Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,66
gun,” Rae said. “Most of them got lots of guns. That Brooks guy looked like a librarian and he had a Kimber .45 in his jacket pocket. You could kill a wild pig with that thing. A mountain lion.”
“How many guns you got?” Bob asked. “Fifteen?”
“No. Not fifteen. Besides, I’m a law enforcement officer. I need the familiarization,” Rae said.
“So do I, but I get by with five guns,” Bob said. “Not counting the job guns, of course.”
“Lucas: How many personal guns?” Rae asked.
“Several,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too depressing.”
* * *
—
THERE WAS ONLY ONE moment of tension over the weekend, but the tension wasn’t between the marshals and the subjects, but between the White Gazette’s publisher, Jackson Wheatley, and his wife, Constance.
The Wheatleys had apparently been fighting when the marshals arrived at their house in the suburban Maryland town of University Park. Constance Wheatley answered the knock on the door, a tall, dignified, fiftyish white-haired woman carrying a little too much weight. She looked at the badges, turned away from the door and screamed, “Okay, shithead, this is it! Now we got marshals breaking down our door. I want a divorce! I’m going to Nancy’s and I want a divorce. You’ll hear from my lawyer on Monday and I’m taking the Benz.”
Jackson Wheatley came steaming out of a hallway, a short, stocky red-faced man in a white shirt and green slacks, wearing white socks with sandals, who shouted, “You’re not taking any of my cars, you cunt! You try to take one of those cars and I’ll . . .”
He saw the marshals on the other side of the screen door and his voice trailed off, but then Constance came out of the kitchen, where she’d gone after turning away from the door, and she had a claw hammer in her hands. “What are you going to do, mister? What? Call me a cunt, I’ll stick this hammer so deep in your brains all the squirrels will get out.”
And she went after him with the hammer, Jackson Wheatley shouting at the marshals, “You’re witnesses, you’re witnesses,” and he ran around a sofa and then behind a leather easy chair and grabbed a hardbacked copy of Good Poems: American Places by Garrison Keillor, off a built-in bookshelf, and fumbled it open. A pistol fell on the floor and then Bob, Rae, and Lucas were all inside, and Jackson Wheatley stooped to pick up the diminutive gun and Bob kicked it and Lucas stepped behind Jackson Wheatley and scooped it up, while Rae faced off with Constance and said, “If you swing that hammer at me, you’ll get badly injured.”
Wheatley stopped with the hammer in the air and Rae said, “We might even shoot you.”
Wheatley pointed a finger at her husband and said, “That sonofabitch is keeping me here by force so he can satisfy his perverted appetites.”
Jackson shouted, “What? You haven’t fucked me in ten years! I called you a cunt? I apologize: I don’t think you got one.” He shouted at Lucas, “You saw that, she tried to kill me with a hammer . . .”
Bob held up a hand. “I have a solution for this. Everybody be quiet for one moment while I go outside. I promise, this will settle things down.”
He went out the door and Lucas, with the small gun in his hand, said to Jackson Wheatley, “This gun is a piece of junk. What century did it come from?”
“That was my father’s personal sidearm . . .”
“Your father was an animal,” Constance Wheatley shouted. “A criminal. Your mother should have cut his nuts off before they had you, but she didn’t have the brains to do it! Now you got the marshals coming to get you. Well, good riddance.” To Lucas: “Take this racist asshole away. Put him in prison!”
Bob came back: “Okay, folks, I called nine-one-one. The cops will be here in a couple of minutes, they’ll be talking to both of you.”
Constance Wheatley took a step back, then asked, “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything.” She dropped the hammer on the floor, as if they might not notice.
Lucas looked at the Keillor book. The center had been cut out, the edges of the pages glued together so the gun could be concealed in the hollowed-out portion. With the covers closed, it looked intact.
“That was a damned good book,” Lucas said. “Put together by one of my neighbors. You guys ruined it.”