deer in the hip, the second one, full on; the second deer tried to leap at the last moment and caught the top of his truck’s brush guard, rolled over it and hit the windshield. Blood exploded across the glass and the deer flipped off as the truck careened into the ditch at the side of the road. Dunn, half-blinded by the blood-slicked windshield, managed to keep the truck upright and finally stopped it, a hundred feet past the point where he’d hit the deer.

He got out of the truck, dazed, sank up to his ankles in the ditch muck, climbed the bank to the blacktop surface; he could smell the wet-copper odor of blood on the truck. He was looking at his truck when another pickup came along, and pulled over. A bearded man got out and asked, “You okay? Hit that deer?”

Dunn scrubbed at his forehead and said, “Yeah. One minute ago.”

“They’re like rats, they’re all over the place.” The man looked down at the truck and said, “I got a chain, but I don’t believe I could get you out of there. You’re pretty much sunk down in the mud. You’re gonna need a tow.”

“Yeah . . .”

“Damn good thing you had a brush guard on there; doesn’t look like you took much damage.”

They got a squat black tow truck out of Harrisonburg and a Virginia state patrol car with it. Dunn waded back to the truck, when he saw the cop car coming, lights flashing in the growing dark, and stashed the carry gun under the front seat. He told his story to the patrolman, who gave him a quick Breathalyzer test, “It’s a routine thing we gotta do,” and cleared him on that. The tow truck arrived and the truck driver and Dunn began trying to figure out how best to get the truck out of the ditch, with unwanted advice from the patrolman.

When they had the tow rigged and ready to go, the patrolman said, “Let’s go look at those deer.”

Dunn walked him back to the spot where he’d hit the two animals. One of them, a spike buck, the second one he’d hit, was dead. They found the other one off the side of the road, a doe, looking at them, eyes unhurt, pulling herself into the trees with her front legs, her back legs dead.

“Must of broke her spine,” the patrolman said. He took his pistol from its holster, moved up close. The doe stopped struggling and looked at him, then at Dunn, catching Dunn’s eyes, and the patrolman shot her in the head and the violent crack made Dunn jump and deafened him for a moment.