Stolen Prey

cowboy boots. He did not, as far as Lucas could see, have a gun.
    He walked up and said, “We’re still missing about three of them.”
    Lucas was looking past him at the farm. What had been the barn was now mostly a concrete slab, with what looked like the half-eaten stump of an enormous silver Oscar Mayer wiener sitting on the slab. The ground was littered with splintered barn siding and shingles, two of the outbuildings had collapsed, and the house was covered with fire foam. “It’s a fuckin’ war zone,” he said.
    “Got pretty busy, there,” Flowers said. “See, what happened was, Richie has this 50-cal, and they were shooting at us with some small machine pistols. He let off a few shots to clear out their nostrils, and then, well, we didn’t know it, but there was an industrial-sized propane tank in there. That’s what the silver thing is. We think the second-to-last shot knocked a hole throughit—that’s when everybody ran—and the propane came spewing out under heavy pressure, and then the next shot through probably hit the tank again, or some other metal, kicked out some sparks…”
    “How many dead?” Lucas asked.
    “Nobody, so far. Three shot, none critical, all dopers.”
    “Meth?”
    “No, no, that’s where the horse shit comes in,” Flowers said. “They were growing magic mushrooms. Industrial-scale magic mushrooms, on a substrate of horse shit and straw. They’d heat in the winter, cool in the summer, perfect growing temperatures all year long. There’s a big plastic tube stuck in the ground in back, an old sewer pipe they got somewhere. There’s probably a half-ton of mushrooms in there.”
    “You’re sure they’re magic?” Lucas asked.
    “Positive.” Flowers chuckled. “We’d really be up shit creek if they turned out to be, you know, button mushrooms. Or shiitakes.”
    “How about my robbers?” Lucas asked.
    “They weren’t here,” Flowers said. “But I was talking to one of the dopers, not a bad guy, for a doper, and he told me where they live, and where they were going this afternoon. They were supposed to bring a load of horse shit back this evening.”
    “So…”
    “I was waiting for you,” Flowers said. “Let’s go get them. Leave the Porsche here. We’ve got to come back this way anyway, we can drop them off with the sheriff.”
    “Good. That way, the Porsche won’t smell like horse shit,” Lucas said.
    A S THEY walked down to Flowers’s truck, Lucas asked, “Where’re we going?”
    “’Bout five or six miles down the road, to a gravel road called Jenks Trail. Half mile north, there’s a trailer sitting on the side with a dirt yard and a pit bull on a chain. That’s them. I pulled some stuff off the computer. There’s a file on the backseat.”
    They got in the truck and Lucas reached over the seat and got the file, a stapled printout from the NCIC. He paged through it as Flowers pulled off the shoulder, and they loafed down the county road, over hill and dale, past the tall corn and rolling woods, the soybeans and alfalfa, kids looking over their shoulders as they pedaled along on their bikes.
    Duane Bird and Bernice Waters were the kind of minor dirtbags that made life a little tougher for everybody. They’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, burglarize any house or business they thought might be empty, get drunk and fight and drive, and choke down any drug they could get their hands on. They weren’t killers, not even much in the way of robbers, although what they’d done with Lucas counted as armed robbery.
    Bird had once been convicted of stealing a hundred manhole covers from Rochester, a theft carried out in a single night. He sold the covers to a junkyard, for processing as scrap. The owner of the junkyard expressed amazement when he found out that the manhole covers had been stolen and immediately rolled over on Bird.
    Waters was believed to be behind the theft of one hundred cartons of Tums from a semitrailer broken down in Park, Minnesota. Each carton contained 144 bottles of Tums tablets, eachbottle containing 150 tablets, for a grand total of 2,160,000 assorted fruit Tums. Nobody knew what she’d done with them.
    They’d both been convicted of shoplifting, with Target their favored retailer.
    When he finished thumbing through it, Lucas tossed the file on the backseat, leaned back, and said, “Nice day.”
    “When did you lose the cast?” Flowers asked.
    “This morning. You know what the goddamned so-called