Excerpts
Read an Exclusive Excerpt from John Sandford’s Masked Prey
Plus, a Q&A from his longtime editor Neil Nyren
(c) Beowulf Sheehan
Learn about the book and get your copy!
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 teen-age romance with paint thinner, none of which he would have done 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.
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.
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 unAmerican, 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 which 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 on 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 with 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 rangefinder, 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 computer and she showed me that, uh, computer place you were talking about. The one you wrote on the napkin.”
Dunn looked back over at him, ran his tongue across the front of his teeth a couple of times, and said, “So, did you read it?” He was vaguely surprised that Stokes hadn’t lost the napkin.
“One of them. I didn’t understand it all and then my sister shoved the napkin in the garbage, by mistake, and got ketchup and shit all over it. But she’d printed one of the articles so I could read it in bed, and she said we could type part of it back in and search for it. We did that, but the computer went to a whole different place. The article was there, and a whole bunch of other articles, but the biggest thing was pictures of kids walking on the street. Seemed weird to me.”
Dunn, who’d only been about nine percent interested in anything Stokes might have to say, because Stokes was a dumbass, found his interest temporarily jacked up to thirty-five percent.
“A different website?”
“Yup. Called itself, uh… 19? No. 1919. With a whole bunch of articles. Including that one you gave me. And the pictures of kids.”
“Porn?”
“No, no, not porn, just kids walking along,” Stokes said. “Some were pretty little, some looked like they were maybe in high school.”
“With the article I sent you to?” Dunn asked.
“Yup.”
“You know what the website was?”
“Yup. My sister wrote it down.” Stokes reached in his hip pocket, found a wadded-up piece of computer paper and spread it on the bar.
Stokes had spent some time in a previous visit to Chuck’s Wagon bending Dunn’s ear about his rights as a natural-born white man and a faithful follower of country music, as well as about how his custom-assembled .223 rifle could give you a half-minute of angle all day long.
Dunn had given him the URL of a skinhead site that combined the three – the white man stuff, country music and guns, and where you could also buy a bumper sticker that riffed on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – Sounds Like Heaven to Me.”
Dunn didn’t recognize the name of the website that was written on the crumpled sheet of paper, in purple ink and a woman’s handwriting. In fact, there was no website name at all, only a jumble of letters, numbers and symbols that looked like a super-secure password. He took the paper and said, “Thanks. I’ll look into it,” and when the bartender came back with the PBR, Dunn said, “I’ll get this one,” and pushed a ten-dollar bill across the bar.
Stokes said, “Well, thank you, big guy. That’s real nice. I’ll get the next one.”
Dunn tipped up his beer, finishing it, and said, “Actually, I have to get home. Got an early job.”
“Well, don’t fall in no holes,” Stokes said.
Dunn was an excellent civil engineer and didn’t fall in no holes and didn’t appreciate hole-falling humor. He nodded at Stokes, a tight nod – everything about him was tight, really tight, screwed-down tight, so fuckin’ tight he squeaked when he walked – and he marched out of the bar in his high-topped Doc Martens 1460s, and, from Stokes’ perspective, disappeared into the afternoon.
The bartender, who was looking up at the titsy chick reading the news on the Fox channel, glanced after him as he went through the door, and muttered to himself, “Asshole.”
Dunn drove home, to a neatly-kept, two-story house on the edge of Warrenton, for which he’d paid seven hundred thousand dollars. He lived alone, his wife having departed six years earlier, leaving him with a red-striped cat, which, like his wife, eventually disappeared and was not missed. He did miss the eight hundred thousand in savings she’d taken with her, but he did all right, putting twenty percent of his income into savings every year, toward an early retirement.
With his tight black combat boots, his tight jeans, his tapered work shirts, his workout body and blond hair cut in a white sidewall, Dunn looked like a comic-book Nazi. He wasn’t a comic-book anything and he definitely was not a Nazi – Nazis were more dumb guys like Stokes who went marching around and saluting and carrying shields and baseball bats and generally behaving like fools.
Dunn wasn’t a Nazi, but he was a fascist.
He went to political lectures in the evenings, when they caught his interest, and there was always something going on in DC; and he knew a few people and placed some money where he thought it might do political good, used for intelligent publications aimed at influential people. Very carefully placed the money: being known as a fascist would not help business.
After his wife left, Dunn had moved out of the master bedroom and into a smaller one, converting the master into an office and library. When he got home from Chuck’s Wagon and his talk with Stokes, he went to his computer and typed in the URL address Stokes’ sister had written on the paper. The website popped up: 1919 in large type, and in much smaller type, beneath that, the words, “Thy Honor Is Thy Loyalty.”
Dunn immediately recognized the motto as one used by the Nazi SS. At first he ignored the photos on the page and instead flipped through the articles that ran on the website. He recognized several of them from his quiet lurking on neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites.
At first, he didn’t understand. There was a space to post responses, but no way to directly address the owners of the site. The articles were routine and all over the place, some from Nazi or KKK fruitcakes, others that might charitably be regarded merely as ultra-conservative. It was one of the worst websites he’d ever seen.
He then turned to the photographs and they mystified him. Pictures of the children of prominent politicians, but nothing to explain why they were there.
Still mystified, he went to his bedroom, stripped off his clothes, pulled on a clean black latex body suit and a pair of ankle socks and walked down to his garage.
The garage had three stalls. He kept his Ford F-150 in one and a Ford Mustang in the middle. His ex-wife, when she was living there, had occupied the third stall with her Lexus, but when she’d left, he’d put up a studs-and-sheetrock wall separating his two stalls from the third, painted the walls white and built himself a home gym.
The gym was based around a Peleton bike for cardiovascular exercise, racks of free weights for strength workouts, and a wall of mirrors. He rode the bike five days a week for forty minutes or an hour. For the weight work, he’d divided his body’s muscle groups in half, and worked each zone three days a week, on alternate days.
He did the bike first, pulling on the biking shoes, putting on the earphones and heart monitor, mounting the bike, bringing up a workout program, then following one of the tight-bodied women on the video screen, who pushed him up hills and more hills, standing, sitting, blowing off five hundred calories, cranking until his leg muscles were screaming at him.
Thinking about that 1919 website.
When he got off the bike, his body pouring sweat, he walked back into the house and drank a protein drink, moved around until the lactic acid had burned off in his legs.
When he was feeling loose and supple again, he went back to the gym, rolled out a yoga mat, set the alarm on his iPhone, sat and closed his eyes and meditated for exactly twenty minutes. When the alarm went off, he rolled onto his stomach, used the iPhone as a timer, and did a “plank” for three minutes, building core strength. That done, he rolled up the mat, and went to the free weights.
Q&A With Neil Nyren, John Sandford’s longtime editor:
PRH: What about John Sandford resonates with readers after all these years and all these books? How would you describe John Sandford’s writing or characters to someone who’s never read him?
NN: First of all, he writes a great thriller – no one ever goes away from a Sandford novel without a paper cut or two from turning the pages so fast. At the same time, he doesn’t follow a formula: Sometimes the books are straight thriller, other times, there’s more of a mystery to it; sometimes you know the bad guy from the very first page, other times you work alongside Lucas Davenport or Virgil Flowers as they piece the case together; sometimes the story is hair-raising all the way, other times there’s a strong vein of humor running throughout. His books are anything but cookie-cutter, so you never know for sure what you’re going to encounter, and as a result, they’re always fresh.
With some writers, their villains are always more interesting than their heroes, but that isn’t the case here either. In the Prey books, Lucas Davenport is a man with many quirks: rich, sexy (though aging now), possessed of a strong but idiosyncratic moral streak that manifests itself in some pretty dark ways. The cops, agents, and other professionals with whom he works are just as individual, and treasured by Sandford’s fans, as are the family members who surround him, especially his wife, Weather, a highly competent surgeon in her own right, who takes no guff and keeps him grounded, and his adopted daughter Letty, whom we’ve watch grow and mature into a frighteningly smart young woman, capable of holding her own with anyone…including those villains.
PRH: How has Sandford’s work evolved over the years?
NN: Sandford’s always known that to keep his books fresh, he needs to keep changing things up. Davenport began as an unpredictable, sexy, rich womanizer and gradually transformed into a grownup (but still unpredictable) with a wife and family and all the considerations and complications that came with them. He began as a Minneapolis cop, then became a detective, then head of his own unit; and then his boss got promoted to the state level and brought Davenport with her as a troubleshooter, the guy who got called in when a case got too hot or too tricky or too political for anybody else. His cases took him all over Minnesota, but even that had to change. For one thing, “too hot” sometimes meant “radioactive,” and “too political” meant making strong enemies, and so eventually his position in the state became untenable. People still needed his skills, however, and after one particularly noteworthy endeavor, in which he saved the life of a presidential contender, he got his reward – a position with the U.S. Marshals Service, but with a unique perk: the ability to pick and choose his cases anywhere in the country. There are no holds barred – meaning that Sandford has endless possibilities for Prey plots for as long as he likes.
And what about the fact that Davenport is no longer young, that he has a family to think about, that he can no longer permit himself to become embroiled in the kind of romantic entanglements that can bring a certain zest to a book? That’s why Sandford created Virgil Flowers, to do all the things appropriate for a man without attachments, and noone can say that Virgil hasn’t pursued it with vigor. Although…there is one certain woman…
Get ready for Sandford to evolve once again.
