Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(2)

“Are they all mine?” Winston asked. He leaned over her shoulder and touched the screen with a fingernail. “Wait. Not this one . . . I think that’s the yearbook photo from last year. Didn’t you put that up on the blog?”

“Yes—when I was bitching about how bad they make you look in yearbooks . . . but what’s this?” Coil asked. She reached out at the screen, pointing at one of the photos. “That’s me with Molly. We’re walking out of school. Where did that come from?”

“We shot that for the blog post about the see-through yoga pants, remember? You guys were talking about seeing some fat chick’s ass crack in the yoga class. It was only up for a day or two.”

“Yeah, but . . . what’s this link . . .”

They followed the link out to a blog called 1919, a primitive piece of work that featured candid photos of what looked like kids walking along different streets, or standing outside what appeared to be schools. A single column of type ran down the left side of the screen, which they ignored for the moment.

Winston said, “What the hell?”

“Yeah, what the hell? How’d that get over here?”

“Who are these other people?” Winston asked.

Coil tapped a different photo and said, “I know that kid. That little kid, that’s Senator Cherry’s daughter, that’s Mrs. Cherry with her. And this one . . .”

She tapped another photo. “I don’t know that kid’s name, but his dad is a political big shot. Maybe in the House. I talked to him at the congressional baseball game, he was sitting with the families.”

“Did you blow him?” A continuing joke; he always asked, she always temporized, as if it were a possibility.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Here we go . . . here’s their names . . .” Winston pointed at an awkwardly placed block of type.



* * *



—

THEN THEY HEARD, from down below, a garage door rolling up. Coil looked up from the screen and said, “Shit! That’s Mom. Open the door a crack.”

She pulled off the chemise and Winston took a few seconds to appreciate her breasts as he was opening the bedroom door. They disappeared as she pulled a black T-shirt over her head, tucked it into her jeans, and said, “Go on over and start taking down the lights. Don’t take them all down until she comes in. Let her see you doing it, packing up. Try to do something about your hard-on.”

She checked herself for propriety. Then, when they heard a door open at the other end of the house, she shouted, “Mom! Blake and I are in my bedroom.”

Senator Coil, a tall, thin, over-caffeinated woman in a blue suit, stuck her head in the bedroom door a moment later. She looked at Winston and then at her daughter, suspicion in her eyes and tone: “What’s going on here?”

“Doing a lipstick ad for the blog. We needed to shoot into my makeup mirror. But! We found something really weird . . .”

The elder Coil may have had more questions about the photo shoot, and more specifically about the rapidly wilting remnants of Winston’s erection, if she’d noticed that, but she shut up when Audrey Coil began pointing out the photos on the 1919 blog.

“What the heck . . . and look at this,” Audrey Coil said.

The senator tapped the computer screen, the column of type. “These people . . . these people are . . . oh, no.”



* * *



—

AS THE SENATOR 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.