Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,6

Scott Fitzgerald didn’t say, but perhaps should have, “The very rich are different than you and me.” And as Ernest Hemingway didn’t say, but probably would have liked to have said, “Yes, they have more money.”

If the exchange had actually occurred, Lucas thought, Fitzgerald would have had the better of it. In his experience, many of the very rich never really touched the sides or the bottom of the world, of life, but were cocooned from it, even when they wound up dead with needles in their arms.

Henderson was a prime example of the privileges of inherited wealth. Still, he and Lucas were friends on some level, and Henderson had twice been in a position to give Lucas something that he wanted but couldn’t get on his own: the authority to hunt.

After Lucas lost his job with Minneapolis, and after he made his money, he’d gotten, with Henderson’s support, a political appointment as an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and a new badge. When the time ran out on that appointment, Henderson and another U.S. senator, Porter Smalls, had ushered him into a job as a deputy U.S. Marshal.

And they’d seen to it that he had the freedom to hunt, as long as he performed the occasional political task.

* * *

—

“I’LL SEND A PLANE,” Henderson told Lucas, because of course he would. Sending a plane didn’t mean much more to him than giving a cop cab fare. “In fact, I already sent it, if nobody’s screwed up, or my wife didn’t sneak off to Manhattan. You need to be here tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Lucas said.

“I’ll talk to the bishop and tell him you’re excused,” Henderson said.

“Ah, Jesus, you know I got shot, I’m still in recovery mode . . .”

“I know all about that,” Henderson said. “You weren’t hurt so bad you didn’t run off to Nevada and kill somebody.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Lucas grumbled.

“Okay—you managed the killing. Well done, in my opinion. The world has enough cannibals,” Henderson said. “Anyway, you’re all healed up. My office, tomorrow, one o’clock. That should allow you to sleep in until eight tomorrow morning. Or seven. Whatever.”

“Eight? Listen, Elmer, I never . . .” But Henderson was gone. Here was the rich man’s assumption: make a call and the guy shows up on time, with a necktie and polished shoes.

* * *

—

WHEN THEIR GUESTS HAD DEPARTED, and the kids were soundly asleep, and the dishes washed, Lucas and Weather had had one of the snarly disagreements common to long-lasting marriages, and they had gone to bed a little angry with each other. The trouble came down to Henderson’s request and Lucas’s occasional political missions. The argument started there, compounded by Weather’s unease with the increasing levels of violence in Lucas’s job, and had moved to a more general political dispute.

Weather, a surgeon, was an unabashed liberal. Because they had much more money than they really needed, Weather had freed herself from the usual routine of plastic and micro surgeries. She no longer looked for clients, but spent much of her time going from one hospital to the next, doing necessary surgical repairs on indigent cases.

There was more work of that kind than she could handle and she was constantly exposed to a population that was unable to care for itself—including people literally driven into bankruptcy by medical costs, who’d had to choose between eating and medical care.

The American medical system was broken, she thought, and needed to be fixed. She’d gone to a convention of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in Los Angeles, and had been traumatized by the sight of thousands of street people, including small children, living under bridges and viaducts.

“Worse than anything we had in the Great Depression,” she said.

Lucas was not so liberal. He believed that no matter how much money or time you spent on the poor, there’d always be people at the bottom unable to care for themselves, and that was simply a fact to be lived with. Also, some people really needed to be shot, and, if only wounded, shot again.

“Your mistake,” he’d told Weather, after one beer too many, and to his regret, “is that you characterize everything as a problem. A problem is something that can be solved. Some things aren’t problems—they’re situations. A situation can’t be solved, it just is. Medical care is a bottomless hole. We could spend every nickel everyone makes in the country on medical care, and it still wouldn’t be enough. If a guy thinks