Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “I appreciate the thought and the agency would be better off, but don’t do that. Everybody would know what happened, and when you start running for the vice presidency, the Republicans will look for every single thing they can get on you. An accusation of blatant meddling wouldn’t help.”
“We could crush that in a couple of minutes,” Henderson said.
“You might not have a couple of minutes to spare, when the ‘Henderson Hoagie’ thing gets out there.”
“What! What! Lucas, where did you hear that phrase?”
“Governor, every sentient being in Minnesota’s heard it. They admire you for it. Whether it’ll play, in, say, Colorado or Oregon, I don’t know.”
Lucas heard Henderson ask the weasel, “Is that true? That everybody in Minnesota knows?”
The weasel said, “Yes.”
The “Henderson Hoagie” referred to the governor’s fondness for three- and four-ways with nubile young Seven Sisters coeds while he was a student at Harvard. Supposedly, ketchup was involved.
Henderson came back. “Well . . . whatever happens with Sands, come talk to me afterwards.”
• • •
AT THE END of the week, an FBI friend called to tell Lucas that the feds had been through both the fingerprint and DNA databanks and had found no matches at all for Pilate. He’d had two driver’s licenses in his wallet, both from California, one for a Robert D. Johnson and another for a William S. Smith. Both were apparently obtained by fraud. Nobody had any idea who he really was. And a cop from North Dakota called and said he’d encountered the Pilate group at a restaurant, and had taken down the license plate numbers of every one of their cars. By the time he found out that somebody might have needed them, the fight was over.
On Sunday morning, at breakfast, Weather asked him for the fifth or sixth time, “You know what you’re gonna do?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah.”
“I got a box in the garage,” she said.
“How’d you know I’d need a box?”
• • •
THAT AFTERNOON, he climbed the steps to the BCA. Not many people were around, but an agent leaving the building stopped on the stairs, looked at him with the box, and said, “Don’t do it, man.”
Lucas shook his hand and said, “Thanks for the thought.”
He’d been in his particular office for seven years, but he had never been much for stuffing it with personal items. He started packing what was there, and a couple more investigators came to the office door, the female agent carrying another box. She said, “Let us help you with that.”
“Okay.”
They cleaned the place out in fifteen minutes, then Lucas got a piece of official stationery, wrote: “Dear Henry. I quit. On a personal note, go fuck yourself.”
He put his ID inside the envelope, wrote Sands’s name on the outside, and slid it under Sands’s office door.
The male agent said, “Succinct. Succinct is always good in interoffice communications.”
The agents walked out to his Porsche with the two boxes and the female agent said, “I’ll never forget the night up in the swamp . . .” And she went on for a while, about a dark night with Lucas and his gang of agents when she killed a man. Lucas peeled off his sport coat and his shoulder holster, dropped the coat and gun on the passenger seat. The woman agent finally ran down, they all shook hands, and Lucas got out of there before things turned maudlin. He’d still have to call Del, Jenkins, Shrake, Flowers, and a few others. He’d do that in the evening.
When he got home, he ran the garage door up and Letty came through from the kitchen. Watched him get out of the car, and asked, “You’re retired now? You’re gonna go sit in a goddamn rowboat for the next thirty years?”
“Don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he said.
“You gotta do something.”
He grinned at his worried blue-eyed child. “I’ll find something. And I promise you this: it won’t involve a goddamn rowboat.”
“Good,” she said. She picked up the .45 off the passenger seat. “Then you’re gonna need this.”
Lucas took the gun.
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