Silken Prey

wool vest over a white dress shirt, and an Italian cotton sport coat, blue-black in color that would be excellent, he thought, for nighttime shoot-outs. It hadn’t yet been tested for that. When he got back downstairs, Flowers had come in, wearing a barn coat, jeans, and carrying a felt cowboy hat. His high-heeled cowboy boots made him an inch taller than Lucas.
    “There better not be a fuckin’ horse in my driveway,” Lucas said.
    A bit later, Lucas took a call from the BCA tech, who said they were set with Verizon, and they could give him a real-time location as soon as Lucas called the other phone, which, as it happened, also used Verizon. There’d been no calls on the phone for two days; the last call had been to Quintana’s number.
    They all ate together at a long oblong dinner table, Flowers and Letty happily gabbing away—Flowers, a part-time writer with a developing reputation, had done a biographical piece about Letty that had been published in
Vanity Fair
, with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. They were all now dear friends, Annie and Letty and Virgie.
    Leibovitz had taken a bunch of pictures of Lucas, too, but the magazine had used only one. Lucas thought it made him look like a midwestern prairie preacher from the nineteenth century. As for the friendship, he thought Letty and Virgie were getting a little too dear. The issue came up before dinner, and Weather told him he was losing it if he thought Flowers had untoward ideas about Letty.
    “When it comes to being around women, I wouldn’t trust that guy further than I could spit a Norwegian rat,” Lucas had grumbled.
    “Why? Because he reminds you so much of your younger self?” she’d asked.
    “Maybe,” Lucas had said. “But not that much younger.”
    “He’s not interested in Letty,” Weather had declared.
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “How about in you?”
    “Don’t be absurd,” she’d said, ostentatiously checking her hair in the mirror.
    •   •   •
    A FTER DINNER, Lucas and Virgil went to Lucas’s study, with Letty perching on a side chair, and Lucas briefed him about the situation. “Basically,” Flowers summed up, “we’ve got nothing, but if their phone’s GPS says that they’re in a certain spot, you think that’s good enough for a search and seizure.”
    “I know it is, because there’s been another case just like it,” Lucas said. “It was in LA, but the federal court refused to order the evidence set aside.”
    “And so this could prove that these two highly trained killers were involved with the porn, and we know for sure that they’ve got guns.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Virgil thought about that and said, “Okay.”
    They’d sat down to eat at seven, had finished with the food and talk at eight, and at eight-thirty, sitting in the den, Lucas took a call from Jenkins. “This is going to wind up sooner than I thought,” Jenkins said. “She finished talking, the TV is pulling out, now she’s going around mixing with the kids, but that’s not going to last long, once the TV is gone. I think we’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, and then it’s an hour back to her place.”
    He said to Flowers, “Let’s go. Excuse me—I meant, ‘Saddle up.’”
    “Yeah,” Virgil said, getting his hat.
    “Don’t let him push you around,” Letty told Virgil. “That hat looks good on you. Not everybody could pull it off, but you can.”
    “Thank you, sweetheart,” Flowers said, and he and Lucas were out the door.
    They took Flowers’s truck, and as they backed out of the driveway, Lucas noticed that Flowers was smiling.
    “What’s the shit-eating grin about?” Lucas asked.
    “Ah, I love pimping you about Letty. And Weather, for that matter.”
    “I don’t mind, as long as you keep your hands off Helen and that mac and cheese and pepperoni,” Lucas said.
    •   •   •
    J ENKINS CALLED TO SAY that Taryn Grant’s caravan consisted of three cars. The first carried what appeared to be three lower-ranking campaign people, one of whom was probably the media liaison. The second car was a big American SUV, and carried Grant, a short, heavyset woman, and one of the bodyguards; from Lucas’s description, he thought it was probably Carver. The third car carried the other bodyguard, Dannon, and a thin woman who was apparently also security.
    “Alice Green, ex–Secret Service,” Lucas said. “Where are you guys?”
    “Shrake is out front, I’m a quarter mile back, with four cars between