The task force had drilled a few investigative dry holes—the Bergstroms were wandering around the Midwest in pickups (“one red, one blue” according to an alcohol supplier squeezed by Lucas) and were therefore hard to pin down.
In the end, an ATF agent named Clayton Vanes set up a fake Internet recycling company that bought and sold empty liquor bottles out of a storage unit in Clear Lake, Iowa. The storage unit was overseen by a rotating group of marshals, including Lucas.
Unfortunately, the Bergstroms hadn’t shown up to buy the bottles themselves—they’d sent Jennifer (Jiminy) Katz, Boy Bergstrom’s girlfriend, instead. Lucas sold her one thousand empty Stolichnaya bottles and she disappeared in her truck, now accompanied by an electronic tracker surreptitiously mounted on the rear axle.
They’d followed her to a rented farmhouse ten miles from Marshalltown, where the cops settled down to wait.
—
Lucas was stilllooking out the window, at heat waves coming off the parking lot—it was hotter than hell outside, and so humid you could drown—still considering the possibilities, pie or tools, when his radio buzzed. He picked it up and Lanny Anderson, who was sitting in a hole on top of a knoll next to a stump in a clump of trees ten miles out of town, with a pair of binoculars, said, “Guys, we got a pickup.”
An ATF agent, Mary McLeod, asked, “Red Silverado? Blue Silverado?”
“It’s red. Not real shiny red, dusty red. But yeah, it’s a Chevy.”
“That’s it, a thousand miles of gravel roads,” McLeod said. “Guys…let’s mount up.”
Lucas was already pulling on his jeans. He added a long-sleeved shirt, clipped on his pistol, and picked up a cheap blue nylon windbreaker that read “U.S. MARSHAL,” all caps, in six-inch-high yellow letters.
Anderson called back, “It’s Boy Bergstrom and his old lady, no sign of Andy. They’re out of the truck, walking up to the house.”
“That’s Andy’s old lady in the house, I gotta believe he’ll be coming in soon, they don’t roam far apart,” McLeod said. “We’re heading for the parking lot.”
Lucas got his gear bag and was out the door. Two other marshals, Turner and Weed, were in the hallway at the same time; altogether, including the guy in the hole on the hill, there were eight of them, four marshals, three ATF agents, and one Secret Service agent. If Andy Bergstrom showed up, they’d bust the house. If Boy Bergstrom tried to leave in the dusty red Chevy, they’d box him in on the road. A Bergstrom in the hand was worth two in the bush.
In the elevator, Weed said, “If I hadn’t gotten out of that room, I’dprobably have killed myself. I watched like two hundred clips ofThe Big Bang Theoryon YouTube, and all I got out of it was that I’d like to jump the blonde.”
“Eminently jumpable, I would say,” Turner said. To Lucas: “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Some kind of porn deal?”
“It’s a famous TV show. LikeFriends, but funny,” Weed said. “Christ, Davenport, you gotta loosen up, man.”
“I’m not feeling loose. I got a headache,” Lucas said.
“Understandable. Things are getting tense.”
“It’s not a tension headache, it’s a boredom headache.”
“Worst kind,” Turner said. “Maybe we’ll have some fun, and it’ll go away.”
In the parking lot, seven of them loaded into four vehicles; Lucas rode with McLeod, an intense fortyish woman who saw a promotion in the Bergstrom investigation. She’d told Lucas, after a couple of drinks in a Marshalltown bar, that everything would be perfect if they got shot at, and got to shoot back, but nobody got hurt. “Getting shot at does wonders for your résumé,” she said. “At least, in the ATF.”
“Not so much in the Marshals Service,” Lucas had said.
“Yeah, I know about you,” she had said. “You don’t duck. You zig when you should zag. You gotta be quicker.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Lucas had said.
—
She was alreadyin the driver’s seat of the Ford Expedition when Lucas got to the parking lot. She was cranked up, ready to go: “This is it,” she said. “This is it.”
“Easy,” Lucas said. “We’re not there yet. We can get both those assholes if we’re patient.”
“I know, I know, I know,” she said, pounding on the steering wheel. She picked up her radio and said, “Everybody loaded up?”
“Jamal ran inside to buy some bottles of water, he’ll be a minute,” Weed radioed back.
