Page 5

5

Present Day

Lucas was sprawled on a king-sized bed in the Holiday Inn Express on the outskirts of Marshalltown, Iowa, hands linked across his stomach, as he gloomily contemplated the blank screen of the television. Nothing on—nothing good. Dressed in boxer shorts, a tee-shirt, and dark blue athletic socks, he thought about getting off the bed to do some pushups, but he’d already done that and the carpet smelled funky.

Masturbation was a possibility, but he was an older guy now, and was saving himself for a double-header when he got back home.

He could go after the slow, extra fat bluebottle fly that was buzzing around the room, with a rolled-up newspaper, but that idea was both trivial and boring.

He had been reading a thriller novel that had annoyed him with: (1) heroes who were bulletproof, and (2) repeated references to “flat-screen TVs.”

He thought, “No, dummy, they’re just TVs. There are millions of people living in the United States who wouldn’t know what a non-flat-screen TV would even look like.”

He confirmed both his annoyance and his boredom by looking up “flat-screen TVs” on his flat-screen telephone and found that old-style CRT TVs hadn’t even been manufactured for fifteen years.

He got up and looked out the window. If he pressed his face against the cool glass, which he didn’t, he could see a soybean field across a highway to the south. Straight ahead, a Menards, a Midwestern version of Home Depot. He was vaguely hungry and considered walking over to a Culver’s diner for a piece of pie, but he really wasn’t that hungry.

Or, he could walk over to Menards and look at building stuff and tools, which he had already done twice.

Lucas would be sixty years old at his next big birthday, still a few years away, but he had a depression gene, which had gotten on top of him a couple of times in his life, and which he feared. He’d been feeling melancholy for months. Not good. His adopted daughter, Letty, had almost died in a New Mexico case the year before, which had been profoundly disturbing. He thought about it too much.

And the years were going by. Unexpectedly, they never stopped. Not only did they not stop, they even seemed to have speeded up, one sloppy winter piling into the next, with only a sliver of summer between them.

He hadn’t had any compelling jobs since one he’d shared with Letty; mostly just chasing around after dirtballs, who, while they were sometimes dangerous, were not interesting in themselves.

Both Letty and his wife were telling him he had to find something besides chasing dirtballs. Find a hobby, they said. Try something arty, or musical. Write more games, as he’d done when he was younger. Take some money out of his investment accounts, which returned a reliable five percent, and see if he could blow the money up into something really large.

He didn’t want to do any of that. He did like going over to Menards and looking at tools: he’d considered finding a congenial contractor and designing and building a spec house, just to see what he could do.

But what he really wanted was to chase down serious, intelligent, violent criminals instead of the dirtballs he’d been pursuing over the last year.

—

The case that brought him to Marshalltown was one of those. Two outlaw brothers, the Bergstroms, Boy and Andy, were selling counterfeit vodka made from corn alcohol. The Marshals Service got involved because the brothers were both under indictment for passing counterfeit twenty-dollar bills, their previous business venture. When Secret Service agents had tried to arrest them, the brothers had shot their way past them, and escaped.

No one had been injured, but you couldn’t let a couple of clodhoppers get away with that stuff.

The Bergstroms gave up on the twenties, which weren’t all that good anyway, made with a scanner and printer that had the anti-counterfeiting chips cleansed by an Iowa State University hacker. The currency looked okay at a glance, but the paper it was printed on sucked, and a couple of months after their venture launched, every convenience store on the plains had been on the lookout for the crappy paper.

As criminals searching for another source of income, the Bergstroms had begun printing fake liquor labels and pasting them to recycled bottles, which they filled with corn alcohol and artificial flavors. They bought bulk alcohol out of the backdoor of Iowa corn-based distilleries that normally sold it to oil companies as a gasoline additive. They resold the rebottled booze to less-than-ethical alcohol distributors.

Their biggest problem, it turned out, was finding the bottles to hold the liquor.

The task force had drilled a few investigative dry holes—the Bergstroms were wandering around the Midwest in pickups (“one red, one blue” according to an alcohol supplier squeezed by Lucas) and were therefore hard to pin down.

In the end, an ATF agent named Clayton Vanes set up a fake Internet recycling company that bought and sold empty liquor bottles out of a storage unit in Clear Lake, Iowa. The storage unit was overseen by a rotating group of marshals, including Lucas.

Unfortunately, the Bergstroms hadn’t shown up to buy the bottles themselves—they’d sent Jennifer (Jiminy) Katz, Boy Bergstrom’s girlfriend, instead. Lucas sold her one thousand empty Stolichnaya bottles and she disappeared in her truck, now accompanied by an electronic tracker surreptitiously mounted on the rear axle.

They’d followed her to a rented farmhouse ten miles from Marshalltown, where the cops settled down to wait.

—

Lucas was still looking out the window, at heat waves coming off the parking lot—it was hotter than hell outside, and so humid you could drown—still considering the possibilities, pie or tools, when his radio buzzed. He picked it up and Lanny Anderson, who was sitting in a hole on top of a knoll next to a stump in a clump of trees ten miles out of town, with a pair of binoculars, said, “Guys, we got a pickup.”

An ATF agent, Mary McLeod, asked, “Red Silverado? Blue Silverado?”

“It’s red. Not real shiny red, dusty red. But yeah, it’s a Chevy.”

“That’s it, a thousand miles of gravel roads,” McLeod said. “Guys…let’s mount up.”

Lucas was already pulling on his jeans. He added a long-sleeved shirt, clipped on his pistol, and picked up a cheap blue nylon windbreaker that read “U.S. MARSHAL,” all caps, in six-inch-high yellow letters.

Anderson called back, “It’s Boy Bergstrom and his old lady, no sign of Andy. They’re out of the truck, walking up to the house.”

“That’s Andy’s old lady in the house, I gotta believe he’ll be coming in soon, they don’t roam far apart,” McLeod said. “We’re heading for the parking lot.”

Lucas got his gear bag and was out the door. Two other marshals, Turner and Weed, were in the hallway at the same time; altogether, including the guy in the hole on the hill, there were eight of them, four marshals, three ATF agents, and one Secret Service agent. If Andy Bergstrom showed up, they’d bust the house. If Boy Bergstrom tried to leave in the dusty red Chevy, they’d box him in on the road. A Bergstrom in the hand was worth two in the bush.

In the elevator, Weed said, “If I hadn’t gotten out of that room, I’d probably have killed myself. I watched like two hundred clips of The Big Bang Theory on YouTube, and all I got out of it was that I’d like to jump the blonde.”

“Eminently jumpable, I would say,” Turner said. To Lucas: “What do you think?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Some kind of porn deal?”

“It’s a famous TV show. Like Friends , but funny,” Weed said. “Christ, Davenport, you gotta loosen up, man.”

“I’m not feeling loose. I got a headache,” Lucas said.

“Understandable. Things are getting tense.”

“It’s not a tension headache, it’s a boredom headache.”

“Worst kind,” Turner said. “Maybe we’ll have some fun, and it’ll go away.”

In the parking lot, seven of them loaded into four vehicles; Lucas rode with McLeod, an intense fortyish woman who saw a promotion in the Bergstrom investigation. She’d told Lucas, after a couple of drinks in a Marshalltown bar, that everything would be perfect if they got shot at, and got to shoot back, but nobody got hurt. “Getting shot at does wonders for your résumé,” she said. “At least, in the ATF.”

“Not so much in the Marshals Service,” Lucas had said.

“Yeah, I know about you,” she had said. “You don’t duck. You zig when you should zag. You gotta be quicker.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Lucas had said.

—

She was already in the driver’s seat of the Ford Expedition when Lucas got to the parking lot. She was cranked up, ready to go: “This is it,” she said. “This is it.”

“Easy,” Lucas said. “We’re not there yet. We can get both those assholes if we’re patient.”

“I know, I know, I know,” she said, pounding on the steering wheel. She picked up her radio and said, “Everybody loaded up?”

“Jamal ran inside to buy some bottles of water, he’ll be a minute,” Weed radioed back.

—

Three minutes later, they were rolling, on their way to a pre-scouted baseball field outside the tiny town of Ferguson, south of Marshalltown. The field was off the road, down a lane, and they could park where a row of oversized SUVs couldn’t be seen; they’d be less than a mile from the target farmhouse. The trip was short and dusty, through an ocean of cornfields. The ballpark was empty, and they parked, got out of the vehicles, gathered to talk and go over the attack plan one last time.

They would wait until Andy Bergstrom showed up, then move.

Lucas and a Secret Service agent named Mark Kenyon would bail out of the convoy a half mile from the farmhouse, cross a barbed-wire fence, and walk through a cornfield and up a hill to the copse where Anderson was hidden with his binoculars. The three of them would circle around the hill to another cornfield that extended right up to the farmhouse’s backyard, which included an old machine shed and the remnants of a barn—the barn’s superstructure was gone, but the basement walls still stood.

They would sneak up behind the machine shed, if that seemed feasible, and act as a blocking force. The other five cops would approach from the front of the house, jamming up the driveway. They would talk to the people in the farmhouse with a bullhorn; and McLeod would call the county sheriff’s office to inform the sheriff of the operation.

When they were all again satisfied that they knew every minute of the plan—McLeod had taken them over it a half dozen times—they stood around.

“Christ, I didn’t know Iowa could get this hot,” said Jamal Barshim, looking up at the sun. “This is like the fuckin’ Amazon.”

They spent forty-five minutes sweating heavily, and then Anderson called: “Got a blue pickup.”

“Load up,” McLeod said.

Anderson, a few minutes later: “It’s Andy. Boy is out on the porch with the women, now they’re all going into the farmhouse.”

McLeod: “Go.”

—

Lucas bailed out of the Expedition, carrying a shotgun from his gear bag and a bottle of water, and Kenyon climbed out of the following Suburban, with an M4 and a bottle of water, and they waded through knee-high weeds in the ditch, carefully crossed the barbed-wire fence into the cornfield, and began walking through the eight-foot-high field corn toward the hill where Anderson was waiting. The corn might as well have been buttered, and yellow pollen stuck to their clothes and faces and slid down their necks, the green corn leaves cutting at their hands as they pushed through the field. The field was a half-mile wide and they could see nothing until they emerged from the far side.

The corn ended at the base of the small knoll. There was no fence, and no sight line to the farmhouse, so they scrambled up, a cow watching them from a pasture on the other side of the knoll, and at the top, in the middle of a stand of several scrubby trees, Anderson was eating a chicken sandwich and watching the house.

“Ready?” he asked. “You guys are sweating like pigs.”

“Thanks for letting us know,” Kenyon said. And, “Pigs don’t sweat. They don’t have sweat glands.”

Anderson ignored that and said, “I haven’t seen any movement since they went inside. I scouted a path down to that shed.”

They followed him off the knoll, past the corner of the cow pasture, through another cornfield, where they were walking blind again, to emerge behind the machine shed. They crossed another fence. Anderson was carrying a shotgun, and he and Lucas pumped shells into the chambers of their guns, and Kenyon popped the charging handle on the M4.

Lucas called McLeod and said, “We’re behind the machine shed, ready to go. Come on in.”

“Moving now.”

Lucas said, “Soon as they show up, Lanny, why don’t you take the right side of the house, I’ll move up behind the barn. Mark, you take the left side.”

“Sounds good.”

—

They heard the trucks coming, saw the cloud of dust following them on the dry gravel, and Lucas flashed on the Lucinda Williams song “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” The trucks burst into the driveway, blocking the two pickups. McLeod was out in a minute and on the bullhorn: “Boy Bergstrom, Andy Bergstrom, come out. We have officers in the back, you are surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”

One minute later, a woman opened the back door and stuck her head out. Lucas, with the butt of the shotgun on his hip, stepped away from the barn so she could see him. She did, and pulled back inside and slammed the door.

Then came the boring part:

After twenty minutes of shouting back and forth, the Bergstroms came out with their hands in the air. They were cuffed, and though they said the women had no weapons, McLeod, Weed, and Lucas carefully entered the house, simultaneously, front and back, and found the two women in the kitchen, where they had been making bean-and-bacon soup in a large kettle. Steam was still coming out of the kettle and it smelled terrific.

Jiminy Katz saw Lucas and poked a finger at him: “You’re the sonofabitch who sold the bottles to us.”

“I did,” Lucas said. He rubbed his forehead. The headache had not gone away.

“That was a shitty thing to do,” Katz said. “I trusted you. I thought you were a good-lookin’ guy. I gave you five hundred dollars.”

“If you write to the President, maybe he’ll give it back,” Lucas said. “Besides, you still got the bottles.”

Katz gave him the finger.

McLeod: “You’re both under arrest for aiding and abetting federal fugitives.”

“Oh, fuck this,” said the second woman, whose name they didn’t know. She was looking at McLeod and had her back to Lucas as he came up, but when he got close, she spun and unexpectedly punched him in the mouth. She was fat, but had fast hands.

Lucas lurched back, then squared off with her, said, “I’m not embarrassed about hitting women, and I will,” and showed her a fist, and she said, “Ah, screw it,” and gave up.

They cuffed the women and McLeod took them out. Weed said, “She got your lip.”

“Yeah. Cut it on my teeth.”

McLeod, over her shoulder: “You zigged again.”

—

They made the arrests a few minutes after noon. Lucas did some perfunctory paperwork—the ATF was running the operation—and at three, he was in his Porsche Cayenne, headed north. He had blue ice in a cooler and took out a bag every once in a while and held it on his lip as he drove; in between icings, he could taste the salt in barely oozing blood. Marshalltown was almost due south of St. Paul, four hours away on I-35.

He called his wife, Weather, on the way, said, “Brace yourself, sweetheart, I’m on the way home.”

“Big talk. We’ll see if you can back it up.”

—

All the way to St. Paul, he nibbled and tongued his cut lip, making it worse, but he couldn’t stop. At home, he didn’t kiss Weather, a plastic surgeon, who told him that his lip wouldn’t need surgery and gave him another blue ice. They were eating dinner with the kids, when he took a call from Elmer Henderson, junior U.S. senator from Minnesota.

“Senator,” he said.

“Lucas. I got a job. I’d appreciate it if you’d take a look.”

“I just got home from Iowa,” Lucas said. “Is the job boring?”

“C’mon, man. And no, I don’t think it will be. Necessarily.”

Weather called across the table: “Some fat cat in trouble, Elmer?”

“Hi, Weather. No, not exactly…Well, sort of,” Henderson said.

—

A change of location:

As Lucas was driving north on I-35, BCA agent Virgil Flowers was standing on the tee at the dogleg fifteenth hole at the Mankato Golf Club, wondering if a seven wood was the right club, when his cell phone rang. His golfing partner, a ruddy farmer named Aaberg, who played in bib overalls and carried an 8 handicap, said, “I told you turn that thing off, you silly shit.”

“I’m working,” Virgil said. “I can’t.”

“Working on another snap hook, is what you’re doing,” Aaberg said.

The call was from Virgil’s boss at the BCA. Virgil took it, listened, said, “Yeah, I can make it, but why? Why can’t you tell me now? Who’s going to be there? How did Lucas get involved? I thought he was in Iowa. Henderson? Really?”

Clusterfuck. He could feel it coming.

“Don’t let the phone call affect your swing,” Aaberg said, when Virgil had rung off. “I mean, that fairway is about as wide as my dick is long. You’ll be lucky to find your ball with a chain saw.”

Virgil drove the ball a hundred and eighty yards straight down the fairway, to the middle of the dogleg turn, watched it bounce and stop, and said, “I’m so pretty. I couldn’t have done that better if I’d walked the ball out there and dropped it.”

“You’re still two down with four to play, my porcine friend,” Aaberg said. “Let me up there.”

“Make sure you get all the way through the swing,” Virgil said. “Gotta fight that tendency to leave out to the right. And for God’s sakes, don’t hold your breath when you swing.”

Aaberg left it out to the right. Golf balls will do what you fear.