1
She had long blond hair and was almost pretty, in the manner of tennis jocks and female gymnasts; too much muscle in the face and arms and butt for the smooth baby-fat look of fashion models or movie stars.
Because she wasn’t one.
Despite the cold, she was lying on her parka, instead of wearing it, the better to anchor the rifle against her shoulder. She put the crosshairs on the target, took up the trigger slack, and squeezed. The recoil was sharp, but manageable.
The man lying in the dirt next to her, looking through a spotting scope, said, “Two centimeters high, a centimeter right. Once more.”
She took her time and squeezed again. The spotter said, “Same hole.”
She said, “I’m so fucking cold, I feel like a goddamned????????????.” In English, literally, a “fruit ice,” or not so literally, a “Popsicle.”
“Forget the cold,” the man said. He had a hard, narrow face and black hair over black eyes. “Three rounds, fast.”
The three rounds went out in less than three seconds, and he said, “All over the place, left right and high, all within six centimeters of the ten-ring.”
“So it’s good.”
“Better than good. I’ve seen what it does to gelatin. If you hit the target anywhere above the waist, he’s dead,” the man said, rolling on his side to look at her. “These copper bullets won’t defeat Level 4, but armor-piercing will. Shoots so flat…I want to take one home with me.”
“If I could shoot as well as you do, I would find a way to do that,” the woman said, handing him the rifle. “Maybe a custom barrel with handloads. The perfect weapon.”
They were lying in a ditch ten miles west of the small town of Owatonna, Minnesota, an informal shooting range, located by their concierge, who was waiting nervously by the car.
“I wish it was suppressed,” the woman added.
“You know the English proverb, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride’?”
Some wrinkles appeared in her forehead: “I’m not sure what that means…”
The proverb didn’t quite translate, because they were speaking in Russian.
Because they were Russian.
• • •
A snaky blacktoppeddriveway led up a gentle slope to the hideout. Two other houses were fed from the same cul-de-sac, allthree out of sight of one another, a carefully contrived privacy set in a suburban forest. Natural shingle siding, a gray-stone chimney, and high peaked roof gave the hideout the vibe of a Minnesota lake chalet, although the nearest big water was a mile away.
The marshals arrived in separate vehicles, Lucas Davenport pushing his Porsche Cayenne up the driveway, while Shelly White left her 4Runner in the street and walked up to meet Lucas.
“The guy gets this place for free? They just gave it to him?” White asked, peering squint-eyed at the house of her dreams, which were unlikely to be realized.
The afternoon light was draining away, a sullen, tangible gathering of gloom, as happens in Minnesota on overcast February days. “The way of the world, sweetheart. You get big enough, you get bad enough, they hand you the fat stacks.”
The hideout was one of twelve houses nestled on four back-to-back cul-de-sacs. Seen from a satellite, the cul-de-sacs resembled a four-leaf clover, set down in a winter landscape of barren broad-leafed trees and evergreens that appeared black in the murky afternoon light.
• • •
Shelly White lookedlike a semi-starved Depression-era farm wife, maybe caught on black-and-white film rattling out of Oklahoma, six snot-nosed kids in a broke-down Model T Ford. She had the knife-edge cheekbones, the pale gray eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, the parched lips held in a tight straight line.
White had never been in Oklahoma, wasn’t starving, and she drove a Toyota SUV much too fast for the crappy suspension. She was a deputy U.S. Marshal who’d grown up in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, looking across the Red River at North Dakota. Four years asan Air Force cop and a degree in criminology got her a job with the U.S. Marshals Service.
She and Lucas, another deputy marshal, hadn’t particularly liked each other when they first met, but they got along, and after a couple of years, had warmed up. Lucas had three natural children with two different women, plus an adoptive daughter; White had three children with two different men, so they had blended families to talk about. Along with guns, fugitives, and mandatory overtime.
White was on the short side, thin and tough as a razor strop. A Glock 9mm hung on her right hip. Below that hip, out of sight beneath her winter cover-ups, she had a massive scar on her thigh where she’d been shot with a fast-expanding jacketed hollow-point bullet from a deer rifle.
Just…life in the Marshals Service.
