Buried Prey

gonna do it in a way that drags us all down. We gotta know that you’re not going to drag three good friends through the shit, just so you can get even with somebody.”
    Lucas felt a surge of anger, turned to Del. “You’re in this, too?”
    “Yeah, and we’re not the only ones. Everybody who knows you is worried. Your family.”
    “You’ve been talking behind my back,” Lucas said, even angrier.
    Shrake nodded: “Yeah. We have. We didn’t want to insult you, if it wasn’t a problem. But it looks to us like you’ve got a problem. The way you’ve been setting up this bust. You’ve got something fancy going on with the entry team, we could smell it.”
    “So what’re you gonna do: try to take my gun?”
    “Maybe,” Shrake said. “If we’ve got to.”
    “You think you could do it?” Lucas asked, taking a step back. Both Jenkins and Shrake were big and hard, and specialized in physical confrontation.
    Jenkins said, “The three of us could, yeah.”
    Lucas half turned to glance at Del, whose mouth was set in a solid line. Del said, “We don’t want your fuckin’ gun. What we want is a promise: you don’t drag your three friends through the shit just to bring down Hanson. You’re not an executioner. And we don’t want to witness an execution.”
    Lucas looked at the three of them, shook his head, his voice cold: “You got no idea what this is doing.”
    “I think we do,” Del said. “We’ve been worried about it for days. Talking about it. We couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
    “All we want you to do is give us your word: no executions, no kind of fuckin’ phony setups,” Jenkins said. “We go in, we take him, the chips fall where they may. We do it straight up.”
    Lucas was breathing hard, as torn as he’d ever been in his life: the three men were among his half-dozen best friends. What they were doing felt like betrayal, but the little man at the back of his head told him that they were sincere enough.
    He said, “Fuck you.”
    Shrake said, “You can’t even do that, huh?”
    “What’re you going to do about it? I’ll go alone if I have to.”
    “We’ll fuck with you,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got the Carver County Sheriff ’s Office on speed-dial. I’ll call them, I’ll get them over here. You go in and ask the desk clerk for the room number, and I’ll embarrass you by telling him not to give it to you.”
    “You motherfuckers,” Lucas said, suddenly uncertain; he felt cornered—and maybe wrong.
    Del said, very quietly, “We’ll believe whatever you say. You give us your word that we’re not going to an execution, we’ll take it.”
    They were all grouped up in a bunch, and Lucas felt as though he were about to start shaking with frustration, but the man in the back of his head was persistent: the three of them were serious, and sincere, and were his friends.
    Finally, he nodded: “All right. Straight up.”
    “That’s good enough for us,” Shrake said, and he and Jenkins backed away, and let Lucas through, to lead them into the motel lobby.
     
     
    THE MOTEL CLERK was a soft-spoken woman with carefully coiffed gold-tinted hair and a Fargo accent; her blue eyes got wide when Lucas showed her his ID. “We’re looking for a man named Roger Hanson who would have checked in probably yesterday. Heavyset, black hair, maybe a thick black beard. He’s driving a Chevrolet van.”
    She said, “That doesn’t sound like anybody I’ve seen, but let me check.”
    As she went to her computer, Lucas’s phone rang. He stepped away from the desk, and the entry team leader at Hanson’s house said, “Man, you’re not going to believe this. We’ve got a male body in the guy’s freezer. We’re gonna leave him until crime scene can go over the place, so we’ve got no ID.”
    Lucas said, “Older, maybe middle seventies, white hair, stocky—”
    “That’s him,” the team leader said. “Who is it?”
    “Probably his uncle, Brian Hanson. Former detective over in Minneapolis. There are a couple of older guys in Minneapolis Homicide who could ID him for you. Also, the former Minneapolis chief, Quentin Daniel, worked with him. Daniel’s retired, and he could probably run over. I’ve got a phone number for him if you need it. Jesus: listen, anything else?”
    “Lotsa porn, kiddie porn. This is the guy, Lucas. You got something going, right?”
    “We’re right behind him, we think. Maybe.” He looked at Jenkins, who was standing by the motel