Wicked Prey

for those parts run by the Jewish bankers. “Something more specific?”
    “Well, we never heard of him, tell you the truth,” Jacobs said. “Then some guy who goes to gun shows ran into him at a quarry over in Wisconsin, in Barron County, where he was sighting in a .50 cal. The guy talked to him and said Shafer got going on Jews and jihad and how the politicians were selling out America, you know . . . and he had this .50 cal, and the guy who saw him said he was knocking over metal plates at seven hundred and forty-five yards.”
    “Unusual distance,” Lucas said.
    “Which has us worried. For one thing, Shafer lives in Oklahoma, and we’ve got no idea what he’s doing up here. He’s poor as a church mouse and he runs around in a rattrap Ford pickup—but he’s got this shiny new rifle with a thousand-dollar scope and a Nikon rangefinder, and he’s shooting at this specific distance . . . seven hundred and forty-five yards. Like he had the distance in mind. He’s got an FBI file: he tried to join the marines and then the army, years ago, but they didn’t want him, said he was a little shaky on his feet. He may have hooked up with some of the extremist white gangs—he’s got a skinhead brother who did some time. The feds think he might have painted some swastikas on a synagogue in Norman, tipped over some Jewish tombstones . . . Got ‘eighty-eight’ tattooed on his chest. Like that.”
    “We’ll get on it,” Lucas said. “The file’s on the way?”
    “I’m pushing the button on it. ATF is working it, too, and the FBI’s interested, so you may be bumping into some of them.”
    “I’ll warn everybody,” Lucas said.
    * * *
    LUCAS DAVENPORT was a tall, tough, dark-haired man, heavily tanned at the end of the Minnesota summer. The tan emphasized his blue eyes, his hawkish nose, and his facial scars: a long thin one down through his eyebrow, like a piece of white fishing line, another circular one on his throat, with a vertical line through it, like the Greek letter phi—the remnants of a .22 wound, followed by the tracheotomy that kept him alive. The tracheotomy had been done by Weather, with a jackknife.
    “So?” Weather asked.
    “Some redneck with a .50-caliber sniper rifle, up here from Oklahoma,” Lucas said. “One of the eighty-eights. They’re worried, but not too worried.”
    “What’s an eighty-eight?”
    “You know—H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, so eighty-eight is HH. Heil Hitler,” Lucas said. “You got guys who get it tattooed on their scalps.”
    “Then I’d be worried, if I were Dan Jacobs,” she said.
    “Yeah . . . The ATF guys are out looking for him, and probably the Secret Service,” Lucas said. “They want me to call our Wisconsin contacts, and people around the metro, see if we can spot him. I’ll make some calls tonight, get some deputies looking around.”
    “Good luck with that,” she said. The longer they’d lived together, the more skeptical she’d become of the concept of sharp-eyed cops picking the bad guys out of a crowd. She’d moved toward Lucas’s view, as regarded cops and robbers: it was all chaos, accident, stupidity, insanity, and coincidence.
    He’d cited as evidence the case of the doper who’d gotten out of Stillwater prison on Wednesday, who’d promptly gotten drunk with his release money, had fallen asleep at midnight in a filling station parking lot, had woken at three o’clock in the morning, out of money, only to spot the Coke machine right there, with a brick sitting next to it, had smashed open the machine with the brick, and was still scooping up the coins when the cops arrived. On Friday, he was back in Stillwater for the remaining three years of his original term.
    Yowza.
    They crossed the St. Croix River into Minnesota, and twenty-five minutes later, were home. There were lights all over the house, and from the garage, they could hear Letty, their ward, shrieking with laughter. Inside, they found Letty and Sam playing a kind of volleyball using a sponge batted over a string.
    Sam quit the moment he saw Weather and Lucas, and Letty called, “Quitter,” which he understood, and he said, “No-no-no-no,” one of his few dozen words, and ran to Weather.
    Perfect, Lucas thought. Just perfect. The kid was obviously brilliant, as well as athletically gifted, and probably the best-looking toddler in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. And Letty was growing up into something interesting. Her mother had