Bob said, “Back, back...”
“Go ahead and shoot, motherfucker, go ahead and shoot me...”
“Stepping right,” Rae said to Bob, and Bob switched his handgun to his left hand and the woman shouted, “Get that nigger out of my house...”
Carter lurched forward another step. He was huge, most of it muscle, some of it fat, but he was slow. Bob had finished third in the heavyweight division of the NCAA wrestling tournament, losing on points only to the eventual champion, and while not as big as Carter, he was very fast and very well trained. Bob stepped into Carter and hit him in the solar plexus with his right fist, a sound like a meat axe going into a side of beef, and Carter bounced backwards and opened his mouth as if to object, but then turned white and sank to his knees and then toppled onto the floor, holding his chest.
The woman, Lacey, bent as if to help him, but then made as if to slap Bob on the face, which wouldn’t have bothered him. But she wasn’t slapping: she raked him with knife-like fingernails, cutting his forehead open, and Bob bumped back, blood streaming from his forehead below his hairline, and then she turned on Lucas with her nails, which were an inch long and filed to silver points and swung her hands to slash him...
Lucas had at least a foot of reach on her. The punch started at shoulder height, snapped out to her chin, caught her perfectly, one of the better punches Lucas had thrown in his life, and the woman flew backwards and landed on top of Carter, rolled off and lay on the floor, one leg twitching, no other sign of life.
“Hope I didn’t kill her,” Lucas said; but he wasn’t hoping all that hard.
“I was kind of hoping you did,” Rae said. “Cuff ’em. Bob, you okay?”
“Sliced the shit out of me,” Bob said. Blood was trickling down into his eyes, and he wiped it with the back of a hand, but he put the cuffs on Carter and the woman, who still wasn’t moving, but was breathing.
“We need an ambulance,” Lucas said. “She might have a broken jaw.”
—
RAE CALLED 9-1-1, and an ambulance and a couple of local cop cars were dispatched; Lucas called Chase, who was still ten minutes out. “Any sign of a gun?”
“Haven’t looked,” Lucas said.
“You’ve got a warrant.”
—
THEY HAD GUNS.
There were four AR-15–style black rifles, two 9mm semi-auto handguns, a .357 Magnum revolver, a twelve-gauge shotgun with cut-down stock and barrel that made it illegal, and, most interesting, a bolt-action CZ 527 American in .223, mounted with a Sig Sauer scope. The CZ and scope would make a decent light sniper combination.
The ambulance showed up—Lacey’s eyes were open, but she couldn’t close her mouth, and wasn’t clearly responsive to questions. An EMT thought her jaw might be broken, and that she might be concussed, and they took her away.
Carter had gotten off the floor, and was sitting on a kitchen chair, stunned, but not so stunned that he hadn’t immediately asked for a lawyer. Lucas, looking through the bedroom, founda copy of the letter: not an early version, but apparently a much-copied one, and the original had not been quite centered on the photocopy machine.
Chase arrived, looked at the letter, and said, “Same letter, different copy. The goddamned thing is everywhere.”
They were standing in the living room, and she turned and looked at Carter sitting in the kitchen chair: “You think he shot the kid?”
“I dunno,” Bob said. His forehead had been patched up by the EMT, who suggested that he might wish to go to an emergency room for stitches. “I can tell you only one thing about that: the ammo in the apartment is not the same as it was in the rifle we recovered. There aren’t any partial boxes of it, nothing of that brand. So...”
“He has the attitude and we’ve got that recording,” Lucas said. “We get a lawyer on him, maybe he’ll have something to say.”
Chase nodded: “We’ll have a better idea by morning. We’ll seal up the house, get a crime scene crew over here. Bob, go get your stitches.”
—
BOB GOT HIS STITCHES, with Lucas and Rae waiting in the hospital with him, like nervous parents. The stitches were done by a young physician’s assistant, who told Bob that she was so good at it, he wouldn’t have scars, as long as he didn’t mess with the cuts. She put a big bandage on his forehead that made him look as though he’d had a lobotomy, and sent them on their way.
At the Watergate, they got more burgers. Rae asked, “What do you think about Sutton?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “He’s at least a candidate. But, I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out in the morning. I’m going to watch some football, then go to bed, and sleep in. This was a long day.”
“Hate those letters floating around,” Bob said. “They all make that same argument—that if you kill a senator’s kid, the next senator might listen to you when you want a vote changed. It makes a weird kind of sense, if you’re nuts.”
“Carter was a felon with five rifles and a sawed-off shotgun, plus a couple of pistolas,” Rae said. “You want nuts, there it is.”
