2

THREE LOCALS were sitting on the wide wooden porch, on a green park bench, to the right of the bar’s front door. An overhead fluorescent light buzzed like a dentist’s drill but didn’t seem to bother them much. All three of them wore trucker hats and were drinking beer from plastic cups.

They stopped to watch when Lucas Davenport rolled his black Mercedes SUV across the gravel parking lot and into a vacant slot between a new Ford F-150 and a battered yellow Cadillac sedan old enough to have fins.

Lucas got out of the truck, clicked “Lock” on the Benz’s key fob, and took in the bar.

In any other place, Cooter’s would have been a dive. Out here it wasn’t, because it was the only bar in Aux Vases, the place where everybody went, from the janitors to the bankers. Built like an old Mississippi River Delta–style house, it featured a wide front porch with an overhanging roof, warped, unpainted plank walls, and neon beer signs in the windows. A million white thumbnail-sized moths were beating themselves to death around the light over the heads of the three men, but they didn’t seem to notice.

In a movie, you’d expect an outbreak of rednecks. Crackers. Peckerwoods, with ropes and ax handles.

Located two hundred yards from one of the rare exits off I-55, with a twenty-foot-wide red-and-white sign that blinked “Cooter’s,” then “Drink,” the bar also attracted anyone who might be running along the interstate between St. Louis and Memphis who might get shaky after two hours without alcohol.

Lucas crunched across the gravel parking lot, climbed the porch steps, and nodded at the three men. He didn’t have to get close to smell the spilt beer. One of the three checked out Lucas’s suit, tie, and black Lucchese lizard-skin cowboy boots, and said, “Evenin’, sir,” slurring his words enough that Lucas thought the men might not be out on the bench voluntarily.

Lucas said, “Evenin’, boys.”

“Nice ride you got there,” the middle one said.

“Thank you. Want to buy it?”

The three all chuckled. They couldn’t afford one of the fuckin’ tires, much less the rest of the truck, but the offer gave them the warm glow of economic equality. Lucas nodded again, said, “Take ’er easy,” went inside, chose the least sticky-looking stool toward the end of the bar, and sat down.

The bartender, a thin man with a gold eyetooth and a black string tie, came over and asked, “What do you need?”

“Make me a decent margarita?” Lucas loosened his necktie.

“I can do that, though some folks think the indecent ones are even better,” the bartender said. When Lucas didn’t crack back, he said, “One decent margarita coming up.”

The bartender had started to step away when Lucas asked, “How do you pronounce the name of this place?”

The bartender’s face took on the look that people get when they’re asked a really, really stupid question. “Cooter’s?”

Lucas laughed. “No, no—the town. Aux Vases.” He pronounced it Ox Vasies.

“Oh. Jeez, you had me goin’ there for a minute,” the bartender said. “It’s, uh, French, and it’s Oh-Va.”

“Oh-Va. Always wondered, whenever I saw the sign,” Lucas said.

“Yup. Oh-Va.” He looked at Lucas a little more closely and saw a big, blue-eyed guy, whose dark hair was threaded with gray at the temples.

The bartender guessed that he might be in his late forties or early fifties. His nose had been broken at one time or another and a thin white scar ran down his forehead across his eyebrow; another scar, a round one, sat just above the loosened knot of his necktie. And the suit—the suit he was wearing was undoubtedly the most expensive suit to come through the door in the last ten years.

He went off to find some tequila.

Lucas looked around the place. Fifteen booths, twelve bar stools, a couple of game machines in the back, plank floors that creaked when somebody walked across them, and the vagrant smell of Rum Crooks and deep-fried fish sticks. He was the only man in the place with a necktie and without a hat.

—

LUCAS SAT ALONE, buying four margaritas over the span of forty-five minutes, and making two trips to the men’s room, or what he hoped was the men’s room. The only identifying signs were a picture of a cat on one restroom door, and a rooster on the other.

He was halfway through the fourth margarita when Shirley McDonald eased up on a stool two down. Lucas looked her over, smiled, and nodded. She was a skinny young blonde. Very young. Black eyebrows, too much eye shadow, crystalline green eyes, Crayola-red lipstick not quite inside the lines. She looked fragile, easily broken; might already have been busted a couple of times. She wore a white blouse that verged on transparent, no obvious bra straps, jeans torn at the thigh and knee, and sandals. Not a debutante. She asked, “How y’all doin’?”

“I’m doing fine,” Lucas said. “For a man this far from the comforts of home.”

“You got a cigarette?” she asked.

“I don’t smoke,” Lucas said.

“Damnit, I’ll have to smoke one of my own.” She grinned at him and fished a turquoise pack of American Spirits out of her purse. One of her big front teeth wasn’t quite straight, but the irregularity made her even more attractive, which she certainly knew. “The goddamn things are so expensive now, I can only afford about a pack a week.”

“Buy you a drink, though,” Lucas said.

“I was waitin’ to hear that,” she said. She lifted a finger to the bartender and said, “Eddie . . .”

“Yeah, I know—expensive and sweet.”

“You are such a sugar bear,” she said. She knocked a cigarette out of the pack, tapped the end on the bar to pack in the tobacco, and asked Lucas, “What’s your story, big guy?”

“I’m just a guy,” Lucas said.

“A married guy,” she said, as she fired up the cigarette. He was wearing a ring.

“Yeah, somewhat.”

“Only somewhat?”

“You know how that goes . . .” Lucas said.

The bartender came over, put down a tall dark drink that smelled of sugar, and handed her a toothpick on which he’d speared three maraschino cherries. She sucked off two of them, then she took a sip of the drink and Lucas asked, “What the heck is that?”

“Jim Beam Single Barrel,” the bartender said, “and Coca-Cola. We call it an Oh-Va Libre.”

Lucas winced, turned back to McDonald, and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Triste,” she said, sucking off the third cherry. “It’s French . . . like Oh-Va.”

The whole cherry-sucking thing was both hilarious and the tiniest bit erotic, but it would have taken a mean bastard to laugh at her. Lucas didn’t. The girl, he thought, was probably younger than his daughter Letty, now in her second year at Stanford.

—

ANYWAY, one thing led to another, and Lucas never did make it to Memphis. At midnight, after a few more margaritas and three more trips to the rooster room, he and McDonald wound up at the Motel 6 on the other side of I-55. Lucas hadn’t more than gotten the room door shut when the girl popped the belt on her jeans and stripped them off, with her sandals, then pulled the blouse off. Lucas was still wearing his suit coat, though he’d stuffed his tie in his coat pocket.

“What do you think?” Triste asked, fists on her hips. She had pale cone-shaped breasts, tipped with the same pink color as a Barbie doll butt. They stood straight out, and wobbled when she spoke.

“How old are you, anyway?” Lucas asked.

“Fifteen,” she said.

Then she snatched up her jeans and started screaming her head off.

Three seconds later, as she huddled in the corner with her jeans held to her breasts, the cops came through the door. With a key, Lucas noticed; no point in kicking down a perfectly good motel-room door.

—

THE FIRST COP through the door was a tall, rangy blond guy with muscles in his face. He looked angry with the world and willing to do something about it, preferably with a gun. He had a flattop haircut with well-waxed front edges; and he had a big blued automatic in his right hand. He pointed it at Lucas’s head and shouted, “On the wall, asshole. On the wall.”

Lucas thought, Oh shit, because if the guy screwed up, Lucas could wind up dead. He turned, hands over his head, facing the wall, and the cop yelled, “Hands on the wall, ass-wipe. Push your feet back. Push your feet back, weight on your hands.”

Lucas said, “I didn’t know—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

The second cop through the door was shorter than the first, roly-poly, with a reddish mustache and sparse red hair. He looked like a woodchuck, or maybe a beaver, Lucas thought. Both cops were wearing chest cameras. The woodchuck asked Triste, “You all right, girl?”

Triste, speaking to the cameras, said, “He said we were gonna watch a movie. He tried to force me . . .”

“Put your clothes back on then,” the short cop said.

Lucas was leaning on the wall with both hands, but turned his head toward the girl and saw her grin at the cop. The blond cop had put his gun back in his holster, patted Lucas’s hips and around his beltline and down his legs, then said, “Hands behind your back. You been trying to fuck this little high school girl, huh? Well, tonight’s your unlucky night.”

“I’m telling you, she was drinking and smoking in the bar—”

The cop jerked him around and popped him in the gut with a lazy right fist. Not too hard, but hard enough to bend Lucas over. “Shut up. You talk when I tell you to.”

Lucas eased back up. “I’m tellin’ ya—”

Boom—another shot in the gut, harder this time. “You deaf? I said, you talk when I tell you.”

“Don’t hit me again,” Lucas said. “Don’t hit me again.”

The blond cop sneered and said, “I oughta smack the shit outa you.”

The woodchuck muttered, “Mind the cameras, Todd.”

“I don’t think no jury’s gonna give me a hard time for spanking a goddamn dirtbag who comes to town and tries to hump a tenth-grader. That oughta be good for fifteen years, in my humble opinion.”

“I did not—” Boom—another shot in the gut; this was getting old.

The woodchuck said to the girl, “You’re gonna have to ride with me over to the sheriff’s, girl. We’ll need a statement from you.”

“He pulled my pants off . . .” she wailed, with all the sincerity of a cup of lemon-flavored Jell-O.

—

THE DEPUTY put Lucas in a holding cell, hands still pinned behind his back. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said before slamming the steel door.

Lucas sat on the concrete bench and waited. The cell smelled like beer vomit and Clorox. His wife had ordered him to try yoga after he’d quit his job with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, as a stress reliever. That hadn’t worked worth a damn, but he’d been given a calming mantra by the yoga instructor and he tried it out now: “Mind like moon . . . Mind like moon . . .”

After a while, it made him laugh.

He couldn’t see his watch, but he thought a half hour had passed before he heard people outside the door. He knew the routine: they were letting him stew and worry about consequences. He heard somebody tapping the keypad lock, the door popped open, and another tall blond cop looked in at him. This one was twenty-five years older than the first cop, but there was a family resemblance, including the tense facial muscles and the well-waxed flattop. The first two cops had been wearing khaki uniforms with shoulder patches that said “Aux Vases County”; this man was wearing a sport coat and tan slacks.

“Bring him outa there, son,” the man said.

The first big blond cop, Todd, came around the door and said, “Stand up, asshole.”

Lucas stood, and the cop hooked him by the arm and led him out into the hallway. Then they all followed the man in the sport coat down the hall to an office, where the man sat down behind a desk. A nameplate on the desk said “Sheriff Robert ‘Bob’ Turner.” There were a dozen pictures of him on the back wall, either receiving awards or standing with some dignitary.

The sheriff asked, “Where’s Triste?”

“Waiting room with Scott,” Todd said.

“Bring her in here.”

—

TODD WENT to get her, and Lucas said, “Sheriff Turner, I did not—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Turner said. “In this office, you speak when you’re spoken to.”

Todd was back ten seconds later with the woodchuck cop and the girl. Turner looked at Triste and asked, “What’d he do to you?”

“He said we’d get some beer and go watch HBO, and when I got in his room, he started pulling off my clothes. He almost had me naked, I was screaming, and Todd showed up just in time,” she said.

The sheriff looked at Lucas and asked, “Is that right?”

Lucas shook his head. “No. It’s not right.”

“You’re saying she’s lying?” Turner asked.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Lucas said.

“Huh. Well, Todd, what do you have to say?”

“We were over at the Motel 6, doing a routine check, and I was walking along that walkway there and I heard Shirley . . . er, Triste . . . cry out, and the door was unlocked and I went through it and I found her naked as the day she was born and this guy here all over her.”

The sheriff looked at Lucas. “That right?”

“No. She took her own clothes off and started screaming,” Lucas said. “I was not all over her—I was standing by the door and she was on the other side of the room.”

“You’re saying Todd’s lying, too.”

“Yes.”

Todd reached over and slapped Lucas’s face. Lucas half spun away, trying to keep his balance, which was harder than he’d thought it might be with his hands pinned behind him. The slap stung but didn’t do any damage. Todd was pissing him off, though.

The sheriff puffed himself up and noisily sighed, then said, “Well, looks like we got ourselves a situation.” He turned to Triste. “You pretty messed up, girl?”

“Hell, yeah,” she said. “Nothing like this ever happened before. I’m pretty much a virgin.”

The sheriff gazed at her for a bit, then said to Scott, “Go sit her down in the waiting room again. You stay with her. Me’n Todd will interview the subject here.”

When they were gone, the sheriff asked Todd, “You check his ID?”

“Not yet. I was gonna do that when you got here.”

“Well, check it. Let’s see who we got.”

“My name’s Lucas . . .” Lucas began.

“Shut up,” the sheriff said.

Lucas carried a bifold alligator-hide wallet in his front pants pocket, and Todd slipped it out, opened it, and said, “No cash, nothing but credit cards and a Minnesota driver’s license. ‘Lucas Davenport, Mississippi River Boulevard, St. Paul.’”

“Well, let’s see what we got on Mr. Davenport,” the sheriff said. He turned to a computer, tapped a key, which brought up a browser, went to Google and typed in Lucas’s name. There were a dozen articles and a hundred mentions or so, some with photographs. The sheriff read for a while, clicking through the articles, and then said to Todd, “Says here Mr. Davenport is a wealthy patron of the arts in Minneapolis and St. Paul, made his money in software. Don’t say a thing about his fuckin’ underage girls. Is that all true, Mr. Davenport?”

Lucas nodded. “I guess.” An FBI computer specialist had done some editing of Lucas’s history beforehand.

“You ‘guess’? Huh. You don’t know for sure?” Turner asked.

Lucas said, “Yeah, that’s me.”

“You so rich you don’t even carry cash? You just wave that black Amex card at people?”

“I . . .”

“You know what?” Todd asked. He reached out and patted Lucas on the chest. “Here we go.”

He fished a second leather wallet out of Lucas’s breast pocket, opened it, and said, “Whoa, Daddy. He is rich.” He pulled out a wad of hundreds, spread it like a hand of cards. “There must be . . . five grand here.”

“That’s evidence,” the sheriff said. “Give it here.”

Todd handed him the money and the sheriff put it in his jacket pocket, peered at Lucas for a few more seconds, then said to Todd, “Take those cuffs off him.” When the cuffs were off, the sheriff said, “Sit down, Mr. Davenport. I need to explain to you some realities of the world.”

—

THE REALITIES, the sheriff said, were that both the deputies had been wearing body cameras, which he called Obama-cams, and they clearly caught Lucas and Triste in the motel room. Triste, he said, had probably been ruined by the night’s sexual experience, or, if not ruined, at least psychologically damaged. Long-term psychiatric care would be needed to fix that, and long-term psychiatric care wasn’t cheap.

“I got enough to send you off to the state prison for, oh, five to ten years, but that’s not gonna do Triste any good, is it? She’s still ruint,” the sheriff said. “I’m saying, between you and me, it might be better to cut our own little deal. I understand how you could have been misled, and everybody likes a little young puss now and then. But that’s neither here nor there—she’s still fifteen. You pay for her care—if those newspaper stories are right, you won’t even miss the money—and we forget the whole thing. Or, you can do the five-to-ten.”

Lucas didn’t say anything for ten seconds, fifteen seconds, then he blurted, “You motherfuckers. You used that girl to set me up. That’s what’s going on here. She doesn’t need that money. I bet you got her doing this three times a week . . .”

The sheriff said, “Todd? A little help?”

Todd swung harder this time, caught Lucas across the cheek with an open hand, knocked him off the chair. Lucas crawled in a circle on his hands and knees, could taste blood this time, and said, “C’mon, don’t hit me, don’t hit me again.”

“Couldn’t help myself,” the sheriff said. “Accusing me of some kind of public corruption. I don’t take those kind of insults. Now get back up on that chair.”

Lucas got back up on the chair, feeling the blood surging through his cheeks where he’d been hit—he’d have a hand-sized bruise in the morning—and the sheriff asked, “What’s it gonna be? You want to pay or you want to go to court? I gotta tell you the truth, we don’t much care for Yankees down here.”

Lucas dragged his hand across his mouth, tasting the salty/metallic dash of blood. “What’re we talking about? How much?”

The sheriff considered for a moment and then said, “Given what the crime is, and given the fact that you’re a rich man . . . twenty-five thousand. That sound about right?”

“Jesus, I don’t have that much around. I don’t have my checkbook with me . . .”

“What we do is this. You give me that American Express card and we’ll fill out, right here, a bond statement, bailing you outa jail. We bail you out for two thousand dollars. Then you go back home and you send us a check. If you don’t send us a check, we’ll schedule you for trial and get in touch with the St. Paul police about extraditing your ass. If the check comes in, well, then it was a bad night in Oh-Va, but you won’t be hearing from us again.”

“I send you a check for twenty thousand? You already got five in cash.”

“And the watch,” Todd said. “That’s a Rolex, I always wanted one of them. Give it here.”

“Not the watch. My wife gave it to me, it’s engraved on the back.”

“The watch,” Todd insisted. The sheriff leaned back, amused. “Give it here,” Todd said, “or, I swear to God, I’ll slap the shit out of you.”

“You gotta take the price of the watch off the rest, I’ll get a new one . . .” Lucas said. He unfastened the watch and handed it to Todd, who admired it for a few seconds, then put it in his pocket.

“No, no. The full price is thirty-two thousand, plus the watch,” the sheriff said, leaning back into the conversation. “You put two thousand on that Amex and send us twenty-five and we’ll keep all of it.”

“How much does Triste get? I hope she gets something from you sonsofbitches.”

The sheriff smiled. “Triste does all right. Better than working at McDonald’s, getting all that smoke and grease up in your hair.” He leaned forward across his desk, fingers knitted together. “You look like a sophisticated man, Mr. Davenport. If you ever talk about this whole thing, the big headline’s gonna say ‘Mr. Davenport Fucks Fifteen-Year-Old’ and the little headline is gonna say ‘Claims public corruption.’ Which headline do you think people will give a shit about? Which headline do you think your wife will give a shit about when Triste gets up on the witness stand and everybody gets a look at those titties?”

Lucas said, “All right. You’ve got the five grand in your pocket, I’ll charge two more on the Amex, but I only send you twenty more. That’s all.”

“You trying to bargain with me?” the sheriff asked with the same shark-toothed smile. “Because you’re not in much of a position . . .”

—

THE OFFICE DOOR opened and the deputy who’d led Triste away stepped back inside the room. His face was shiny with sweat, and maybe regret, and the sheriff broke off to say, “What . . . ?”

The deputy looked back over his shoulder, and then a dark gray semiautomatic pistol extended past his ear, pointed at Todd’s head, and the deputy lurched farther into the office, and a man in a blue suit with a wide gray mustache pushed inside and said, “Todd, I don’t want to have to tell you twice, but if you move a hand toward your gun, I’ll blow your brains all over Daddy’s office.”

The sheriff pushed back from his desk, a stricken look on his face. He’d already figured it out, but he asked anyway: “Who’re you? Who the fuck are you?”

“Deputy U.S. Marshal James Duffy, Eastern District of Missouri. You are both under arrest. Got a looong list of charges, we’ll read them to you when we get up to St. Louis. Harry? You want to get in here, put some handcuffs on these gentlemen?”

Another man in a suit edged past the gun, which was still pointed at Todd’s head. The second man, Harry, spoke directly to Lucas. “Turner really wasn’t dumb enough to put the money in his pocket, was he?”

“Yes, he was, and Todd put the watch in his pocket,” Lucas said. “I’d like to get the goddamn wire off me. My back is itching like fire.”

“You all right other than that?” Duffy asked.

“Yeah. Todd smacked me a few times but never touched the wire pack. I was mostly worried that somebody would see me flushing those margarita sponges down the toilet in the rooster room.”

The second marshal cuffed Todd’s hands behind his back and said to the sheriff, “On your feet, Mr. Turner.”

“That’s Sheriff Turner . . .”

“Not anymore,” the marshal said.

Todd began to cry, his wide shoulders shaking under the deputy’s uniform, then he looked at Lucas and said, “You asshole.”

“That’d be Marshal Asshole, to you, Todd,” Lucas said.

—

THE ST. LOUIS MARSHALS arrested six people—the sheriff, four deputies, and Shirley McDonald. They’d be back, later, to get a state judge.

After they put the cuffs on her, Shirley had started talking about being extorted by the Turners, and still hadn’t stopped when they pushed her into a federal car and sent her north. “Them fuckin’ Turners made me do it. Todd and Scott made me suck them off, too. Ask them about that. I’m only fifteen . . .”

It all made an interesting recording, and since the marshals read her rights to her a half dozen times, and she talked anyway, it would all hold up in court.

Before he got in the car, Lucas took a breath test, which showed a 0.01 BAC—about what a man would get if he rinsed his mouth with whiskey a half hour before he took the test. Which Lucas had done. That level implied no impairment whatever, in case a defense attorney should ask.

—

THE STING at Cooter’s had begun when a widower federal judge had run into the same trap. Turner and his son had decided he might be more useful in his capacity as a judge than in his potential to pay his way out, and made a deal: the judge agreed to give them three verdicts, any three that could conceivably be seen as reasonable, and nobody would talk about young girls in motels. Three verdicts in the right corporate cases could be worth a million dollars . . .

But they’d misjudged the judge. As soon as he got back to St. Louis, he’d contacted the U.S. attorney and made a statement about the entrapment and blackmail. He’d admitted to having been alone in a room with a girl whose age he didn’t know. He thought she might be nineteen or twenty, he said, but he made no other excuses.

Two days later, the St. Louis Marshals office was checking around for a rich-looking marshal with a decent backstory. They found Lucas.

—

THE FIVE arrested men rode north in a federal van, with two deputy marshals to drive and watch over them. Duffy, the chief deputy for the Eastern District of Missouri, rode with Lucas, in the comfort of the big Benz.

“One day ought to do it on the paperwork, but we’ll need you back for depositions and so on,” Duffy said. “We appreciate you coming down. Our own people are too well known, couldn’t take the chance that Turner might recognize them. Anyway, don’t none of us got that slick veneer you actual rich guys got.”

“It’s only a veneer,” Lucas said. “Underneath, I’m just another really, really good-looking yet humble working cop.”

Duffy snorted and asked, “How’s your caseload?”

“I’m still looking.” Duffy knew about Lucas’s circumstances: a freelance deputy marshal, slipped into the Marshals Service through nothing but pure, unalloyed political influence, wielded by Michaela Bowden, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Lucas had kept Bowden from being blown up at the Iowa State Fair the year before.

He’d been a marshal for three months, and had gone through brief training at Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., most of which hadn’t applied to him because of his special status. On the other hand, he really did have to know about the paperwork, which was ample.

“There’s some interesting stuff out there, but not really to my taste,” Lucas told Duffy. “I’m looking for something hard. Something unusual. Something I can work at and would do some serious good.”

Duffy said, “Huh.” He looked out the window at the countryside, damp, green, shrouded in darkness. A moment later he asked, “You ever hear of a guy named Garvin Poole?”

“Don’t think so,” Lucas said.

“No? Then let me tell you about him.”

“Poole? Marvin?”

“Garvin. Gar’s a good ol’ Tennessee boy . . . maybe killed ten or fifteen innocent people, including at least one six-year-old girl, just last week, and a Mississippi cop, sometime back, and God only knows how many guilty people,” Duffy said. “He’s smart, he’s likable, he’s good-lookin’. He once played in a pretty fair country band, and he’s got no conscience. None at all. He’s got friends who’d kill you for the price of a moon pie. Some people think he’s dead, but he’s not. He’s out there hiding and laughing at us. Yes, he is.”