Lucas glanced at him and said, with a grin, “Bell is sometimes too social . . . if you know what I mean.”
“He talks too much,” Robertson said.
“But he’s a good guy,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, he is,” Robertson said. He leaned back in the seat and put his feet up on the dash, caught himself and said, “Whoops. Sorry about that.”
“Not a problem, put them back up there,” Lucas said. “I like those shoes. Where’d you get them?”
“Vegas . . .” They talked about fashion for a while, then Robertson asked, “You’re straight, right? You seem really straight.”
“Yeah, of course. Straight guys can’t talk about fashion? Clothes? Shoes?” Lucas said.
“Of course. FYI, I’m as gay as a fuckin’ Christmas tree,” Robertson said.
“Yeah?”
“What? I don’t seem gay?” Robertson asked.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Lucas said. “Maybe the turned-up jean cuffs should have been a clue.”
Robertson laughed and said, “Or tan shoes with blue jeans.”
“I wear cordovan shoes with navy suits all the time,” Lucas said.
“There you go. I totally approve. But you know what the British say, ‘No brown in town.’”
“That’s why we threw their asses out of here in 1776,” Lucas said. “Not a moment too soon, as far as I’m concerned.”
—
THEY BULLSHITTED THEIR WAY
down the highway to Grinnell, which was a few miles north of I-80, and when they turned off, Robertson retrieved Lucas’s iPad from the backseat, did a search
for fast-food restaurants, and said, “Subway, McDonald’s, and Jimmy John’s, all on the way.”
“Jimmy John’s. Had a good one over in Ames.”
They made the turn onto Highway 6, made a quick stop at Jimmy John’s. Lucas got his .45 and a holster out of the back, pulled his shirt out over his slacks to cover the gun, then took the passenger seat so he could eat while Robertson drove.
“Your guy said it was six-point-one miles from the turn . . . Got about five miles to go,” Robertson said, as they left town, heading east on Highway 6.
“Drive slow. I want to enjoy the sandwich,” Lucas said.
Lucas could see the sun in the right wing mirror. Twenty minutes or a half hour to sunset, he thought. Plenty of time before it got dark.
H
ighway 6 was flat, heavily patched, and nearly dead straight as it ran east between cornfields and farmhouses. The air was clear and soft with humidity from the frequent rains, with occasional creeks trickling under the highway to the south, and islands of trees, elms and cottonwoods and box elders, sometimes woodlots but mostly windbreaks, dotting the landscape.
Robertson kept his eye on the odometer as Lucas finished the sandwich. At six miles he slowed and they spotted the red four-door garage and the two-story white house. A weathered white barn with a sagging ridgeline sat in back, with weeds growing up around it. A car was parked outside the house, and there were lights on, so most likely there was somebody home.
“How do you want to do it?” Robertson asked. There was no traffic behind them, and he’d slowed, then stopped the truck in the middle of the highway.
“Your state. I’m not as comfortable on farms as I am in the city,” Lucas said.
“All right. On houses like this, people are gonna use the side
doors, not the front doors so much,” Robertson said. “I’ll crowd the side door with the car, one of us stays behind it, the other one knocks, until we see what the situation is.”
“Sounds right,” Lucas said. “Who knocks?”
“I do. I’ve got the badge. There’s a good chance we won’t have to knock at all,” Robertson said. “If there’s somebody home, they’ll probably come to the door to see who we are. If that happens, I’ll pull them out into the yard.”
Lucas nodded. Robertson was doing it the way he would have. “Watch for dogs,” Lucas said.
—
COLE PURDY WAS INVISIBLE
in the cornfield.
He’d arrived an hour earlier, after parking his truck off a side road to the east, behind trees that had grown up along a creek. He’d counted his paces after leaving the truck and jumping a fence into the cornfield and figured he was about three-quarters of a mile from the truck.
He wouldn’t have to worry about concealment when he was running back to the vehicle, because it was corn all the way, twenty-inch rows with the stalks probably averaging ten or eleven feet in height. It was easier to see somebody in a rain forest than in a mature cornfield. He figured it would take about ten minutes to get back, carrying his bag and the rifle.
The rifle was a new one—new to him, anyway—purchased six months earlier at a Missouri gun show, a Colt in 5.56 NATO, shooting military ammo and equipped with an Aimpoint Pro red-dot optic. He’d picked it up back when they’d thought they might
shoot Bowden. He’d hidden the gun carefully, had never let anyone see him shoot it, not even Jesse. Deep in the woods, he’d sighted it in dead-on at fifty yards, a bit high at a hundred, dead-on again at one-fifty, a bit low at two hundred yards—but none of the lows or highs would take the slug out of the kill zone. Here, he’d be shooting at fifty to sixty yards, depending on where Davenport put his vehicle, and with the two-minute-of-angle red dot, accuracy shouldn’t be a problem.
He’d taken some granola bars with him, because that seemed to be the thing to do, along with a couple of bottles of water. He was wearing the full bow-hunter camouflage, including a face net to keep the bugs off.
He settled into a screen of low weeds right next to the edge of the corn. His mother had seen Davenport’s truck, a black Mercedes-Benz.
Not something you often see pulling into random Iowa farmyards.
As the sun dropped down to the horizon, he saw a black SUV coming in from the west, slowing. Then it stopped in the middle of the highway, and despite his sense that he was cool, even calm, he felt a clutch at his heart. What were they doing? Did they know he was there?
—
“ALL SET?”
Robertson asked.
“Sure. Let’s go.”
The farmhouse’s side door was on the left side of the house as they looked at it, across the driveway from the garage. A line of
flagstones ran from the bottom of the stoop to the driveway, and Robertson turned down the drive and put the truck close enough to the edge of the driveway that Lucas would be stepping out on the flagstone.
They both popped their doors before the truck was fully stopped. Lucas got out a half-second before Robertson, turning to shut the door and to step to the back of the truck, where he’d be out of the line of fire if somebody came to the door with a gun. Simply by chance, he was looking toward the cornfield when he got out of the truck, and he saw the orange wink of the muzzle flash when Cole Purdy pulled the trigger.
A split second later, he heard the blast from the shot and Robertson cried out and went down. Lucas leaped backward, trying to get behind the truck, when a second shot knocked the wing mirror off the passenger side of the truck, glass flying everywhere, and he felt a stinging in his cheek, then he fell on his ass, behind the truck, rolled back to his feet, crouching. He was behind the hood, his gun already coming up, his eyes fixed on the spot where he’d seen the muzzle flash. He unloaded the .45 as quickly as he could with rough accuracy: he had no illusions about hitting anything at fifty yards, but it should keep the shooter occupied.
The gun locked open and he slammed another magazine in. As he did it, he either saw or imagined he saw a ripple moving through the cornfield and fired four more shots at it, then stopped, crouched, and stepped sideways across the nose of the truck, saw Robertson facedown in the driveway gravel. He was alive, pushing up with his hands, getting nowhere.
Lucas took the chance, jumped into the open, grabbed
Robertson by his shirt collar, and dragged him behind the truck, and then heard another
bang!
coming from behind him, jerked around and nearly shot the woman who’d just let the screen door slam shut.
She was middle-aged, wearing a dress and an apron, but with nothing like kinky white hair. She had dark blond hair to the middle of her back and her mouth was open, and she was shouting something as the .45’s front sight crossed the line of her eyes, but Lucas couldn’t make it out immediately, what she was screaming, and fought the automatic trigger pull, and then realized what she was saying was, “Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!”
Her hands were up and empty: no gun there.
He turned and looked back toward the cornfield, saw no movement, and the woman was screaming at him, “What happened? What did you do?”
Robertson was at Lucas’s feet, looking up to him, seemed to be choking, and Lucas shouted at the woman, “Is there a hospital?”
She shouted back, “Yes, yes, in town . . .”
They were shouting, five feet apart. Lucas: “Help me, get the truck door.”
“You’re bleeding . . .”
“Get the goddamned door!”
Lucas picked up Robertson, and when the woman yanked the passenger door open, Lucas put him in the front passenger seat, strapped him in; Robertson’s head was rolling on his neck like a ball bearing, no control at all, a guttural growl coming from his throat. The Iowa cop was bleeding heavily from a chest exit wound and also from the entry wound on his shoulder blade.
Lucas shouted at the woman, “Get in the backseat, take me to
the hospital,” and as she got in the backseat, he ran around to the driver’s side. The engine was still running—Robertson hadn’t killed it—and he made a quick U-turn, his head low behind the steering wheel in case the shooter was still out there, yelling at the woman, “Get down, get low!” and then they hit the highway, throwing gravel and dirt, got back on the hard surface and he dropped the hammer, rattling over the patched pavement at a hundred miles an hour, then a hundred and fifteen, and a hundred and twenty-five.
Robertson groaned and bubbled blood down his chin, made a choking sound like
huh-huh-huh
.
As a cop, Lucas had had emergency lights on the truck: no more. He was running naked, and blew past a pickup that was probably doing eighty, the other driver’s stunned white moon face looking over at him through the window.
The woman in the back hadn’t belted in, but was half-standing, leaning over the seat at Robertson, who was now sputtering blood, and she shouted, “I’m going to tip him right, so he doesn’t drown in his blood,” and Lucas shouted back, “Yes, yes . . .”
She did that and then grabbed Robertson’s shirt and ripped it away from the wound, and as Lucas watched, she said, her voice down a notch, “Not a huge hole, but he’s bleeding bad, I’m gonna stick my finger in it.”
Lucas: “Press your palm to it, press your palm to it, seal it up.”
They got to the edge of town in less than three minutes. The woman had one hand over Robertson’s chest, and with the other she was on her cell phone, and then she was saying, shouting, “We’re bringing in a man with a gunshot wound, he’s hurt bad,
he’s shot in the chest, he’s bleeding bad, we’ll be there in one minute, call the police, call the police . . .”
She directed Lucas through Grinnell, Lucas barely slowing through the business district, leaning on his horn the whole way, running stop signs, and then around the hospital and up a ramp to the emergency entrance.
The woman was out of the vehicle as soon as it stopped, tugging open the passenger door as two nurses, an orderly, and a doctor ran out to the car with a gurney. The orderly and the nurses lifted Robertson onto the gurney and rolled him inside. As Lucas followed behind, a cop came out the entrance and the woman pointed at Lucas and blurted, “This man has a gun.”
The cop put his hand on his pistol and Lucas put up his empty hands and said, “State police. That’s Jerry Robertson of the Division of Criminal Investigation. He was shot by a sniper at this woman’s farm. We were going to interview her.”
The cop looked at the two of them uncertainly, then Lucas lifted his shirt to show him the empty holster and said, “The gun’s in the car. It’s loaded and cocked but the safety is engaged. It’s been fired, so you’d be better off not to touch it until this is all sorted out.”
The cop: “That’s a DCI guy in there?”
“Yes. We need to get some people out to this woman’s farm,” Lucas said. “There was a sniper waiting for us across the road. I fired a magazine and a half into the cornfield where he was hiding, but I was probably too far away to hit anything.”
The cop said, “All right. Back inside. I’ll get some help here . . .”
The woman said to Lucas, “I didn’t do anything. Why did you come to my house?”
Lucas looked at her shocked, reddened face and said, “You’re right. You didn’t do anything.”
“But why . . . ?”
“They set us up to kill us and they used you for bait. They must have known about your farm. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for helping Jerry like you did. You were . . . wonderful. You’re Sandra Burton?”
“Yes.”
—
IN TEN MINUTES,
the emergency room was swarming with Grinnell cops, Poweshiek County sheriff’s deputies, and one highway patrolman who’d come to the hospital after being alerted by the 911 operator that a truck had gone through Grinnell at a hundred miles an hour.
As the cops were arriving, Lucas got on the phone to Bell Wood, who freaked.
“Sniper? Sniper? Jesus, God, Lucas, what have we got here? Is Jerry gonna be okay?”
“I don’t know. He was hit hard. Bleeding out his mouth, bright red blood, so he probably took a hit to his lung. He was alive when they took him into the operating room . . .” Lucas gave him the details he had, then gave the phone to the highway patrolman, who knew Wood, and Wood confirmed Lucas’s status.
Robertson was in the operating room and no word on his condition was coming out. A bloody-handed nurse, who’d taken him in, stood washing her hands, and when Lucas asked, she said, “I’ve seen worse who lived. But then, I’ve seen better who died.”
No help there.
A nurse practitioner approached him and said, “You’re bleeding, your face is cut . . .”
Lucas spotted a mirror, checked himself: four or five cuts on the side of his face opposite the black eye. Nothing serious, damage done when the sniper’s shot had hit his wing mirror, but if one of those shards had hit him in the eye, he’d have been blinded.
The nurse said, “Here . . .” and touched Lucas’s face with a sterile pad wetted with something that smelled like alcohol. When he pressed on the cuts, Lucas felt nothing but the pain from the alcohol on three of the cuts, but the fourth cut delivered a sharp cutting jolt, and he flinched. The nurse took him to a side room, sat him down, and a few seconds later fished a tiny sliver of mirror glass out of the cut. He covered the cuts with tape and Lucas went back out the door.
The sheriff showed up, checked his black eye and the taped cuts, and said, “We’ve got to go back out to Miz Burton’s place, see what there is to see. Maybe you hit that sucker and we’ll get some DNA. Or a body.”
“Have you heard any more about Jerry?” Lucas asked.
“They’re pumping blood and oxygen into him, that’s all I know. He’s alive, his heart’s okay.”
“Let’s go then. It’s almost dark.”
—
LUCAS’S .45 WAS RETRIEVED
from the floor of the truck, unloaded, decocked, and put in an evidence bag.
The sheriff asked him to leave the truck where it was, so it
could be processed, and they went back to Burton’s farm in the sheriff’s personal car, which he’d been driving when he got the call. Sandra Burton rode with them, in the backseat. Lucas told them his story, and when he was finished, the sheriff said, “You were set up, all right. That’d be you in the emergency room, if you hadn’t stopped at Jimmy John’s and switched to the passenger side.”
“Why me?” Sandra Burton asked. “Why’d they pick me?”
“Because somebody in the Progressive People’s Party knew you and knew it would be a good place to ambush us,” Lucas said. “You probably know whoever set us up. Might even be a friend. You have any ideas about that? Somebody seriously off balance, a Bowden-hater?”
“No, no. Most of my friends are Bowden lovers,” she said.
—
FOUR SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES
had followed them to the farm; when they all had pulled into the farmyard and parked, the sheriff called back to the hospital. Still no word on Robertson.
Lucas wasn’t precisely sure where he’d seen the muzzle flash—the weeds along the edge of the field all looked about the same—but he remembered he’d stepped out of the truck onto a flagstone. He went back to the end stone, and looked toward the field, and that gave him an angle.