turn signal and carefully rolled up the ramp at Rice County 1, two cars behind Flowers. Flowers had to guess, and Lucas shouted into the radio, “She went to Carleton. Go left. Go east.”
Flowers turned left, the next car went right, and Anderson turned left behind Flowers. Carleton was off to the east in Northfield, but they’d already gone past the Northfield exit; still, she might be familiar with the countryside around it, Lucas thought, and that had been a better bet than the open countryside to the west.
Now they had a close tag on her, but from the front. Flowers slowly pulled away, leading her into the small town of Dundas; but just before the town, she turned south on County 8, and Flowers was yelling, “I’m coming back around,” and Shrake said, “I got her, I got her.”
Well back, now. Not many cars out, and all but Lucas had been close to her, and she might pick one of them out. They kept south, onto smaller and narrower roads, Shrake breaking away, Jenkins moving up, until she disappeared into a cornfield.
“Whoa. Man, she turned,” Jenkins said. “She’s, uh, off the road, hang back guys, I’m gonna go on past…”
Hadn’t rained in a few days, and when Jenkins went past the point where she’d disappeared, he looked down a dirt track, weeds growing up in the middle, and called back, “She looks like she’s going into a field. I don’t know, man…you can probably track her by the dust coming up.”
“That’s not a road,” Lucas said, peering at his atlas. “Doesn’t even show up here; I think it must go down to the river.”
“Maybe she’s going canoeing,” Flowers said. “This is a big canoe river.”
Lucas said into a live radio, “Ah, holy shit.”
“What?”
“It’s the Cannon River, man.”
“Yeah?”
“The money that got laundered in Las Vegas, on the quilts—it went to Cannon, Inc., or Cannon Associates, or something like that.”
Shrake came back: “Dust cloud stopped. I think she’s out of her car; or lost. What do you want to do?”
“Watch for a minute,” Lucas said. “Flowers, you’re wearing boots?”
“Yup.”
“I got my gators,” Shrake said. “I didn’t think we were gonna be creeping around in a cornfield.”
“Gators for me,” Jenkins said.
“You guys get a truckload deal?” Flowers asked.
“Shut up,” Lucas said. “Okay, Flowers and I are gonna walk in there. Jenkins and Shrake get down the opposite ends of the road. If she comes out, you’ll be tracking her.”
“How do we hide the cars?” Flowers asked.
“Follow me,” Lucas said. He went on south, a hundred yards, a hundred and fifty, found an access point, and plowed thirty feet into the cornfield. The corn didn’t quite hide the truck, but it wouldn’t be obvious what kind it was, unless you rode right up to it. Flowers followed him in and got out of his state car shaking his head. “Gonna be one pissed-off farmer.”
“Bullshit. He’ll get about a hundred dollars a bushel from us,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”
Flowers said, “I got two bottles of water in the car.”
“Get them. And get your gun,” Lucas said.
“The gun? You think?”
“No. I just like to see you wearing the fuckin’ gun for a change,” Lucas said. “C’mon, let’s get moving.”
HOT DAY. Flowers pulled his shoulder rig on as they jogged along the rows of shoulder-high corn, ready to take a dive if Anderson suddenly turned up in the car.
“Looks like she’s down by the water,” Flowers said. They could see only the crowns of the box elders and scrub cedar along the river, so she was lower than they were, and they should be able to get close. At the track, they turned toward the river, panting a bit now, hot, big men in suits carrying guns and a pound of water each, no hats; the track was probably 440 yards long, Lucas thought, one chunk of a forty-acre plot; but since it was adjacent to the river, there might be some variance.
“Sand burrs,” Flowers grunted. Their feet were kicking up little puffs of dust.
THEY RAN the four-forty in about four minutes, Lucas thought, and at the end of it, he decided he needed to start jogging again; the rowing machine wasn’t cutting it. When the field started to look thin, and the terrain started to drop, they cut left into the cornfield and slowed to a walk, then a stooped-over creep. The corn smelled sweet and hot and dusty, and Lucas knew he’d have a couple of sweaty corn cuts on his neck before he