Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,2

from Georgia and her daughter were looking at the photographs, Randy Stokes rolled his broken-ass 2002 Pontiac Firebird into the graveled parking lot of Chuck’s Wagon, a crappy country music grill outside of Warrenton, Virginia, an hour’s drive west of Arlington.

Stokes had had his problems—beer, wine, bourbon, weed, crack, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and a short but violent teenage romance with paint thinner—none of which he would have had if the country hadn’t been overwhelmed with greedy, grasping blacks, Hispanics, Arabs, and a whole range of Asians who kept him from his rightful due as a white man. Except for them, he believed, he might have become a lawyer, or a golf pro.

Lately he’d been clean, back working construction; clean except for the beer and Old Crow Bourbon, $7.99 a bottle. Even the Old Crow had adopted the foreign, and therefore un-American, 750-milliliter bottle, which was probably invented by the French or some other faggots over there, instead of the traditional American fifth, which actually contained three-tenths of an ounce more whiskey than the 750-milliliter bottle, but at the same price, SO WE’RE BEING SCREWED by this foreign intrusion.

In his opinion.

He’d been told his opinions were stupid, often by people who were bigger, stronger, meaner, and smarter than he was, but this was still America, and he had a right to his opinions, didn’t he?

* * *

—

STOKES WAS A SHORT THIN MAN, with short thinning brown hair that he cut himself with a home-barbering set that he’d found at a garage sale for six dollars. It did a good enough job, he thought, but he only had one attachment head for the electric clipper, so his hair was exactly the same length all over his head, all the time. That gave him the aspect of a hedgehog when he took off his coiled-snake “Don’t Tread On Me” ball cap, which he rarely did.

Other than that, he looked pretty normal, with brown eyes, a short button nose, and a small rosebud mouth that guarded the gray teeth left behind from his adventure with methamphetamine.

Before getting out of his car, Stokes collected the pile of Diet Pepsi bottles and Hostess Fruit Pie boxes from the floor of the passenger side, crushed them against his chest so he’d only have to make one trip, and deposited them in the trash can outside the Chuck’s Wagon main door. Inside, in the dim light, he spotted Elias Dunn, sitting alone at the bar with a bottle of Budweiser, looking up at the Fox News program on the overhead TV.

“Hey, El,” he said, as he slid onto a stool two down from the other man. He didn’t sit right next to him because that’d seem a little queer.

Dunn looked over at him—was that a flash of disdain?—and said, “Stokes.”

Stokes looked around. There were ten other people in the place, he and Dunn at the short bar, a dozen tables and booths, served by one slow-moving waitress. Chuck’s Wagon smelled of microwave everything: barbeque, pasta, pizza, pot pies, anything that could be stored frozen and nuked.

Stokes and Dunn had met on a construction job. Dunn was a civil engineer, and had been leading a survey crew staking out the streets and drainage for a new subdivision over toward Gainesville. Stokes had been a shovel operator—the kind of shovel that had a wooden handle—and had peppered Dunn with questions about his thirteen-thousand-dollar surveyor’s total station.

Stokes, it seemed, was an enthusiastic rifleman and was fascinated by the total station, which was an optically-linked computer on a tripod. With a scope and a laser range finder, the instruments had replaced the old surveyor transits. They could tell you that you were, say, four hundred and twenty-four yards, two feet, nine and three-eighths inches from your target and could tell you exactly how much higher or lower you were than your target.

After talking for a few minutes out on the job site, Dunn had concluded that even if Stokes could pull a trigger, the operation of a total station was beyond his intellectual reach.

* * *

—

NOW STOKES WAVED at the bartender and said, “PBR,” and the bartender said, “No offense, Randy, but you got the cash?”

“I do,” Stokes said. He pulled a wad of sweaty one-dollar bills from his pocket and laid them on the bar, where they slowly uncurled. “That’s eighteen dollars right there.”

The bartender walked down the bar to get the beer, and Stokes said to Dunn, “I was over to my sister’s place last night and she’s got a