Wicked Prey (9 page)

She was going to have to start thinking about sex pretty soon, she knew, but now was too soon. When she really got back to school, maybe. A friend of hers, a month younger than she was, was already being thoroughly mauled by her boyfriend, bra up, pants down, and though there hadn’t yet been any actual intercourse, that wasn’t far off. She’d be giving it up during football season, unless something happened to the relationship, Letty thought. The girl was in love and that made it all a lot more complicated.

Still, the whole thing made her uneasy. She’d get around to it, but . . . later. Not with John. He was too old, a senior. Jeff was in her grade, and had a shot, when he got rid of the braces. And she was still a little flat-chested. That bothered her a bit, that a boy might go in looking for a mountain and find a molehill.

Weather had told her not to worry: “I know you can’t
not
worry about it—but, don’t worry about it. You’re not the big-boobed kind, and believe me, that’s better. The boys are going to like you fine. More than fine. You’re going to have to fight them off with a baseball bat.”

Letty rode around with John and Jeff for a while, looking at the political freaks, and then John said, “You get any money off your old man?”

“Yup. A twenty.”

“You gonna treat?”

* * *

THEY WENT to the McDonald’s on West Seventh Street, down from the Xcel Center where the convention was being held. The guys got supersized and Letty went for a Quarter Pounder, no cheese, a small fries, and a Diet Coke, and they sat there and talked about the school year coming up, and who was going with whom, and who might like who else, and what they’d heard Harry was doing with Sally, and that Frank had made enough money working two summer jobs to buy a dork-mobile, meaning a Camaro, ten years old, which they made fun of, although John was driving his mother’s Camry, which nobody mentioned; and they watched the convention people come and go.

Then Randy Whitcomb rolled through the door in his wheelchair, trailed by Briar. Letty recognized him as soon as he came in, and caught Whitcomb’s eyes when they flicked toward her. She said nothing, but looked down at her fries. Whitcomb and Briar got their food and rolled back to the table next to Letty and the boys. Whitcomb cocked his head when they got close, looked at Letty, and smiled and asked, “Don’t I know you?”

She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Lucas Davenport’s girl? I think I met you when you were smaller.”

She bobbed her head. “I guess; Lucas Davenport’s my dad.”

“I thought so,” Whitcomb said. He stuck out his hand and Letty gave it a little shake. “Nice to meet you. My name’s Carl Rice, and this is my friend.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

The boys wanted to talk to Letty, and Whitcomb’s presence annoyed them; Whitcomb was trying to be friendly but gave off the stink of the hustler, the shyster, the guy who leans on young women. But they were polite, so they chatted, and then John said, “We better get home. My mom’s gonna need the car.”

“Mom’s car, huh?” Whitcomb said, still friendly, but they all felt the hook of the put-down.

“Yeah . . .” John was embarrassed, but they got out of there, and in the parking lot, on the way to the car, John said, “He’s a fuckin’ creep.”

“He’s a crippled guy,” Jeff said.

Letty asked, “Could you do me a favor?”

They were in the car, buckling up, and John said, “Sure. What?”

“Drive around the block and come back and park over there. I want to see what car he gets into,” she said.

“Sure. Why?”

“Because I think he was looking at me today, at the Capitol,” Letty said. “It’s like he followed me or something.”

“I told you he’s a creep,” John said.

They went around the block and parked for fifteen seconds, and then Whitcomb and the woman came out and got into a white van, using a ramp that folded down from the side. They watched as the woman did something with straps to hold Whitcomb’s chair in place, and then got into the driver’s seat.

“That’s him,” Letty said. “That’s the guy I saw. Could you guys do me one more favor?”

“Sure.”

“Get up close enough behind him that you can read the license number. Not too close. Jeff and I can get down, so if his girlfriend looks in the mirror, she’ll only see one guy.”

And that’s what they did.

* * *

WHITCOMB NEVER KNEW.

He said to Briar, “Gonna give her to Ranch. Gonna let Ranch fuck her. Gonna whip her with my stick until she looks like a skinned rabbit.”

Briar said, “I don’t know.”

“You’re not supposed to know, dummy. I’m supposed to know. So shut the fuck up and drive.”

SATURDAY NIGHT, AND ROSIE CRUZ was driving west on I-494 on the Bloomington strip near the Mall of America and Minneapolis- St. Paul International, a digital police radio on the floor of her car, the illegal software picking up police calls from the major dispatching centers in the metro area. The sun was down and the lights were up, and people were ricocheting through the bars and motels along the strip, putting cocaine up their noses and Wild Turkey down their throats, and Rosie said into her cell phone, “The radios are hot, but they’re all in St. Paul. There’s some kind of cop rehearsal going on. If you’re ready—do it.”

“See you back at the motel,” Cohn said.

Cruz dropped off 494, up the ramp and across the highway to the south, down the side streets to the Wayfarer Motel, thinking about Cohn and Lane and McCall going into the High Hat with masks and guns.

Nothing she could do about it now. They were ninety-five percent good, five percent in trouble; but
she
wasn’t in trouble. If Cohn and McCall and Lane went down, well, there were more where they came from.

* * *

 

SHE PARKED OUTSIDE the Wayfarer Motel, walked down the side of the first floor, past all the doors, climbed the concrete stairs to the second floor, knocked on 214. The door popped open, and Justice Shafer was there in all his flat-eyed, underfed shitkicker glory. He stepped back and asked, “Anything?”

“Not a thing,” she said. “You all sighted in?”

“Ready to go, if we need it.” His tongue touched his dry bottom lip. “I’m running low on cash.”

She nodded and took an envelope from her pocket, ripped the end off, and thrust the naked stack of bills at him, holding on to the envelope. He pulled the bills free—fifties—thumbed them, and nodded. “How’s Bill?”

“Bill’s lying low,” she said. “There are about a million cops out here.” She checked the time on her cell phone. “He’s moving around, but he said he’ll call you at eight-thirty, or thereabout, if he can get to a clean phone. The last time I talked to him, he was in some roadhouse over in Wisconsin.”

Shafer turned to look at the bedside clock: 8:13. “I’ll hang around here.”

Cruz stepped back to the door. “You keep down, Justice. There’s a big chance that nothing’ll happen and you can go on your way, no harm done. But you gotta stay sober. If this thing does pop, and the anarchists head in toward the Capitol, we’re gonna need every man we can get. Gonna need to take out the leadership.”

“I’m ready,” Shafer said. He squared his shoulders. “How long should I wait for Bill to call?”

“I’d wait until nine—after that, I doubt that he will. Like I said, things are getting tense. One of these anarchist guys put out the word that he wants Bill’s head. They put a hundred thousand on it.”

“Ah, man, a hundred grand?” Shafer was amazed by the amounts they threw around. He’d never made more than twelve dollars an hour, except when he was holding up gas stations.

“Stay tight,” Cruz said, and she was out the door.

Shafer was a moron, and he was undoubtedly sitting on the bed staring at the phone, but once down in the parking lot, she sat five minutes and watched the door to his room. She’d made a big point about his policing up his brass at the quarry where he sighted the gun in . . .

Five minutes gone, she pulled on a hairnet and gloves and walked over to his truck and took the key out of her pocket and popped the back hatch on his topper, crawled inside and pulled it down. He’d thrown a plastic sheet over the gear inside, and she pulled it back, spotted the olive drab army-surplus ammo boxes. There were three of them, and she popped the lid on the lightest one and found it half-full of empty .50-caliber shells. She took four, crawled back out of the truck, locked it, and went back to her car.

Looked up at the room: the dummy was still sitting there, she thought, staring at the phone, waiting for Bill. But Bill wasn’t making any phone calls to hotels in Minnesota: Bill was in jail in Port-land, Oregon.

COHN, LANE, AND MCCALL had each driven separately to the hotel, positioning the cars for trouble. If the cops got a call about three guys doing a stickup, and saw a car with three guys in it, they might pull a traffic stop to take a peek. If there was no trouble, and they all left separately, they had an extra inch of safety.

The night was warm and starlit, quiet in Hudson, but with traffic building into Minneapolis. At the hotel, Cohn circled the block a half-dozen times, saw Lane’s car ahead of him, saw Lane spot a car backing out of its parking place, circled a couple more times, saw a movement, pulled in smoothly, got the space. McCall would have gone to the parking ramp, the other emergency car. The scene was just as Cruz said it would be, people coming and going around the hotel. He walked a block back, could hear cheering in the distance—some political thing in Loring Park, he thought—and turned down the alley toward the hotel’s loading dock. McCall was already crossing the dock, Lane behind him. Cohn took a last look around.

This was a danger point—if, for some reason, a cop car went past the mouth of the alley, saw him, and the cop got curious, Cohn was there with a mask and a gun, and that would be hard to explain.

So he’d kill the cop. He’d killed a cop in Houston one time, and never thought about it anymore. Bad luck, for him and especially for the cop. No animus involved. Some black guy went to death row for the killing—more bad luck for the black guy.

Lane and McCall were inside. There were five concrete steps up to the dock, nothing on the dock but a metal Dumpster, two steel doors where deliveries would go in, and a steel door to the left, open just an inch. He walked through it and found Lane and McCall at the bottom of the stairs, their masks in their hands.

“Ready?” He pulled his mask out, slipped it over his head.

McCall said, “All set,” but there was tension in his voice. He tended to get more and more stressed until the action began, and then he was fine. He added, “Car’s right where we planned: back of the third floor.”

Pulled on the latex gloves. Adrenaline starting to flow with all of them now, Cohn could hear them breathing in the enclosed concrete stairwell, as if they’d already climbed the stairs. McCall was wearing the tux and red shirt, his mask rolled on top of his head like a watch cap, an empty FedEx envelope in his hand.

“Ready,” McCall said. Lane nodded.

They were fast going up the stairs, their footfalls echoing off the multiple concrete walls that went up nine stories, the smell of raw cement pushing through their masks. They stopped at the door with the red-painted “5” on it, listening. McCall stepped out into the hallway, one hand to his face, like he had a headache. The hall was empty and he pulled the mask most of the way down. He could see the smoked-glass camera dome halfway down the hall. Film only, Cruz had said; no live monitoring.

She’d better be right. But of course she was.

Room 505 was nearly at the front of the hotel and they had to move a long way down the hallway, not quite at a run; found it, knocked with a car key. Felt a vibration from inside.

“Somebody’s coming,” McCall muttered. Cohn stood between McCall and the camera, and McCall rolled up his mask. From inside, “Yes?”

“FedEx,” McCall said. He held up the envelope, so it could be seen through the peephole.

“Just a minute.” The door rattled and popped open and McCall turned his face away as a short bald guy in suit pants and a blue dress shirt opened the door, and Cohn was on top of him, flashing the gun, hit him squarely in the center of the chest with his good right hand and the short guy went down and the door banged shut and a young woman in a burgundy dress, sitting on a couch with a carton of chocolate milk, yelped and looked like she was about to scream and she lifted her feet off the floor and Lane was there and he batted the milk away from her like a T-ball, and it splattered across her face and across the curtains and McCall landed on the short man’s chest, and hit him once in the face with his fist, breaking the short man’s nose, and the woman yelped again and screeched, “Don’t do that.” Lane put his face six inches from hers and yelled, “Shut the fuck up, bitch,” and she shut up, but whimpered, and he swatted her in the face and she went down on the couch, bounced, and rolled off on the floor, losing her shoes.