“They’re holding up the Republican party,” Lucas said. “The party—the goddamn
ball.
The
dance.
All those people on the streets, we saw them all night walking up there, diamonds all over them . . .”
Shrake was the tiniest bit skeptical: “They’re holding up the party?”
“C’mon,” Lucas said. “Get in the car. Get on the phone. It’s gotta be either the St. Paul or the St. Andrews. Hell, maybe it’s both.”
Shrake shook his head but got in the car and called the duty man at the BCA and said, “Get onto St. Paul, right now, get some guys over in Rice Park, over behind that TV stand, over by the Ordway, anybody you can get. If they got armor, it’s better, don’t let them be seen from the St. Paul Hotel or the St. Andrews. We think there could be a holdup going on . . . The Cohn gang, yeah, get some guys . . .”
Lucas let him talk and concentrated on the driving: in a straight line, six blocks or eight or ten blocks, something like that. But the streets were all blocked off, and he didn’t know exactly where the barricades were. He headed up the hill at speed, running every stop-light they came to, and they were all red, and around the north side of the blockades. Shrake was clutching his phone: “Easy, man, easy, man, Jesus Christ, you’re gonna kill us before we get there.”
The Porsche held on like it had claws until he pumped to a stop behind the old federal building. “Let’s go,” he said.
Shrake was on the phone: “Gotta get some guys . . . I don’t care, we gotta get some guys . . .”
There were two cops waiting, both from St. Paul. Lucas ran up, said, “I’m Davenport, with the BCA. This is Shrake. It’s possible that either the St. Paul Hotel or the St. Andrews is being robbed exactly this minute—or maybe in a little while.” He grinned at them. “Or maybe not at all. Shit, I don’t know. But I think so. The thing is, if they’re in there, we have to stop them. If they’re still on the way in, we can’t let them see us, because we need them to make their move. And maybe . . . we’re wasting our time.”
A squad car turned the corner and pulled to the curb. Shrake jogged over and talked quietly to the cops inside, and they both got out, unconsciously hitching up their gun belts.
“What’re we going to do?” one of the cops asked Lucas.
“Shrake and I will take a peek at the hotels. We want one of you with us, for the uniform, and we want a couple more blocking the back exit. We need at least one guy to run around and take the stairway up into the skyway . . .”
The cops from the squad had a shotgun and an M16 in the trunk. Lucas put them back in the car: “Get around behind the hotels, fast as you can do it. I want you”—he pointed at the guy with the M16—“at the top of the stairway in the St. Paul. Don’t let anybody through, but be careful with that thing, for Christ’s sakes. Don’t shoot any little old ladies.”
The shotgun he wanted outside the back door.
Another cop car, directed by St. Paul communications, stopped behind Lucas’s Porsche and two more cops got out. Lucas kept talking to the first four:
“Talk to your guys, get some backup behind you, but get into place. If they’re in there, they could be coming out any minute.”
It took longer to get organized than Lucas had hoped, because it was, technically speaking, a cluster-fuck. But with everybody on their way, with more St. Paul cops moving in, he nodded at Shrake and said, “Let’s look at it.”
* * *
THE ST. PAUL HOTEL was probably the oldest, and one of the two fanciest, in St. Paul. Lucas, Shrake, and the chosen St. Paul cop, a gray-haired sergeant whose name was Larkin, strolled down the sidewalk that ran past the side of the hotel, looking at the front entrance. The hotel cultivated a garden alongside the circular drive in front, and in the cold light from the street, the flowers looked pale and ghostly.
“Don’t see anybody watching,” Shrake said.
Lucas said, “Goddamnit. I fucked this up.” He looked around him, in a circle, at the buildings surrounding the park: the central library, the old federal courthouse, the Ordway Music Theater. “We should have met somewhere else, but I didn’t take the time. What if they’re in the old courthouse? Or the library? That’s where I’d be. I’d have a lookout up there with a radio . . . They might be looking right down at us, right now. C’mon.”
Now he started jogging, down the street, up the driveway to the front of the hotel. He looked in. Two women behind the check-in counter, a guy in hotel livery, with a lunchbox next to his hand, talking to them, leaning on the counter. He looked real, but the box might hold a gun.
Before they’d started over, he’d told Larkin to take off his cop hat and put it under his arm—it was too readily identifiable at a distance. Now he told him to put it back on: “Get your hand on your gun, but keep it out of sight,” Lucas said to Shrake. “Through the doors all at once.” He pushed through the revolving door, with Shrake and Larkin going through the swing doors beside it.
* * *
THE PEOPLE at the desk looked down at them, and Lucas, one hand on the .45 under his jacket, held up his credentials. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul Police. I’m a police officer, let me see your hands, please. Put your hands on the desk.”
The guy said, “What?” but then put his hands on the desk. “What?”
Larkin asked, “Where’s your safe?”
One of the women said, “Uh . . .” and looked to the side.
Nobody in the strong room: and Shrake checked their IDs. All Minnesota driver’s licenses.
Lucas said to Larkin, “Call the guy on the back door. I want him here, behind the desk, in case they come in. Move the other guys around behind the St. Andrews. I think there’s a skyway exit, too, out to the parking ramps; we need somebody in the skyway . . .”
As Larkin called, Shrake said, “St. Andrews?”
Lucas nodded. “Let’s go.”
“Starting to feel like an idiot yet?” Shrake asked.
“About forty percent,” Lucas said. “It seemed like a really good concept. Christ, years ago, when I was first on the Minneapolis force, there was a hotel that got knocked over down in Miami, and they took millions out. Millions. That was more than twenty years ago . . . And there was no kind of thing like they had tonight . . .”
At the door, Lucas turned around and called to the women at the desk: “Did you guys have the big ball tonight? The Gold Key, or whatever they called it?”
One of them shook her head and said, “I don’t know anything about that,” but the other one said, “That was at the St. Andrews. I saw them all coming out when I was coming to work.”
“What time was that?”
“One o’clock . . .”
* * *
LUCAS, SHRAKE, and Larkin jogged toward the white limestone structure at the other end of the block, Larkin and Shrake chatting now, Lucas feeling that they just didn’t believe, but he felt the impatience pushing him, a hand in his back, and halfway up the block he stepped up the pace. The St. Andrews was a new hotel, less than four years old, but modeled on the St. Paul, with a similar rose garden in the front. A Toyota Sienna was parked in the drive. Lucas detoured around the garden, leading the other two by fifteen feet as he came up to the double front doors.
The lights were down in the hotel lobby; he could see lots of marble, plush red carpet, wood paneling, and gold paint. To one side, a single woman stood behind the check-in desk, doing nothing, and Lucas felt a tingle.
Shrake and Larkin came up and Lucas said, “She looks like a fuckin’ cigar store Indian. Get your hands on your guns . . . ready . . .”
They went in all at once, Lucas at the point, and six feet inside the doors, Lucas saw a second woman, this one in a gray suit with an odd face, something wrong here, and he dropped his gun hand to his side and suddenly the woman behind the desk dropped out of sight and the suit-woman lifted her hand and at the same time screamed, “Cops,” and opened fire, flashes like firecrackers on the Fourth of July, and Lucas went down and rolled right and windows shattered and furniture exploded; he heard somebody screaming and he kept rolling and rolling and then somebody opened up with a machine gun . . .
25
CRUZ RECOGNIZED THE BIG DARK-HAIRED cop as soon as he came through the door—recognized him from the press conference. Didn’t know how they’d broken it down, but here they were. She saw Ann hit the floor and she screamed, “Cops,” and pulled the little pistol and opened fire. She wasn’t a good shot, and hardly knew what she was doing, but bullets are bullets and she put as many as she had in the air, the cops scattered and then Lane was there, his mask still up his face, with the Uzi, and he burned through a clip and then Cohn was there, shouting at them, and they broke toward the back of the building, and Cruz registered the fact that Lane was carrying the tool bag: now the jewel bag.
They turned a corner in the hallway and at the far end of the hall, a cop was crouching in the doorway, and hesitated, and Lane fired a one-handed burst at him and the cop went backward—Cruz had the impression that he was scrambling, not hurt—into the street, and they ran down the hall and now Cohn was firing backward, back where the original cops were from, and they reached the stairway to the skyway.
* * *
LUCAS ROLLED and rolled and the couches and the chairs in the big reception area were useless as cover and so he kept scrambling and the bullets coming in were way too high. Then stopped. In the sudden silence, he heard Shrake screaming at him, “They’re moving, they’re moving.”
The only place they could move to would be down the hall behind them and Lucas had rolled far enough to the side that he was out of their line of fire, and he rolled to his feet and let his .45 lead him toward the hallway. From the mouth of the hallway he peeked down its length, saw nothing, and then Shrake was coming up from the side and Lucas shouted, “How bad are you hit?” and Shrake shouted, “I’m okay,” and Lucas shouted, “You’ve got blood running down your face,” and Shrake brushed at it and said, “I’m okay, it’s glass, a glass cut.” Lucas shouted, “What about Larkin?” and Shrake shouted back, “He’s okay, he’s got some glass cuts, he’s okay, he’s trying to get people into the skyway.”
Lucas shouted, “I’m going down the hall,” and Shrake shouted, “Go,” and Lucas went, saw the stunned face of the clerk behind the reception desk, saw the shambles of the strong room through the door, passed it, did a peek at the corner and saw a tall man in a dark suit all the way at the end of a long hall, at the foot of a red-carpeted stairs, and the man saw him and fired three or four shots that zinged off the wall, and Lucas was about to peek again when a man called to him from a side room, “Help us, we’ve got a dead man here,” and Lucas saw a dry country face close to the floor, a man on his hands and knees under a gold plaque that said “Nondenominational Chapel,” and he said, “Help’s coming,” and he did another peek, saw a clear hallway, and launched himself into it.
Shrake came up and shouted, “Where’d they go?” and Lucas shouted back, “Up the stairs.” He stepped into the hallway and there were two quick gunshots from the open ground-level door and two bullets smashed plaster off a pilaster next to his head and he went down and somebody from the doorway shouted, “Police!” and Shrake screamed, “Hey-hey-hey-hey, we’re police, police here, for Christ’s sakes,” and then Larkin came up and waved his hat around the corner, and then out with his hands up, and they heard more shouting outside.
A uniformed cop came in, his face white and scared, clutching his gun like a hammer, and he shouted, “You got them?”
Lucas shouted back, “They went up, they’re in the skyway,” and they heard another gust of shots from up above, and Lucas and Shrake ran up the stairs, following their pistols.
* * *
COHN, CRUZ, and Lane made the top of the stairs, breathing hard, paused in a niche of a wall. Lane slapped another magazine into his Uzi and Cohn asked Cruz, “Where’d they come from?” and she said, “I don’t know—but it’s the same guy we saw on television. The big dark-haired guy.”
“Okay.” Cohn looked both ways. “We got a fifty-yard run to the parking garage. If they’re in the garage, we go down the side stairs and out the side and go for the street car.”
“They won’t let any cars out of the garage,” Cruz said. “I think we gotta go for the street car. Right into the ramp, then down the stairs. That’ll bring us out on . . .”
“We know. Let’s go.”
They ran then, sprinting, Lane still carrying the bag, but he heard clinking sounds as he went, and looked back and saw a trail of gold bars, like Hansel’s bread crumbs . . .
They ran through the glass tunnel of the skyway, across a street; as they were coming to the entrance, a cop opened the door and stepped into the skyway, saw them, ducked back as Lane let loose another volley with the Uzi, and then they were at the entrance and they could hear the cop running down the stairs that led to the street—the stairs they were going to take.
“We go down the entrance ramp, the car ramp,” Cruz gasped out.
They were at the ramp when the big dark-haired cop popped through the door behind them, fired a shot, and Cruz felt it hit her in the small of the back, felt a ripping wound at her stomach, and she went down and gurgled, “I’m hit . . .”
Lane fired a burst from the Uzi over her head, and then ran on down the ramp. Cohn was ahead of her, fifteen feet away and lower, already going down the ramp, and she saw him lift his gun, thought he was shooting at the cop. She never saw the muzzle flash.
Cohn shot her in the forehead and followed Lane down the ramp.
* * *
WHEREVER THEY were, they’d left the skyway—Lucas and Shrake could see sixty or seventy yards of it, and it was empty. “Parking garage,” Lucas said. Shrake shouted at Larkin, who was coming up behind with his radio: “They’re in the parking garage, the Clayton Ramp, get your guys outside . . .”
“There’s gold bars,” Larkin gasped. “There’s little gold bars all over the place . . .”