“I suspect you’re right about that,” Lucas said. “So, you thinking steak or cheeseburger?”
“Anything with beef in it that’s not Mexican,” Knight said.
“Yeah? Mexican’s one of my favorites,” Lucas said.
“I’m married to a Mexican, and we got gourmet Mexicano right there in the kitchen, so I ain’t eating Mexican in Wichita. I’d like to get around a big bloody T-bone.”
“You can dothatin Wichita,” Lucas said. “Did I ever tell you about the time I danced with a professional assassin in Wichita? No? Her name was Clara Rinker...”
—
LUCAS, WORKING OUT OF MINNEAPOLIS,but without a lot to do, and Knight, working out of Dallas, had hooked up to look into the murder of a Jesús Rojas Molina.
Molina, at the time of his death, was in the Federal Witness Protection Program, which was run by the U.S. Marshals Service. Both marshals now, Lucas and Knight had been chosen to look at the case because they both had histories in earlier lives as homicide investigators, Lucas in Minnesota, Knight in Houston.
Molina, the dead man, had ratted out his boss in a homegrown “cartel” that served the illegal drug needs of Birmingham, Alabama. After the boss was convicted and sent to prison forever, Molina was relocated to Wichita to keep him away from the boss’s relatives, who’d promised to disassemble him with a power drill and a straight razor.
He believed them, as did the Marshals Service. As a Witness Protection client, Molina got a crappy manufactured home onthe south side of Wichita, and a five-year-old Corolla, and a greeter’s job at a Walmart Supercenter.
Not good enough for a man who liked rolling high.
A year after moving to Wichita, he was peddling cocaine to the town’s higher-end dope clientele, meaning those who were afraid of methamphetamine or didn’t like the way meth cut into their frontal lobes. He did that until Bobby Wise, whom he’d met as a fellow free enterprise enthusiast and whose wife Molina was screwing, put five shots from his .44 Magnum through Molina’s screen door and into his chest and neck.
One would have done the job. Then Wise would have had the other four to use on his wife, who had promptly turned him in for the murder. But he loved her, so he simply cried when the cops came to get him, and he told her he still loved her.
The Wichita cops seized the .44, matched the slugs, confronted him with the evidence, and got a confession. Lucas and Knight were the Marshals Service representatives to the investigation, making sure that Wise was the one and only killer: that he hadn’t been sent by the Alabama boss’s murderous wife or equally murderous children.
They’d interviewed both Wise and his wife, who’d been confused about the whole Witness Protection thing—they had no idea that Molina had been in it. They were convincing.
Lucas and Knight were moving on: nothing to see here.
—
THAT HAD BEEN THE STORYtoo frequently with Lucas in his two years as a marshal. He’d had a half dozen interesting cases, most resolved in a couple of weeks, along with a half dozen tracking cases that were still open and two cold cases that might never beresolved. Lucas had joined the Service specifically to work on difficult cases—and he’d found something he hadn’t expected.
The world was opening up to American criminals. The wars in the Middle East and the demand for American blue-collar workers in foreign jobs meant that the brighter crooks were disappearing into the confusion of war and irregular employment.
Others were crossing into western Canada, where the raucous oil sands industry provided income and obscure hideouts, as well as a familiar language. The disaster industry, helped by climate change, provided unregulated construction jobs and opportunities for scam artists in the Caribbean and Mexico.
In the U.S., even casual contact with the law often tripped up fugitives; when they went foreign, that didn’t happen.
—
BUT THERE WAS ONE OPENING,one source of interesting investigations, which Lucas still wasn’t sure would develop into a full-time gig. He wasn’t sure that he wanted it to. The jobs were coming out of Washington, D.C. From politicians in trouble.
—
THE PREVIOUS SPRING,a Democratic congressman from Illinois had gotten in touch through the former governor of Minnesota, who was a friend of both the congressman and Lucas.
The congressman, Daniel Benson, had a college dropout daughter who’d gotten herself a flaming skull tattoo above the crack of her ass and a boyfriend in a sleeveless jeans jacket with a Harley. Benson hadn’t worried about it too much until he learned that the boyfriend was an ex-con and a member of a neo-Nazi party and that the daughter had made a YouTube video with him.She was largely unclothed in it, except for the fake German SS helmet and a red-and-black swastika armband. The congressman couldn’t get in touch with her, either on her cell phone or by email.
The congressman thought she might have been kidnapped—or, if not exactly kidnapped, at least was being held against her will. Lucas was asked to take a look. The Marshals Service director was consulted, and he was more than happy to approve a quiet favor for a ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Lucas found the Nazi and the daughter in eight days, at their Ohio hideout. He and another marshal had retrieved the girl and had gotten her enrolled in a sex-and-drugs rehab center. The boyfriend had resisted arrest, and one of his legs had been broken in the fight. Because resisting arrest with violence is a crime, they were able to enter the rented hideout, where they found two thousand hits of hydrocodone in a plastic baggie and four semiautomatic pistols.
Charges of possession with intent to distribute and possession of firearms by a convicted felon were added to the resisting arrest charges, and the boyfriend was shipped off to a federal prison.
Lucas couldn’t do much about the videos, which were out on the Internet, but the daughter was obscure enough, and the video was stupid enough, that the congressman thought he could probably let it go.
