Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,46

internet, and the pain eased a bit.

He woke on the next morning with a lingering ache at the back of his skull, but no gnats in front of his eyes. He crawled out of bed, nearly fell, staggered to the kitchen and ate a whole box of raisin bran with one-percent milk. He managed to keep that down and walked unsteadily to his computer and out to the Fauquier Now website, which covered Fauquier County and Warrenton. He poked around there, found nothing about any murders.

Nobody had found them yet?

He could hardly believe it, but that was apparently the case. He was tempted to search for the Stokeses by name, but decided that might be a security breach. He’d wait to hear.

* * *

—

HE SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER and went back to his bed and flopped facedown. He didn’t sleep—at least, he didn’t think he did—but when he went back to bed, it had been morning, and when he got up, it was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. The hours in between had been taken up with dreams not only of reruns of the shootings of Rachel and Randy Stokes, but also imagined videos of gunned-down children, police sirens, screaming politicians.

Eventually the reruns of the Stokeses’ shootings had faded and the imagined images of screaming politicians and urgent media coverage had come to the fore. When he got up, his bare feet hit the floor and he sat there for a moment, imagining CNN and Fox and MSNBC covering those future shootings.

He wasn’t a man given to a lot of self-analysis, but he recognized something he hadn’t felt before: he was now more important than he’d ever been, or ever imagined he’d be. He was now a man who could change the nation.

He walked up to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked bad, without a doubt, three days of whiskers, his hair in disarray, his face sallow, gaunt. He cleaned up, taped a piece of plastic bag over his buttocks to keep the water off, then stood in a hot shower for fifteen minutes. He needed to work out, or jog, but was afraid that either one would break open the wounds.

But the shower helped: he was better.

On the phone to the job foreman: “Bill? This is El . . .”

“Man, how you feeling?” Bill sounded like he actually cared.

“Better. Whatever it was put me on the toilet every ten minutes for three days, but I went out and ran this afternoon. No after-effects, far as I can tell. I think I got a bad salad. Not coughing or anything. Where’re we at?”

“You were running far enough ahead of us that we’re okay, but if you could work tomorrow, that’d be a good thing.”

“We’ll be there at dawn, we’ll work right down to dark and not charge you an extra nickel.”

“You’re a good man, El. I’ll see you out there.”

* * *

—

DUNN HAD NEVER gotten much in the way of email, and what he had, he caught up with, and then walked out and got his snail mail, his butt still throbbing as he walked. He found a couple of bills—he did bills every Saturday morning, so he was always current—and a first-class letter with his name and address printed on a laser printer. He carried the mail inside, opened the letter, and to his astonishment, found a copy of the letter he’d sent out to the three men he thought might use them.

The appearance of the letter fogged up his brain for a minute or so, until he realized what had happened. One of the original recipients of his letter hadn’t known where it had come from, but he had thought that Dunn might be somebody to send it to. Anonymously. Dunn didn’t know which man had passed it back, but he assumed that man might also have passed it to more people.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to shoot again.

Maybe somebody else would do it. If enough people saw that letter. He walked around with the letter in his hand, and then went to the bathroom, burned it, dropped the ashes in the toilet and flushed them. He sat at the kitchen table, looking out at the tree line along the backyard, and thought about it: and was surprised by the feeling of disappointment.

Somebody else was going to be important?

Wasn’t that a good thing? Setting himself up with alibis while the dirty work was done by someone else? Nobody would ever discover that