'Ain’t gonna be anything left from December,” Odd said. “Like to take a look anyway,” Lucas said.
Odd led them back to the garage and pointed. Two was a black 2001 Ford 550 diesel with a dual winch on the back. They walked around it, and Lucas stuck his hand over the side and dragged his fingers across the bed, held them up in front of his face, rubbed his fingers. All the oil you could want. The winch lines were shiny, but gritty: there would be, Lucas thought, metal filings in the oil.
“What do you think?” Del asked. “I think I gotta find a place to wash my hands; and we should call Dakota County, get their lab people up here,” Lucas said. “Not gonna take the truck, are they?” Odd asked. “If they have to, you’d be compensated,” Lucas said. Odd brightened: “Welp, that’d be a benefit. What’d that boy do, anyway?” Del asked, “So what’s Jerry’s last name?”
Lucas washed his hands; and while they waited for the Dakota County crew, they got Linda and Odd around Linda’s desk, and cross examined them on Ricky Davis. “Used to work on towboats, down on the river, got tired of that, and decided to start a farm. He and his girlfriend are raising emus.”
“Emus-like the bird.'
'Yup. Ricky says that they got no cholesterol and no fat, and he’s gonna sell them to high- rent restaurants in the Cities. They got a batch of chicks last fall, and they’re gonna start harvesting them…”
“That means ‘chop their heads off,’” Linda said. “… around next Christmas.'
'Where’s the farm?” Lucas asked. “Down south of here, somewhere, what’s the town?” Odd scratched his head. Linda said, “Wanamingo-it’s by Zumbrota.”
Lucas got on his phone, called Carol, had her look at a map and figure out what county Wanamingo was in. She came back a minute later and said, “Goodhue. The county seat is at Red Wing.”
“Get me the number for the county recorder, will you?'
'Let me get on the Net.” Another minute, and she said, “Here it is…” and read out the number. As he dialed it, he asked Linda, “Any idea what Ricky’s full legal name is? Is it Richard or Ricky, his middle initial?” She poked her computer a couple of times and said, “Richard William Davis, 01-07-75.”
Lucas got a clerk in the recorder’s office, identified himself, and asked her to check the computer for any deeds, mortgages, or liens listed to Richard William Davis in the past year.
She was back almost instantly: “We have a deed recorded and a mortgage satisfaction on November twenty- one, forty- two thousand dollars for apparently… let me figure this out… forty acres out in Cherry Grove township.”
“Is that near Wanamingo?'
'It is. Let me see… four, five miles?”
The Dakota County crime-scene guys arrived a couple of minutes later, and Lucas and Del and Odd walked them out to Two. “You know what you’re looking for?” Lucas asked.
“Yes.” The older of the two guys looked into the truck bed. “We’re gonna find it, too-whether or not it’s
“I understand there were some oak leaf bits stuck in the plastic sheet,” Lucas said.
“That’s right,” the older one said. “We’ll look for them. What we’ll do, we’ll seal up the bed as best we can, then take it back to the garage and sample everything.”
“How long before you know?'
'Lot to sample,” he said. “Let’s say… a preliminary read by tomorrow, something definitive in a week or so?'
'I’ll give a preliminary read right now,” the shorter guy said. “Given what we found in the sheet, you couldn’t even think of a better possibility than this truck. We had a mix of engine oil and transmission fluid and brake fluid and… shit, we should have thought of wreckers.”
“Good enough for me,” Lucas said. To Del: “Wanna go talk to Ricky?”
“What’d that boy
They were only fifteen minutes from Lucas’s place, so they went back into town, and Lucas dropped the Porsche and Del left his state Chevy in the street, and they took Lucas’s truck. They got lost cutting across country, and didn’t make the Davis farm until late afternoon.
The farm was not on what Lucas would have identified as farmland: it was a forty- acre hump of scraggly, sapling- infested meadow with a big wire cage in the middle of it, backed on one side by the foundation of an old barn. The barn foundation was tented with plastic; the pen itself was full of five- or six- foot- tall birds that Lucas would have called ostriches. A trailer, missing its wheels, sat on blocks to the right of the driveway, opposite the barn and bird pen, and a Dodge pickup was nosed in to the trailer.
They pulled into the driveway and parked fifty feet down the hump from the trailer; as they did, Ricky Davis stepped out of the trailer and peered at them. Lucas slipped his gun out of its waist holder and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Watch yourself-that’s the motherfucker who shot me.”
“You sure?'
' Ninety- four- point- six percent.”
Davis was watching them, a frown on his face. When Lucas stepped out, with Del on the other side, his face dropped, and then he looked both ways, up and down the hill, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky…” but Davis had thrown himself into his truck.
“Shit,” Lucas said, and pulled the.45. Davis fired up the truck and hit the gas, backing straight toward them, and Lucas yelled, “Ricky,” and pointed the pistol, and Del, who was exposed, ran around behind Lucas’s truck, and Davis accelerated, backward, past them, down the hill, all the way to the gravel road, across the gravel road, into the ditch on the other side.
Neither Lucas nor Del had fired a shot; they both climbed back into Lucas’s truck and Lucas whipped it around in a circle. Davis was moving forward, but couldn’t climb the steep bank of the ditch for a hundred yards or so, and bounced and ricocheted over the rough turf on the edge of the ditch, and finally coaxed the truck up the side and hit the gravel road. Lucas was a hundred feet behind him when they cleared the top of a hill, past a farmhouse where there was a woman standing on the lawn with a golden retriever. They were going way too fast.
Gravel dust made it impossible to see for more than forty or fifty yards. Every time Lucas moved to the side, to get out of the dust, Davis moved over in front of him.
“Gotta hard right coming up,” Del yelled. “Coming up… Coming up close!”
Lucas hit the brakes and dropped back, the stability- control lights flashing on his dashboard, but Davis plowed into the intersection, too fast to hold. The back end of the pickup started to slide, the rear wheels frantically throwing rocks and dirt, and the truck almost went into the ditch again, but Davis at least got it straight, with two wheels down in the ditch and two on the shoulder. Then the ditch wall got steeper and he tried to stop; did stop. Sat for a moment, and then the truck slowly rolled sideways. Davis tried to steer into it, but failed, and the truck rolled, and stopped upside down.
“Hard right,” Del said, climbing out behind the muzzle of his Beretta 9mm.
Lucas said, “Might be a gun in the truck. Watch it.” They boxed the truck, easing up behind it. There was no visible piece of sheet metal on the vehicle that hadn’t been dented in the roll. All the windows were cracked, and when Lucas came up on the driver’s side, he could hear Davis weeping.
He risked a peek: Davis was hanging upside down in his safety belt, his face contorted, tears running down his forehead into his hair. Lucas asked, “Are you hurt?”
Davis, out of control, asked “ Wha- wha- what’s gonna happen to the birds?”
“Are you hurt?” Del asked.
“No, I’m just upside down.'
'Gotta gun?” Lucas asked. “No.'
'Let’s get you out of there.”
