Wicked Prey (25 page)

“Tate’s dead? You’re sure he’s dead?” she asked.

“Yeah, he’s dead, his brains are all over the hotel room, for Christ’s sakes . . . Ah, Jesus, Tate, he walked right into the cop’s gun. He kicked the door and the cop was right there and, boom, and he goes down, ah, McCall . . .”

“So now we’re done,” Cruz said bitterly. She was watching the speedometer. There was a tendency to drive fast after a hit, and she didn’t want to do that. “Now we’re done. Jesse’s gonna be really screwed up about this, Tate was a good friend.”

“Tate was a good friend of all of us,” Cohn said.

“You’re sure he’s dead?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“If he’s not dead, then the cops are going . . .”

“He’s
dead
,” Cohn said. “Ah, Christ . . .”

Cruz shut up and they drove along and Cohn thought,
Maybe I could have saved him.

But he didn’t really think so. McCall had been hit hard, right through the center of his body, he was dying on the floor, and Cohn didn’t have time to wait for him to die, and no way to get him out of the hotel in a hurry. If Cohn abandoned him, and McCall
did
somehow survive, well, McCall might have been a little pissed.

Nobody was immune to extortion by the legal system. They would have given McCall a chance to get out, in fifteen, maybe, if he talked about Cohn and the other gang members. He’d done the right thing, but goddamn: it was
Tate
.

* * *

LUCAS HEARD about it from the duty officer at the BCA who called and shouted, “Benson’s down. Benson got shot, Benson’s dead, he’s shot . . .”

Lucas ran out of the hotel room with Snider and Craig calling after him, “What? What?” and he shouted back, “Keep the door locked,” and he ran down the stairs because the elevators were too slow, piled into the car and screamed across town and dumped the Porsche in a cluster of cop cars and a cop flagged him and he held up his ID and shouted back and then he plowed through a flower bed, through the lobby and into an elevator with another cop, a St. Paul uniform he didn’t recognize, and he asked, “Is my guy dead?” and the cop nodded and said, “Yeah, fuckin’ awful.”

Lucas pounded the elevator doors, once, twice, with the heel of his hand, and then they came on out on twelve and two St. Paul detectives were standing in the hall outside an open door. Lucas headed for the door and one of the detectives, whose name was John Elleson, caught him around the waist and said, “Whoa, whoa, Lucas, slow down, slow down.”

Lucas tried to push past him, but Elleson held on, jammed him into a wall. Elleson was a small guy, but strong. “I wanna . . .”

“We think that the shooter’s on the loose, one of them, anyway,” Elleson said. “You can go in, but stay on the edges. We need to take everything we can get out of there.”

Lucas nodded, took a breath, relaxed, and when Elleson let him go, went in past the busted door: Benson was there, with two other bodies. Benson was on his back, his head cranked backward, his forehead shattered, his bulletproof vest skewed around to his left, a pistol near his hand, a shotgun under his legs. A black man lay on the floor at Benson’s feet, and a woman lay beside a bed, shot in the back.

Elleson said, “There’s a couple in the room next door. They were in bed, heard the shots, the guy says he heard somebody running, so he thought it would be okay to look. They had to turn on the lights and he went to the door and looked, and the hallway was already clear. The shooter knew where he was going. There’s no blood in the hallway or on the stairs, so if he was hit, he wasn’t bleeding too bad.”

“Benson shot the black guy?” Lucas asked.

“We don’t know, but I think he probably did. We’re gonna have to wait and look at the slugs, to see who shot who—it’s too complicated.”

“Ah, man . . .” Lucas put his hands to his temples, backed into the hallway.

“You okay?” Elleson asked.

“Fuck no.” He wasn’t; he was nauseous.

“We’re gonna need a statement from everybody involved. We understand Benson was working as sort of a bodyguard.”

“These are the same guys who did the robbery down behind St. John’s last night,” Lucas said. “The same guys who killed the Hudson cop. They’re a murder gang hitting political money guys. I’ll get you everything we know—we’ve got the main guy’s picture out there . . .”

He gave Elleson a summary of what they knew then said, “We think they’ve got a hideout somewhere around here—they either rented a house or a condo or something. We’ve papered all the hotels and motels, and nobody’s seen them.”

“They got some balls,” Elleson said. “There were two hundred cops within three blocks of here. They had to drive right through them to get in and out.”

“Did we get them on video? Any chance?” Lucas asked. The feds had come up with a grant for surveillance cameras, and they were all over the streets.

“Depends on which street they were on,” Elleson said. “We’ve got video on the front and the side, but not along the back.”

“Got to look at it, man: if we could spot the car, that’d give us a big leg up. Can’t hide the car.”

“I’ll get that going,” Elleson said. “What’s Benson’s family situation?”

“He’s single, divorced four or five years ago. No kids. Parents live up in St. Cloud, I think. I’ll have our duty guy pull the file . . . We gotta look at the tapes.”

“I’m sorry about this, man,” Elleson said.

The elevator dinged and Del stepped out, looked both ways, spotted Lucas and came on down the hall. “Is it true?” Looked at Lucas’s face, and said, “It’s true.”

* * *

 

THE CONDO was only six blocks from the hotel, and after parking the car, Cohn and Cruz took the back stairs up. Cruz took a peek at the lobby before they walked into it, and then they were inside. Lindy was sitting on the couch reading a copy of
Women’s Health
magazine, and Lane came out of the back room, a smile on his face, and he asked, “How’d it go?” And then, the smile slipping away, “Where’s Tate?”

Cohn told him: “They ambushed us.”

“Oh, no,” Lindy, pale-faced, hand to her mouth.

“It’s my fault,” Cruz said. “I should have known. We couldn’t do this many . . .”

“I thought they couldn’t tell the cops,” Lane said to her.

“That must have gone out the window when the cop was killed in Hudson,” Cruz said.

Cohn said, “I’m so sick I can’t even spit.” He looked at Cruz. “It’s not your fault, Rosie. I pushed for it, but there’s a smart guy on the other side, and he punked us.” He gave them a blow-by-blow account of the entry and the shooting, lied about McCall getting shot, said the cop shot him twice. “Never had a chance. Tate kicked the door and boom-boom, he goes down and I see the cop and I hit him, then I hit him again, and then this woman’s on the floor and I hit her, and then I’m out of there. I got out clean, but . . .”

“I’m heading home,” Lane said. He looked around the condo. “Clean this place up . . . get out of here.”

“I’m with you,” Cruz said. She looked at Brute. “You and Lindy ought to get out of here. You’d be safer as a couple. You can use your Visa card and driver’s license for about two weeks yet, rent a car, head south. You’ve got enough money to last a long time in Belize or Costa Rica.”

Lane said to him, “That’s what you gotta do, man. You can have Tate’s cut—they’re not looking for me or Cruz, but you’ve got to get out of here, you need the money. With Tate’s cut, you got almost a million and a half.”

“Not enough,” Cohn said. He ran his hands through his hair and said, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go get a drink.”

Cruz said, “Brute, don’t do it. The cops . . .”

Cohn said, “Fuck ’em.”

“There are a million cops out there. If they spot you . . .”

“Fuck ’em,” he said again. “I don’t look anything like those pictures. Especially if I’m sitting down. I’m gonna get a drink.” To Lindy: “You coming?”

“Brute: bad idea, I’m really scared.” She looked scared.

“I’m going,” he said. “That fuckin’ McCall, man,” and tears ran down his face and he went out the door.

The door opened behind him and Cruz came out with her purse and said, “If you’re going, I’ll go with you.”

* * *

SHE’D SCOUTED the town thoroughly, and steered him through the nearly empty skyways, for the best part of a half mile, then outside and across a street and into an outdoor mall, with bars and outdoor seating, to a place called Juicy’s. They got a table in a corner back against a building where Cohn couldn’t be seen head-on, and he ordered a cheeseburger and a double martini with four olives, and she got fries and a Diet Pepsi. He sat looking at the tabletop for five minutes, drinking the martini, then said, hollow-eyed, “What do I do, Rosie?”

“Can’t do the hotel anymore,” she said. “We really needed four people. Three was marginal. Now we’ve only got two, even if Jesse was willing. That won’t work; too many people to control. So, we do what we did when there was trouble in the past—we get out. Jesse and I both have cars at the airport. We take the rentals back right now, clean out the apartment, get out of here late tonight, in my car. You and me and Lindy, maybe to Des Moines. Go out to the airport, you rent a car there, take it to Vegas, give the cash to Harry and move it to your investment account. What do you have left in there?”

“Maybe a quarter.”

“So you’ll have almost two. That’ll kick off eighty thousand a year until you die. There are lots of nice places where you can live pretty well on eighty thousand.”

“Pretty well—if you want to live like a retiree. You know, watching your dollars. Watching your budget,” Cohn said. “Won’t be any Social Security or Medicare or any of that . . . Goddamnit, I need at least four. Five would be better. On two hundred thousand a year, you know, I could live okay.”

“Brute, you’ve got to deal with reality,” Cruz said. “You get someplace safe, cool off, maybe I can put together one more big one. A good safe armored car, a credit union.”

“Credit union won’t do it. Most we ever took out of a credit union was a half,” Cohn said.

“With no work and no risk,” she said.

“So I need three more million, and my cut on a big credit union is maybe two hundred, so you’re saying we ought to do fifteen credit unions?”

She leaned forward: “What I’m saying is, we need to get the hell out of St. Paul. We can worry about money some other time. There are more important things: like staying alive.”

“But this hotel . . .”

“We don’t have the personnel . . .”

They were talking about it, working through the original plan with Cohn on his second double martini, when a crippled man in a wheelchair, a dusty head-bent street kid, and an overweight woman took a table fifteen feet away. The cripple looked at Cohn without recognition, sneered and turned away and waved at a waitress and shouted, “Hey! Hey! Am I invisible or some fuckin’ thing?”

Cohn leaned close to Cruz and said, “It’s yon bugger—the one who ran over my feet at the airport.” The
yon bugger
came off as an Alabama drawl—the British accent had vanished with four days in St. Paul.

“Ignore him,” Cruz said.

“Right.” Cohn gulped the last of the second martini and waved at the waitress.

Cruz said, “Better slow down on the martinis, you’re gonna be on your ass.”

“Ah . . .” He ordered the third one and said, “When I was living in York, I’d get up every morning and read the
Times
, the
Independent
, the
Guardian,
and the
Financial Times
. I’d have four cups of coffee, and by the time I was finished with all that, it’d be noon, and a friend would come around, and we’d have a lunchtime martini or two or three. The Brits drink like fish. So I’m in training.”

* * *

“WAS THIS FRIEND male or female?” Cruz asked. Cohn cocked an eyebrow at her and grinned, and Cruz said, “I hope Lindy doesn’t find out. All we need is her throwing a fit.”

“I ain’t gonna tell her, but I don’t think she’d be too upset. Probably guessed,” Cohn said. The third martini arrived, and he took a sip. “My woman there . . . nice lady. Wish I could’ve said good-bye. Told her I’d be gone for three weeks and would see her then.”

“That’s life,” Cruz said. She deeply didn’t care.

“I’d read the
Financial Times
every morning,” Cohn said. He was now drunk, Cruz realized. “You know what? All this stock market shit that’s going on, they’re all to blame for it . . .” He gestured around the patio. “The fuckin’ politicians. People say I’m a criminal, look at these bastards. Fuck over ordinary folks, they’re sitting here laughing and singing, suckin’ up the money and power.”

Cruz covered his free hand with hers and said, smiling, “You’re not exactly ordinary folks, Brute. You’re more like Jesse James.”

“No, but my brothers and sisters are,” he said. “Ordinary people.”

“You don’t like your brothers and sisters,” she said. “And they don’t like you.”

“That’s not the point . . .” He gulped down the last of the third drink, and fished out the last olive. “You know what I need . . .” He interrupted himself: “Look at this.”

The cripple had the overweight woman by the neckline of her dress and was snarling something at her. Other patrons were looking away; nobody wanted to get involved in a fight between a woman and a cripple. A waitress eased away, looking for help.

* * *

WHITCOMB HAD Briar by the neckline of her dress and snarled, “Fuckin’ bitch, you’ll do what I tell you or I’ll drag your fuckin’ ass back . . .”

* * *

 

COHN, DRUNK and angry at life, hissed at Cruz, “The bugger’s a
pimp
. See that? That’s one of his girls. Fuckin’ nasty little pimp . . .”