Lucas Davenport was in the awkward position of holding a pair of fives after the draw, with three people still in the pot, and, at the same time, defending the FBI.
“They’re not all assholes,” he said. He was the only one wearing a suit, a silvery-gray ensemble too relaxed to be currently fashionable except maybe in certain parts of Milan, where he’d never been but would like to go for the shopping. He was tieless in a checked shirt open at the collar. He looked again at his hand, threw the cards facedown in the center of the table, and said, “I’m out.”
“Name one who isn’t an asshole. Just one,” Shrake said, referring to the agents at the FBI. The back room smelled of beer, deli sandwiches, and a hint of cigar, though none of them smoked.
Lucas: “There’s this chick I met in Washington . . .”
“I mean one that I know,” Shrake said, pointing the top of a beer bottle at Lucas. “Maybe there’s one, somewhere, but here . . .”
“I gotta think about it,” Lucas said. He had a corned beef sandwich sitting on a paper plate on the table, picked it up, and took another bite. The genuine French mustard—moutarde—bit right back.
Shrake: “See?”
Shrake and his partner, Jenkins, both large men with battered faces, wore gray sport coats over short-sleeved open-necked golf shirts—pastel green and baby blue, respectively.
“Lotta assholes in the BCA and St. Paul and Minneapolis cops . . .” Lucas said, around a mouthful of corned beef.
“Yeah, but we’re not all assholes, like in the FBI,” Jenkins said. He threw a white chip into the pile in the middle of the table. “I’m in for a buck.”
“I’m telling you . . .”
Virgil Flowers, a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent visiting from southern Minnesota, said, “How about Terry McCullough? He never seemed that bad.”
They talked about Special Agent Terry McCullough for a couple of minutes and, by a vote of three to two, found him to be an asshole.
“Then I got nothing,” Flowers said. He was wearing a canvas shirt and jeans. He’d found out earlier that week that in six or seven months he would become the father of twins, God willing and the creek don’t rise. He threw a white chip and a red one into the pot and said, “See your buck and raise you a half.”
Jenkins said, “Fuck you and your raise, you sandbagging piece of shit.”
Lucas: “Just because all the feds got college degrees . . .”
“We all got college degrees,” Shrake said.
“A real college, not a four-day putting school,” Lucas said.
Jenkins said, “Oh.”
“Feds are like classical musicians,” said Sloan, a former Minneapolis homicide cop who owned the bar where they were playing cards, and who sometimes played guitar in a J. J. Cale tribute band. He was a narrow man who dressed mostly in shades of brown and wore hats with brims. “They can read music like crazy, but you want them to play a C major seventh chord, they got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“I got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” Lucas said.
“Take my word for it, it’s exactly the same thing,” Sloan said. And, “Buck and a half to me? I’m gone.”
* * *
—
LUCAS’S PHONE buzzed in his pant pocket and he slid his chair back and looked at the screen: Rae Givens.
“I gotta take it,” he told the others.
He stepped away from the table, put a finger in his off ear, and said, “Rae. What’s up, sweetheart?”
“You been reading about the bodies coming out of the woods in Louisiana?”
“Yeah, in the newspapers,” he said. “Four dead, right?”
“Five, as of an hour ago, could be more. Probably more.”
“Are you and Bob involved?”
“Yeah. We spotted the graves, but we’re on the fringe of it for the moment,” she said. “We got FBI like a rat’s got fleas. We need you to use some of your political shine to get involved and take us along for the ride. Me and Bob.”
“Any reason why I should?” Lucas asked.
“He’s major, Lucas. A bad dude, the kind you like. I don’t think the FBI is gonna find him,” Rae said. “They’re way too zone defense and we need a man-to-man. We need somebody chasing him down, not circulating bulletins around the places he might be.”
“Five dead makes it more interesting . . .”
“How about this? He ate them,” Rae said. “We think he barbecued them on his home grill. We found a woman’s body—a girl, really—with