Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5

Then the feds: Hey, he’s stopped. He’s definitely stopped, he’s up ahead, must be along County Y, two miles east of AA. We’re about four or five minutes out.

Lucas: Find a good place to stop and wait. We’re all coming in. We don’t know what kind of weapons he’s carrying.

“There’s not much down that road,” Climpt said, thinking about it. His hands were tight, white on the steering wheel, holding on, his head pressed forward, searing the snowscape. “Not around there. I’m trying to think. Mostly timber.”

Carr came up: Weather thinks he’s at the Harris place. Duane was supposedly seeing Rosie Harris. That’s a mile or so off AA on Y. Should be on the tract maps.

“Goddammit,” said Lucas. “Weather’s riding with Carr.”

Climpt grunted. “Could of told you she wouldn’t stay put.”

“Go

“Eight dead that we know of,” Climpt said, his voice oddly soft. A red stop sign and a building loomed out of the snow, and Climpt jumped on the brake, slowing, then went on through. “Can’t find Russ Harper or the Schoeneckers, and I wouldn’t make any bets on them being alive, either. Goddamn, I thought it only happened in New York and Los Angeles and places like that.”

“Happens all over,” Lucas said as they went through the stop sign.

“But you don’t believe that, living up here,” Climpt said. He glanced out the window. A roadhouse showed a Coors sign in the window. Three people, unisex in their parkas, laughing, cross-country skis on their shoulders, walked toward the door. “You just don’t believe it can happen.”

The feds had stopped at a farmhouse a half-mile from where their ranging equipment said the radio beacon was. Visibility was twenty feet and was falling. In little more than an hour it would be dark. Lucas and Climpt pulled in behind the federal truck, climbed down, and went to the house. Tolsen met them at the door. “I’m go

“Okay. Don’t go in.”

Tolsen nodded. “I’ll wait for the troops,” he said grimly. “Those two boys are gone?”

Lucas nodded, grimacing. “Yes.”

“Shit.”

A farm couple sat in the kitchen with a grown son, three pale people in fla

“We’ve got to do something quick,” Climpt said. “If there’s another sled in there, or if he gets out in a truck, we’ll never find him.”

“So what’s the plan?” asked Lansley. “Where’s Carr?”

“They’re ten or fifteen minutes back,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you go down and back up Tolsen. Just watch the drive, don’t get close. Gene and I’ll go in on the sleds until we’re close, then go in on foot. He can’t see us any better than we can see him, and if we catch him outside, we can ambush him.”

“You got snowshoes?”

“No. We’ll just have to make the best of it,” Lucas said.

The farmer cleared his throat. “We got some snowshoes,” he said. He looked at his son. “Frank, whyn’t you get the shoes for these folks.”

Lucas and Climpt unloaded the sleds and rode them through the farmyard. The farmer had given them a compass as well as the snowshoes. Fifty feet past the barn, they needed it. Lucas took them straight west, riding over what had been a soybean field, the stubble now three feet below the surface. The snow was riding on a growing wind, coming in long curving waves across the open fields. The world was dimming out.

Lucas had strung the radio around his neck, and turned it up loud enough to hear the occasional burp: No movement . . . Nothing . . . Five minutes out . . . Get a couple more sleds down here, see if you can rent a couple at Lamey’s.

A darker shape shimmered through the snow. Pine tree. The farmer said there was one old white pine left in the field, two hundred feet from the Harris’s property windbreak. Lucas pointed and Climpt lifted a hand in acknowledgment. A minute later the windbreak loomed like a curtain, the blue spruces so dark they looked black. Climpt moved off to the left, fifteen feet, as they closed on it. At the edge of the treeline, they stopped, then Climpt pointed and shouted over the storm. “We’re back too far. We gotta go through that way, I think. Windbreak’s only three or four trees deep, so take it easy.”

They moved back toward the road, Climpt leading. After a hundred feet he waved and cut the engine on his sled. Lucas pulled up beside him and pulled the long trapper’s snowshoes off the carry-rack.

“This is fuckin’ awful,” Climpt said.

Inside the windbreak, the wind lessened, but swirled among the trees, building drifts. They plodded through, and a light materialized from the screen of white. Window. Lucas pointed and Climpt nodded. They slid further to the right, moving down the lines of pine, coming up on the back of the double-wide mobile home. A snowmobile track crossed the backyard, curved around the side and out of sight.

“Let’s get back a bit. I don’t think they could see us.”

Keeping the trees between themselves and the house, they moved around to the front. A snowmobile sat next to the door. A space had been cleared for a truck or a car, but the space was empty.

“I’ll watch the back,” Climpt said. He’d slung the M-16 over his shoulder and now slipped it off into his hands.

“Sit where we can see each other,” Lucas said. “We gotta stay in touch.”

Climpt moved back the way they came, stopped, beat out a platform with the snowshoes, and sat down. He lifted a hand to Lucas and put the rifle between his knees.

Lucas spoke into the radio. “We’re here. We can see a snowmobile parked in front. No other vehicle. The windows are lit.”

Any sign of life?

“Not yet. There’re lots of lights on.”

Carr: We’re here—we see you guys on the road.

Feds: Nothing’s come out.

Carr got with the agents. Deputies would block County Y in both directions. Others would filter into the treeline and occupy the abandoned chicken house in back of the Harris home.

We’re talking about how long we wait for him. What do you think? Carr asked.

“Not long,” Lucas said into the radio. “There’s no vehicle here. I don’t see any fresh tracks, but I can’t see the other side of the yard. It’s possible that he dumped his sled and took off on another one before we got here.”

The feds have some kind of shrink on the line. He could call. We got some tear gas coming.

“Talk it out, Shelly. Talk to the hostage guy. I’m not a hostage specialist. All I can do from here is ambush the guy.”

Okay.

A moment later Carr came back: We’ve got a pickup coming in. Stand by.

Two minutes later, from Carr: We’ve got Rosie and Mark Harris in the pickup. They say their sister’s in there, Gi