Wicked Prey (38 page)

“That was different,” Lane said.

“Ah, phooey,” Cruz said. “They’re all different. Every single black person is different, and when you get right down to it, none of them is what you rednecks made them out to be. You and Brute both probably got some black blood running through you, coming out of where you do.”

“Some Indian, for sure,” Lane said. “Cherokee.”

“Lot of black blood in the Cherokee,” Cohn said. “Your real God name is probably Willie Lee Thunder Cloud Crackeriferus Lane. Cracker, for short.”

Lane said, “Now we hear from the fuckin’ Hebrews.”

Cohn laughed and said, “My great-granddaddy did all right by himself. My great-grandma was this good-looking blond southern belle. Her daddy was vice president at a steel mill down there, building guns for the Confederates. Bet her family hated that big-peckered Jew banging her brains loose every night. They had eight children before she gave it up and died in childbirth.”

“How do you know he had a big pecker?” Lane asked. “They take a picture of it?”

“Well, if he didn’t, where’d I get mine from?” Cohn asked.

“Ahhh, God. Men and their penises. If they didn’t have them, we’d have to sew one on, just to give them something to talk about,” Cruz said.

“You ever seen one?” Cohn asked casually.

“Brute . . .” She shook her head.

“I was just wondering, you being queer and all,” he said. “If you haven’t, I could show you mine. Something terrible could happen tonight. You wouldn’t want to die without seeing one.”

Made her laugh, which was one of the things Cohn was good at, in the last minutes before a job: taking the weight off. “I can get by without it.”

“That’s good, because, you know, sometimes I get that rascal out, and he don’t want to go back in. I’m too goddamn tired for a big wrestling match.”

* * *

A WHILE LATER, Lane said, “We never sat in a car like this, on the run, and still pointing at the job. Other jobs, we would’ve called it off a long time ago.”

Cohn said, “Yeah.”

“Would you be sitting here if Lindy hadn’t taken off?”

Cohn nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. We gotta get out of this, Jesse. Our days are numbered. The cops got all this stuff now. You read about it on the Internet. You know, they can sometimes get DNA if you even just
grab
somebody; if you just
touch
something. You know, they can get DNA off a goddamn beer can. If you spend any time in a place at all, they can get DNA. It’s always coming off you—hair and skin cells and blood and semen . . . if you sleep between two sheets, they just sure as shit can prove you did.

“Then in England, they put up these movie cameras everywhere,” Cohn continued. “You see them on posts and street corners, watching you all the time. Big Brother. You’re always watched. There were these Arab guys, they were up to something, they tracked them all the way across town on these cameras. Right from one camera to the next. You knock over an armored car there, or a bank, and the cops could get out the cameras and track you wherever you go. That’ll be here, sooner or later. They’ll watch every fuckin’ thing you do, and people will be saying, well, if you don’t do anything wrong, what’s your problem? That’s what they say in England.”

“It’s only going to get worse,” Cruz agreed. “Look how quick they tracked me down—they’re all talking to each other all the time now. They can do fingerprints in five minutes. Five minutes! Twenty years ago, it could take them weeks, even with a good set of prints. When I was scouting this thing, I read that Minnesota has a law that says everybody who’s convicted of a crime has to give up some DNA. They put it on file, and when they get a crime, and they get some DNA, they can run it like that,” and she snapped her fingers. “They were going to pass a law that said that whenever anybody was
arrested
, they had to give up DNA, even though they hadn’t been proven guilty of anything. That got stopped, but it’ll come back. Pretty soon, they’ll start taking DNA from babies, to protect the babies, is what they’ll say. In case your kid disappears, they can find him later. Identify him. They’ll scare people into giving it up.”

“There are still places you can go, and get away from it—in our lifetimes, anyway,” Cohn said. “Belize, maybe. Lots of Americans in Costa Rica. New Zealand, maybe.”

“I’ll just go back to the farm. Try to make that work,” Lane said. “Get serious about it.”

* * *

 

COHN SAID to Cruz after a while, “Tell me the truth. Are you Mexican?”

She shook her head. “I was born and raised in LA. My folks came across the border back in the fifties. Funny thing is, one of my grandfathers was an American who settled down there. Liked the women. Never did go back across to the States.”

“You speak Spanish?”

“Pretty good,” she said, nodding. “My mother learned to speak good English, but my father, not so much. So, we spoke Spanish in the house. I’ve lost some of it, though.”

“Still, it gives you more options,” Cohn said. “Me and Jesse, if we’ve got to run for it, it’s gonna have to be an English-speaking place.”

“Go to Israel,” Lane suggested. “Lots of people speak English there.”

“Ah, I don’t count as a Jew,” Cohn said. “They got something about how your mother has to be a Jew. We never did have a mother who was a Jew in our family. They were all Baptists.”

“Well, fuckin’ lie about it,” Lane said. “You wouldn’t be going there as Brutus Cohn anyway.”

“Let me share something with you, Jesse. You get to be a Jew the same way you get to be a peckerwood,” Cohn said. “You pecker-woods know all about stump-training a heifer, about using a corncob for toilet paper . . .”

“. . . bullshit, that’s fuckin’ nuts. A corncob?”

“. . . because you grow up with it. I didn’t grow up being a Jew. I know as much about being a Jew as you do. End of story.”

* * *

MORE TIME passed, the minutes dragging their feet.

Then, “If Lindy hadn’t run, we’d have had enough money to go somewhere for a while,” Cruz said. “We could have gotten ourselves back together.”

“I would’ve wanted to do the hotel anyway,” Cohn said.

“Yeah, but . . . I’ve got a story about a guy out in LA who’s supposed to be the big money-mover man for a Russian gang. He moves cash around at a big discount, and the Russians get stocks and bonds and buy land and apartments and so on. The story is, this guy sometimes has ten or fifteen million dollars at his house. He’s got some guys with guns around, but hell, if you feel fine about hitting an armored car, we’d have no trouble taking out a few guards.”

“Have to kill them, probably, if they’re Russians,” Cohn said.

“Well, yeah,” she said.

“I wouldn’t do that unless it was just you, me, Jesse, and Tate,” Cohn said. “You couldn’t ever take the chance that somebody would talk about it. The Russians would track you down and cut you up an inch at a time.”

“I was thinking about it as a last job. I never had the time to develop it, but, if you went in shooting, you could probably do it with three people—just like tonight,” she said. “But it would have taken a lot more research.”

“If Lindy hadn’t run,” Cohn said. “I’m gonna kill her when I find her.”

“You keep saying you were going to do this one anyway,” Lane said.

“Yeah, but now I feel
pushed
,” Cohn said. “I’m afraid it might be coloring the way I think. I need that money bad. I need to get out of this. I need to end it. If I’d had that money that Lindy took, and if we came up to the hotel tonight and I got a real bad feeling, maybe I’d just decide we should walk away. Now . . . I feel pushed. I can’t explain it.”

“I know exactly what you’re saying,” Cruz said.

“Wish Tate was here,” Lane said. “He was a good ol’ boy.”

Cruz looked at her watch: “Goddamnit, time is really crawling.”

LUCAS SAW THE COPS STANDING AT the back of the yard in the headlights of their own cars, the spinners on the car roof flicking scarlet light into the treetops at the back of the lot. A man and a woman stood with the cops, and they were all looking down into Swede Hollow, and then one of the cops started down.

Lucas parked and got out of the car and hurried toward the group, and the uniformed cop looked at him and held out a hand, and Lucas called, “Davenport, BCA.”

The cop nodded and said, “Hey, Lucas,” and Lucas recognized him but couldn’t remember his name. Lucas looked at the woman standing next to the cop and recognized her as Juliet Briar, and he asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I live here,” she said.

“You live here?” Lucas looked from her to the cop, who asked, “What’s going on?”

Briar asked, “Are you Lucas Davenport? Letty’s dad?”

“What?” the cop asked.

Lucas said, “Where’s Letty?”

Briar shook her head. “I haven’t seen her. Is she coming?”

As they were talking, the cop below had skidded down the slope to the tree line and disappeared into the trees. Now he called back up, “Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance. Tell them to hurry.”

The cop said to Lucas, “Keep an eye on them,” and stepped away and called for an ambulance.

“What happened?” Lucas asked Briar.

“Randy was messing around and his chair went over the edge,” she said, looking at the man with her, rather than at Lucas.

The guy nodded and then shrugged.

“Is that what happened?” Lucas asked him.

Ranch turned hollow yellow eyes to Lucas and opened his mouth, and then said, “I can’t remember.”

“You can’t remember? It happened one minute ago,” said the uniform cop, as he stepped back to them. Regions Hospital was just down the hill, and they heard a siren start.

“Uh, Randy and Ranch—this is Ranch—had been partying pretty hard,” Briar said.

“On what?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe . . . a little amp,” Briar said.

“A little? Or a lot?” the cop asked.

“Three zippies,” she said.

Enough to kill the average pony, Lucas thought.

“What about you?” the cop asked her.

“They don’t allow me. If I smoke, I can’t work.” She looked at Lucas. “Randy was going to take Letty and do stuff to her.”

“Yeah? Did she know that?” Lucas asked.

“I think so,” Briar said. “We mostly talked about my situation.”

“Who’s Letty?” the cop asked. “What’s your situation?”

Lucas shook his head: “This is really screwed up. Letty’s my daughter. I don’t know where the hell she is . . .” He looked at Briar, then at Ranch. “If she’s hurt . . .”

Briar stepped away from him.

* * *

THE AMBULANCE pulled into the yard, its headlights sweeping across them, as the second cop, the one who’d gone down the hill, climbed back using his hands as well as his feet to keep his balance. Red-faced and out of breath, he said, “He’s alive, but his head looks funny. He might have broken his neck.”

One of the paramedics walked over from the ambulance and looked over the edge. “Holy cripes,” she said. “Maybe we ought to come up from the bottom.”

The second cop shook his head. “He’s less than halfway down, and it’s even steeper below him. Gotta hurry, guys, he’s hurt.”

The paramedics got a lightweight carry stretcher, a backboard, a cervical extrication collar, and safety straps, and went over the edge with the second cop.

The St. Paul cop with Lucas asked, “What are we doing here?”

Lucas shook his head: “Not my case. We picked up Briar earlier today . . .”

He told the cop about the scene at the motel, and the cop listened to it all, and then said, “What about your daughter?”

“I’m looking for her. She was down at the convention, but she was supposed to be home hours ago.”

Lucas looked at Briar again, but Briar said, “We haven’t seen her. Honest. Not since day before last.”

“How do you know her?” the cop asked. “How’s she involved?”

“She’s not,” Lucas and Briar said simultaneously.

Briar said, “She works for a TV station. She found me downtown. She wanted to interview me.”

Lucas said to the cop, “She was trying to do a story on young . . . prostitutes. For Channel Three.”

“Oh, yeah,” the cop said. “I know her—the good-looking blond chick.”

“She’s fourteen,” Lucas said.

The cop was unembarrassed: good-looking is good-looking. “You a young prostitute?” he asked Briar.

“I’m just a kid,” she said.

Ranch, naked except for his Jockey shorts, dug his hand in his pants, scratched himself and said: “Some pretty good pussy, though.”

Lucas and the cop both turned to him, and Lucas asked, “What’d you say?”

“Pretty . . . uh . . .”

“They raped me,” Briar said. “Or, Ranch did. I think.”

“You think?” the cop asked. “You’re not sure?”

“Does it count if they do it in your butt?”

The cop rubbed his forehead and said, “Yeah, that counts.” He said to Ranch, “Turn around.” Ranch, head bobbing, turned around, and the cop cuffed him. “Hey, dude, that’s pretty fuckin’ . . . rude.”

Briar said, “Randy made him do it.”