Wicked Prey

by John Sandford

  Out of the Taco Bell, he stopped at the supermarket, got some apples, one doughnut, and three Pepsis. He picked up a bottle of George Dickel at the liquor store, then carried the whole load down to Home Depot, where he bought a box of contractor's clean-up bags and a crescent wrench, the biggest one he could find.

  "Big wrench," said the cute little blonde at the checkout.

  He gave her a twinkle: "I gotta big nut to deal with," he said.

  She giggled, seeing in the comment a double entendre of some kind, which may or may not have existed, Cohn thought, as he walked back to the motel with his bags.

  ***

  SO the gang was back in town.

  Jesse Lane was a white man with dirty-blond hair that fell on his shoulders, a thick face with eyes too closely spaced, a bony nose marked by enlarged pores, and thin, pale-pink lips. A handmade silver earring, big as a wedding ring, hung from his left earlobe. Fifteen years earlier he'd done time in an Alabama prison, for armed robbery, where he picked up the weight-lifting habit. He was still a lifter, and showed it in the width of his shoulders and his narrow, tapered waist.

  Lane owned a farm in Tennessee, on the "Bama border, where he grew soybeans and worked on cars in a shop in the barn. His specialty was turning run-of-the-mill family vehicles into machines that could flat outrun the highway patrol-not for crooks, but just the everyday Dukes of Hazzard wannabes.

  Tate McCall was a black version of Jesse Lane. He'd done a total of ten years in California, both sets for robbery, but had been clean for eight years. Like Lane, he'd been a lifter, but where Lane was square, McCall was tall and rangy, like a wide receiver, with hands the size of dinner plates. McCall owned a piece of a diner on Main Street in Ocean Park, a neighborhood in Santa Monica.

  Jack Spitzer was from Austin, Texas. He looked like a big-nosed French bicycle racer, or a runner, mid-height but greyhound-thin, his thinning black hair slicked back on his small head. His nose had been broken sometime in the past. He was mostly unemployed.

  Lane was sitting at the computer desk, McCall was draped over an easy chair, Spitzer sat on a bed, more or less facing the other two. Lane and McCall were wearing golf shirts and slacks, while Spitzer wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a black sport coat, because, all the others thought, he was carrying a pistol in the small of his back, the dumb shit.

  Rosie Cruz came through the door that connected Cohn's two rooms and said, "He's coming."

  "Nothing around here to see but chain restaurants," McCall said.

  "How'd you know?" Cruz asked.

  "I looked," McCall said. "While you were pickin' up Brute."

  "And that's what Brute's doing-looking," she said. "You know what he's like."

  "We gotta get this shit straightened out," McCall said, looking at Spitzer.

  Spitzer said, defensively, "I'll do whatever Brute says."

  "Goddamn right," Lane said.

  ***

  They all sat, waiting, the television on but muted, a CNN chick soundlessly running her mouth with a forest fire on a screen behind her head. A minute or two, then a key rattled in the door lock, and Cohn came in. He was wearing tan golf slacks, a red golf shirt, and a blue blazer, carrying a grocery bag and a plastic sack. He looked like a city manager on his day off.

  He saw them and flashed his smile, genuinely happy to see them, and they knew it. He shut the door and said, "Boys. Damned good to see you. Jesse. Tate. Jack'" He stepped through the room, shaking hands, slapping shoulders. Cruz was leaning in the doorway to the second room, watching.

  Lane said, "Man, you're looking good. I like that beard."

  "Yeah, yeah," Cohn said, scratching at the beard. "Let me run down the hall and get some ice."

  He picked up the ice bucket, went out, and was back in a minute with a bucket of ice cubes.

  "Got some Dickel," he said. "I been drinking nothing but scotch and gin, and it's good, but it ain't bourbon."

  McCall said, "We got some shit to figure out." He looked at Spitzer.

  "All right," Cohn said. "Let's get it out." He found a glass, scooped some ice into it, and poured in a couple of ounces of bourbon. "I think we agree that Jack sorta screwed the pooch the last time out." He took a sip of the drink and closed his eyes and smiled: "That's smooth."

  "Screwed the pooch? He signed us up for death row," Lane said. "Wasn't no point in shooting those boys."

  "Accident," Spitzer said. "Goddamn one in a million. I thought he was coming for me. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Once he was down, I had to do the other one."

  "They were cops," McCall said.

  "Jack's right, though. After the first one went down, he had to do the second," Cohn said. He was standing next to Spitzer, one hand on his shoulder, drink in the other hand.

  McCall said, "Brute, you know I like working with you. You got a class act. But this asshole…"

  Spitzer turned his head toward McCall and away from Cohn.

  When he did that, Cohn put the drink down, pulled the eighteen-inch-long crescent wrench from his back pocket, cocked his wrist, and slammed it into the back of Spitzer's head. Spitzer jerked forward, his face suddenly blank, eyes wide, and fell on the floor.

  Cruz said, urgently, "No, no, Brute…"

  "Go in that other room," Cohn said.

  "Brute…" She didn't move.

  Cohn ignored her, went to a closet alcove with a dozen wire coat hangers on a rod. He'd already unwrapped one of them and he took it down, carried it back to Spitzer's body. Spitzer was out, and maybe dying, but making low growling sounds. Cohn bent the coat hanger around Spitzer's neck, put his knee down hard on the unconscious man's spine, and pulled up on the wire until it cut halfway through his neck. His teeth bared with the effort, he did a quick twist of the wire, turning it around itself. Spitzer stopped making any sound, though a minute later, his feet began to tremble and run as his brain died.

  Cohn looked at McCall and Lane and said, "Sooner or later, he'd have given us up. He didn't have a job, like you boys. He was on the street. Sooner or later, he was going to get caught, and then he was gonna cut a deal. We were nothing but money in the bank, to him."

  They all looked at the body for a minute, then Cruz said, "You should have told me what you were going to do."

  "Didn't know how you'd react," Cohn said, in apology. "I'm sorry if this offends you."

  "That's not what I meant," Cruz said. "What I mean was, if you'd told me, I'd have figured out a better place to do it. He's bleeding, ah, for Christ's sakes, if they find blood in the carpet'"

  She took three long steps to the closet niche, snatched a HomTel plastic laundry bag off a hanger, and as the men watched, bent over Spitzer's body, lifted his head by the hair on the back of his skull, and pulled the bag over his head. Then she tugged the head to one side and said, "The carpet's okay. Goddamnit, Brute, try thinking about consequences once in a while."

  Cohn was embarrassed and shrugged, and said, "Sorry, babe."

  "Go wash that wrench. We'll throw it out the car window somewhere," she said. "And don't call me babe."

  McCall looked at Lane, who shrugged. "Be good if nobody found out about this for a while."

  "We'll take him out in the woods and bury his ass," Cohn said. "When I was buying the wrench, I bought some garbage bags at Home Depot. We can pick up a shovel on the way out."

  They looked down at the body, and Cruz said, finally, "Four guys would have been better."

  Cohn grinned at her: "You'll just have to carry a gun yourself, darling."

  She shook her head. "I need to be outside. If I'm not outside, I can't manage the radios and all the other stuff. Three is okay, four would be better. I don't know how many people we'll be handling."

  Cohn looked at Lane. "How about your brother?"

  Lane shook his head. "We can't go on the same job. You know, so there'll be somebody to take care of the families, if something happens."

  McCall asked, "You remember Bob Mortenson from Fresno?" Cohn nodded.
r />   "He had a wheelman named Steve Sargent, he was in Chino until last year. He got caught on a jewelry deal that broke down in LA after Mortenson quit. I know him, some, he's careful, he can keep his mouth shut. If we needed him…"

  "We'll talk about it," Cohn said. "But I'd rather not work with someone new. Look what happened when we brought in this piece of shit." He prodded Spitzer's body with a toe of his shoe. "We'll work it with Rosie, see if we can do it with three. What happened with Mortenson? I haven't heard about him in years."

  "He retired. He's in Hawaii," McCall said. "Got a place there. Goes fishing a lot. Plays golf."

  "That's what we're talking about," Cohn said, the enthusiasm lighting his eyes. "That's what this job'll do for us. Rosie says this should be large: we pull this off, we're all done."

  Lane levered himself to his feet. "In the meantime, we gotta get rid of Jack," he said.

  "You're the farm boy," McCall said. "You know about the woods. I'm city, man. I'm scared of them bears and shit. Wolves."

  A bad smell was coming from the body-flatulence, emptying lungs, or maybe death itself. Cruz said, "We need to get some air freshener. Some pine scent, that's what the motel uses."

  Lane said to Cohn, "You know, even if we weren't here for a job, Jack would have been worth doing. I feel a hundred percent safer already."

  McCall said to Cohn, "If you got that garbage bag…" But then Lane asked Cruz, "What're we gonna hit, anyway? You never said."

  "Not one hit," she said. "Maybe six or eight."

  Lane and McCall stared at her for a second, and Cohn said, "She'll tell you all about it-but let's get rid of Jack and she can lay it all out."

  "Just give me one minute of it, right now," Lane said. "Not the details, just the outline."

  Cruz said, "There are two parts to the deal, but they're not really connected. The Republican convention is starting, and the people who run the party down at the street level are here, as delegates and spectators. So these big lobby guys come in with suitcases full of cash, and pass it out, expense money. They call it street money, hire guys to put up signs and all that, off the books. Everybody knows about it, nobody tells. Can't tell, because it's illegal. I've got the names and hotel rooms for seven of them. They could have anywhere from a quarter-million to a million dollars, each. We hit them until we feel nervous. We'll have to feel it out as we go, but three or four guys anyway. Five, maybe? We'll see. Look for reaction on TV, watch the targets, see if they get bodyguards, whatever."

  "Who watches them?" Lane asked.

  "I do, basically. I've got a file on each of them," Cruz said. "They're schmoozers, they want to make sure they get the credit for the cash they're handing out, they'll be hooking up with people all the time."

  "You're going into the convention?" McCall asked.

  "No. Neither will these guys. The security is super-tight and they don't want to get caught with a hundred thousand in small bills," Cruz said. "So they do the business at the hotels. Two of the guys are thirty seconds apart in the same hotel; we can do them both at the same time-and they're two of the biggest money guys. The third guy and the fourth guy we'll have to check. If we see any reaction from the cops, we quit and go on to the second part."

  "Which is?" Lane asked.

  "A hotel job. The night McCain gets nominated there's a big ball at the St. Andrews Hotel downtown. We hit the strong room afterwards. Three in the morning. I'm thinking twenty million in jewelry, maybe a million or two in cash."

  "You got a guy inside?" McCall asked.

  "Had one. A guy in Washington. Worked for the committee that sets up room assignments."

  "What about at the hotel?"

  "I couldn't find anybody there that I could risk recruiting," Cruz said. "The Secret Service is all over the place. I stayed there a couple of times, a week at a time, did a lot of scouting ' put my stuff in a safe-deposit box, I've been in and out of the strong room a half-dozen times. I know the hotel, top to bottom."

  " Lot of people coming and going in a hotel," Lane said.

  "That can be handled," Cruz said. "There's no more risk than an armored car or a bank. And I'm working a little thing that'll keep the cops occupied while we're inside."

  Nobody said anything for a moment, and she added, "Guys, this is it: this is one where we all get out. If we get two million from the political guys and a million from the hotel and twenty million in diamonds, that'd be another seven or eight in cash-and we'll get at least that, I swear to God-we can quit. Shake hands and walk."

  They'd worked with her on a dozen jobs and she'd never been wrong. And they'd talked about quitting. Lane had a family, McCall had a longtime lover, Cohn was getting old, Cruz was getting nervous. Past time to quit. Lane and McCall glanced at each other again, McCall tipped his head and said, "All right; we can get the details later. Right now, we need those white-trash bags."

  ***

  Randy Whitcomb, strapped into the back of the van, with Juliet Briar at the wheel, Ranch sitting in a fog layer in the passenger seat, rolled past Lucas Davenport's house every few minutes, until they saw the girl getting out of a private car. She waved at the driver and headed up the driveway to Davenport 's house. She was a rangy blond teenager, dressed conservatively in dark slacks, a white blouse, and sandals.

  "Maybe a babysitter," Ranch said.

  "She's got a key," Briar pointed out. "They don't give keys to babysitters."

  "Then it's gotta be his daughter," Whitcomb said. "Too young for him to be fuckin'. Daughter'd be good."

  "Never done anything to us," Juliet said, doubtfully.

  " Davenport did this to me," Whitcomb said, whacking his inert legs. "Set it up. Started it all."

  "The girl didn't'"

  " Davenport set me up," Whitcomb said. He watched the girl disappear into the house. "I'm gonna get him back. No fun just shootin' him. I want to do him good, and I want him to know what I done, and who done it. Motherfucker."

  "Motherfucker," Ranch said, and the word made him giggle, and then he couldn't stop giggling, even when Whitcomb started screaming, "Shut up, shut up, you fuckin' scrote." He didn't mention it, but he was also frightened of Davenport, who he thought was crazy They went back to the house, Ranch trying to suppress the urge to laugh, but cloudbursts of giggles broke through anyway.

  Because Ranch was crazy.

  Chapter 2

  Lucas Davenport rolled in his Porsche through the August countryside, green and tan, corn and beans, the blue oat fields falling in front of the John Deeres, weeping willows hanging over the banks of black-water ponds, yellow coneflowers climbing the sides of the road-cuts, Wisconsin farms with U-Pick signs hung out on the driveways, Dutch Belted cows and golden horses and red barns, Lucas's arms prickling from sunburn ' One of the finest summers of his life.

  His wife, Weather, dozed beside him, despite the gravelly ride of the car. She'd tuned to a public radio station before she'd gone to sleep, and it was playing something by Mozart or one of those big guys, and the sound floated around them like the soundtrack in a chick flick.

  Weather's nose was burned and would be peeling; so were her stomach and her thighs. Twenty minutes, she said, only twenty minutes, lying back in a two-piece bathing suit, on the front deck of Lucas's boat. She'd known better, but she'd done it anyway.

  Twenty minutes was all it took. Lucas grinned at the thought of it: she was cooked. Because she was almost constitutionally unable to admit error, she wouldn't even be able to complain about it.

  He idled through Hammond, up the hill past the golf course, down the hill past the high school, the small-town boys out on the football field, turning at the burble of the car's exhaust to look at the Porsche; and then on down County T to I-94, where he made the turn toward the Cities in the evening's dying light.

  They'd spent two days at their lake cabin outside Hayward; hiding out. Two weeks before, one of Lucas's agents, Virgil Flowers, had arrested two Homeland Security officials for conspiracy to commit murder.
r />   The shit hit the fan with all the expected velocity. The governor and his chief weasel were handling it-had asked for it. The arrest was as political as legal, although the big newspapers, the New York and L.a. and even the London Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, said the legal looked fairly strong. Of course, it was hard to tell whether the papers were serious, or just fucking with George Bush.

  The governor was definitely fucking with George Bush, since the Republican National Convention was in town the next week.

  In any case, Lucas took two days at the lake to avoid the growing siege of phone calls, while Virgil went fishing in northern Minnesota, and the governor continued to make the rounds of the Washington talk shows. They'd watched him on satellite and Weather had been delighted. She'd once had a favored pair of manicure scissors seized by the TSA, and as far as she was concerned, this was payback time.

  Now Weather woke up and groaned and said, "Ah, God, where are we?"

  "I-94. Six miles from the river," Lucas said.

  "Mmm." She fumbled around for her purse, took out her BlackBerry and punched it up, stared at the screen for a moment, then put it back in her purse. "Nothing from anybody ' I can't believe you're listening to Chopin."

  "Well, no phone calls means that everything's okay," Lucas said. Weather hadn't wanted to leave Sam, their son, though he was almost two, and they had a live-in housekeeper who was like a second mother to the kid. Still, she was anxious about it: she'd never been away from him for more than eight or ten hours, and wanted to get back.

  "You feeling a little pink?" Lucas asked.

  "What?"

  "Sunburned?"

  "Oh, not really," she said. "It's nothing."