Wicked Prey (33 page)

“So you were hustling a hamburger and this guy suddenly offers you a hundred bucks?” Jenkins was skeptical.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It sounded weird to me, too. I thought maybe . . . but he said I wouldn’t have to do anything. Just pick Justice up and take him to Half-Way Books.”

Half-Way Books was a comic and games store halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul.

“Where’d you get the van?” Lucas asked.

“I borrowed it from a friend,” she said.

“A crippled friend?” More skepticism.

“That’s right. He gets a check from the government and sometimes he pays me to drive him around,” she said. “I know how to run the power ramp out the side of the van and I push him up and down the ramps to his house.”

“What’s your friend’s name?” Shrake asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

Shafer grinned at her and gave her the thumbs-up. “Good for you. Take care of your friends.”

“Shut up,” Jenkins told him. To Briar: “Where do you go to school?”

“I dropped out. I’m working on my equivalent,” she said. She let them see this lie, because she knew they expected it.

“Why’d you drop out?”

“I had to run away because my mom’s boyfriend kept trying to fuck me,” she said.

“You let him?” Shafer asked, suddenly serious.

“Of course not,” she said to him. “That’s why I ran away.”

Jenkins looked at Shafer and shook his head, and then asked Briar, “You a hooker?”

“Why are you so mean to me?” she whimpered.

* * *

LUCAS SAID, “You sit on that bed and if you move your ass one inch, we will take you down and put you in jail.” To Jenkins and Shrake: “Let’s talk.”

Out in the hall, Jenkins said, “She’s a hook, and they picked up on that, and the fact that she looks like Diaz, and they sent her in here to see if anybody would jump. We did and they’re gone.”

Jenkins: “Now what?”

“We talk to the Secret Service, let them make the call,” Shrake said.

“They don’t want Shafer,” Lucas said. “Why would they want the girl?”

INSIDE THE motel room, Justice Shafer made his move; not having ever made one before, it was nervous and tentative. “Why’s a good-looking woman like you running errands for assholes?” he asked.

“I wasn’t sure he was an asshole,” Briar said. She looked him over. “Are you a cowboy?”

He laughed, and she noticed that he had very white teeth. His best feature, maybe. “Yeah, I sat on top of some horses. Mostly, though, it was Gators.”

She was puzzled. “Alligators?”

“No, a
Gator
. It’s a John Deere four-wheeler. Or six-wheeler. Mostly use them instead of horses. Or I did. Mostly used for hauling shit around a ranch.”

“I used to draw horses,” she said.

“That’s cool.” He had a feeling that he was making progress, which was unprecedented. “I like the way you handled those cops. Those guys are jerks.”

“I have a talent for finding assholes,” she said, with the thinnest possibility of a smile. Then, “You really think I’m good-looking?”

“I think you’re one of the most gorgeous things I ever saw,” Shafer said, the sincerity shining through. “I wish you could come visit me sometime, down in Oklahoma.”

* * *

 

LUCAS TALKED to the lead Secret Service agent by phone, then he and Shrake and Jenkins went back into the room and found Shafer and Briar talking, and Lucas said, “Here’s the deal. We’re going to take you guys into St. Paul so you can talk to the Secret Service. They’ll decide what we’re gonna do.”

“They owe me a truck and a bunch of gear,” Shafer said. There was an assertive note in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“You’ll get the truck,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t push them on the gun.”

“Hey, that gun is perfectly legal . . .”

Lucas held up a hand: “Justice, I’m just telling you. I wouldn’t push them. A guy who’s wandering around a national political convention with a .50-cal in his truck . . . he’d be best off not pushing too hard.”

Shafer thought about that for a minute, then said, “I definitely want the truck. Then I’m going home to Oklahoma and I’m never coming back to this place. Minnesota sucks.”

Jenkins said, “
Casse toi, pauvre con
.”

Shrake said to Lucas, “French lessons.”

* * *

 

BACK AT the apartment, Cruz told Lane and Lindy about the cops at the motel. “They’re right on top of us,” Lindy said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Cohn was watching her: she was excited, pink-faced, scared, rattling around inside a thin cotton dress, and it was making him horny. Cruz, on the other hand, was pulling together, tighter and tighter.

“No. What they did was, after they found my place in LA, they checked phone numbers and got the number from my phone,” Cruz said. “That was the phone I used to call my friend, to get her out of the house. She did, and she’s . . . safe. But they found the record and they traced that to the calls I made to Shafer. They’re moving really fast. Really fast. I don’t know how they dug Shafer out of the motel, but I’ve put enough word around about him, to wind them up, that they might have shaken down the whole motel and picked him up at random. So they get him, and they co-opt him, get him to call me. They still don’t know where we are. They do know
who
we are. Brute and me, anyway. And Tate. They’ve digitized all the fingerprints and they’ll nail Tate down in two minutes. If they find any connection to Jesse, they’ll have him, too.”

They all looked at Lane, who said, “I hung out with Tate a few years ago, in LA, but never got busted with him. The only jobs I done with him I did with Brute.”

“So you might still be clear,” Cohn said. “Besides, they’ll be looking for a guy with swastika tattoos. That little idea may save your bacon, someday.”

Cruz looked at her watch: “We’re twelve hours away from hitting the hotel. If we can get through the twelve hours, we’re good. I mean, we could have used Tate, but . . . we could still do this.”

“We’ll be in there for an hour,” Lane said. “We’ll be making noise. Christ . . .”

“We can do it,” Cruz said. “If Lindy can make it as a desk clerk, we can pull it off.”

Lindy shook her head, but she didn’t say anything.

* * *

CRUZ HOOKED her laptop to the television, took them through it, using PowerPoint, a series of photos and diagrams of the St. Andrews Hotel.

“We go in between three and four o’clock in the morning. Everything will be over for two hours, by then. Two cars here, in the parking ramp.” She flashed the route with a laser pointer. “From the hotel, if we have to run, we have access to the ramp twenty-four hours a day, up the back stairs to the skyway, or down on the street, up through this stairway.” She pointed out the access and escape routes on the photos. “We should walk it one last time, this evening. There’ll be a night manager on duty, and a desk clerk, but all the restaurants and bars are closed. The safe-deposit room is right behind the reception desk. When I put my stuff in it, I got these photos . . . this is just a cell phone cam, so excuse the quality.”

The safe-deposit room was a six-by-eight-foot rectangle, with sixty steel-door boxes set into a concrete wall.

“What worries me is that whole ‘one minute’ business,” Lane said. “Sixty boxes, sixty minutes. But if it’s a minute and a half, then we’re in for an hour and a half. If it’s two minutes . . .”

“We get the point,” Cohn said. “If we get pushed, we drop the tools and walk. But Don Walker said that he knows those boxes, and it won’t take a minute. He says it’ll take more like thirty to forty-five seconds . . . So now we’re in for less than an hour.”

“I would have liked to have drilled one myself,” Lane said. “Just to
know
.”

* * *

 

“I’M THINKING, if we get in clean, I might want to talk to the desk clerk for a couple of minutes,” Cohn said. “I’ll take a rope along and strangle her a little, if I need to. Tell her we need the names of the boxes she put stuff in. The ones with the most jewelry, the most cash . . . She’ll have an idea.”

“That could work, if you’re not herding other people around,” Cruz said, nodding. “If we get in clean, we move the manager and the clerk onto the floor in the safe-deposit room, put on the restraints. If they won’t talk, maybe get rough with one of them . . .”

“That would cut the time down,” Lane said. “If we knew which boxes to do first—or which ones were empty.”

“We’ll know which ones are empty, if there are any, because the desk will have both keys for them. For the ones being used, they’ll only have one key. They keep their keys in a cupboard behind the front desk,” Cruz said.

Cohn said, “The other thing is, I could take a look at what we’re taking out. If we hit some certain point, we quit. Or, if nothing much is happening, if we’re getting junk, if there’s no cash, we wrap it up and take off.”

Lindy asked, “Are you going to kill the clerk and the manager?”

Cohn said, “See when we get there. It’s bad business, killing somebody when you don’t have to. Tends to attract the eye.” He didn’t want her to know ahead of time.

Lindy was looking at the photograph of the safe-deposit room, and said, “Look at the wall plug-in. It looks like it’s burnt.”

They all looked and Cruz said, “Picture’s not clear enough.”

“I wonder if they had to drill a box, and it sucked down too many amps,” Lane said. “If that outlet is burned out, we’d be fucked.”

“That’s a good catch, Lindy,” Cruz said. “I didn’t see that. There’s another outlet on the wall behind me, behind where the camera is, but if there’s a circuit problem . . . You know what, Jesse? You should stop at a hardware store and pick up one of those long heavy-duty extension cords. It’s ninety-nine percent that we won’t need one, but if we need one and don’t have it . . .”

“I’ll get one,” Lane said.

* * *

WHEN THEY finished working through it, they ordered out for pizza. Lindy met the pizza man at the door, overtipped him, and brought the pizza back into the living room and said, “What we need to do is ask, ‘What if we didn’t do this?’ We know there are a bunch of cops on our asses. They know what Brute looks like, and Rosie. What if we walked away from it, and started planning another job somewhere else? We could get in the cars and be in Missouri by midnight. Jesse could be home by tomorrow morning . . .”

“Maybe not,” Jesse said. “That’s a long haul, south of St. Louis.”

They all sat and chewed on the meat-eater’s specials, with olives and mushrooms, and Cohn sighed and said, “The big money keeps getting harder. The trucks get better, the guards get better, there are more cops all the time. They got DNA now, and instant fingerprints . . . This money is right
there
. And Rosie and I gotta go deep, this time. We’ve got to stay gone for
years,
maybe. If we pull this off tonight, we won’t ever have to come back. I can move to India or New Zealand or South Africa and stay lost forever. If we have to come back for another job . . . I mean, the way fingerprints work now, if I get stopped coming across the border, and they print me, I could get busted right there.”

“It’d still be safer,” Lindy said. “I got a really bad feeling about this one, Brute. Really, really bad. We don’t even know how the cops got onto this Shafer guy, we don’t even know what they’re doing.”

Cohn sat chewing for a minute, then said, to Lane, “We can’t do it without you. You in, or out?”

“If you make the call, I’m in,” Lane said. “But Lindy has some points.”

Cohn bobbed his head, smiled at Lindy. “You do have some points. You’re smarter than I thought. Saw that thing on the outlet, too.” He shook his head. “But fuck it: we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna do it, so let’s get ready.”

* * *

THEY FINISHED eating and watched TV for a while,
Oprah
, and then Lane said, “I’m gonna go get that extension cord. Anybody want to come?”

Nobody did. Lindy was scared. “I’m afraid to go outside. This convention, I bet they got cameras everywhere. If they see me with you guys, I’m as bad off as you are, and I haven’t even done anything.”

Cohn nodded, stood up and stretched. “So you keep your head down,” he said. “Once it gets dark, the cameras won’t work so well.” To Cruz: “Let’s go walk to the hotel.”

* * *

THE ST. ANDREWS was the modern counterpart to the aging St. Paul Hotel, as they stood side by side facing the CNBC TV platform set up in Rice Park, and conveniently outside the main security lines. The St. Paul was once the classiest place in town; now it was the second classiest, to the St. Andrews. Because they were only two blocks from the convention center, the richest Republican donors were stuffed in the two hotels, and the richest Republican nomination ball was set for that night in the St. Andrews ballroom, with John McCain himself scheduled to make a handshake tour and maybe dance with a couple of dowagers.