Silken Prey

voted after five o’clock.
    Taryn had been scheduled to make four appearances during the day, set up to capture the noon and early evening news: going in, they’d thought they might need the small extra boost from those television appearances. Porter Smalls had ended his campaign with a breakfast at the St. Paul Hotel in St. Paul, so wouldn’t be much of a factor on the news. Besides, the news departments at TV stations in Minneapolis were generally liberal, and would give Taryn a publicity break if they could get away with it.
    In the front seat, Schiffer said into one of her phones, “I don’t want to know about helium. I want some of the balloons to go down, instead of up. Is that too much to ask? Get it done.”
    On her second phone she said, “Well?” She listened for a moment, then grunted and wrote a number in the right column in green ink. She said, “Keep it going,” and hung up and turned to Taryn.
    “Eighteen of twenty-seven, and we’re running stronger in our precincts than Sterling did last time.”
    “You want to make a call?” Taryn asked.
    “I never believe it until I see the actual numbers . . . but yeah. You got it. You’re the new senator from Minnesota.”
    Taryn said, “Yes!” and Dannon slapped the steering wheel and cried, “Oh, my God, it makes my dick hard!”
    Taryn said, “Douglas . . .”
    “I’m sorry, it’s . . .”
    Schiffer: “Don’t worry about it. Makes my dick hard, too.”
    •   •   •
    A T FOUR-FIFTEEN THEY ARRIVED at St. Mary’s Park for a rally timed to the evening news. Del was there, too, wearing a navy blue suit that was a couple sizes too big for him, with a wrinkled white shirt and a blue-white-and-chocolate-striped nylon tie whose wideness would have made him proud in 1972. His hat had a snap brim and a feather. He looked like a flake and nobody paid any attention to him.
    He got on his cell phone and told Lucas, “Dannon’s still with her. Man, I think she’s gonna win. She’s not saying so, but it’s coming through.”
    “Carver’s still sitting there, I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s something,” Lucas said. Carver had gone from the Caribou Coffee to a Starbucks, not far away.
    “I’ll call you back if anything happens,” Del said. “It looks like they’re gonna be here for a while. A couple of TV trucks just came in. I’m gonna stick that bug on their truck.”
    “Make sure you can do it clean.”
    “Do that,” Del said.
    •   •   •
    L UCAS WAS ON THE STREET, ten miles away, in a parallel parking spot, ready to roll out in front of Carver, if he came that way. He couldn’t actually see Carver, but Jenkins could, from a dry-cleaning shop across from the Starbucks. From his vantage point, Jenkins said it looked like Carver had gotten two or three cups of coffee at twenty-minute intervals and spent the rest of the time crouched over an iPad.
    “I don’t think he’s reading the Bible,” Jenkins said, on his handset. “But whatever it is, he’s all over it.”
    “Maybe he’s buying plane tickets,” suggested Shrake, who was on the same net. Shrake was a half-mile up the street, ready to follow if Carver broke that way.
    “That worries me,” Lucas said. “We don’t have enough to pull him in. If he gets on a plane, all we could do is wave good-bye.”
    “I haven’t seen him take out a credit card,” Jenkins said. “I’m more worried that he’s waiting for his dry cleaning.”
    “This guy isn’t dry cleaning, he’s strictly wash-and-wear,” Shrake said. “He’s all Under Armour and nylon shells and combat boots.”
    “Sounds like you,” Jenkins said. Then: “Hey. He’s up. Looks . . . He’s headed out.” A minute later, “He’s turning your way, Lucas. You better move.”
    “Got him on the monitor,” Shrake said.
    Lucas rolled away and said, “I’m gonna jump on 94, bet he’s headed back to Grant’s.”
    •   •   •
    C ARVER HAD SPENT an hour with his iPad, part of the time doing what Lucas had feared: checking planes from Minneapolis to the East Coast—New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami. He’d also checked in with old acquaintances working with contractors who supplied private security personnel in Afghanistan and several other nations in the Middle East and Africa; he asked about job openings.
    Time,
he thought,
to get out of Minneapolis.
    He spent the last minute or two on his cell phone. He was in-house for the party that