Naked Prey

cold-bloodedly murdered his daughter. So fuckin’ what?”
    Lucas said to Mitford, “Don’t get your shorts in a knot,”and then, to the governor, “You say take him, we’ll take him. It’s seven-thirty now, I can kick Del out of bed, we’ll go down and get him. We can have him by, say, ten at the latest, and you can make your announcement. I’ve got Neil’s cell-phone number, if he’ll be with you.”
    “I will,” Mitford said. He jumped up and rubbed his hands together like a cold man in front of a fire. “Hot damn. We came, we saw, we kicked ass. And . . . he’s a Republican.”
    “Poor bastard,” said Rose Marie.
    “You making the call?” Lucas asked, looking at Henderson.
    “Get him,” Henderson said.
    D EL WAS AS much a night owl as Lucas, and was not happy when Lucas shook him out of bed. Del’s wife, Cheryl, was already awake and writing bills in the kitchen when Lucas arrived, and she sent Lucas back to the bedroom to do the dirty work. Lucas stuck his head in the door and cooed, “Get up, sleepyhead. Time to work.”
    Nothing.
    “Sleepyhead, get up . . . ”
    “I hope you die of leprosy,” Del moaned. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “What do you want?”
    “It’s not what I want,” Lucas said. “It’s what the governor and Rose Marie and McCord want. They want Sorrell busted at ten o’clock this morning, and you and I are going down, with a couple of BCA guys in another car, and we’re gonna drag him kicking and screaming out of his mansion.”
    “Can’t you do it by yourself?”
    “I could, but then I’d feel bad, knowing that you were up here in a nice warm bed sleeping late while I was dragging my ass all the way down to Rochester.”
    “All right.” He dropped back on the pillow. “Just give me one more minute.”
    Lucas wasn’t buying that routine.
    J ENKINS AND S HRAKE were the BCA’s official flatfeet. Most of the other agents had degrees in psychology or social work or accounting or computer science, and worked out for two hours a day in the gym. Jenkins and Shrake had graduated from Hennepin Community College with Law Enforcement Certificates, and, as far as anyone knew, that was the last time either had cracked a book that didn’t have Tom Clancy’s name on the cover. Both of them smoked and drank too much, both had been divorced a couple of times, and Lucas knew for sure that they both carried saps. They were the pair most often sent to arrest people because, they admitted, they liked the work.
    Lucas and Del were eating scrambled eggs at a Bakers Square restaurant on Ford Parkway, six blocks from Lucas’s house, when the other two arrived. Jenkins was a heavyset man, unshaven, with gray hair and suspicious eyes. Shrake was tall and lean, closely shaven with a pencil-thin white mustache, also gray-haired with suspicious eyes. They both wore hats and buttoned-up woolen overcoats and Shrake had an unlit cigarette pasted to his lower lip. They didn’t sit, they stood outside the booth looking down, their hands in their coat pockets, like a couple of wandering East German Stasi thugs. They finished each other’s sentences.
    Jenkins: “If we can bust this asshole at ten . . . ”
    Shrake: “We can get back up here in time to watch the playoff game.”
    Jenkins: “If you guys don’t fuck something up.”
    Shrake: “In which case, we’ll miss the game.”
    Jenkins: “Then we’ll tell everybody in the BCA that you guys are queer.”
    Shrake: “And that Davenport is the girlie.”
    Lucas continued to chew and Del put a piece of bacon in his mouth, and stared out the window at the Ford plant across the street.
    “I think we can get it done by ten,” Lucas said, after swallowing. “But you guys oughta know—Del actually is gay, and you’ve probably violated about six diversity guidelines.”
    Del turned and stared steadily at the pair, unsmiling, until Jenkins said, “Not that it really matters,” and they all tried to laugh, but it was too early in the morning and too cold, and Shrake’s hoarse laughter trailed away into a spasm of tobacco coughs. The sun was just up, and the car exhausts were melting the frost on the streets, leaving behind nasty little streaks of black ice. Too fuckin’ early.
    T HE TRIP THROUGH the frozen countryside took an hour and a half, with an orange sun finally groaning up over the horizon. There was more snow around the Cities than in the northwest, and for twenty minutes, they ran down the highway