Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(6)

“I’ll go with you,” Rae said to Bob. “Bring that pole.”

“Ah, jeez.”

But Bob went, and even led the way. The trail looked like something that might have been used by deer, or even pigs. It was only a foot wide and, here and there, overgrown with sedges, which Bob carefully probed with the dowel before crossing. The place had a wet dirt odor, but when Bob broke through some round green plant stems the air was immediately suffused with the smell of green onions, or garlic. A tiger swallowtail flittered in and out of shafts of sunlight—now here, now gone, now here again.

They saw no snakes, but the trail went on, and so did they, cutting through downed trees and live ones, stepping around low spots filled with stagnant water, until Rae said, “Bob? Look.”

She pointed at an oval depression, six feet off the trail, in which the weeds were half the height of the surrounding foliage; they were younger, and a lighter shade of green. “What does that look like?”

“Looks like this one, over here,” Bob said, pointing to a similar-sized depression on the other side, well off the trail. Ten feet farther along the track, they saw another, but with taller brush growing over it.

“Let’s go have a tit-à-tit,” Bob said.

They went back out, told Tremanty that they hadn’t seen any snakes, but that they needed an opinion. Tremanty followed them back, stepping high, keeping a sharp eye out for slithers. When they showed him the low spots, he looked at them and said, “Could be natural.”

“Nature often fools the eye,” Bob said. “Since that’s decided, let’s get out of here and down to New Orleans and get some crawfish. I’ll buy.”

“Goddamnit. Every time I go out with marshals, weird shit happens,” Tremanty said. He took a cell phone out of his pocket.

“So, in your opinion . . .”

“My opinion is, those are natural depressions, or maybe Deese was burying something back here.”

“Let me say it again,” Bob said. “Crawfish.”

Tremanty shook his head. “I gotta make some calls.”

“If those are graves, there could be a hundred of them back here,” Rae said, looking into the twisted, fetid brush around them.

“Pray that they’re not,” Tremanty said, as he punched a number into his phone. “I’m serious. Pray.”





CHAPTER


TWO


Five guys sat in the bar’s back room, playing dealer’s choice poker, five-card draw on this particular hand, and they were cheap. The most valuable chips, the white ones, were worth a buck.

Lucas Davenport was in the awkward position of holding a pair of fives after the draw, with three people still in the pot, and, at the same time, defending the FBI.

“They’re not all assholes,” he said. He was the only one wearing a suit, a silvery-gray ensemble too relaxed to be currently fashionable except maybe in certain parts of Milan, where he’d never been but would like to go for the shopping. He was tieless in a checked shirt open at the collar. He looked again at his hand, threw the cards facedown in the center of the table, and said, “I’m out.”

“Name one who isn’t an asshole. Just one,” Shrake said, referring to the agents at the FBI. The back room smelled of beer, deli sandwiches, and a hint of cigar, though none of them smoked.

Lucas: “There’s this chick I met in Washington . . .”

“I mean one that I know,” Shrake said, pointing the top of a beer bottle at Lucas. “Maybe there’s one, somewhere, but here . . .”

“I gotta think about it,” Lucas said. He had a corned beef sandwich sitting on a paper plate on the table, picked it up, and took another bite. The genuine French mustard—moutarde—bit right back.

Shrake: “See?”

Shrake and his partner, Jenkins, both large men with battered faces, wore gray sport coats over short-sleeved open-necked golf shirts—pastel green and baby blue, respectively.

“Lotta assholes in the BCA and St. Paul and Minneapolis cops . . .” Lucas said, around a mouthful of corned beef.

“Yeah, but we’re not all assholes, like in the FBI,” Jenkins said. He threw a white chip into the pile in the middle of the table. “I’m in for a buck.”

“I’m telling you . . .”

Virgil Flowers, a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent visiting from southern Minnesota, said, “How about Terry McCullough? He never seemed that bad.”

They talked about Special Agent Terry McCullough for a couple of minutes and, by a vote of three to two, found him to be an asshole.

“Then I got nothing,” Flowers said. He was wearing a canvas shirt and jeans. He’d found out earlier that week that in six or seven months he would become the father of twins, God willing and the creek don’t rise. He threw a white chip and a red one into the pot and said, “See your buck and raise you a half.”

Jenkins said, “Fuck you and your raise, you sandbagging piece of shit.”

Lucas: “Just because all the feds got college degrees . . .”

“We all got college degrees,” Shrake said.

“A real college, not a four-day putting school,” Lucas said.

Jenkins said, “Oh.”

“Feds are like classical musicians,” said Sloan, a former Minneapolis homicide cop who owned the bar where they were playing cards, and who sometimes played guitar in a J. J. Cale tribute band. He was a narrow man who dressed mostly in shades of brown and wore hats with brims. “They can read music like crazy, but you want them to play a C major seventh chord, they got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”