Wicked Prey (32 page)

“Justice, damnit, we might need you,” Cruz said.

“I want to talk about it, face-to-face,” Shafer said. “From what my daddy says, you’ve been lying to me. They say Bill is in jail somewhere.”

“You sit right there,” Cruz said. “I’m coming to talk to you. Give me an hour.”

“Well, I don’t know . . .” There was an odd pause, and then Shafer said, “My daddy said the sheriff was looking for me, and that the Secret Service, you know . . .”

“Sit right there,” Cruz said, and she punched off the phone, turning it in her hand, staring at it.

COHN ASKED, “That was the gun guy?”

“Yeah.” She told him what Shafer had said, and then, “There was something not right about it. He was talking in whole sentences, and loud. He usually mumbles around. Then there was this minute, there, when he ran out of things to say, and I could feel like something was going on, off the phone. You know? Then he repeated everything he said the first time, in the same words. And then . . .” She frowned.

Cohn asked, “What?”

“He said his daddy called to tell him that the sheriff was looking for him, down in Oklahoma . . . But when I was recruiting him, he told me his father had abandoned them years ago. That he hadn’t seen him since he was a kid.”

“You think the cops got him?” Cohn asked.

They all looked at one another, and then Lane said, “We need the guy, right?”

Cruz: “He’s the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. People spot him down Seventh Street, and every cop in the area will be down there. Every one.”

“And they’d spot him,” Cohn said.

Cruz cracked a smile: “I can guarantee it. I was going to call nine-one-one every two minutes, to tell them where he was. But he didn’t sound like himself.”

Lane asked, “So . . . the cops got him?”

Cruz shook her head: “I don’t know.”

Cohn studied her for a minute, then rolled up from the couch he was lying on, carefully tied his shoes, and said, “I know how we can find out.”

* * *

 

LUCAS LISTENED to Wilbur Rivers talk on the telephone, then Rivers took the phone away from his ear and said, “The conversation was too short to narrow it down much, but the woman was calling from a St. Paul cell, and the tech thinks the signal was coming from south of Seventh Street, between St. Peter and Sibley. North of the river. That’s as close as he could get it.”

Shrake scratched his chin and said to Lucas, “That’s probably thirty or forty blocks, total. Lot of condos in there. Apartments above some of the stores.”

“But it’s manageable,” Lucas said. “We can handle that. We just grind it out. Talk to the guys at the City Hall, the tax assessor’s office, nail down the highest possibilities, work those first.”

“Gonna need some more guys,” Shrake said.

“That could be tough,” Lucas said. “Everybody’s on the streets. We need investigators. Not uniforms. I’ll talk to Harrington, see if they can spring me a couple of guys.”

“Harrington’s up to his ass in alligators,” the FBI agent said. Harrington was the St. Paul chief of police.

“We can handle it,” Lucas said.

“You might not have to,” Rivers said. He handed Lucas the phone. “Tell Mark to play the call for you.”

Lucas listened to the replay, said, “Thanks,” to the tech, handed the phone back to Rivers and said to Shrake and Jenkins: “She’s on her way to the motel. She says she’ll be there in an hour. We gotta run.”

* * *

NEITHER CRUZ nor Cohn had been in a hospital for years, and they talked about possible hospital security, about bullshitting their way in, about what to do if they were kicked out . . . but when they got to Regions, they found a reception desk, asked a volunteer lady, got a room number and directions.

“What if he starts screaming?” Cruz asked, as they went up in the elevator. She basically liked Cohn’s idea; it appealed to her sense of humor.

“I’ll strangle the little motherfucker,” he said.

“Brute . . .”

“I’m going in money-first,” Cohn said. He held up a pack of hundred-dollar bills. “Pimps are always willing to talk about money.”

They found Whitcomb’s room, a double, with Whitcomb on the window side. The near bed was empty, and the hooker they’d seen the night before was sitting at the end of Whitcomb’s bed, reading a
Betty & Veronica
comic book. She looked up, saw them, then recognized Cohn and stood up, her hand to her mouth, and said, “Ohhh.”

“Shut up,” Cohn snapped, and her mouth snapped shut.

He looked around the divider curtain as Whitcomb turned toward them. Whitcomb frowned, and Cohn held up the money and said, “Two thousand bucks.”

“You fuck,” Whitcomb said, finally recognizing him. Whitcomb looked clean and very white, in a hospital gown, tucked in with white blankets.

“Call me a fuck again and I’ll throw you out the fuckin’ window,” Cohn said, and they both looked toward the window. Then Cohn held up the money again. “Two thousand bucks, hundreds, in cash.”

Whitcomb said, “For trying to kill me?”

“No, asshole. I could have walked away from that,” Cohn said. “But I felt bad, you being handicapped and all. I also need to borrow your woman for an hour.”

They both looked at Briar. Then Whitcomb asked, “What has she got to do?”

“Entertain a pal of mine. He likes young pussy. A guy up here from Oklahoma. I don’t know any entertainers locally. I saw you last night, looked you up in the paper, and here I am. Two thousand for my friend, and to keep your mouth shut if the cops catch up with me.”

Briar said to Whitcomb, “Randy, I need to stay by you.”

Whitcomb said to Cohn, looking at the money in Cohn’s hand, “Just a quick one-time job?”

“Just a little . . . friendship,” Cohn said, letting himself smile. “He’ll think it’s funny.” He turned to Briar. “You’ll like him. He’s a nice guy. Clean.”

Briar said, “Randy . . .”

Whitcomb said, “Shut up.” To Cohn: “Where is this guy?”

“He’s in a motel in Bloomington . . . but the thing is he likes the schoolgirl look. You know, a ponytail.” He turned to Briar. “Could you pull your hair back in a brown ponytail?”

Whitcomb took the money, then flipped the hospital blanket back and pushed himself up. To Briar, he said, “We’re getting out of here. Unfold my chair and tell the nurse we’re going.”

“Randy, you can’t—you’re hurt.”

“My foot’s hurt. The rest of me is okay. Now shut the fuck up and get that fuckin’ nurse in here.”

* * *

WHITCOMB’S VAN rolled out of the parking garage and Cruz fell in behind them. “We’re late,” she said. “The checkout took too long.”

Cohn said, “Worth the wait. She doesn’t look that much like you, but with the ponytail, she’s about the right height, the right coloring, the sunglasses . . .”

“She’s about thirty pounds heavier than I am,” Cruz said.

“That’s disguised by her dress, at least some.”

“I don’t know.”

Cruz grinned at her: “I don’t know, either, but, either some cops get a surprise, or Shafer does.”

* * *

THEY GATHERED in an empty motel room, seven of them, including four BCA SWAT guys in armor. Lucas said, “All right. We don’t know exactly what she looks like, so wait until I call. As soon as she knocks on the door, we rush the stairs, both guys come up, put the guns on her, and then we pop the door and we’ve got her three ways. You gotta remember, maybe she’s got a gun in her hand, planning to hit Shafer as soon as he opens up. So take care.”

“If the other guys are with her?” one of the SWATs asked.

“You don’t take any chances,” Lucas said. “You order them on the ground and you keep your weapons on them. I don’t think the whole bunch will come over—that’d be too conspicuous. But there might be one in the car, maybe another one comes up the stairs with her. Take care: they’ve already killed four cops, so a few more won’t make any difference to them.”

Lucas and Shrake would be in Shafer’s original room. Shafer would wait in the motel room they were gathering in, and as a precaution, they’d handcuffed him to a bed rail, which pissed him off. “I’m like one of you guys.”

“It’s for your own safety,” Lucas said. It wasn’t, but they were like magic words and temporarily shut him up.

Jenkins and one of the SWAT guys would rush the front stairs, another of the SWAT guys would literally block the second stairway: they’d wedge an office chair between a down-railing and the door, so the door couldn’t be opened. The SWAT guy was there just in case.

Two more SWAT guys were waiting in a minivan in the parking lot. They would block and then check the woman’s car after she got out.

“If she comes in,” one of the SWAT guys said.

“She’s coming; she bought it,” Lucas said.

* * *

AN HOUR and twelve minutes after the phone call, another minivan rolled into the parking lot, and slowly down the line toward the office, and parked in a handicapped slot.

“Dark-haired woman in a minivan,” one of the parking-lot SWAT guys called to Lucas. “But she parked in a handicapped slot. She’s got a handicapped tag in the window.”

“Watch her. That’s a known behavior, and they grabbed Weimer from a van,” Lucas said. “She might want to keep the van close so she can run.”

“She’s out,” the SWAT guy called. “Dark hair, ponytail, sunglasses, she’s got a scarf over her head . . . big purse. She’s looking the place over. I mean, she’s really looking the place over. She’s going in . . .”

“That’s her,” Lucas said. “Everybody, set. Block the back door.”

* * *

JULIET BRIAR, who thought Randy loved her, who thought she wouldn’t do this anymore—she thought about Letty, who suggested that maybe she could become a nurse, and overnight, caring for Randy, she’d almost thought of herself as a nurse—and here she was, and she knew the guy was going to want a blow job, because that’s what you gave guys for their birthdays. She felt the gorge rising at her throat, cast her head down, and walked toward the stairs.

Randy couldn’t see any further than the two thousand dollars.

Randy couldn’t see her at all, if there was money around.

* * *

AT THE top of the stairs, she lingered, just for a second, then walked down the carpeted hall which smelled like smoke and beer and maybe a little pee. Found the number, took a breath, knocked.

A man appeared at the end of the hallway, wearing a helmet, carrying a gun, and he screamed at her, “On the floor. On the floor, on the floor . . .”

“What?” Her hands came up, in surrender.

“On the floor . . .”

And the door popped open and another man was there with a helmet and gun, pointed at her face. “On the floor . . .”

* * *

ACROSS THE road, across a chain-link fence, behind a fast-food joint, Cohn and Cruz watched two guys in armor first block, and then rush, Briar’s minivan.

“There you go, sugar bun,” Cohn said.

“Cops,” Cruz said. She put the car in gear. “Don’t call me sugar bun.”

The cops all stood around and looked at the weeping Briar, and Lucas said, “They were looking at us. They sent her in, and they were looking at us.” He laughed, a sour sound. “Man: we took it right in the shorts.”

18

THEY CUFFED THE WOMAN, WHOSE NAME was Juliet Briar, and took her down to the room where they were holding Justice Shafer, sat her down on a bed and told her that she was in a world of hurt.

“You don’t even know what they’ll do to you in that women’s prison, they got wall-to-wall bull-dykes . . .” Shrake went on for a while, but stopped when Briar broke down again, weeping. Shafer said, “I could never be a cop, you know it? Doing this to a little kid. Why don’t you pick on somebody a little older?”

“Because somebody a little older isn’t part of a murder gang,” Jenkins snarled at him.

“I’m not part of a murder gang,” Briar wailed. “A guy gave me a hundred dollars to come over here and tell Justice that he was supposed to come to Half-Way Books and give him a ride . . .”

“He’s got a truck,” Lucas said.

“I didn’t know that,” she lied. She had them going, she could feel it. Mostly the truth, with a couple small variations, like Letty had taught her. “I just wanted a hundred dollars.”

“What’d the guy look like?” Lucas asked. “The guy who gave you a hundred dollars?”

“Tall, thin, black hair, black mustache, blue eyes, really strong-looking. The woman was about as tall as I am. She had dark hair and . . .” She put her hand to her mouth, in sudden comprehension. “You thought I was
her
. They
tricked
you.”

“How did you meet this guy?” Shrake asked. He was the bad cop. “Why would he give you a hundred dollars?”

“I didn’t know why. He just said. I met him at Juicy’s.”

“You’re too young for Juicy’s,” Shrake said.

“Not for a hamburger. I know a waitress there, but she wasn’t working, but sometimes she gives me a hamburger for free. If I get hungry.”