Wicked Prey

long five seconds, then shook his head. “Can’t say as I have.”
    “How about this guy?” Lucas shuffled the papers, and put the Shafer head shot on top.
    Terry looked at it for a couple of seconds, then an extra wrinkle appeared among the set on his forehead. “What’d he do?”
    “Never mind that,” Jenkins said. “You seen him?”
    “I did,” Terry admitted. “About a week ago. He was here maybe twenty minutes. I didn’t think he was gonna buy anything, and he didn’t.”
    “Was he looking for anything in particular?” Lucas asked.
    “He was looking for some .50-cal rounds in bronze,” Terry said. “I told him I could get it, good lathe-cut stuff. He asked how much, and I said, ‘Eighty bucks for ten rounds,’ and he said that was a little high. Then he looked at a Bushmaster M4, and went on his way. Haven’t seen him since.”
    “Didn’t buy any ammo?” Lucas asked.
    “Nope. Didn’t buy a thing,” Terry said.
    Lucas said, “We’re local guys, and I gotta tell you, you’d be better off dealing with us if you’re not telling the truth. The Secret Service and the ATF are chasing all over looking for this guy. With the convention in town, I don’t have to tell you why. You don’t want to be the one who sold him some ammo and then get caught lying about it.”
    “Didn’t sell him anything, with Jesus as my witness,” Terry said, holding up his right hand as though taking an oath. He looked satisfactorily worried.
    Lucas nodded. “All right. Gonna have to talk to the ATF though, so you’ll probably be hearing from them. Maybe the Secret Service.”
    “How much you want for the cop killer in the window?” Jenkins asked again.
    “Six hundred dollars,” Terry said. “Lot of handwork in a self-defense gun. There is a police discount.”
    * * *
    OUT ON THE STREET, Jenkins said, “Ten percent. I’d almost be willing to do it, to get the piece off the streets, but the little cockroach would make another one.”
    “First stop, and Justice Shafer is right there,” Lucas said. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
    “That happened to me one time,” Jenkins said. “One-stop shopping.”
    “When did it happen to you?” Lucas asked.
    “Well, it didn’t exactly happen to me , but it happened to a guy I knew,” Jenkins said.
    “Never happened to me,” Lucas said.
    Back in the car, he got on the phone to Dan Jacobs at the security committee. “I don’t want to yank your weenie when everybody else is, but I’ve got some news about your pal Justice Shafer.”
    Lucas told him about Terry’s, and Jacobs said, “That’s pretty interesting. The Secret Service and the ATF are doing research on him, down in Oklahoma, and they’re getting worried. Some of these gang guys say Shafer’s never been accepted because he’s sort of a pussy—never proved himself.”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “I’ll call them with this. They’ll send a guy around to talk to . . . Terry?”
    * * *
     
    THEIR SECOND STOP was a two-man weapons outlet in a warehouse district in Eagan, south of the Twin Cities core, a concrete-block building filled with hunting knives, compound bows, crossbows, samurai and fantasy swords, a barrel half-full of Louisville Slugger baseball bats, a shelf of lead-weighted fish-whackers, and a rack of used guns; but mostly knives. To one side, a customer in camo cargo pants was methodically pounding a six-inch target with carbon-fiber arrows, on a four-lane archery range.
    The two owners, who were brothers, named Jenkins—they agreed with Jenkins that they weren’t related—both checked the photographs, and swore they’d never seen either man. Lucas asked, “What’s the advantage of the crossbow over the compound bow?”
    The customer, who was shooting a compound bow, said over his shoulder, “You don’t have to know nothing to shoot a crossbow.”
    Jenkins asked one of the Jenkins brothers, “If I were to ask you where I could get a switchblade, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
    The Jenkins brother looked puzzled: “Well, sure. Right here. What do you want?” He walked down the counter and tapped the top of a case. Inside, a half-dozen switchblades nestled on red velvet.
    Jenkins was taken aback: “Switchblades are legal?”
    “Well, sure, in Minnesota,” Jenkins said. “You can order them on the Internet.”
    “I didn’t know that,” Jenkins said. “Is there a police discount?”
    * * *
    THE FOURTH AND FIFTH dealers hadn’t seen either Cohn or Shafer, but