Stolen Prey

that Flowers was fucking with him. Horse shit thieves?
    H E WAS pushing paper again when Del called. He was talking fast: “What’re you doing? Right this minute?”
    “Trying to choose between Caspian mocha and Castilian Café au Lait when I paint the hallway.”
    “All right. Listen, can you get down to South St. Paul? Andersonjust pulled into a junkyard by the river. I think he’s going for it, and I need some backup.”
    “The sculpture?”
    “The sculpture. You still keep your running gear in the office? The shoes and pants?”
    “Sure. You think—”
    “Change into it and get your ass down here,” Del said. “Bring somebody else, too, if you can find anybody. Down by the river, by that little airport.”
    L UCAS GOT specific directions, then went out to the main office and found an agent named Jenkins, who wasn’t too busy, got him moving. Back in his office, he took his gym bag out of a file cabinet, sniffed it—not bad, he must’ve washed it after his last run—closed the office door, changed into gray sweatpants and a dark blue hoodie over an Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt, and running shoes. His Beretta went under the hoodie.
    Jenkins was a very large man who, with his sidekick, Shrake, had a reputation for asking questions later. They took Jenkins’s personal car, a three-year-old Crown Vic that Lucas felt would work better with the riverside gestalt than would a Lexus.
    “Is there gonna be any shooting?” Jenkins wanted to know.
    “Nooo … probably not,” Lucas said. “I just needed somebody large to load up this sculpture, if we find them. They weigh like three tons, it’s gonna take some work. A crane or forklift or something.”
    “Screw that,” Jenkins said. “My hands were made for love, not for heavy labor.”
    They took twenty minutes getting south, and found Del waiting in a beat-up Jeep Wrangler in a park off Concord Street.
    “I’ll drive,” Del said.
    “You sure you got them?” Lucas asked.
    “Eighty-three percent,” Del said. “There’s a big old metal shed down there, used to be a barge terminal. It’s big enough to hide the low-boy with the crane. And the thing is, before he came over, he drove around for a while, like he was trying to figure out if anybody was tailing him.”
    “And you being a genius tracker, he never saw you,” Jenkins said.
    “That’s right. We wound up down here,” Del said.
    “Unless he’s chumping you, and we go running in there, and he says, ‘Aha, you were following me,” Lucas said. “No copper here, copper.”
    “It’s bronze. Like I said, I’m eighty-three percent,” Del said. “The other seventeen percent is what you just said.”
    T HEY LEFT Jenkins’s Crown Vic on the street and took the Jeep back into the tangle of streets and tracks that ran along the river, Del at the wheel. He eventually took them down a muddy dirt road, then off onto a branching track that ran down to the water. He parked and said, “We walk from here. Bring the camera. I got some glasses.”
    They walked back to the dirt road, then farther along it, another hundred yards, then Del led the way through some low brushy trees to the top of a dirt levee that smelled like beached carp and dead clams. “Watch the snakes,” he said.
    Lucas: “Really?”
    “Yeah, I almost stepped on a great big fucker when I came up here. Bull snake, I think.”
    “What do you know about snakes?” Jenkins asked. He was watching his ankles.
    “Not much. Just garter, bull, and rattle. Wasn’t a rattlesnake, I don’t think, and too big to be a garter.”
    “Yeah, well … I don’t fuck with snakes,” Lucas said, with a shudder.
    “Neither do I,” Del said. “That thing scared the shit out of me.”
    A T THE TOP OF the levee, Lucas could see what Del called a junkyard, but was really a long raw-dirt clearing with five chunks of wrecked, rusting machinery of uncertain purpose, and a couple of abandoned cars and trucks, some of which looked like they’d been submerged by past floods. The shed sat in the middle of it: dull-silver corrugated steel, the same thing farmers once used to build silos, but this structure was probably a hundred and fifty feet long and sixty feet wide, in the domed shape of a Quonset hut.
    There were two sliding doors, closed tight, but big enough to accommodate a light airplane; Lucas thought the building might have been designed as a hangar. Although the big doors were closed, tracks in the dirt outside suggested that trucks had been