Stolen Prey

“Hey: Cheryl’s been trying to get in touch with you. She said it’s urgent.”
    Lucas borrowed Del’s phone, called his secretary, and she said, “Call Virgil an hour ago.”
    L UCAS CALLED F LOWERS . Flowers shouted at him: “Hey.”
    “Where are you?”
    “I’m lying in a goddamn ditch. Look at that! Look at that!” Flowers was screaming now, but apparently not at Lucas.
    “Look at what?” Lucas asked, raising his voice. In the background, he could hear a stuttering sound, which might have been some kind of strange Verizon static, but he was afraid it wasn’t.
    “One of those sonsofbitches has a machine gun,” Flowersshouted. “Holy shit, he took that Chevy out. Hey! Hey! Get out of there! Get out of there!”
    “What?” Lucas shouted into the phone. Everybody stopped messing with the gold and looked at him.
    “They’re shooting at the TV chopper,” Flowers yelled. Lucas stepped across the room, bent and turned on the television. The over-the-air picture was a little hazy, showing some kind of reality show rerun, and he clicked around to Channel Three.
    The aerial shot popped right up, a circling tracking of a big red barn, with a bunch of crumbling outbuildings behind it, and a white farmhouse to one side. Sheriff’s cars were stacked up in the driveway, and Lucas could see what looked like bodies along the driveway. Then one of the bodies moved, fast, across the driveway, and he realized that they were sheriff’s deputies, on the ground.
    A runner burst out of the back of the barn, headed toward a woodlot that was embedded in a blue-green grain field—the oat field that Flowers had mentioned. The onboard reporter was shouting, “They’re shooting at us, Jim. Get out of here, they’re shooting at us, you dumb shit!”
    Lucas yelled into the phone, “What the fuck is going on there?”
    “We raided the place and ran into a hornet’s nest,” Flowers shouted back. There was a background explosion that sounded like a howitzer, and Lucas asked, “What was that? What the hell was that?” and Flowers, laughing, said, “Richie’s got himself a 50-cal. He’s blowing holes in the—Whoa, look at them, they’re like ants…. They don’t like that 50-cal.”
    On the TV, Lucas could see a half dozen men break from the barn, running toward the back of the farm lot.
    On the phone, he heard another howitzer blast, and an instant later, on TV, in full color, the red barn blew to bits in an enormous gaseous fireball that rose into a mushroom cloud.
    Flowers: “Holy mother of God…”
    Lucas shouted into the phone, “I’m coming.”
    D EL TOOK him back to the Victory garage where Lucas recovered the Porsche and his cell phone. He got Flowers on his phone and said, “Keep calling me. What’s going on now?”
    “We’re chasing them. They’ve stopped shooting, and we’ve got the farm, and now we’re chasing them down. Gonna take a while.”
    “I’ll be there.”
    “Computer says you’re an hour and fifteen minutes away, if the traffic’s not too bad,” Flowers said.
    “Does the computer say how long it takes if you’re driving a Porsche with flashers?”
    “Don’t kill anybody,” Flowers said. “See you in fifteen minutes.”
    H E ACTUALLY took fifty minutes to get to the farm, following the nav system the whole way, busting a lot of stop signs, topping out at 115 miles an hour on clear blacktop; the barn wasn’t out in the sticks, he thought. He actually
passed
the sticks fifteen miles before he got there.
    The place was a jumble of sheriff’s squads, highway patrol cars, ambulances, fire trucks, civilian vehicles, four-wheelers, and three circling helicopters and one light airplane. Lucas was stillrunning with lights when a skeptical highway patrolman pointed him to the shoulder of the county road. Lucas hung his ID out the window, the patrolman said, “Slick ride,” and let him through.
    He saw Flowers’s 4Runner parked on the freshly mown shoulder of the road and pulled up alongside it, all four wheels on the road, hoping that the SUV would cover the Porsche from any fresh outbreak of gunfire. Insurance companies don’t want to hear about bullet holes.
    Flowers was up the driveway, talking to a sheriff’s deputy. He saw Lucas coming, said something to the deputy, and walked down to Lucas. Flowers was a tall man, as tall as Lucas, but slender, with long blond hair. He was wearing a cowboy hat, a pair of aviator sunglasses, a vintage Radiohead T-shirt, jeans, and