mushrooms. Or shiitakes.”
“How about my robbers?” Lucas asked.
“They weren’t here,” Flowers said. “But I was talking to one of the dopers, not a bad guy, for a doper, and he told me where they live, and where they were going this afternoon. They were supposed to bring a load of horse shit back this evening.”
“So…”
“I was waiting for you,” Flowers said. “Let’s go get them. Leave the Porsche here. We’ve got to come back this way anyway, we can drop them off with the sheriff.”
“Good. That way, the Porsche won’t smell like horse shit,” Lucas said.
As they walked down to Flowers’s truck, Lucas asked, “Where’re we going?”
“’Bout five or six miles down the road, to a gravel road called Jenks Trail. Half mile north, there’s a trailer sitting on the side with a dirt yard and a pit bull on a chain. That’s them. I pulled some stuff off the computer. There’s a file on the backseat.”
They got in the truck and Lucas reached over the seat and got the file, a stapled printout from the NCIC. He paged through it as Flowers pulled off the shoulder, and they loafed down the county road, over hill and dale, past the tall corn and rolling woods, the soybeans and alfalfa, kids looking over their shoulders as they pedaled along on their bikes.
Duane Bird and Bernice Waters were the kind of minor dirtbags that made life a little tougher for everybody. They’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, burglarize any house or business they thought might be empty, get drunk and fight and drive, and choke down any drug they could get their hands on. They weren’t killers, not even much in the way of robbers, although what they’d done with Lucas counted as armed robbery.
Bird had once been convicted of stealing a hundred manhole covers from Rochester, a theft carried out in a single night. He sold the covers to a junkyard, for processing as scrap. The owner of the junkyard expressed amazement when he found out that the manhole covers had been stolen and immediately rolled over on Bird.
Waters was believed to be behind the theft of one hundred cartons of Tums from a semitrailer broken down in Park, Minnesota. Each carton contained 144 bottles of Tums tablets, each bottle containing 150 tablets, for a grand total of 2,160,000 assorted fruit Tums. Nobody knew what she’d done with them.
They’d both been convicted of shoplifting, with Target their favored retailer.
When he finished thumbing through it, Lucas tossed the file on the backseat, leaned back, and said, “Nice day.”
“When did you lose the cast?” Flowers asked.
“This morning. You know what the goddamned so-called doctor did?…”
When they got to Jenks Trail, they decided to make a slow pass on the trailer, to check out the dog situation and see if anybody was around. Flowers cut his speed back to thirty-five or so, kicking up a long trail of gravel dust behind the 4Runner. They came up to the trailer, a twenty-year-old aluminum capsule painted turquoise and desert tan, set up on concrete blocks, in a bare lot carved out of a perfectly good cornfield. The dog was lying in the dirt yard, a white beast with jaws like a bear trap. The dog stood up to bark as they went by.
A pickup sat in front of the trailer, with its hood propped up. It looked as though it’d been propped up for a while.
“Do not want to fuck with that dog,” Lucas said, looking over his shoulder.
“Doesn’t look like the chain would reach the door,” Flowers said. “We could come up from the back, through the cornfield.”
“Wouldn’t be a surprise … and we know they’ve got that piece-of-shit pistol.”
“They never shot anybody,” Flowers said.
“Maybe come up behind the trailer, watch it for a while,” Lucas suggested.
They parked Flowers’s truck on a gravel road on the opposite side of the field, where it would be out of sight for most cars going down to the trailer. Lucas took off his suit coat, and Flowers pulled on a long-sleeved shirt so he wouldn’t get scratched by the corn leaves. At the last minute, Flowers went back to the truck, got a pistol out from under the front seat, already in a carry holster. He stuck it in his back beltline and said, “I’m good.”
They climbed a barbed-wire fence and submerged in the tall corn. Lucas would have been lost in a minute or two, but Flowers pulled out his cell phone, called up a compass app, and they followed the arrow across the field.
When they got close, they found they were a bit too far to the west, and so went back in, walked east two hundred feet, then climbed another fence and jogged up to the back of the trailer, a single-wide.
“Smell it?” Flowers asked, in a whisper.
Lucas nodded: a faint odor, like a mix of alcohol and ammonia, hung about the trailer. They’d been cooking meth inside. Lucas pressed his ear to the metal siding on the trailer and listened. Not a sound. Not a creak. “Nothing moving,” he said.
“That smell-we’ve got probable cause,” Flowers said.
“Let’s go. Let’s kick the door,” Lucas said.
They walked around the side and then the front, and the dog went nuts. His chain would have covered the rut up to the front door, but fell short of the concrete-block stoop. Lucas took his pistol out as Flowers, with cowboy boots, walked up to the door and simply kicked it open.
Lucas went through, with Flowers a couple steps behind: nobody home, but the place was saturated with the odor of the chemicals.
“Jesus, what a shithole,” Lucas said. Dirty clothes were stacked around the built-in couches, papers-bills and advertisements-were scattered over the tiny dinner table.
The dog was still going nuts.
“If we find them, we gotta do something about the mutt,” Lucas said.
“There’s a pit bull rescue place in the Cities. They’ll come down and get him.” Flowers shook his head. “A dog like that, you had to abuse it to make it that crazy. Once pits go nuts, sometimes you can’t get them back.”
They made a wide circle around the dog and hiked back to the truck, Lucas bitching about what the gravel was doing to his Italian shoes.
Flowers had addresses for two horse stables where Bird and Waters might be. He had Google maps for the locations, marked by the county agent. Bird and Waters were driving a rust-red 1994 Ford F-350.
They found them at the first farm, shoveling shit, no clue about the shoot-out they’d missed. The farmer walked Lucas and Flowers down to the main barn, explaining, “Most of the manure is taken out mechanically, but we’ve got to clean the last bit by hand.”
“That’s good information,” Lucas said. He stepped in something too soft, looked down at his shoes, winced.
The barn was empty, all the horses being out in a pasture. Flowers pointed them out, and said they were called Appaloosas, identifiable by their dappled asses.
“Then how come they’re not called Assaloosas?” Lucas asked. The farmer looked at him oddly, and they went around the barn.
The two robbers were working with coal shovels and brooms, dragging shovelfuls of horse shit off a manure pile and throwing it on the truck. They were dressed in overalls, a tall, tough woman and the skinny man; when the man looked at them, and tried to smile, Lucas realized he’d lost all his teeth.
Lucas recognized them instantly, and said to them, “Yup. You’re them.”
The woman said, “Who?”
“The two who took five hundred dollars off me up in St. Paul this spring and broke my wrist,” Lucas said. He held up his ID. “I’m a cop. You’re under arrest.”
The couple looked at each other for a moment, and the man’s shoulders slumped. The woman had a push broom in her hands and said, “Thank God,” and tossed the broom on a pile of lumpy manure.
The man said, “Fuck me. What’s gonna happen to my truck?”
“Probably sold for restitution,” Lucas said. “Okay. You have the right…”
