"Got it covered, Minneapolis," Dumbo said. "Keep your heads down. We don't want a crowd."
"Thanks for the technical advice," Sloan muttered.
As Dunn and the federal parade turned off the interstate, Sloan blew past a Dodge pickup on the Highway 36 entrance ramp. The truck swerved onto the shoulder as they passed, and the driver, a young, long-haired man, leaned on his horn and then came after them as they weaved through the traffic, down a long passage of convenience stores and fast-food joints.
"Asshole," Sloan said, grinning into his rearview mirror.
"Better hope he doesn't kill any kids," Lucas said.
"Yeah. The fuckin' paperwork alone. We gotta light coming up, you wanna hop out and chat with him?"
"Unless you want to run the light."
"All right."
The truck loomed behind them as they slowed for the light, closed to eight inches from their bumper, and the kid was back on the horn.
Lucas turned to look over the backseat. The trucker had one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn; a young woman, next to him in the passenger seat, seemed to be yelling-he could see the points of her canine teeth-but Lucas couldn't tell whether she was yelling at the driver or at him. Then she gave him the finger and Lucas decided that he was definitely the target. The trucker dropped the transmission into park, popped his door, and started to climb out, and Sloan went through the red light.
"Goddamn, he's coming through the red," Sloan said, peering in the mirror.
The radio: Two miles out of Bayport, slow and steady.
"We gotta do something about this guy," Sloan said as they took the long sweeping curve toward the St. Croix River. They'd cut the corner off Dunn's route and were approaching Highway 95 ahead of him. "Dunn's not five miles away. Going through Bayport'll slow him down, but this asshole…" He looked in the mirror, and the truck was coming after them.
"All right," Lucas said. "There's a marina up ahead. Pull in there. He'll come in behind us and I'll take him in the parking lot." Lucas pulled his.45 out of the shoulder rig, popped the magazine, jacked the shell out of the chamber, slapped the magazine back in the butt, and dropped the extra shell in his coat pocket. "What a pain in the ass."
"Ready?" Sloan asked.
"Yeah. You got cuffs? If we need them?"
"Glove compartment."
Sloan kept the speed up until he was on top of the marina entrance, then stood on the brakes and took them off the highway. The trucker almost rammed them, swerved out at the last minute, then cranked the truck down the road behind them. Sloan kept moving until they hit the parking lot, then pulled around in a circle. The trucker cut inside them, and they stopped, nearly nose-to-nose.
Lucas popped the door and climbed out, the pistol back in its holster. The trucker was already on the ground, running around the back of his truck, reaching into the open truck bed for something. Lucas ran toward him and the trucker pulled out a length of two-by-four and Lucas screamed, "Police," showed his badge in his left hand, and pulled the pistol in his right. "On the ground. On the ground, asshole."
The trucker looked at the two-by-four, his eyes puzzled, as though it had gotten into his hand by mistake, then chunked it back into the truck. "You cut me off," he said.
"Get on the fuckin' ground," Lucas shouted.
The woman started out of the passenger side, but when she saw the gun, she got back in and punched down the door locks. Sloan got out and held up a badge where she could see it.
The trucker was flat on the blacktop, looking up, and Lucas said, "We're on an emergency run, we're in a big goddamn hurry or I'd kick your ass into fuckin' strawberry jam. As it is, I'm gonna take your truck license number. I want you to sit here, out of the way, for a half-hour. You can sit in the truck, but you sit for a half-hour, and then you can leave. If you leave before then, I'll be all over your ass. I'll put your ass in jail on fifteen fuckin' traffic counts and a couple of felonies, like interfering with officers. You understand that?"
"I understand, sir." The trucker had grown calm.
"All right. Get in the truck and sit. Half an hour."
Lucas hurried back to the car and Sloan pulled it around in a circle and they were halfway out of the parking lot before they started laughing.
"Funny, but Christ, I wished that hadn't happened just then," Lucas said as he reloaded the.45. "They say anything more on the radio?"
"Yeah, they said…" Before Sloan could get it out, the radio said, He's into Bayport, still proceeding north. We got him.
"We've got five minutes," Sloan said.
"Main Street's only about ten blocks long. Let's run down it and see what we can see," Lucas said.
Stillwater was an old lumber mill town, with most of the turn-of-the-century mercantile buildings still in place, crowding Main Street. The buildings had been renovated with tourists in mind, and were now filed with bricks-and-copper-pot restaurants, fern bars, and butter-churn antique stores; the long row of brick store fronts was inflected by the white plastic of a Fina station.
Lucas slumped in his seat, Sloan's baseball cap on his head, only his eyes above the window sill. He hoped he looked like a child but wouldn't have bet on it. "Two million vans," he said. "Everywhere you look, there's a van, if the sonofabitch is dumb enough to still be driving that van around."
The chopper: Subject proceeding through Bayport.
Sloan idled the length of the town, and they saw nothing of interest: storefronts full of tourists, teenagers idling along the walks, one lad who might've been Mail but wasn't. In the light of a pizza place, his face was five years too young.
At the north end of town, Lucas said, "We've got three or four minutes to set up. Let's go back to the other end and find a spot where we can watch the street. If he turns off right away, we should be able to see him. If he goes on past, we can fall in behind."
"Piss off the feds," Sloan said.
"Fuck 'em. Something's happening."
Sloan made a U-turn in the parking lot of a run-down building with a line of dancing cowboy boots painted on the bare, corrugated metal in flaking house paint. They waited for a break in traffic and then drove back to the south end of town, pulled into a parking lot, and found an empty handicapped parking space facing the street. A line of pine trees separated the lot from the street. "Probably get a ticket," Sloan said as he pulled into the handicapped space.
"I don't know," Lucas said. "I've always thought of you as handicapped."
Radio: The subject has exited Bayport and is proceeding north.
"Why's he talking like that?" Sloan asked.
"He's got that camera with him. He'll say perpetrator in a minute."
From their vantage in the parking lot, they could look through the line of trees and see the cars coming into town on Highway 95. Dunn drove a silver Mercedes 500 S, and as the chopper radio said Subject is entering Stillwater, Lucas picked it out in the traffic stream.
"See him?"
"I've got him."
"Let him get past."
Sloan backed the car out of the handicapped slot. "I wonder where the feds are?"
"Probably not real close."
They waited behind the trees until the Mercedes went past, and then Sloan pulled out of the lot and back onto Main Street. There were two cars between them and Dunn. Lucas, slumped in his seat, couldn't see him.
"What's he doing?" he asked, when they all stopped for a red light.
Sloan had edged a bit to the left, and said, "Nothing. Looking straight ahead."
"What do you think? Is Dunn legit?"
Sloan looked at him. "If he's not, they had to set it up ahead of time."
"Well, he's a smart guy."
"I don't know," Sloan said. The traffic started moving again. "That'd be awful tricky."
"Yeah."
After a moment, Sloan said, "It looks like he's going all the way through town. Unless he's going to that old train station. Or one of the antique places."
"Shit: I hope he doesn't take a boat somewhere. Did the feds think of a boat? Boy, if the sonofabitch goes out on the water…"